Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Kaboom Clark, and
Speaker 2: there's Chuck Wow Bryant, and Jerry's not here. She's a
Speaker 2: dud and this stuff you should know about bomb disposals.
Speaker 1: That's right, and specifically a dud meaning a thing that
Speaker 1: doesn't go off right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a dud.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think you're a kid playing with fireworks and
Speaker 1: you light one through it at your friend. Nothing happens,
Speaker 1: and you start crying because it's a dud.
Speaker 2: You're like, I don't have two cents to waste, black cat,
Speaker 2: give me my two cents back.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, when you're a kid, two cents matter back in
Speaker 2: the eighties.
Speaker 1: That's true.
Speaker 2: You can put that together with three other cents and
Speaker 2: buy yourself a stick a butter.
Speaker 1: Throw it at your friend.
Speaker 2: So we should shout out. Speaking of friends, are Newish
Speaker 2: writer Kyle Houkstra, who's writing for us from the UK
Speaker 2: makes us an international podcast of mystery, and he helps
Speaker 2: us out with this one. It's a pretty interesting topic
Speaker 2: if you ask me, and I don't remember where I
Speaker 2: got the idea, but it's been on the list for
Speaker 2: a little while and I finally pulled the trigger mechanism
Speaker 2: on it.
Speaker 1: No, wow, you're in a roll today.
Speaker 2: I guess. So that's one way to put it.
Speaker 1: Had you just seen the hurt Locker or something.
Speaker 2: I've never seen the hurt Locker. Really, yeah, you check
Speaker 2: it out.
Speaker 1: It's great movie.
Speaker 2: Oh. I know, I've heard nothing but good things. I
Speaker 2: just have not ever gotten around to seeing it. I'm
Speaker 2: not crazy about war movies. The last war movie that
Speaker 2: I saw that I really liked was probably Uncommon Valor.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, see like terrible war movies.
Speaker 2: No, are you crazy, that's one of the best war
Speaker 2: movies of all time. Oh okay, you don't like an
Speaker 2: Uncommon Valor?
Speaker 1: I mean I liked it as a kid in the eighties,
Speaker 1: But I mean it was very much that I don't
Speaker 1: think it's regarded as one of the great war movies.
Speaker 2: You don't think it'd hold up now, huh?
Speaker 1: Well, I mean I think it would hold up as
Speaker 1: an eighties war movie.
Speaker 2: I mean he was a guy in it, Gene Hackman.
Speaker 1: Randall Tech Cobb, he was Patrick Swayze. Yeah, okay, great movie.
Speaker 2: It was a great movie. So yes, But no, I
Speaker 2: haven't seen hert Locker I from what I understand, it's
Speaker 2: about as accurate a depiction of how bomb disposal technicians
Speaker 2: or EOD technicians explosive ordnance disposal technicians, I should say,
Speaker 2: for those who don't know the lingo, it's about as
Speaker 2: accurate as is what they do. Is is that correct?
Speaker 1: I mean, I've never done that job, so I don't know,
Speaker 1: but judging from reading this, it seemed pretty spot on.
Speaker 1: And I know that Catherine Bigelow makes heck of a movie,
Speaker 1: so I'm in her corner no matter what.
Speaker 2: What else does she made besides Zero Dark.
Speaker 1: Thirty, Well, she did movies. I mean those two were
Speaker 1: kind of later in her career as far as like
Speaker 1: a big time recognition, but she did. You know, she
Speaker 1: did a movie, a vampire movie called Near Dark back
Speaker 1: in the day. It was great. Oh yeah, and yeah
Speaker 1: you should see that one too.
Speaker 2: That's the trilogy Near Dark, the hurt Locker, and Zero
Speaker 2: Dark thirty.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Vampire's Bombs and Osama bin Laden.
Speaker 2: So okay, so we're talking about people who go near bombs,
Speaker 2: unexploded bombs, and try to disable them, try to diffuse
Speaker 2: them so that they can either be taken somewhere and
Speaker 2: disassembled or they can be safely removed from an area
Speaker 2: where say there's a lot of people are real estate
Speaker 2: around and blow them up in a much safer manner.
Speaker 2: They walk up to bombs that have not yet did
Speaker 2: and they have no idea how or if or when
Speaker 2: it's going to detonate, and that is their job. That's
Speaker 2: who we're talking about today.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that can be you know, a military personnel
Speaker 1: if it's in wartime or whatever, and that can obviously
Speaker 1: be a civilian bomb squad, because bombs are not only
Speaker 1: wartime weapons, as we've seen with things like the Boston
Speaker 1: marathon bombing. That kind of stuff happens on the on
Speaker 1: the streets of the USA and other places too. So
Speaker 1: you've got to have cops at work, you got to
Speaker 1: have military at work, and they have all kinds of
Speaker 1: cool gear that just gets better and better. One thing
Speaker 1: Kyle points out is that, you know, it's always and
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about the history, but it's always
Speaker 1: been sort of a race of devising bombs that aren't
Speaker 1: you know, that that blow up when they're supposed to,
Speaker 1: and then defeeding bombs from blowing up, and then new
Speaker 1: technology and then new anti bomb technology it's just sort
Speaker 1: of back and forth.
Speaker 2: What's horrif is that when new bomb technology comes out,
Speaker 2: like they don't know until after somebody's died. Essentially, that's
Speaker 2: that's often the case, that's how their bomb's gone off, right,
Speaker 2: But often it's like if it's if say, like it's
Speaker 2: booby trapped, a new kind of booby trap, that probably
Speaker 2: means that they found out the hard way that there's
Speaker 2: this new style of booby trap. That's the kind of
Speaker 2: job that these people have.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and since I mentioned that, we've got to throw
Speaker 1: Kyle some love because he inadvertently came up with his
Speaker 1: first band name for the show mm hmm, because in
Speaker 1: describing that back and forth of technology and racing against
Speaker 1: the bomb technology, he called it the pendulum of development.
Speaker 1: And I think it's a pretty good band name.
Speaker 2: Sure what kind of music?
Speaker 1: I mean, that's got to be some sort of like emo, right.
Speaker 2: I guess I could also see like trance or drone
Speaker 2: or something.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like it too. Youre better at that than me,
Speaker 1: I should ask you.
Speaker 2: That's not true. That's not true, Chuck.
Speaker 1: Well. I feel like we each have our part. I
Speaker 1: generally recognize the band names, and you're always spot on
Speaker 1: it nailing the kind of music that it would be.
Speaker 2: All right, well let's move on, we'll both take the
Speaker 2: compliment out with that.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, should we cover some of the history,
Speaker 1: I guess yeah.
Speaker 2: What was really surprising to me is that that bomb
Speaker 2: disposal really started back in England in the nineteenth century,
Speaker 2: like yeah, you know the Victorian era. I think the
Speaker 2: eighteen seventies really was when it started to take off.
Speaker 2: One of the reasons why is that Ireland was trying
Speaker 2: to gain independence from Great Britain and one of the
Speaker 2: ways they did that was through bombing campaigns. So essentially,
Speaker 2: as you'll see, like you said, the pendulum of development
Speaker 2: like situations whether it's war or some sort of struggle
Speaker 2: or something like that, where bomb's make an appearance, that
Speaker 2: leads to bomb development, and that leads in turn to
Speaker 2: bomb disposal development. Right, and so that was I mean,
Speaker 2: right off the bat, people started adopting this new technology
Speaker 2: at the time, dynamite, which is a stable form of
Speaker 2: nitroglycerim into bombs. So now it was up to people
Speaker 2: who were in charge of disposing of these bombs to
Speaker 2: figure out how to do that safely. Like that's the
Speaker 2: kind of pendulum of development you were mentioning.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so dynamite comes along. It's a big sort of
Speaker 1: leap forward in bombing technology, right. And the first person
Speaker 1: to kind of pioneer this inspection routine was a guy
Speaker 1: named Vivian durang Majindi. What was the Finnian Dynamite campaign
Speaker 1: was kind of the first big bombing campaign that featured dynamite,
Speaker 1: and Vivian came along and pioneered this field. Was the
Speaker 1: first bomb disposal specialist because he got to work on
Speaker 1: that anti dynamite campaign.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so when you think of bomb disposal, we
Speaker 2: probably should have said this at the outset. The job
Speaker 2: entails much more than just diffusing and disposing of bombs.
Speaker 2: There's also like finding bombs, there's identifying the kind of
Speaker 2: bomb you're dealing with, and so that's what Magendi was doing.
Speaker 2: It was really low hanging fruit because it was such
Speaker 2: a new field. He would walk into the room and
Speaker 2: be like, yep, that's dynamite and they'd be like, oh,
Speaker 2: good show, you know, like and he was like a
Speaker 2: celebrated bomb disposal expert, but he was also a very
Speaker 2: brave one and he would not delegate dealing with bombs
Speaker 2: to anyone else below him, like he took on the
Speaker 2: actual handling and attempts to diffuse bombs by himself, and
Speaker 2: he was celebrated for that for sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely. He was the first head of the explosives
Speaker 1: department that they set up over there in eighteen seventy
Speaker 1: five that would later become the Forensic Explosives Laboratory, which
Speaker 1: basically any kind of explosive activity, like literally explosive activity, right,
Speaker 1: not like a Beatles concert or something like that in
Speaker 1: Great Britain is run through the Forensics Explosives Laboratory.
Speaker 2: Yes, so this is going on in the third or
Speaker 2: fourth quarter of the nineteenth century, and as the Irish
Speaker 2: were laying bombs, so too were anarchists starting to use
Speaker 2: dynamite as well. And that was a problem in Europe too,
Speaker 2: but it was also a problem in New York in America.
Speaker 2: And so just like in Great Britain and England, where
Speaker 2: there were suddenly a lot of people putting bombs all
Speaker 2: over the place, there was a huge need for people
Speaker 2: to figure out how to make those bombs not go off,
Speaker 2: and so America developed its first bomb squad back in
Speaker 2: nineteen oh two under the leadership of guy named Giuseppe Petrosino,
Speaker 2: and they were dealing with the mafia. Thank you. They
Speaker 2: were dealing with the mafia at the time, and apparently
Speaker 2: they did their job because the Bomb Squad got disbanded
Speaker 2: and then as anarchists started to really step up their game,
Speaker 2: the Bomb Squad, actually the Anarchist and Bomb Squad was
Speaker 2: created in nineteen fourteen in the NYPD and it was
Speaker 2: basically the revived Italian Squad under Petrosino.
Speaker 1: I can see Reddit now, my friend, what's up with
Speaker 1: Josh doing Italian names? Now after sixteen years?
Speaker 2: Right, you can take it?
Speaker 1: Oh no, no, no. Which you don't do is go
Speaker 1: back and redo an Italian accent.
Speaker 2: So take it. I think you can under the right circumstances.
Speaker 2: And the circumstances are these do that Italian accent as
Speaker 2: Christopher Walkin doing Sammy Davis Junior doing the Italian accent.
Speaker 1: My brain just broke all right, So we're in nineteen
Speaker 1: fourteen with the Anarchists and Bomb Squad. It's kind of
Speaker 1: a clunky name. I guess the aabs.
Speaker 2: Yeah or ABS, Well, they.
Speaker 1: Threw that and in there it's just sort of strange.
Speaker 2: Abs are made in the kitchen was their slogan.
Speaker 1: So they uncovered a plot to blow up Saint Patrick's
Speaker 1: Saint Patrick's Cheese I'm getting it all backwards Cathedral in
Speaker 1: New York City. They basically let this thing go off.
Speaker 1: They got all the manuals of the fuse design. It
Speaker 1: was a timed fuse, and so they they kind of
Speaker 1: let it happen and then arrested these like they wanted
Speaker 1: to catch the people, So they let the fuse be lit,
Speaker 1: be lit, and then they got these guys, and of
Speaker 1: course it extinguished the fuse.
Speaker 2: Yeah, during mass. Yeah, they they went ahead and let
Speaker 2: the bombers light the fuse.
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess that's the only way to know
Speaker 1: who the guys were, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess. But yeah, that was I mean, that
Speaker 2: was gutsy.
Speaker 1: That's the way I took it was that they were
Speaker 1: they wanted to, you know, find out who was actually
Speaker 1: doing this, and the only way to do that was
Speaker 1: to see the views get lit.
Speaker 2: No, absolutely, I think you could also just say anybody
Speaker 2: who's who starts to crouch down near the fuse, you
Speaker 2: can go ahead and arrest that guy.
Speaker 1: Or raise your hand if you're not here to blow
Speaker 1: this place up right and then just arrest who doesn't
Speaker 1: raise their hand yep.
Speaker 2: So also remember we talked about Jay gar Hoover running
Speaker 2: the Radical Division. They also had an early bomb unit
Speaker 2: within the FBI, and the FBI probably ever since has
Speaker 2: had bomb specialists special agent basically bomb technicians, and they
Speaker 2: do a lot of training. We saw a really interesting
Speaker 2: video on Wired I think, where a FBI bomb technician
Speaker 2: describes like, you know, what the whole process is like.
Speaker 2: It was pretty fascinating. Yeah, very calmly, but still, I
Speaker 2: mean you got anarchists laying bombs, you have Irish Republicans
Speaker 2: laying bombs, and then what really steps up the whole
Speaker 2: game makes it necessary. Area of the world wars and
Speaker 2: the First World War came along and there's a lot
Speaker 2: of munitions that were fired on either side all over
Speaker 2: the place, all over Europe. And anytime you're firing munitions,
Speaker 2: just like we said at the outset with black Cat
Speaker 2: fire crackers, some are bound to be duds. And just
Speaker 2: because they didn't go off now doesn't mean they're not
Speaker 2: going to go off one hundred years from now. So
Speaker 2: it's actually, as we'll see, like a huge problem. Still,
Speaker 2: we covered it a lot tangentially in our Land Mines
Speaker 2: episode about how when bombs are you know, shot off
Speaker 2: in war, laid in war, they can you know, kill
Speaker 2: people a century later. Essentially that was a problem in
Speaker 2: and of itself, and there were volunteer usually Air Force
Speaker 2: for some reason, like soldiers, who taught themselves essentially how
Speaker 2: to try to diffuse the bombs that were left over
Speaker 2: for World War One. But it wasn't until World War
Speaker 2: Two that the whole thing started to be formalized, both
Speaker 2: in the UK and in the US.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the training that they had in World War One,
Speaker 1: the equipment that they had wasn't enough to snuff, and
Speaker 1: I think it just sort of slowly built in everyone's
Speaker 1: minds that like, all right, this is something we need
Speaker 1: to officially address. Where we're not trained up, we don't
Speaker 1: know what we're really doing, and so we got to
Speaker 1: correct that because this is a big problem moving forward.
Speaker 1: And in nineteen forty Winston Churchill said, we owe it
Speaker 1: to these brave men to provide them with the very
Speaker 1: best technical equipment. So equipment and training was really the
Speaker 1: way forward, especially after Germany's blitz happened over the period
Speaker 1: of you know, about a year or two, because there
Speaker 1: were a lot of bombs dropped, and like you said,
Speaker 1: you know a lot. I mean, I don't know if
Speaker 1: we have an exact percentage of I guess it depends
Speaker 1: on the war. But even today, like some of the
Speaker 1: more recent wars, I've saw numbers like twenty thirty percent
Speaker 1: of bombstone even go off. So those things are just
Speaker 1: laying around waiting for you know, Unfortunately, sometimes some some
Speaker 1: kid or any innocent person to just stumble upon it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I saw something I can't remember, I send
Speaker 2: it to you, So maybe you'll remember either hundreds of
Speaker 2: thousands of tons or millions of tons of munitions were
Speaker 2: dropped in Europe.
Speaker 1: I don't remember.
Speaker 2: Okay, well it was one of those. It was just
Speaker 2: a mind boggling amount. So if you think of twenty
Speaker 2: or thirty percent of that, like that's they're still there.
Speaker 2: They're still in Europe. Like those bombs, if they didn't
Speaker 2: go off, they would plant themselves sixty feet underground, waiting
Speaker 2: for some guy who like later was going to build
Speaker 2: a sports arena on the site to find it and
Speaker 2: hope that he didn't accidentally blow it up with his
Speaker 2: earth mover. Like that's a I don't know how common
Speaker 2: it is, but it's a frequent occurrence in Europe.
Speaker 1: Still, Yeah, absolutely, As they got better at disabling these bombs,
Speaker 1: of course that that race starts again the pendulum of development.
Speaker 1: That great band takes the stage and Germany is like, well,
Speaker 1: here's what we'll do. Then we're going to start implementing
Speaker 1: things that will kill somebody trying to dismantle it. An
Speaker 1: anti handling device. They had all different kinds, but you know,
Speaker 1: basically most of them were just you know, if you
Speaker 1: mess with the fuse or if you mess with the wiring,
Speaker 1: like if you were trying to extract something to keep
Speaker 1: it from going boom, that would make it go boom.
Speaker 2: Right, And so yeah, I just want to like punctuate
Speaker 2: that these anti handling devices were booby traps specifically designed
Speaker 2: to blow up the very people whose job we're talking
Speaker 2: about today. Yeah, that was the whole thing. That was
Speaker 2: the point of it. And for people walking around like
Speaker 2: me who just have always thought of fuses as that
Speaker 2: long wick that goes to like a shiny black round bomb,
Speaker 2: there are basically anything that sets off the detonator or
Speaker 2: the thing that blows up the detonator that's a fuse.
Speaker 2: It can be everything from something magnetic, it can be barometric,
Speaker 2: can be like a gyroscope, so if the bomb is
Speaker 2: tipped over, it blows up. Anything that you can use
Speaker 2: to to that detects a change in the environment, a timer.
Speaker 2: It can also be a radio, something as simple as
Speaker 2: a garage shore opener. All those are fuses. It's not
Speaker 2: just like there's a wick that'slit. It's anything that can
Speaker 2: blow the thing up that triggers the explosion.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so they started working hard again to try and
Speaker 1: counteract this by developing, you know, new methods, new techniques
Speaker 1: to not only diffuse bombs, but you know, figure out
Speaker 1: what was sometimes literally making them tick, drilling holes in them,
Speaker 1: and time bombs. They started listening to them with stethoscopes
Speaker 1: so you could hear if it had a clock, and
Speaker 1: if it did have a clock, see if there was
Speaker 1: some sort of mechanism called a clock stopper, like it's
Speaker 1: basically a steel collar, battery power thing, to see if
Speaker 1: that thing's firing, to see if they, you know, had
Speaker 1: any anti withdrawal devices. Thank you Germans. Boiling water. They
Speaker 1: started using water and steam early on to render either
Speaker 1: the powder useless or as we'll see now, like just
Speaker 1: like flooding a thing with a lot of water very
Speaker 1: quickly can sometimes work as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that also didn't quite make sense to me
Speaker 2: at first until I realized that bombs also are made up.
Speaker 2: There's a really like the explosive part that makes the
Speaker 2: big boom, but there's also frequently a slightly smaller explosive
Speaker 2: that makes the big boom go off. The thing that
Speaker 2: booms really hugely, they're usually really kind of hard to detonate,
Speaker 2: so you can do things like pour water on the
Speaker 2: whole thing, and you're you're not necessarily trying to keep
Speaker 2: the big bomb from going off. You're trying to disable
Speaker 2: that either explosive charge or the fuse or whatever that's
Speaker 2: gonna make that bigger bomb go off. It's kind of
Speaker 2: hard to jiggling around a bomb to make like say
Speaker 2: the plastic explosives or something like that go off. It's
Speaker 2: way easier to make the black powder get triggered. That's
Speaker 2: what you're trying to disable most of the time when
Speaker 2: you're messing with the bomb. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, I mean, we talked about that a lot in
Speaker 1: our episodes on nuclear bombs and stuff like that.
Speaker 2: You said we did one on IEDs. Is that right?
Speaker 2: I genuinely don't remember that.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, eleven years ago.
Speaker 2: Wow, I'm glad you remember. Oh, just we're talking about
Speaker 2: previous episodes. I think we should take a second here, Chuck,
Speaker 2: to correct ourselves. I don't know if you saw some
Speaker 2: of the emails come in, but we released our Genghis
Speaker 2: Khan episode as a Saturday select. I think I chose
Speaker 2: it ye this past Saturday, And apparently in it we
Speaker 2: say that when Genghis Khan was running around, there were
Speaker 2: seven billion people on the planet and three billion of
Speaker 2: them were Mongols, and that is that could not be
Speaker 2: further from the truth. Apparently we didn't hit one billion
Speaker 2: until the nineteenth century, and we're at seven billion now.
Speaker 2: So we were so off that it doesn't even make
Speaker 2: sense what we were saying. And I can't believe we
Speaker 2: got it that wrong, but apparently we did. So sorry
Speaker 2: to everybody who's like, I can never listen to Josh
Speaker 2: and Chuck again. After that, you said, I guess you
Speaker 2: wouldn't be listening right now.
Speaker 1: You kept saying we did we both say that in unison.
Speaker 2: Hey man, if one of us said it and the
Speaker 2: other one didn't correct it. We're both guilty.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, all right, well we're guilty of not taking
Speaker 1: an ad break. So we'll do that right now and
Speaker 1: beg forgiveness when we come back right after this. All right,
Speaker 1: So flash forward again. You know, the sort of technology
Speaker 1: of defeating bomb seems to rise and fall with lots
Speaker 1: of bombings happening, of course, and that happened between nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty nine and really up into kind of the mid
Speaker 1: two thousands with the Provisional Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland.
Speaker 1: During that time, twenty three different specialists were killed in
Speaker 1: action from the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, and ordnance is
Speaker 1: just sort of a fancy name for any kind of artillery.
Speaker 1: But you'll hear, you know, like unexploded ordnance and stuff
Speaker 1: like that a lot. And that's like a bomb that
Speaker 1: didn't go off.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so the troubles in Northern Ireland were a
Speaker 2: huge impetus for new bomb disposal technology. Simultaneously, bomb disposal
Speaker 2: techs who had fought in Vietnam were sorry to come
Speaker 2: back to the United States too, So there are two
Speaker 2: different things that were pushing bomb disposal technology at about
Speaker 2: the same time in both the UK and America. And
Speaker 2: what's interesting is this is the second time that it happened.
Speaker 2: Third time actually, remember there were there was the Irish
Speaker 2: Republicans in the nineteenth century, followed closely by the anarchists
Speaker 2: in New York. There was the Vets returning from Vietnam,
Speaker 2: and in the UK dealing with the troubles of Northern Ireland.
Speaker 2: And then in World War Two there was the there
Speaker 2: was Churchill's push to train veterans or servicemen in World
Speaker 2: War Two, and at the same time, the US Navy
Speaker 2: was learning to defuse SA minds at the same time.
Speaker 2: So it's just strange to me that the US and
Speaker 2: the UK have run in paralleled so many different times.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally so. Prior to seventy two, it was basically
Speaker 1: using your hands like a human being dismantling a bomb
Speaker 1: with their fingies. After that, because of you know, the
Speaker 1: new threats coming from all the bombs from the troubles,
Speaker 1: they started saying like, hey, maybe, and the idea very
Speaker 1: much now is to try and do everything as far
Speaker 1: away from the bomb as possible, including the actual technician
Speaker 1: obviously getting the people out of there. But they did
Speaker 1: this by developing a bunch of new tools, one of
Speaker 1: which is called the pig stick. I was a minute
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy one, and this is one of those
Speaker 1: that sends a water jet, a really powerful water jet,
Speaker 1: to try and just interrupt the circuitry and disable it.
Speaker 1: And they're still used to this day.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I saw one of these go off. It also
Speaker 2: took me a minute to figure out why they call
Speaker 2: it a pigstick, and then I remembered Anton Sugar in
Speaker 2: No Country for Old Men. It's essentially they're kind of
Speaker 2: saying it's the same thing as that. It's a charge
Speaker 2: that shoots water so forcefully that I saw it slowed
Speaker 2: down to twenty percent and it still happened too fast
Speaker 2: to see. Yeah, Like it's so quick that it will
Speaker 2: disrupt the bomb before the bomb knows what hit it, right,
Speaker 2: So any fuse or firing mechanism or anything like that,
Speaker 2: it's just going to get separated before it can trigger
Speaker 2: the bomb. And the fact that it's water means that
Speaker 2: it's not going to let the it's not going to
Speaker 2: accidentally light any say like incendiary trigger inside. So it's
Speaker 2: pretty ingenious. And the fact that they were using this
Speaker 2: all the way back in the early mid seventies is
Speaker 2: pretty impressive, and because it was just so effective, like
Speaker 2: you said, like, it's still pretty much standard around the
Speaker 2: world today.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, they're not very effective for car bombs obviously,
Speaker 1: so more and more car bombs started to be used.
Speaker 1: Like again, once something is sort of figured out and
Speaker 1: you figure out a better way to defeat it, the
Speaker 1: enemy morphs, and so car bombs became sort of and
Speaker 1: are still just a big problem worldwide because car bombs
Speaker 1: are mobile obviously, and they're huge, Like you can have
Speaker 1: a two hundred to three hundred pound bomb hidden in
Speaker 1: a that's not very big without even seeing it. So
Speaker 1: of course they had to develop even newer technology and
Speaker 1: we all knew it was going to go this way.
Speaker 1: But eventually robots would come onto the scene.
Speaker 2: I'm impressed you didn't say robots. Thanks.
Speaker 1: That's Hodgman Steele.
Speaker 2: So yeah, one of the technologies that came out of
Speaker 2: that is the early prototypes or proto robots used today
Speaker 2: were called wheelbarrows. I think the first one was made
Speaker 2: out of a lawnmower motor and essentially you could put
Speaker 2: say something like a pigstick and then maybe a video
Speaker 2: camera on there and go approach a car, and some
Speaker 2: of the ones that came later you could use this
Speaker 2: robot to hook toe ropes up to move the car
Speaker 2: out of the area to someplace safer to blow it up.
Speaker 2: And I think something like four hundred wheelbarrows were destroyed
Speaker 2: just between nineteen seventy two and nineteen seventy eight, now,
Speaker 2: which gives you an idea. That's six years. That's just
Speaker 2: the ones that were destroyed. That's how many bombs were
Speaker 2: laid around Northern Ireland, but also in Europe and England
Speaker 2: to somewhat lesser extent during that period, during the Troubles
Speaker 2: which ran all the way to ninety eight, I think
Speaker 2: there was a lot of bombs going off around there
Speaker 2: at the time. So the more bombs there were, the
Speaker 2: more quickly they had to develop these techniques to counter
Speaker 2: bomb measures too. That's what was going on. It was
Speaker 2: just a huge laboratory and pressure cooker at the same time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, to be fair, I think the purpose mostly for
Speaker 1: the wheelbarrow was to blow it up, So I don't
Speaker 1: think there were a ton of wheelbarrows that made it
Speaker 1: out alive, you know.
Speaker 2: Oh, okay, all right, Still four hundred there is a
Speaker 2: lot of bombs in six years.
Speaker 1: Oh totally. There was a well, I guess we should
Speaker 1: just sort of give the general breakdown of how this
Speaker 1: might work back then, and it's not too dissimilar from
Speaker 1: how it works now. But you would initially, you know,
Speaker 1: get the call that there's a suspected device to this,
Speaker 1: this team or the specialists, they would the first thing
Speaker 1: they do is clear the area. They try to get people,
Speaker 1: you know, they figure out what they think might be
Speaker 1: the blast zone, get as many people as far away
Speaker 1: from that area as possible, and then you get that
Speaker 1: robot out. If the robot can't do the job, then
Speaker 1: you have to get a person in a bomb suit
Speaker 1: in there. We'll talk about bomb suits a little bit
Speaker 1: more later. And then they go in and they explode
Speaker 1: this thing if it's real.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, that's another thing. Kyle found this BBC documentary
Speaker 2: on the bomb squads working in Northern Ireland at the
Speaker 2: time from nineteen seventy four and everything has a real
Speaker 2: clockwork orange look to it still, but they find a hoax.
Speaker 2: But at the end of it they're working on like
Speaker 2: a real live bomb and they just have the audio
Speaker 2: of the guy who you know, is now inside this
Speaker 2: building trying to figure out what kind of bomb they're
Speaker 2: dealing with, and you just hear his breath and it
Speaker 2: just gets like more and more quickened and like like
Speaker 2: it sounds not quite like he's going to hyperventilate, but
Speaker 2: he's breathing way harder than the normal average person does.
Speaker 2: And it's really just kind of stirring at the end there,
Speaker 2: Especially for a fifty year old hour long BBC documentary.
Speaker 1: You should see the hurt Locker then. Okay, that that
Speaker 1: turns you on.
Speaker 2: I don't know if it turned me on, it is
Speaker 2: the right way to put it, but yees I definitely
Speaker 2: noticed it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's an anxiety inducing film for sure. It's very
Speaker 1: very tense as you would imagine.
Speaker 2: Okay, I'll check it out.
Speaker 1: Sure you don't have to, man.
Speaker 2: I mean, are you one of the financiers of the.
Speaker 1: Movie or you know, just suggesting very related to this topic,
Speaker 1: you know?
Speaker 2: Sure?
Speaker 1: So IEDs again, we did a full episode on these
Speaker 1: about eleven years ago, so we don't need to really
Speaker 1: go through what all those are. But they are improvised
Speaker 1: explosive devices. And the scary thing about IEDs, like this
Speaker 1: is what you had in the boss of marathon bombing
Speaker 1: is is like it could be almost anything, like a
Speaker 1: pressure cooker, a pipe bomb, could be you know, something
Speaker 1: just sitting in a backpack on the corner. So those
Speaker 1: are that's you know, incredibly frightening to face that kind
Speaker 1: of reality.
Speaker 2: Yes, so yeah, so that's something that say, like a
Speaker 2: public safety bomb disposal tech would be more likely to
Speaker 2: deal with, rather than say like a military grade bomb
Speaker 2: being left somewhere. That would probably be more like a
Speaker 2: military person that was dealing with that. But I also
Speaker 2: saw one other thing that people in public safety have
Speaker 2: to deal with are illegal fireworks. I didn't even know
Speaker 2: there was such a thing as illegal fireworks.
Speaker 1: Did you You mean, like the firework itself is illegal
Speaker 1: in a legal state.
Speaker 2: I think the impression is that they're homemade, okay, or
Speaker 2: they're so powerful that they're not legal.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I've heard that. I think as a kid,
Speaker 1: we all heard rumors of like in one hundreds and
Speaker 1: in one twenties, it probably didn't even.
Speaker 2: Exist, right, A black cat. The size of your forearm.
Speaker 1: Also on those IEDs, especially in the case of Boston
Speaker 1: that video we saw. You know, one thing you don't
Speaker 1: think about is when you find out that there is
Speaker 1: like a bomb, you know, or a tip that there's
Speaker 1: a bomb somewhere, and you clear out an area, like
Speaker 1: a lot of things can look like a bomb at
Speaker 1: that point, because he was like, you know, people drop
Speaker 1: their backpack, they get out of there there, you know,
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, there's a lot of things laying around,
Speaker 1: or it could be like the mailbox, you know, so
Speaker 1: they have to check out like everything.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I noted that too. That was pretty interesting. Another
Speaker 2: thing that they'll do is they'll pre sweep areas, say
Speaker 2: like there's a political rally or something like that, you
Speaker 2: can pretty much bet that there's a bomb squad that
Speaker 2: moved through the area already and swept it for bombs. Also,
Speaker 2: one of the other big jobs that they have, Chuck,
Speaker 2: is they will identify like evidence of bombs. They'll help
Speaker 2: people gather evidence. They'll be like, that's a part of
Speaker 2: a bomb, that's part of bomb. And the more that
Speaker 2: they can collect, the more information they can take back
Speaker 2: to the lab and figure out about the bomb, the
Speaker 2: bomb maker, the country that it came from. And the
Speaker 2: more they can do that, the more they can learn
Speaker 2: to counter them as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, you know I mentioned that in the seventies,
Speaker 1: kind of the protocol of how you would go about
Speaker 1: this on the scene basically being the same today. Like
Speaker 1: some of the only differences today is like they have
Speaker 1: X rays now, so yeah, you know, just like in
Speaker 1: the doctor's office, they'll go and put a plate behind
Speaker 1: the bomb and take an X ray of it. And
Speaker 1: that has been a real game changer in being able
Speaker 1: to look inside this thing safely and see what's going on.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And the other thing too that the guy in the
Speaker 1: video really wanted to drive home is they want to
Speaker 1: spend as less as little time around that bomb as possible.
Speaker 1: So like if you're going in, you don't want to
Speaker 1: go in with a couple of things and be like, oh,
Speaker 1: let me go back and get this now and try this.
Speaker 1: Like they want to go in there one time and
Speaker 1: have everything at their disposal on hand to assess and
Speaker 1: evaluate and decide how they're going to disrupt this thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but as it stands, because you almost exclusively across
Speaker 2: the board, every bomb disposal unit's going to take an
Speaker 2: X ray first, you have to put a person in
Speaker 2: danger at least at some point. Ideally after they take
Speaker 2: the X ray, they get the heck out of there,
Speaker 2: and then they never go back again. It's the robot
Speaker 2: that's sent in, the wheelbearer or whatever to handle the
Speaker 2: whole thing with, say like some sort of disruptor, like
Speaker 2: a pigstick or something. Right, But if, like you said,
Speaker 2: the robot can't get to it, it's up the stairs,
Speaker 2: it's over some weird debris, it's just in a place
Speaker 2: where the robot can't get to it, that person's going
Speaker 2: to have to go back in and deal with this directly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and like this is frightening when you think about,
Speaker 1: like you have to go in to get that X ray.
Speaker 1: And two out of the three methods for a bomb
Speaker 1: potentially going off are threats to you at that moment.
Speaker 1: If it's a time bomb and you have some bad
Speaker 1: luck with your timing, you could be exploded. If it's
Speaker 1: a remote controlled bomb, you could very easily be exploded.
Speaker 1: The only one that you're I guess, relatively safe from
Speaker 1: if you're doing your job really, really carefully, is victim
Speaker 1: initiated or like a booby trap or something. So you
Speaker 1: know you're not gonna want to disturb it. Basically, you're
Speaker 1: gonna want to be really really careful when you're laying
Speaker 1: when you're doing that X ray.
Speaker 2: Yeah for sure. All right, Chuck, I say we come
Speaker 2: back and we talk about some of the technology that
Speaker 2: these very brave people are using when they do this crazy,
Speaker 2: crazy stuff. Let's do it, all right, man. So, as
Speaker 2: we promised, we're going to talk about some of the
Speaker 2: technology that bomb disposal technicians use. We already talked about
Speaker 2: the robot and we mentioned the bomb suit a little bit,
Speaker 2: but I think you can go into it a little
Speaker 2: more because they're fairly complex.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, and uncomfortable. There are variations. You know, they'll
Speaker 1: gauge what kind of level of suit you need, like
Speaker 1: lighter versus heavier. But if you've got on the full
Speaker 1: heaviest kevlar plated collar, protected, helmet visor wearing suit, it
Speaker 1: is clunky. You do have use of your Fingi's so like,
Speaker 1: you know, I think if you're a one of these
Speaker 1: kind of specialists, one thing you're going to have to
Speaker 1: really consider is that you may at some point be
Speaker 1: living your life without or hands right at the very least.
Speaker 1: But they are fairly effective. I mean they're pretty clunky,
Speaker 1: but like the heat is the biggest problem, especially you know,
Speaker 1: you know, when you're disrupting a bomb, let's say in
Speaker 1: the Middle East in the middle of summer or something
Speaker 1: like that, they don't last long in those So the
Speaker 1: very latest technology has actual cooling units. They all used
Speaker 1: to have fans, but now they have actually coolant that
Speaker 1: says they can withstand like any amount of heat for
Speaker 1: an hour.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: And I don't think they want to be in there
Speaker 1: for more than an hour anyway, So hopefully that's helped
Speaker 1: a lot.
Speaker 2: Yeah. One thing that I saw that a lot of
Speaker 2: them don't have, though, is like communication equipment, because you
Speaker 2: usually use radio and you can accidentally set off a
Speaker 2: bomb that's radio controlled, so they often don't have any
Speaker 2: sort of calm equipment in there. I also saw, and
Speaker 2: I don't know this is not from a legitimate source
Speaker 2: or vetted source. How about that it's either on Core
Speaker 2: or Reddit. No offense to either of those sites, but
Speaker 2: where somebody who presented themselves as a bomb technician essentially
Speaker 2: said if you're yes, if you're dealing with a pipe bomb,
Speaker 2: maybe illegal fireworks something like that, you're probably gonna wear
Speaker 2: a bomb suit if you have to diffuse it yourself.
Speaker 2: Not a robot, but at bomb bomb, you probably aren't
Speaker 2: going to go to the trouble of wearing a suit
Speaker 2: because that bomb will kill you if it goes off,
Speaker 2: whether you're wearing a suit or not. And those suits
Speaker 2: are definitely made to protect your against shrapnel. Projectiles. A
Speaker 2: lot of them are literally bulletproof because they're they're so
Speaker 2: tough and made of such thick kevlar and ceramic plates
Speaker 2: and all that. But the overblast, the shockwave that's produced
Speaker 2: is what can It can give you crushing injuries just
Speaker 2: from hitting you that hard if you're very close to
Speaker 2: a blast radius. So putting all that together, I couldn't help.
Speaker 2: But wonder if they were if they were correct, or
Speaker 2: if they were just talking jive.
Speaker 1: Well, there is something called blast long. It's very common injury,
Speaker 1: and it's basically, you know, like you said, getting just
Speaker 1: smashed in the chest with an invisible, you know, wrecking ball.
Speaker 1: So it's an internal injury. But that's one of the
Speaker 1: most common and those suits, you know, they obviously stop
Speaker 1: projectiles and stuff, but they also decreased that blast wave impact.
Speaker 1: It's you know, they're made to do that. So I
Speaker 1: would be surprised if the just sort of the rules
Speaker 1: around it were like, yeah, he's just not gonna wear
Speaker 1: it today.
Speaker 2: That was my take too, It's like, are you are
Speaker 2: you really allowed to just say that yourself. But also
Speaker 2: I wonder if they're in such short supply that it's
Speaker 2: like do whatever you want. Man, Like, just hats off
Speaker 2: to you for even trying this. They're expensive, Yeah, they're
Speaker 2: like thirty five grand, but I stopped and thought about it.
Speaker 2: That's because probably it's local and federal governments buying them,
Speaker 2: so I'm sure they're marked.
Speaker 1: Up, you know, yeah, you probably make one of those
Speaker 1: for a couple hundred bucks.
Speaker 2: I bet sure. I also saw some of them have
Speaker 2: spinal protection, so that if you're blown back by the
Speaker 2: blast wind, the actual wind that's pushed out from the blast,
Speaker 2: and you land on your spine, you're not automatically going
Speaker 2: to get a spinal injury.
Speaker 1: Oh that's that's cool, because that guy in the video
Speaker 1: kind of indicated that the back was the least protected.
Speaker 2: I saw that. But this is on a site for
Speaker 2: a manufacture of actual blast suits bombs.
Speaker 1: Did you ever think they're just trying to sell you suit? Josh,
Speaker 1: Come on, come on, naive.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was a little kind of hokey. It looked
Speaker 2: like it was like a drawing of a tuxedo on
Speaker 2: the front of it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So the other, you know, piece of technology we
Speaker 1: talked a little bit about is the it was called
Speaker 1: the disruptor. Those pigsticks or disruptors. There are all kinds
Speaker 1: of disruptors, from things that use you know, sound to water,
Speaker 1: that that bottler thing. You know, I tried to understand
Speaker 1: what he was talking about in that video, but I
Speaker 1: was a little little confused.
Speaker 2: So essentially, which one the bottler? Yeah, so it's the
Speaker 2: same thing as the others, except the pig stick and
Speaker 2: the other one that shoots everything in like a v wedge.
Speaker 2: It's it's not it's not like a hyper located on
Speaker 2: a certain area. Okay, it blows out in a circle.
Speaker 2: It's multidirectional. Again, the same key is it's spreading water
Speaker 2: and it blows up so fast that it can disable
Speaker 2: the trigger before it can fire. All. It's that's what
Speaker 2: disruptors do essentially.
Speaker 1: Okay. Uh, there's also you know, they're they're bomb carriers
Speaker 1: that just sit on the back of a pickup truck.
Speaker 1: You know, they're bolted to a pickup truck or pumby
Speaker 1: or whatever.
Speaker 2: Or a cyber truck.
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh god, I saw one in the wild the
Speaker 1: other day for the first time.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, what'd you think. I was just like, it's
Speaker 2: just the.
Speaker 1: Dumbest looking thing to drive around in that I've ever
Speaker 1: seen in my life. That's what I thought.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I get that a lot of people do.
Speaker 2: There's a subreddit called cyber stuck, and the whole thing
Speaker 2: is just totally dedicated to making fun of people who
Speaker 2: drive cyber trucks and all of the woes that they
Speaker 2: have from driving a cyber truck.
Speaker 1: It's pretty finny if you've got one.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: I'm not trying to yuck or you. Everyone has different tastes,
Speaker 1: but let's just say it's not my taste.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that was well aesthetically. So these bomb carriers,
Speaker 1: like I said, you know, it's kind of just a big, like,
Speaker 1: you know, heavy chamber to put a bomb in to
Speaker 1: carry it somewhere else.
Speaker 2: Yes, And like I think they can. I've seen that
Speaker 2: some of them can hold up to ten kilograms of
Speaker 2: TNT the equivalent of that, right, Yeah, so like you
Speaker 2: could blow up you could put twenty something pounds of
Speaker 2: dynamite in this thing and blow it up, and the
Speaker 2: thing will be like that's all you got. It'll like
Speaker 2: get belched or something like that. It's just amazing that
Speaker 2: we can make something that can can that kind of
Speaker 2: violent force. Yeah, for sure, I'm just impressed by those things.
Speaker 2: One other thing that I saw that it really stuck
Speaker 2: out to me is like you would think that that
Speaker 2: bomb disposal experts are paid like basketball stars and they
Speaker 2: are not. Like the average bomb tech makes about fifty
Speaker 2: thousand dollars a year in the UK or the US.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that's wrong.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, I just wanted to go on record as
Speaker 2: saying that I support bomb techts being paid through the roof.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean it's just another example of job
Speaker 1: you do. Does it necessarily equate to money you make?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: You know, as far as the fairness scale goes, yeap,
Speaker 1: So unexploded ordinances. I keep saying ordinances, ordinance without any right.
Speaker 1: It's hard to say that right for me. But like
Speaker 1: we said, those are bombs from past wars that have
Speaker 1: not gone off. I think you already mentioned that World
Speaker 1: War Two has a lot of these still scattered across Europe.
Speaker 1: And these are really dangerous because you know, these things
Speaker 1: degrade over time in every way you can imagine, from
Speaker 1: the fuses to the primers to you know, parts resting
Speaker 1: out and stuff like that. So it's you know, it's
Speaker 1: literally sometimes a bomb just waiting to go off, and
Speaker 1: you never know when that might be.
Speaker 2: Right, and this happens, I mean sometimes it goes off
Speaker 2: and kills people, as recently is two thy ten, twenty
Speaker 2: twenty three. I think in that twenty ten incident it
Speaker 2: was in Germany. Three three bomb techs were killed in
Speaker 2: that explosion. Yeah, and again this is World War two ordinance.
Speaker 2: Like imagine being a pilot who drops a bomb, it
Speaker 2: doesn't go off, You go home, you return from the war,
Speaker 2: you buy a house in the suburbs, you have a
Speaker 2: pick of fence, a family, you grow old, you die,
Speaker 2: and then thirty years after that, after you're buried, somebody
Speaker 2: comes along and that bomb you drop blows up and
Speaker 2: kills them completely outside the context of war. That happens
Speaker 2: in Europe.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that happens all over the world.
Speaker 2: Yes, for sure, that's well put.
Speaker 1: Because you know, more recently in the nineteen seventies with
Speaker 1: the wars in Indo China, I think Kyle found the
Speaker 1: stat two million tons of munitions were dropped between sixty
Speaker 1: four and seventy three, and of the two hundred and
Speaker 1: seventy million cluster bombs dropped, thirty percent may have failed
Speaker 1: to detonate. That's over eighty million cluster bombs potentially still
Speaker 1: scattered about that area.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's not including all the land mines that
Speaker 2: were purposely laid and not cleared too, man, unbelievable. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and kids get killed by that, the kids in I Rack.
Speaker 2: I saw between twenty seventeen and twenty twenty two, five
Speaker 2: hundred and nineteen kids were either killed or injured in
Speaker 2: a rock from unexploded ordinance. And then the United States
Speaker 2: has its own stockpole problems too. I saw that we
Speaker 2: dumped millions of pounds of bombs when when the stockpiles
Speaker 2: got too big they were, and the stuff was getting old,
Speaker 2: they just dumped it off the coast in the east
Speaker 2: and the west.
Speaker 1: That's just how can that be allowed?
Speaker 2: It was, well, it was stopped being allowed in nineteen seventy.
Speaker 2: But it's not like they went back and got every
Speaker 2: fished everything out, which is funny because it does get
Speaker 2: fished out once in a while in a fishing net
Speaker 2: and apparently Lake Erie had Camp Perry, which was a
Speaker 2: proving ground from munitions, and just like in war when
Speaker 2: you're shooting off a bunch of munitions to test them,
Speaker 2: some of them aren't going to aren't going to blow up,
Speaker 2: right then, So apparently Lake Erie is littered with unexploded
Speaker 2: ordnance as well.
Speaker 1: That we talked about. When wasn't it a nuclear bomb
Speaker 1: off the coast of Savannah, right?
Speaker 2: Yeah? From I think the early fifties, didn't it.
Speaker 1: Did they find that thing recently? Yeah?
Speaker 2: I think they did, and they were like, it's too
Speaker 2: it's too dangerous to move. We're just gonna cross our
Speaker 2: fingers if I'm not mistaken.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I couldn't remember because I feel like we got
Speaker 1: email because we talked about that a long time ago.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they made the they made the call that it's
Speaker 2: really just Tybee Island that's in danger in there, like
Speaker 2: Tybee Island.
Speaker 1: That's so mean.
Speaker 2: Okay, since I just made fun of Tybee Allen, I'm
Speaker 2: just kidding Tybee. Uh, it's time for listener mail. I say, you.
Speaker 1: Know who loves Tybee jas Jerry does.
Speaker 2: She's a Tybee person and she's.
Speaker 1: Not here today, so she'll hear this when she uh,
Speaker 1: or maybe she won't, who.
Speaker 2: Knows, No, she'll be doing something else.
Speaker 1: All right, So you said listener mail, right, Yeah I did.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna call this. I have to do it. Friend.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, but I have to do this Minecraft correction.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, because the emails. And this is one where
Speaker 1: I just tried and tried and tried to tell you
Speaker 1: that that wasn't right, and you stuck to your guns.
Speaker 1: Hey sure, Hey, guys, been listening for her almost as
Speaker 1: long as I played Minecraft a little over a decade.
Speaker 1: Josh repeated the point that there is one seed per
Speaker 1: game copy, but Minecraft has more to offer than you think.
Speaker 1: You can make as many worlds as you want concurrently,
Speaker 1: and even pick your seed. It's gotten so popular that
Speaker 1: entire websites are dedicated to seed sharing. That sounds gross.
Speaker 1: If someone finds an interesting seed with something like an
Speaker 1: island inside a volcano close to your spawn point, they
Speaker 1: will often share the random string of characters that produce
Speaker 1: that seed so others can generate that same world. There
Speaker 1: was also a sarcastic comment made about kids learning that
Speaker 1: the ancient ones built underwater cities. I don't think it
Speaker 1: was sarcastic. I think it was clever quip.
Speaker 2: Probably sarcastic. It's sardonic. It was sardonic.
Speaker 1: Okay, but this is actually true, guys. Tons of ancient
Speaker 1: settlements in real life are currently under the water because
Speaker 1: the coastline changes over time, we tend to build near
Speaker 1: bodies of water.
Speaker 2: Absolutely true on both counts. Thank you and for day
Speaker 2: that is Nathan, Nathan, that was great. That's pretty awesome.
Speaker 2: You've been listening to us about as long as you've
Speaker 2: been playing mine. That is high praise as we take it.
Speaker 2: And thank you for so gently correcting me even though
Speaker 2: I got it so wrong long.
Speaker 1: That's okay.
Speaker 2: If you want to be like Nathan and gently correct us,
Speaker 2: we're always up for that. You can send it via
Speaker 2: email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.