Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
Speaker 1: from house Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome to
Speaker 1: the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. I can feel pain with
Speaker 1: me as always A Charles W. Chuck Bryant and he
Speaker 1: hold on, dude, Chuck can feel pain as well. I
Speaker 1: just tested him. I wanted to make a hund percent sure.
Speaker 1: That's the second take though, and you didn't really have
Speaker 1: to do it twice. We could effaked it this time.
Speaker 1: I wanted a realistic response. Well that's real, Josh, pinch
Speaker 1: me hurt? Yeah, yeah, you could tell um you are right? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm fine. Okay, how you doing besides the throbbing forearm?
Speaker 1: I'm great, sir, and you I'm doing pretty good. Good.
Speaker 1: Everything's just peachy, including with my hair. Josh has a
Speaker 1: he goofed He shaves his head and he kind of
Speaker 1: goofed it so he looks like a a patient from
Speaker 1: some word where he had to surgery or something in
Speaker 1: his on his brain. I didn't goof my hair, that's right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I have an eastern black haircut now right. Yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: So other than that I'm feeling pretty good. You're right,
Speaker 1: So you felt emotional pain with your odd haircut. I did, which,
Speaker 1: by the way, Chuck, is different from physical pain. You
Speaker 1: knew that because of a yet to be released audiobook.
Speaker 1: That's right, it's forthcoming. It's a little teaser for everybody. Um,
Speaker 1: But there are actually people out there, Chuck, who cannot
Speaker 1: feel pain straight up, don't feel pain. It's amazing. It
Speaker 1: is very rare, but it happens. It is rare, Chuck. Actually,
Speaker 1: the only hard number that I've seen is UH sixty
Speaker 1: sixty reported cases worldwide, sixties since three. Actually, I've got
Speaker 1: thirty five in the United States as of now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've seen I saw that number as well. I've seen
Speaker 1: people who just plumb said, we have no idea how
Speaker 1: many could be under reported, especially with younger kids. UM
Speaker 1: with what we're talking about is called congenital insensitivity to
Speaker 1: pain with an hydrosis. Otherwise, we're just gonna call it
Speaker 1: SIPA for short, right, because that's much easier. And that
Speaker 1: is actually part of a it's a sub type of
Speaker 1: a larger disorder called hereditary sensory and autonomic neuropathy UH.
Speaker 1: And this is actually the type four SIPPA is type
Speaker 1: four s H s A N. Yes, and it's the
Speaker 1: most severe. Uh. Well, we'll get into what it all means,
Speaker 1: but it's the most severe. We will. Um. There's actually
Speaker 1: kind of a recent famous case of it. There's a
Speaker 1: British physician named Dr Jeoffrey Woods. You heard of him, chuck, No,
Speaker 1: But is he one of the g o F guys. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's British. Yeah, he's spilled programmed with two ms in
Speaker 1: an e UM. But Dr Woods uh travels to Pakistan
Speaker 1: fairly regularly, and while he was there he heard about
Speaker 1: a kid who used to pass like thick needles right
Speaker 1: through his arm walking on hot coals. Uh, and showed
Speaker 1: no signs of feeling pain whatsoever. And he wasn't in
Speaker 1: the gym Rows circus. No, he wasn't, actually, but he
Speaker 1: probably could have done a lot better for himself than
Speaker 1: just on the streets of Lahore right. Um with Dr
Speaker 1: Woods heard about this guy and this little kid and
Speaker 1: was kind of interested and finally got around to trying
Speaker 1: to go see him. Right before he could see him,
Speaker 1: the kid, around his fourteenth birthday died. Actually, Um, he
Speaker 1: was he was. I don't know if he was dared
Speaker 1: or he was doing it for money or whatever, but
Speaker 1: he jumped off a roof and died. But Dr Woods
Speaker 1: got ahold of this kid's family and actually found out
Speaker 1: that a bunch of them have no sensitivity whatsoever to pain. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which is also called analgesia. Oh that's the other word
Speaker 1: for it. Didn't know that. Yeah, pain killers are called analgesics.
Speaker 1: So this would be like the state of not having
Speaker 1: pain or having reduced pain would be analges yet. But
Speaker 1: this isn't just reduced pain as a chuck, No, we're
Speaker 1: talking about no. Uh. You can feel pressure, but you
Speaker 1: can feel no pain. Uh. And you can feel no
Speaker 1: heat or cold. You can feel no temperature on your
Speaker 1: skin either. Right, that's the one with anhydrosis, Yes, exactly. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's talk about the pain part first. Let's talk about
Speaker 1: pain in general. Okay, how do how do we feel pain? Well, Josh,
Speaker 1: your your nervous system is where all this happens. And
Speaker 1: we're talking about your brain here. This is your brain
Speaker 1: on pain. Yeah, your cranial nerves, spinal cord, spinal nerves,
Speaker 1: and other things like your gangli and receptor sensory receptor
Speaker 1: stuff like that, and your nerves carry messages to your
Speaker 1: spine through your body to your spine. Spine carries it
Speaker 1: to your brain and the receptors. If you burn your
Speaker 1: finger or something will send the message up to the
Speaker 1: spine to the brain that says you got burnt, It hurts, right,
Speaker 1: and it sends a response message that moves your hand
Speaker 1: away real quick, touching a hot stove or something like that that.
Speaker 1: You can take it from here though, because your Mr
Speaker 1: Doctor guy Dr Clark, thank you chuck. Um. Actually, the
Speaker 1: sense of pain, the experience of pain is called no susception,
Speaker 1: right um. And this is the experience of physical pain
Speaker 1: as a response to noxious stimuli. And there's actually four
Speaker 1: categories of noxious stimuli. There's mechanical, electrical, thermal, and chemical,
Speaker 1: right um. And we have actually specialized uh nerve endings
Speaker 1: receptors called no susceptors that are responsible just for sending
Speaker 1: pain signals. They use peripheral nerves. Yes. Actually, as as
Speaker 1: painful as pain is, we have it for a reason.
Speaker 1: Like you said, you know you're touching a hot stove
Speaker 1: and your brain says, get your hand off of it,
Speaker 1: right um. We also all uh what one one theory
Speaker 1: of how we develop fear, which is good in and
Speaker 1: of itself as well, UM, is through direct conditioning. That's
Speaker 1: one of three ways we we learn fear responses is
Speaker 1: through direct conditioning. And part of direct conditioning is experiencing
Speaker 1: physical pain because once you've hit the hot stove, once
Speaker 1: you know that the stove is always going to burn
Speaker 1: you exactly, or if you're a dumb kid, maybe two
Speaker 1: or three times, but eventually you're gonna pick it up.
Speaker 1: Right now, what happens with sippa, as far as I understand, um,
Speaker 1: and actually did you notice as well? There's there's not
Speaker 1: a pet explanation of if you have SIPPA, this is
Speaker 1: exactly what happens to you. Yeah, well probably because it's
Speaker 1: so rare. Right. But when you think that if they
Speaker 1: could get this the group of patients together, they would
Speaker 1: find like, okay, well yeah, all of you people are
Speaker 1: lacking no susceptors. Uh So in some patients the no
Speaker 1: susceptors aren't there. In other patients, UM, the peripheral nerves
Speaker 1: that the nose acceptors are attached to, or uses the
Speaker 1: information highway UM aren't there, or else they're not innervated. UM.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of different ways that this this can
Speaker 1: come about. But it all results in this cardinal diagnosis
Speaker 1: or diagnostic tool of SIPPA, which is you feel no
Speaker 1: pain and you aren't responsive to temperature either. But nerve
Speaker 1: conduction is there, right, It depends on some of them.
Speaker 1: There's innervation and others the nerves aren't conducting, they're not
Speaker 1: capable of conducting. And specifically with anhydrosis, I think, um,
Speaker 1: there's no there's no innervation of the nerves in the
Speaker 1: sweat glands. So when you start to get hot, there's
Speaker 1: nothing sending your brain the message, Hey, you're getting hot.
Speaker 1: We need to start sweating so we can cool down. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: we should go ahead and say that that's the A
Speaker 1: is anhydrosis and after the sip part, and that's the
Speaker 1: most sever your case, and that's when you don't sweat,
Speaker 1: which you know how I sweat. I know you definitely
Speaker 1: don't have anhydrosis. Remember at the aquarium, I sweated underwater
Speaker 1: in like forty degree water too. I mean there was
Speaker 1: like little chunks of ice floating on the surface of
Speaker 1: the water and you had cartoons sweat jumping off your
Speaker 1: forehead did so is I could handle the anhydrosis part
Speaker 1: or at least a slight version of that. I could
Speaker 1: deal with that, right. Uh, and this is our These
Speaker 1: are ekron sweat glands or ekron glands that are responsible
Speaker 1: for regulation of body temperature. So what they they found
Speaker 1: with the anhydrosis, it seems fairly uniform in that respect
Speaker 1: that we the a sip of patients don't have um innervation,
Speaker 1: meaning the nerves aren't becoming activated in their sweat glands. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's especially I mean it's bad enough to over
Speaker 1: you know, because you can overheat just as an adult,
Speaker 1: but it's really scary with babies with SIPPA because a
Speaker 1: baby can overheat and die like very easily. Well yeah, actually,
Speaker 1: I think of people who have SIPPA die before or
Speaker 1: by the age of three, and I think another quarter
Speaker 1: of those deaths are um from sepsis from an untreated infection.
Speaker 1: One of the things about not being able to feel
Speaker 1: pain is you can cut yourself and if you're a kid,
Speaker 1: you don't think, well, I'd better treat this cut. And
Speaker 1: at the same time you're not crying, so your parents
Speaker 1: aren't alerted, and so this cut can go untreated become infected.
Speaker 1: When they cut is infected, the bodies immunological response UH
Speaker 1: raises your body temperature. It can lead to a fever,
Speaker 1: and unchecked, this fever can actually lead to um brain damage.
Speaker 1: So a lot of patients with SIPPA who have made
Speaker 1: it past you know, three or so have some form
Speaker 1: of mental retardation. Yeah, they also saw where um. We'll
Speaker 1: get to the tips later, but since you brought it up.
Speaker 1: One of the tips for small kids as they will
Speaker 1: teach the child to recognize blood and teach them what
Speaker 1: that means. So if you see blood, you need to
Speaker 1: come find mommy and daddy real quick because you don't
Speaker 1: know you're hurt. But that's a bad thing to happen,
Speaker 1: So come come find mom and dad. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: thought these tips that, like you said, we'll get to
Speaker 1: in a minute, or they were pretty clever, right, or
Speaker 1: come fine mom and mom or dad and dad. Chucky guy,
Speaker 1: I've been minded around here. Or just mom or just
Speaker 1: dad or uncle Charlie, who's uh grandma or grandma or
Speaker 1: grandpa and grandpa. There's all kinds of scenarios, A lot
Speaker 1: of know somebody the first person um to be legally
Speaker 1: pronounced a sexual was legally pronounced a sexual in the
Speaker 1: last couple of weeks, I believe. Really, yeah, it's true.
Speaker 1: Very interesting that. Yeah, Okay, where are we, Chuck, Let's
Speaker 1: talk about sipa. The medical history of sippa Okay, as
Speaker 1: far as I could find, it was first described in
Speaker 1: eighteen forty seven, uh and described as what is going
Speaker 1: on here? Yeah, exactly. And actually in the sixties. I
Speaker 1: read an article in nineteen sixty that was based on
Speaker 1: UM a hypothesis that people who feel no pain were
Speaker 1: actually it was actually a psychological disturbance. There's been such
Speaker 1: a massive affront to their ego that as a response,
Speaker 1: the response to their ego mounted resulted in a loss
Speaker 1: of the sensation of pain. That cat just can't feel pain.
Speaker 1: He's so out there, so far out. There is a
Speaker 1: doctor who was who was surveying this literature of UM
Speaker 1: certain patients, and he was describing like how the diagnosis went,
Speaker 1: the diagnosis went. And there's this one poor guy in
Speaker 1: the fifties who he was described as a pretty nice, upbeat,
Speaker 1: bright guy, and he goes to the doctor and it's like,
Speaker 1: I can't feel pain. And the doctors like, oh yeah,
Speaker 1: so you can see this half drunk doctor, right, he's
Speaker 1: got like a glass of scotch and a right and
Speaker 1: uh right, and the little reflective thing on his forehead. Um,
Speaker 1: and he ran this guy through a battery of tests,
Speaker 1: including squeezing his testicles, running an electrical current across his
Speaker 1: lower teeth, and Chuck, it gets worse, taking a skin
Speaker 1: and muscle biopsy without anesthetic. What did he do each
Speaker 1: of these? And was he like what about that? You know?
Speaker 1: I feel that? Can't you imagine like this? Doctors like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: that didn't yeah. Um, So the psychological idea was discarded
Speaker 1: pretty quickly. And now, because we're in the age where
Speaker 1: the genome has been cracked, it's all genetics, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: And I guess we should go ahead and mentioned too
Speaker 1: that they think they have narrowed it down to a
Speaker 1: mutation of the t r K A parentheses in t
Speaker 1: r K one gene, which appears to control nerve growth,
Speaker 1: but again they don't know for sure. They just think
Speaker 1: that might be the culprit, right, Chuck, that seems to
Speaker 1: be the likeliest UM candidate, because that gene actually is
Speaker 1: it's responsible for producing nerve growth factor, which goes and
Speaker 1: recruits UM neurons and nerves, isn't I guess it would
Speaker 1: be neurons uh to become no susceptors, and so that
Speaker 1: wouldn't happen, right, right, But they're kind of speculating still
Speaker 1: a little bit, right. Yeah, we still don't have an idea.
Speaker 1: I mean, sixty cases reported worldwide, thirty five in the US. Maybe, although, um,
Speaker 1: it does seem like it would be genetic, like that
Speaker 1: kid in the Little Horror Pakistan when he died and
Speaker 1: the doctor went to go see his family and found
Speaker 1: out he had siblings that had the same condition. Sure, Um,
Speaker 1: that suggests either something environmental close to the home or uh, genetic,
Speaker 1: And that's kind of what they're leaning to. That's the
Speaker 1: genetic part, right, Josh. They do think or do they
Speaker 1: know for sure that it's an autosomal recessive disorder. I
Speaker 1: don't know how they do, but that's that's how I
Speaker 1: take it, right, Which means that both of your parents
Speaker 1: must pass down a copy of this gene. So each
Speaker 1: one of your parents has this mutation and it's not
Speaker 1: related to gender or anything. But they do know that
Speaker 1: both of your parents have to give it to you,
Speaker 1: so that that's probably what makes it rare as well. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: both of your parents have to have this really rare thing. Apparently,
Speaker 1: also it hasn't It doesn't affect every ethnic group. Oh
Speaker 1: really Yeah, but I was reading another study on this
Speaker 1: from I think two thousand and it was in I
Speaker 1: think Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, one of the two, and
Speaker 1: they got together a bunch of kids who had sippa
Speaker 1: and um, some of them were related, and they took
Speaker 1: a family history and found that I think nine of
Speaker 1: the thirt participants parents were first or second cousins. So
Speaker 1: I wonder how much that has to do with something
Speaker 1: too interesting? Yeah, very interesting? So should we talk about
Speaker 1: some of the problems. I mean, they're pretty obvious, but
Speaker 1: there are something that I didn't actually well, yeah, let's
Speaker 1: talk about raising a baby with sippa. How would you
Speaker 1: first start to recognize that your kid has sippa? Well,
Speaker 1: that's a problem because the first way you would probably
Speaker 1: recognize it is seeing witnessing an accident that should cause
Speaker 1: your baby to cry, and your baby doesn't cry. Right,
Speaker 1: that's like, did you have you ever heard the discovery
Speaker 1: of ether and nitrous ox side is anesthetics right here? Well,
Speaker 1: actually it happened in New York City, but a physician
Speaker 1: from our fair City name ms Dr Crawford Long. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I did a little book report on him when I
Speaker 1: was like the fourth grade. He was like our nineteen
Speaker 1: sixties Scotch and cigarette doctor, and that he liked the
Speaker 1: party and he noticed that people on in the depths
Speaker 1: of an ether bender would run into walls and gash
Speaker 1: their foreheads and not have any response to it whatsoever,
Speaker 1: aside from laughing hysterically. Right exactly, look at all this blood. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so there's there's a similarity there. And well for me
Speaker 1: to add that tangent, we have Crawford Long Hospital here too,
Speaker 1: I know, look at you with the sidebars. So, like
Speaker 1: I said, the first thing it will happen is apparent
Speaker 1: season accident and the child doesn't cry. Um, so you're
Speaker 1: gonna have some problems getting diagnosed. So because it is
Speaker 1: so rare. Uh. And in the meantime, the kid could
Speaker 1: end up with an infection and die of overheating or
Speaker 1: suffer some sort of brain damn. One of the other
Speaker 1: big problems with the baby is um when a baby tease,
Speaker 1: a baby just naws like crazy, but if they don't
Speaker 1: feel pain, they may gnaw like straight through their little
Speaker 1: baby finger without even realizing right, or their tongue or
Speaker 1: their lips. Those are common injuries as well, yeah, which
Speaker 1: is just awful. There's also um ice scratching. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: they said though on the teeth, they said that some
Speaker 1: parents it's elect to have the teeth baby teeth removed
Speaker 1: altogether and wait for the adult teeth to come in,
Speaker 1: at which they're in age where they can understand like
Speaker 1: don't bite through your finger. Yeah, but that's not good either,
Speaker 1: because then your child has no teeth and it makes
Speaker 1: it harder to eat and right, but it's like eat
Speaker 1: baby food for many many years, or she right through
Speaker 1: your tongue right right? You know? So what was the
Speaker 1: one you just mentioned? I scratching? Yeah, you know you
Speaker 1: if you are just rubbing your eye or whatever, you
Speaker 1: pretty much know when to stop. If you are a patient,
Speaker 1: a sip of patient, you don't know when to stop.
Speaker 1: I was reading about this five year old girl who
Speaker 1: blinded herself. She can still see shapes, I believe, um.
Speaker 1: But she had one eye removed and scratched the other
Speaker 1: eye and she was five and could barely see. She'd
Speaker 1: done it to herself. Well, another tips, since we're there,
Speaker 1: a lot of parents elect to have little baby goggles
Speaker 1: for their for their child, so they can't get to
Speaker 1: their eyes, which is sad. Yeah, um, hunger pains. This
Speaker 1: was interesting. They don't feel hunger pains, so eating isn't
Speaker 1: something they realized they should do. So uh they sometimes
Speaker 1: sip A patients will set a clock to remind them
Speaker 1: to eat or to use the potty. Right, Because one
Speaker 1: of the ways that you know that you have to
Speaker 1: go number one or go number two is from the
Speaker 1: discomfort involved. Your body is alerted like you need to
Speaker 1: evacuate your bowels, and so you go evacuate your bowels.
Speaker 1: But if you don't have any sense of discomfort whatsoever, Um,
Speaker 1: you aren't going to go to the bathroom. You can
Speaker 1: suffer constipation all manner of horrible results from that from
Speaker 1: holding it too long. Yeah for sure, Um, fractures are
Speaker 1: very common. Obviously. You can slam your hand in the door,
Speaker 1: won't feel the pain, won't realize you've got a broken
Speaker 1: hand and joints to This is something I hadn't thought
Speaker 1: of either. But consider this, like, how many times have
Speaker 1: either one of us moved in our chairs during this podcast?
Speaker 1: And the reason we're moving shifting is because it's become
Speaker 1: uncomfortable to lean on that joint, so we move and
Speaker 1: put the our weight on another joint. That's your body
Speaker 1: telling you to to shift, so you're not putting too
Speaker 1: much stress on anything. Right. If you don't shift, then
Speaker 1: all of that weight is on that joint, and this
Speaker 1: can actually result in charcot joints. These are joints where
Speaker 1: basically you can't feel pain. Uh, to develop charcot joints
Speaker 1: because when you it's the result of like a prolonged
Speaker 1: and repeated destruction of a joint or several joints, And
Speaker 1: what happens is like little bone fragments break off and
Speaker 1: then you have bone pieces grading in the joint, it
Speaker 1: fills with fluid and UH, there's definitely a point of
Speaker 1: no return that can lead to amputation, um limb replacement,
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff. Gez, Well, one of the since
Speaker 1: we're kind of doing the problem tip thing, one of
Speaker 1: the tips don't think we have so far. One of
Speaker 1: the things that they recommend is occupational therapy, so they
Speaker 1: can teach your child different ways to sit and do
Speaker 1: physical tasks to like put the least amount of stress
Speaker 1: possible on those joints, right or they may say your
Speaker 1: kid needs to be in a wheelchair a little more
Speaker 1: than than here. She is true and again very sad.
Speaker 1: This whole thing is just one of the most depressing
Speaker 1: rare disorders I can think of. Uh, if you have
Speaker 1: a baby that has um SIPA, you should probably do
Speaker 1: a regular check over your child, like you need a
Speaker 1: baby proof the heck out of your house. Like it's
Speaker 1: baby proof anyway, but you really need to go overboard
Speaker 1: with softening corners and things like that, making sure the
Speaker 1: stove and anything dangerous isn't accessible the knife drawer, that
Speaker 1: kind of thing. But um, you should also check your
Speaker 1: check your child for until they're old enough to do
Speaker 1: this on their own, check them for injuries, you know,
Speaker 1: a couple of three times a day. Also, um, because
Speaker 1: of the anhydrosis. Uh that a lot of families opt
Speaker 1: to move to cooler climates just you know, to protect
Speaker 1: against overheating. Yeah, and um, Katie Lambert wrote this article
Speaker 1: of stuff you miss in history class are cohorts And
Speaker 1: uh Katie supposed that as far as getting exercise, which
Speaker 1: you know everyone needs, that swimming might be a good
Speaker 1: good thing for them to do. And that kind of
Speaker 1: made sense to me. Yeah, but have you ever like
Speaker 1: swam and sweat it underwater? Well you know it? Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: but now I I wondered about that because I mean,
Speaker 1: if you think about it, if you are sweating underwater,
Speaker 1: then your body's saying you need to be cooler than
Speaker 1: the ambient water temperature. So it could still lead to trouble.
Speaker 1: I guess getting cool water and maybe don't swim so
Speaker 1: much that you're gonna be sweating could be my advice.
Speaker 1: Dr Chuck's advice. That's good advice, Dr Chuck. Although the
Speaker 1: water is a good medium because it's easier on the joints. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I think that's why she recommended it. Sure, Uh, there
Speaker 1: is no cure, no that that has happened yet, and
Speaker 1: it's so rare that it's it's one of these things
Speaker 1: it's hard to get a cure when you don't have
Speaker 1: anyone to test it on. Yeah, although Chuck, don't you
Speaker 1: think the advent of stem cells will probably cure everything?
Speaker 1: I hope so. Well, I mean think about it, it's
Speaker 1: a if it's a genetic flaw measually that means that
Speaker 1: an enzyme or protein isn't being produced, so you just
Speaker 1: use stem cells to generate that enzyme or protein and
Speaker 1: R Clark no more sippa. There are a couple of
Speaker 1: websites should we go ahead and plug those. Gift of
Speaker 1: Pain is a website set up by a family whose
Speaker 1: daughter has SIPPA, and if you want to have your
Speaker 1: heart broken and learn a little bit, you can go
Speaker 1: visit there and help. Roberto dot com is another one
Speaker 1: that details a young boy with SIPPA and Chuck. Also
Speaker 1: there is, from what I understand um, a pretty good
Speaker 1: documentary called A Life Without Pain by director Melody Guild
Speaker 1: and it's about SIPPA. Huh, it's supposed to be pretty cool.
Speaker 1: I haven't seen it, but anybody interested, we want to
Speaker 1: rent that? And I say look for a pain podcast
Speaker 1: in the future. I think we should do one on
Speaker 1: pain Josh and Chuck's House of Pain. Do you know
Speaker 1: how many times I'm gonna pinch you during that thing?
Speaker 1: It's gonna be rough, hopefully no more than once. It
Speaker 1: will be more than once, all right. If you want
Speaker 1: to learn more about SIPPA, type in c I p
Speaker 1: A in the handy search bar at how Stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com. That means it's time for listener mayle yes sir, exactly, Chuck,
Speaker 1: I want us to give a special shout out the
Speaker 1: three sisters triplets. In fact, we have triplets triplet listeners. Yeah, Helen,
Speaker 1: Spence and Echo, and they all three are voracious stuff.
Speaker 1: You should know listeners A cool name, Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: like it. A Spence goes by Zebra apparently just came
Speaker 1: in when I was on vacation. Huh yeah, yeah, because
Speaker 1: you replied I did, and you promised the shout out
Speaker 1: and never gave it. Yeah. They we didn't do a
Speaker 1: shout out and we are now though, I mean, come on,
Speaker 1: they break me over the coals and I responded, yeah,
Speaker 1: And you know, we typically don't do shoutouts because we
Speaker 1: get request and there's just too many of them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but how many triplets do we have listening to? Exactly?
Speaker 1: So if it's something remarkable, or if you want your
Speaker 1: name read so bad, just tell us your quadruplets and
Speaker 1: make up three names. So you guys keep the fourth
Speaker 1: doubt and thanks for listening. Thank you girls, and we'll
Speaker 1: get the listener mail eventually, I think. But we should
Speaker 1: probably plug Facebook and Twitter tweet tweet. We are children
Speaker 1: of the next generation. I don't know modern why I
Speaker 1: think no your x M. Why no, seriously, we're definitely
Speaker 1: not millennial. So, yes, we're on Facebook now, for sure.
Speaker 1: We're on Facebook. We have can validated are We had
Speaker 1: multiple pages. It was kind of a mess, but now
Speaker 1: we're all consolidated. We're personally putting stuff on Facebook and
Speaker 1: talking to people. It's kind of kind of fun. Actually, yeah,
Speaker 1: it is. You're doing a heck of a job, Chuck.
Speaker 1: You you can type in stuff you should know on
Speaker 1: Facebook's handy search bar and that should bring up our page.
Speaker 1: You go ahead and join. I'm very curious to see
Speaker 1: how many people join. Yeah, you know, as long as
Speaker 1: we have more than all the other podcasts combined, and
Speaker 1: I'm fine. Yeah. And the same goes for Twitter too.
Speaker 1: Do you have that same that same desire, the same goal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I've embraced Twitter. I can't believe it. Yeah, I'm tweeting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Chuck's first tweet was hilarious, as I imagine all successive
Speaker 1: tweets will be. Our Twitter name is s y s
Speaker 1: K podcast. That's our Twitter name at yeah past right,
Speaker 1: the little at simbulture for those of you who don't
Speaker 1: know how that works. Right, Uh, so you can check
Speaker 1: those out join up, follow us, and we will be interacting. Right,
Speaker 1: We're gonna come down from our ivory tower, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: all right? Uh so, Josh, I'm gonna call this um
Speaker 1: earthquake survivor. Did you read this one? Pretty remarkable? You're
Speaker 1: You're back. You're not on vacation anymore. Hey, Josh and Chuck.
Speaker 1: I just wanted to email and say thanks for unknowingly
Speaker 1: doing a lot to keep things normal for me in
Speaker 1: the least normal of times. Let me explain. I live
Speaker 1: in Santiago, Chile, and in late February I was invited
Speaker 1: to the camping trip in a place down south called Mocha.
Speaker 1: Do you like my phonetic pronunciations. It was all really
Speaker 1: last minute, but before leaving I managed to grab ahold
Speaker 1: of your latest podcast, which was How Braille Works, put
Speaker 1: it on the old iPod. I thought I might need
Speaker 1: it for the long bus ride, and I only grabbed
Speaker 1: that one because, being a true fan, I had already
Speaker 1: listened to the others, So good for you, Ignacio. On
Speaker 1: our second night camping on the island, we had an
Speaker 1: eight point eight Richter earthquake, if you remember, and we
Speaker 1: were pretty near the epicenter. We had to run from
Speaker 1: a tsunami, which only gave us about seven minutes to
Speaker 1: get the higher ground. After the earthquake, our tents and
Speaker 1: all of our stuff was washed away. We never saw
Speaker 1: it again. Turned out we had it easy. Most of
Speaker 1: the homes on the island were taken by the wave,
Speaker 1: and we camped without tents of course, with the locals
Speaker 1: up on a hill for a couple of days before
Speaker 1: being able to even take a plane to start our
Speaker 1: journey back home, which was difficult, Josh, because the bridges
Speaker 1: were down, streets were cracked, and there was no gas
Speaker 1: at the gas stations, that kind of thing for like
Speaker 1: five days. Um. In the middle of it all, I
Speaker 1: was feeling really bad about everything, though grateful for being alive,
Speaker 1: and I was not really knowing about my friends or
Speaker 1: family since cell phones were down and I was in
Speaker 1: the middle of the least normal situation I'd ever been.
Speaker 1: Then I remembered I had your podcast, pulled out my
Speaker 1: iPod which I had saved in my Fannie pack and
Speaker 1: just listen with my eyes closed, really happy because that was,
Speaker 1: for the first time the only nection to normal I had.
Speaker 1: That is awesome, really cool. Uh. It made the hugest difference.
Speaker 1: So I wanted to say thank you so much like
Speaker 1: you guys to stop and think what a difference you
Speaker 1: can make in the listeners lives. So let's stop and
Speaker 1: think for a moment. All right, all right, nice? I
Speaker 1: feel good. How often do we just sit and be quiet? Never?
Speaker 1: Never what we're supposed to do? Uh? You you have
Speaker 1: a loyal listener for years to come. That is from Ignatio. Thanks.
Speaker 1: Ignatio was alive and well thank god. Did you hear
Speaker 1: about the Day's Army Family or the Day's Arms. They're
Speaker 1: a family from Haiti who survived the Porter Prince quake
Speaker 1: and they had a son who lived in Saniago who's like,
Speaker 1: come live with me. You're kidding. They moved to Saniago
Speaker 1: just in time to survive the Chili quake, survived both though. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and since you said that that way, it's the name.
Speaker 1: What did you say? The name of the place was Saniago.
Speaker 1: The Day's Arms, Yeah, they're the family. That's that's the
Speaker 1: plane Illinois. We should say, well we goofed that one.
Speaker 1: We didn't know. It's apparently planes death planes. Dutch Boot
Speaker 1: sounds very strange because it would seem like it would
Speaker 1: be silent, but everyone made fun of me saying you
Speaker 1: sounded like tattoo with the plane deplane. I think we're
Speaker 1: the same. We're interchangeable. My pain is your pain. You
Speaker 1: can you can switch our guts, right bellies. So officially, UH,
Speaker 1: I would like to switch bellies. You're a slightly smaller
Speaker 1: than mine. Thank you. UM. Officially, we'd like to make
Speaker 1: that correction. It is de Planes, Illinois, and it's yo.
Speaker 1: Claire yeo. Claire was continent, it's not. And in Canada
Speaker 1: they called Canadian bacon bacon. Yes, Canadians. We have corrected
Speaker 1: that for two years now, so you can stop with
Speaker 1: the emails. It's a joke. If you have a correction
Speaker 1: you want to send Chuck or me, or you want
Speaker 1: to get into some UH email combat over a topic
Speaker 1: and issue something like that, send us an email. Do
Speaker 1: not cite Wikipedia UH to support your claims, or else
Speaker 1: you've lost right out of the gate. Do better wrap
Speaker 1: it up. Send it to stuff podcast at how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com for more on this and thousands of
Speaker 1: other topics. Is that how stuff works dot com. Want
Speaker 1: more how stuff works, check out our blogs on the
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Speaker 1: you