Speaker 1: Hi, everybody. I picked this selection. This is Chuck by
Speaker 1: the Way of Stuff You Should Know, co host September seventeenth,
Speaker 1: twenty fifteen. We did an episode called the Great Nuclear
Speaker 1: Winter Debate of nineteen eighty three, and I picked this
Speaker 1: one because I don't remember even recording it. What in
Speaker 1: the world were they debating in nineteen eighty three about
Speaker 1: the Great Nuclear Winter? It was probably just nuclear winter,
Speaker 1: and the great refers to the debate now that I
Speaker 1: see how it's worded. But you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: I guess I'm going to learn right around with you
Speaker 1: because I'm about to listen to it right now. Welcome
Speaker 1: to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's
Speaker 2: Charles W Chuck Bryant, and Jerry's over there somewhere off
Speaker 2: in the ether. But I don't think on ether. Just
Speaker 2: in the ether.
Speaker 1: Oh man, we try not to breathe. Now we had
Speaker 1: a tank of ether in here.
Speaker 2: It would be a much different podcasts.
Speaker 1: Josh and Chuck's ether cats.
Speaker 2: Do they put those things in tanks?
Speaker 1: Oh? I don't know, surely, yeah right? No? Does it
Speaker 1: look like in the bottle still like the eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 2: I don't know. I don't know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think you just have it a little milk bottle,
Speaker 1: You put it in a rag, you put.
Speaker 2: It in your face, and then go to happy town.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: If there's any pharmacists out there that want to set
Speaker 2: us straight, let us know how ether comes these days.
Speaker 2: It's probably a gas.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I imagine it's not like hunter S Thompson.
Speaker 2: I think we talked about it before in anesthesia. Probably
Speaker 2: it's like ether gas. What a weird start. Yeah, that
Speaker 2: has nothing to do with what we're about to talk about.
Speaker 1: I was trying to relate it, but there really is nothing.
Speaker 2: One of my favorite favorite topics of all time nuclear
Speaker 2: holocaust from the Cold War?
Speaker 1: Yeah, what we did? We did want a Cold war,
Speaker 1: didn't we.
Speaker 2: Oh we've done several.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, we batted around this thing, but we've never
Speaker 1: done a full nuclear holocaust podcast.
Speaker 2: Have we?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 2: And nuclear holocaust is that's not quite right. That's not
Speaker 2: the right way to put it, because what we're talking
Speaker 2: about is actually that after effects from a nuclear holocaust.
Speaker 1: Isn't that the holocaust? Mm?
Speaker 2: If you want to be a purist, the nuclear holocaust
Speaker 2: is the immediate destruction as a result of exploding nuclear
Speaker 2: bombs over like population centers.
Speaker 1: And oh, I didn't know that. I thought it was
Speaker 1: the whole kitten kaboodle.
Speaker 2: I should say, if you're a purist and you want
Speaker 2: to say it, from my opinion, that's sort of nuclear holocaust.
Speaker 1: Okay, I think we know what's going on here.
Speaker 2: I got it.
Speaker 3: Um.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Robert Lamb wrote this of stuff to blow your mind.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I have to say, I said, man, way to
Speaker 2: go on that one. That was a good one.
Speaker 1: You told him that I did.
Speaker 2: I actually uttered those words.
Speaker 1: What do you say?
Speaker 2: Thanks?
Speaker 1: Man? That's nice.
Speaker 2: But the thing that gets me about nuclear winner, which
Speaker 2: we will talk about in depth, what fascinates me about
Speaker 2: it just as much as the nuclear winter itself, chuck, Yeah,
Speaker 2: is the controversy debate that arose from it. Throughout the eighties.
Speaker 2: There was a huge debate.
Speaker 1: Debate on the severity debate.
Speaker 2: Yeah, debate on whether it's something to worry about or not.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, I looked up because I was like, does
Speaker 1: anyone think that this is a myth? Out and outright myth?
Speaker 1: And from what I saw on my research is that no,
Speaker 1: this is fact. It's just a dispute. What's a dispute
Speaker 1: is the scenario and the severity of what would happen.
Speaker 1: But no one says, like, no, there would be no
Speaker 1: nuclear winter, there would be no problems after a nuclear bomb.
Speaker 2: So there used to be like back in the early
Speaker 2: eighties when this was a huge new thing, there was
Speaker 2: a group of scientists who were hawkish, very much in
Speaker 2: favor of the US building up its nuclear arsenal as
Speaker 2: much as possible, and started a basically a pr letter
Speaker 2: writing campaign to discredit the science behind this. And they like,
Speaker 2: these guys don't know what they're talking about.
Speaker 1: So what they think that the bomb would drop and
Speaker 1: then in like the next day the birds would be out.
Speaker 2: They they said, initially, yeah, that was kind of their position,
Speaker 2: was just to poke holes in this and that it
Speaker 2: wasn't it wasn't a a it wasn't legitimate science, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: it didn't sound like and then they ultimately the whole
Speaker 2: point was that this came from an argument over whether
Speaker 2: the US should engage in the SDI, the Strategic Defense
Speaker 2: Initiative or star wars, which is the lasers that shoot
Speaker 2: nukes from space, right, they shoot down nukes from space.
Speaker 1: We did a showing that didn't we they did.
Speaker 2: That was another one. But that's what the whole thing was.
Speaker 2: It's the context of it. It was an argument over what
Speaker 2: over either nuclear disarmament which Carl Sagan and his friends
Speaker 2: were in favor of hip or nuclear proliferation and Star
Speaker 2: Wars program.
Speaker 1: Warmongers, right, these versus the warmont.
Speaker 2: But the weird thing is is this debate, Chuck took
Speaker 2: place in the pages of like academic journals and it
Speaker 2: ended up being a fight between science and science deniers.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it sounds like these scientists that you mentioned might
Speaker 1: have been had their coffers full from the US government.
Speaker 2: So potentially or private industry or something like that. Yeah.
Speaker 2: And the thing is is they use this old chestnut
Speaker 2: where so if you're a scientist, there's no certainty in
Speaker 2: anything you say. It can always be disproven or remember
Speaker 2: we talked about this in the Scientific Method episode. Yeah,
Speaker 2: all your stuff can be disproven ultimately, which is why
Speaker 2: it's just a theory. Yeah, so no science is going
Speaker 2: to be like this is one hundred percent certain, right, Well,
Speaker 2: these other scientists who were poking holes in it would
Speaker 2: point out these guys aren't even certain, which means that
Speaker 2: there's there's disagreement over whether we'll have a nuclear winner
Speaker 2: or not. So they were being very disingenuous in poking
Speaker 2: holes in it by saying, these scientists aren't even certain
Speaker 2: in their findings. Well, no scientists are certain in their findings.
Speaker 1: It's so dangerous.
Speaker 2: But to the public that you think, oh, well, these
Speaker 2: scientists can't say that they're certain, so that they must
Speaker 2: not know what they're talking about for it.
Speaker 1: That's dangerous. That's why we're at three minutes to midnight
Speaker 1: on the doomsday clock. It's exactly right because some people
Speaker 1: might say, well, you're not certain, so let's just not
Speaker 1: act fast enough.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I should say, also check, we should prepare
Speaker 2: for a lot of listener mail because this is a
Speaker 2: conservative flash point. Nuclear winner is long standing one.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, great, sounds good.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about this all right.
Speaker 1: Well, Robert starts where most people should start when talking
Speaker 1: about nuclear winner, and that's in the atmosphere. It's a
Speaker 1: very finely tuned system we have. I want to say
Speaker 1: it's like homeostasis, but it's not people, So I guess
Speaker 1: it's like an ecostasis where the sun just enough sun
Speaker 1: gets through to make things, make the earth habitable and
Speaker 1: proliferate with plants and water and humans and animals and
Speaker 1: all kinds of great stuff. Too much sun, even by
Speaker 1: a little bit, could be catastrophic, and too little sun,
Speaker 1: but even by a little bit, could be catastrophic. So
Speaker 1: thanks to humans, we've struck a great balance here with
Speaker 1: the sun, a great deal made.
Speaker 2: You can shine to unshine too much sun.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's working out awesome. The idea of nuclear
Speaker 1: winter is that there would be enough ash from and smoke.
Speaker 1: It's really not the fallout from the nuclear bombs themselves,
Speaker 1: from what I understand, It's more the smoke from the
Speaker 1: resulting fires that would cause the blacking out of the
Speaker 1: sky and the sun not getting through.
Speaker 2: It's actually all of it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, But everything I read across the board said it's
Speaker 1: almost the smoke, right that goes on.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's true. I mean you you you shouldn't negate
Speaker 2: the idea that, like nuclear radiation, poisoning is going to
Speaker 2: kill a lot of people as a result.
Speaker 1: But the blacking out of the skies is due to
Speaker 1: the smoke from fires exactly from the bomb that happened, right.
Speaker 2: So this whole thing, the context of it again comes
Speaker 2: from the seventies, right, chuck uh yeah. In eighties, yeah,
Speaker 2: and back in I think that nineteen seventy five a
Speaker 2: group issued a statement that said, you know, there probably
Speaker 2: wouldn't be that big of a fallout from nuclear explosions.
Speaker 2: A few years after that, another group, I think that
Speaker 2: the first two group is the National Academy of Scientists.
Speaker 2: Another group said, you know what, we don't think that's
Speaker 2: exactly true. We think that there probably is some sort
Speaker 2: of there will be something, but our models are too
Speaker 2: primitive to say for certain what the fallout would be. Sure.
Speaker 2: A few years after that, Carl Sagan and his crew
Speaker 2: got together and said, no, there's going to be serious consequences.
Speaker 2: And here's what they are.
Speaker 1: Billions of lives.
Speaker 2: Lost, billions and billions, right. And one of the things
Speaker 2: they based this on, this idea on that if you
Speaker 2: spew a bunch of smoke or particulate matter into the
Speaker 2: atmosphere that it'll have a negative influence on the global climate,
Speaker 2: is past history from volcanic eruptions.
Speaker 1: Yes, most noted, well, there are a few over the years,
Speaker 1: but one of the notable ones in eighteen eighty three
Speaker 1: at the time, then the dust Dutch East Indies now Indonesia, Krakatoa.
Speaker 1: That volcano was massive, to the tune of thirty six
Speaker 1: thousand deaths just from the volcano. And this is in
Speaker 1: Krakatoa in eighteen eighty three.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's only like ten people there somehow.
Speaker 1: It's not like it was super populated, right, And two
Speaker 1: thirds of Krakatoa collapsed. The smoke rose up and warmed
Speaker 1: the global temperature global by two point two degrees fahrenheit.
Speaker 2: I think it. No, it lowered it, yeah, lowered.
Speaker 1: Sorry. Yeah, it took five years for temperatures to return
Speaker 1: to normal. And it affected This was in Indonesia, and
Speaker 1: it actually they think increased the rainfall in Los Angeles
Speaker 1: by more than double that next year. Wow, it's in
Speaker 1: La in southern California.
Speaker 2: So that was the Krakatoa blast from eighteen eighty three.
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, and that it literally changed the color of
Speaker 1: the sky for like years afterwards. The sky was red
Speaker 1: such that they think, you know, the scream, the painting
Speaker 1: the screen, yeah, munch, Yeah, the red sky. They think
Speaker 1: that's this guy looked was because of this volcano.
Speaker 2: That is so neat.
Speaker 1: Yeahn't' crazy that guy was like that volcano is crazy.
Speaker 2: Maybe what the man is saying.
Speaker 1: And that's just one of them.
Speaker 2: What was the other one in Mount Tambora.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Indonesia once again.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Indonesia's got bad luck with the volcanos back in
Speaker 2: the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: And this was actually earlier in eighteen fifteen.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I remember learning about this when I was a kid,
Speaker 2: because Ohio got it really bad. A volcano went off
Speaker 2: in Indonesia in eighteen fifteen, and the following year much
Speaker 2: of the United States did not have a summer. It
Speaker 2: was actually called the Year without a Summer.
Speaker 1: And Ohio was affected.
Speaker 2: Yes, so well yeah, oh yeah, there was like snow
Speaker 2: on the ground in the middle of July.
Speaker 1: Do you learn that in state history class?
Speaker 2: I did?
Speaker 1: I remember that? Yeah? Yeah, Georgia State History. That was
Speaker 1: like a full course at our school.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Half of it was just sitting around with the teacher,
Speaker 2: like staring off into the distance.
Speaker 1: Right, I remember. Ours was just like a lot of
Speaker 1: talk about Crawford Long and the Civil War.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we didn't talk about Crawford Long and ours.
Speaker 1: Because he wasn't from Georgia.
Speaker 2: We talked about Anthony Wayne. Yeah, the Battle of Fallen Timbers. Yeah,
Speaker 2: well that summer without a winter, year without a summer,
Speaker 2: I mean, uh huh. And then there's some like canals
Speaker 2: and locks that donkeys used to pull barges on.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I just remember Crawford Long and a lot of racism. Yeah, basically, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right. So that was Mount Timboro the year without summer.
Speaker 1: There have been other events, like when the oil fields
Speaker 1: burned during the during the war in the early nineties.
Speaker 2: Yeah, apparently Carl Sagan predicted basically a nuclear winner from that. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's pan out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's where they take some flak. Was it was
Speaker 1: not nearly as bad the fallout from nut smoke as
Speaker 1: Sagan predicted.
Speaker 2: No, but.
Speaker 1: What can you do but predict you're going to be wrong.
Speaker 2: Yeah, occasionally, surely you're gonna be wrong.
Speaker 1: It doesn't mean you should be like, oh, well, let's
Speaker 1: smoke didn't do much, so let's start building nuclear bombs again.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well that's the whole thing, Chuck. I am so
Speaker 2: glad you said that, because that's the whole mad thing
Speaker 2: to this argument. Yeacause it's like, what are you arguing
Speaker 2: in favor for If you're arguing against the idea of
Speaker 2: what precisely are you arguing.
Speaker 1: For yeah, like it won't be that bad.
Speaker 2: We'll talk a little bit more about it, like later
Speaker 2: on in the show what some people have argued about.
Speaker 2: But it seems like what you say, ultimately you're arguing
Speaker 2: in favor of more nuclear weapons that seems wrongheaded by definition.
Speaker 1: Well not even just that, but using them won't be
Speaker 1: as bad as you say, right, not just have them,
Speaker 1: but well the fallout wouldn't be as bad as they'll predict,
Speaker 1: so use them.
Speaker 2: You almost get the impression like they're just like, well,
Speaker 2: let's just find out. Let's just shoot a couple off
Speaker 2: and find out what happens. Come on, you'll see them.
Speaker 1: Right, and then as they die from a inhalation, they say,
Speaker 1: I was wrong?
Speaker 2: What have I done?
Speaker 1: Oh goodness, Let's take a break, all right, let's do
Speaker 1: and we'll come back and we'll talk a little bit
Speaker 1: more about the nuclear.
Speaker 3: Winner Stoffy the jowshh, stoff.
Speaker 1: I said nuclear and jest.
Speaker 2: But I know I heard the break. That was good stuff,
Speaker 2: all right.
Speaker 1: I just want to point that out because some people
Speaker 1: might think I was serious.
Speaker 2: No, And now that you said it was in jest,
Speaker 2: some people are like, what k Maybe that man was
Speaker 2: my hero?
Speaker 1: I posted something on Facebook the other day that said,
Speaker 1: you're sciencing wrong as a joke, and people called me
Speaker 1: out there like verb.
Speaker 2: I thought, remember last try, you could use like everything
Speaker 2: as a verb.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 2: Yeah, people have gotten extremely serious, extremely self serious.
Speaker 1: I'm a not self serious person, so I don't fit
Speaker 1: in today's world.
Speaker 2: You're a relic. You're an all dinosaur, just.
Speaker 1: A stupid, laughing dinosaur. Speaking of dinosaurs. Yeah, well, I
Speaker 1: guess we should talk about the k T boundary extinction event,
Speaker 1: which was some people, some in science, have theorized that
Speaker 1: that's what happened to the dinosaurs. Was there was an
Speaker 1: impact winter, not quite the same as a nuclear winter,
Speaker 1: but the same effect as a nuclear winter due to
Speaker 1: the impact of an asteroid.
Speaker 2: And that would have happened at the border of the
Speaker 2: Cretaceous and Tertiary periods. Again, when the dinosaurs all died off,
Speaker 2: still inexplicably, there's no there's no definitive answer. Again, though
Speaker 2: we're talking science.
Speaker 1: No one found a journal.
Speaker 2: Diary. Today. Something is streaking through the sky and it's
Speaker 2: making everyone nervous.
Speaker 1: It's very hot now. But I noticed that dinosaurs are dying,
Speaker 1: so that's good.
Speaker 2: Oh, this is a dinosaur writing in my opinion. Oh
Speaker 2: oh so that's bad, right, right, Okay, so let's talk
Speaker 2: Nuclear Winner, right. You kind of said it earlier, But
Speaker 2: the whole idea behind nuclear Winner is that if you
Speaker 2: shoot off nuclear bombs, especially a bunch of them. And
Speaker 2: you have to understand, at the time that these scientists
Speaker 2: were really starting to debate this, there were like seventy
Speaker 2: thousand nuclear warheads, like many, many times more nuclear warheads
Speaker 2: in existence in like the early eighties than there were today.
Speaker 2: And when they started debating them, they really took up
Speaker 2: this cause because the Reagan administration was saying, we need
Speaker 2: this Star Wars program because we can prevent almost with
Speaker 2: you know, ninety percent certainty, a Soviet nuclear.
Speaker 1: Attack right with laser guns exactly.
Speaker 2: And so these scientists who were concerned scientists, basically anti
Speaker 2: nuke scientists, said, wait a minute, there's something that you
Speaker 2: guys aren't thinking through here. If you do that, the
Speaker 2: Soviets are going to say, well, wait a minute, if
Speaker 2: this thing is ninety percent effective, then we need to
Speaker 2: build up our nuclear arsenal so that when we shoot
Speaker 2: everything we got at them still that ten percent will
Speaker 2: totally annihilate the United States that the presence of the
Speaker 2: star Wars program was going to put the nuclear arms
Speaker 2: rates into even higher gear than it already was. So
Speaker 2: they very much took it upon themselves to tackle this
Speaker 2: with science, but also publicize it and sell it to
Speaker 2: the public. And it's that that's stuck in the craw
Speaker 2: of a lot of other scientists, particular scientists who were
Speaker 2: in favor of nuclear proliferation as a matter of national defense.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 2: The point of it is when they tackled this, they said,
Speaker 2: here's the big problem with it. If you shoot off
Speaker 2: a bunch of nuclear bombs at a lot a lot
Speaker 2: of nuclear bombs which could totally go off as far
Speaker 2: as the nuclear war is concerned, it's going to cause
Speaker 2: a lot of smoke to enter the atmosphere. And that
Speaker 2: is where this domino effect is going to create, this
Speaker 2: global catastrophe, and the whole outcome of it is based
Speaker 2: on the number of nukes that you shoot off, which
Speaker 2: is basically what Carl Sagan and his buddy Richard Turco
Speaker 2: divided the different types of nuclear winter into.
Speaker 1: That's right, mister Sagan and mister Turko are they doctors.
Speaker 1: Let's just call everyone a doctor.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah he was. Carl Sagan was a doctor of
Speaker 2: astro chemistry, I believe, and Richard Turco is a veterinarian.
Speaker 2: I can't remember what he was.
Speaker 1: They wrote a book called it Path Where No Man Thought,
Speaker 1: A Path where No Man Thought, and that seemed like
Speaker 1: there would be one more word there. And they have one, two, three, four, five,
Speaker 1: six scenarios for what a nuclear winter might look like,
Speaker 1: ranging from minimal to extreme. In minimal best case scenario,
Speaker 1: which is just a little bit of a nuclear attack,
Speaker 1: not many bombs going off, maybe like let's say Hiroshima
Speaker 1: or Nagasaki, which we'll talk about those. Yeah, that means
Speaker 1: that there would be minimal cloud cover, not much environmental
Speaker 1: impact globally, and the targeted areas would be wiped out,
Speaker 1: of course, but the world itself would not have big
Speaker 1: consequences right atmospherically, So if.
Speaker 2: You are talking a nuclear war, especially old war nuclear war,
Speaker 2: that was a fairly unlikely scenario. By the time the
Speaker 2: early nineteen eighties rolled around and people started talking about
Speaker 2: the concept of a nuclear winner, those like Hiroshima and
Speaker 2: Nagasaki level nuclear bombs were like attached the average fighter jet. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they were considered like just tactical, like you just could
Speaker 2: shoot them off on a battlefield if you needed to. Yeah,
Speaker 2: So the idea that it would just amount to that
Speaker 2: is unlikely. Yeah, it was, but they would be nice.
Speaker 2: That's the best case scenario. They're trying to cover all
Speaker 2: avenues here.
Speaker 1: Yes, number two was marginal, and that's a few detonations
Speaker 1: again in the northern hemisphere, and they said it would
Speaker 1: lower the temperature by a few degrees and there would
Speaker 1: be some crops in some agriculture that suffered, and probably
Speaker 1: some famine, but it would not Oh black rain, of course,
Speaker 1: who wants that? Did happen in Hiroshima? Yes, they drank it,
Speaker 1: you and died.
Speaker 2: From hacking it to go, Yes, because it was radioactive rain.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but they drank it because they were thirsty because
Speaker 1: they had no water.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's devastating you and everyone should have to go
Speaker 2: to the city of Hiroshima, Like it is amazing what
Speaker 2: they've done to preserve what happened there. Oh, as like
Speaker 2: a teaching lesson for everyone. Yeah, it's really moving.
Speaker 1: We should have one of those here.
Speaker 2: We should. Instead people are like, yeah, Japan forced the
Speaker 2: US to drop the bomb, it's fact, right, which is
Speaker 2: not correct.
Speaker 1: Right, So black rain would happen in that marginal scenario.
Speaker 2: Man, this is a really political episode, isn't it.
Speaker 1: I think anytime you tackle nuclear war it's going to
Speaker 1: be divisive. Yeah, because some people think.
Speaker 2: It's awesome nuke, the whales got a nuke something.
Speaker 1: Things below the equator in that scenario in the southern
Speaker 1: hemisphere would be just fine.
Speaker 2: So here's something that I found really interesting and wrong
Speaker 2: in this analysis of it, Sagan. I guess he was
Speaker 2: strictly talking about atmospheric effects. Yeah, but he mentions like
Speaker 2: famine and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: The thing is that would have a global effect for sure. Yeah.
Speaker 2: The rest of the world depends in large part on
Speaker 2: North American wheat and corn. So if there's a nuclear
Speaker 2: fallout in North America that affects our crop yields dramatically
Speaker 2: and causes famine in the US, it's going to cause
Speaker 2: famine elsewhere too.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: I think what he's saying is as far as climatologically speaking,
Speaker 2: what he and Turco are saying is, as long as
Speaker 2: you're not shooting off nuclear bombs in the southern hemisphere,
Speaker 2: it's gonna climatologically speaking, be unaffected or largely unaffected because
Speaker 2: the wind goes down to the equator and then back
Speaker 2: up like the equator separates the hemispheres as far as
Speaker 2: the atmosphere is concerned.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. There would still be global troubles, yes, But
Speaker 1: in reading on these scenarios, it made me really want
Speaker 1: to move to Australia.
Speaker 2: Well that's another thing too. How many people would be
Speaker 2: like I needed to get out of the United States,
Speaker 2: so I moved down to Mexico, or I'm moving down
Speaker 2: to Brazil, or I'm moving down to Australia, And then
Speaker 2: the infrastructure in those countries are just super stressed because
Speaker 2: the northern hemisphere that survived is suddenly moving down to
Speaker 2: the southern hemisphere. Yeah, that's another widespread effect.
Speaker 1: Mexico would help you too much, though.
Speaker 2: Well, weren't they like super helpful in Independence Day? Was
Speaker 2: it Independence Day or the morning or no, the day
Speaker 2: after tomorrow everybody starts having to move south because North
Speaker 2: America is just frozen ice sheet.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but I just mean as far as you'd have
Speaker 1: to go pretty far south, further south in Mexico if
Speaker 1: you want to escape the atmospheric fallout.
Speaker 2: Oh, you're right, So Ecuador.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like what is it like half of Africa and
Speaker 1: South America or in the southern hemisphere? Yeah, probably not half.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so the northern hemisphere would show up at the
Speaker 2: Southern hemisphere's doorstep. I'd be like Christmas in July. We'll
Speaker 2: get used to it.
Speaker 1: That's right. Your drain goes the other way when you
Speaker 1: release the water from the tub. Yea nido, And.
Speaker 2: I know Christmas doesn't fall in July. It was a
Speaker 2: metaphorical statement everyone, Yeah, I get you.
Speaker 1: Nominal nuclear winners number three. That is what they consider
Speaker 1: the low end full scale nuclear war, right, but still
Speaker 1: full scale six thousand to twelve thousand nuclear weapons. That's
Speaker 1: all just six to twelve thousand nuclear bombs.
Speaker 2: Right, and we're talking a megaton or more bombs and
Speaker 2: a mega ton was I think fifty Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Speaker 2: bombs combined, So twelve thousand times fifty of those for
Speaker 2: this kind of nominal nuclear war.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a lot of zeros.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: They predicted noon sunlight would be about a third of
Speaker 1: what it was global temperature drops of eighteen degrees. That's
Speaker 1: bad news, my friend. It would destroy a lot of
Speaker 1: the ozone layer and again, the Southern hemisphere wouldn't experience
Speaker 1: major climactic change.
Speaker 2: To cut to the Southern hemisphere, they're all at the beach.
Speaker 2: There's like topical music playing.
Speaker 1: But they have no wheat.
Speaker 2: Who needs wheat when you got wrong drinks?
Speaker 1: That's a t shirt. Josh Clark said that one number
Speaker 1: four substantial. That is full scale nuclear war, freezing temperatures,
Speaker 1: big time fallout. The whole day would be like it's overcast,
Speaker 1: billions of humans dead, billions, billions and billions species going extinct,
Speaker 1: and finally possible damage to the Southern hemisphere finally possibly.
Speaker 1: And then the last two we can just bunch together.
Speaker 1: I think severe and extreme, less than one percent of
Speaker 1: the sunlight getting through for months and months on end,
Speaker 1: global temperature dropping, no photosynthesis happening, every crop dying, all
Speaker 1: life perishing. Let's just go ahead and wrap it up
Speaker 1: right there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, as Robert puts it, most of the planet's life
Speaker 2: would perish within the chili confines of this black atmospheric tomb.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's got a little love Craft in him, does.
Speaker 2: He does this unnameable tomb Chuckers. Let's take another break
Speaker 2: and then we will come back and talk about the
Speaker 2: fallout from nuclear winter theory.
Speaker 3: Stoff with the jaw shot.
Speaker 2: So, like we said, Carl Sagan and his friends got
Speaker 2: together and basically took it upon themselves to educate the
Speaker 2: public about the potential catastrophe that could happen as a
Speaker 2: result of nuclear war. Everybody before was like, Yeah, that
Speaker 2: would really suck to be in a city that a
Speaker 2: nuclear bomb went off on, but maybe it wouldn't be
Speaker 2: my city. I live in Schenectady, New York. No one's
Speaker 2: gonna bomb s Connective, so I'm probably gonna be Okay.
Speaker 2: These guys said, Hey, Western civilization, not just in the US,
Speaker 2: but also the USSR, that's not necessarily the case, You
Speaker 2: too will be affected. There's gonna be big problems after
Speaker 2: a nuclear war, so much so that let's make sure
Speaker 2: that our leaders never do this right. Wake up basically
Speaker 2: is what they were doing. And so Sagan and his
Speaker 2: friends created a paper and it's now called the tas
Speaker 2: Paper after all of their names.
Speaker 1: Right, Turco, Tune, Ackerman, Polk, and Sagan.
Speaker 2: Okay, And they wrote this paper and had it published
Speaker 2: in Science, the pre eminent scientific journal in the United States.
Speaker 2: It was a big deal. They also held a very
Speaker 2: well publicized conference, and Carl Sagan, apparently without the group's
Speaker 2: knowledge or blessing, went off and also wrote a piece
Speaker 2: in Parade magazine. Yeah, to make sure that every dick
Speaker 2: and Jane in the US knew about this. It was
Speaker 2: like a three page article about the nuclear winner, which
Speaker 2: is a new term at the time, complete with illustrations
Speaker 2: where like the earth was like this dead, lifeless what's
Speaker 2: called like a gray chalk billiard ball, basically just really
Speaker 2: scary stuff. And then he also simultaneously wrote another longer
Speaker 2: piece that was in Foreign Affairs that's a little more wonky.
Speaker 2: So Sagan went off after writing this scientific paper and
Speaker 2: publicized it to policymakers and to the American public.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is the early nineteen eighties.
Speaker 2: And yes, it was nineteen eighty three, and you this
Speaker 2: was before all the science was in. This is from
Speaker 2: the first paper, before the first papers conference was even held, right,
Speaker 2: And a lot of people, including people who were on
Speaker 2: his side about this issue, were really mad at them
Speaker 2: because it opened up this group and the whole idea
Speaker 2: of nuclear Winner to allegations that they were fear mongering
Speaker 2: and that they were basically trying to sell the public
Speaker 2: on science, which is, you know, that's not what science does. Yes,
Speaker 2: pure science is about research and coming up with facts,
Speaker 2: and whether they're popular or unpopular, it doesn't matter. Science
Speaker 2: is science, in fact is fact. A good theory is
Speaker 2: a good theory. But these guys again were concerned that
Speaker 2: something really, really bad could happen, and they went to
Speaker 2: the trouble of taking it upon themselves to advertise it
Speaker 2: to the public. But again Segon going off and dow
Speaker 2: this it really opened up for a lot of allegations
Speaker 2: and debate that took place afterward.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but some say that their work and the t
Speaker 1: Taps Report actually did help cool things down in the
Speaker 1: Cold War a little bit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I mean it wasn't just these American scientists.
Speaker 2: They worked with Soviet scientists as well, and apparently sometimes
Speaker 2: it went good, sometimes it didn't go so well, But
Speaker 2: they're both sides were working on this issue, and the
Speaker 2: fact that it got so much publicity actually created a
Speaker 2: firestorm of back and forth in the scientific community, and
Speaker 2: this issue ended up getting really well studied.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it did. And seven years later they revised the
Speaker 1: report in nineteen ninety and it had new, more modernized data,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't quite as dire, which some critics were like,
Speaker 1: all right, this is a little more reasonable.
Speaker 2: Yes, they revised it to call it the Nuclear Autumn.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and everyone loves autumn.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Autumn's good autumn all the time. They'd be wonderful.
Speaker 1: Oh man, that would be wonderful. That'd be Chuck's world.
Speaker 1: And they there are disagreements over that still, and they
Speaker 1: basically there's a few four variables that are always the
Speaker 1: factors that are the unknowns, and it's really they're all
Speaker 1: to me kind of one four versions of the same variable,
Speaker 1: which is we don't know how much smoke there would be, Yes,
Speaker 1: we just don't know. And number one is how much
Speaker 1: material is there to burn? So the idea is you
Speaker 1: drop a bomb on a city, a nuclear bomb, and
Speaker 1: everything catches on fire and that creates tremendous amounts of smoke.
Speaker 1: But since these are all theoretical and you don't know
Speaker 1: what would happen if you drop something the size on like,
Speaker 1: let's say a major city like New York, they're like,
Speaker 1: what would be there to burn? Like, we just don't know.
Speaker 2: Well, that's that's yeah. So if you dropped it on
Speaker 2: a city, is it an old city that's that isn't
Speaker 2: super modern, sure, and therefore isn't built out of like
Speaker 2: lots of plasts that can get into the atmosphere and
Speaker 2: really mess things up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like the really bad stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if it's an old city, maybe the burning wouldn't
Speaker 2: be so bad even after a nuclear holocaust. Or maybe
Speaker 2: you're not shooting nuclear bombs two cities, but to other
Speaker 2: nuclear installations that are out in the middle of like
Speaker 2: nowhere in Nebraska.
Speaker 1: Right, because we have I mean we've there's been like
Speaker 1: two thousand nuclear bombs detonated, but they only two on
Speaker 1: a cities, right, exactly. Everything else has been out of
Speaker 1: the ocean or out in the middle of nowhere, and
Speaker 1: there's been no fire.
Speaker 2: Right. The assumption is that though if you shot a
Speaker 2: nuclear bomb at an at a modern city, a lot
Speaker 2: of really toxic smoke would be produced. That's probably the
Speaker 2: worst case scenario in both the immediate nuclear holocaust and
Speaker 2: the fallout the nuclear winner as a result, because of
Speaker 2: all the smoke that would be created.
Speaker 1: I mean, look at the fallout from nine to eleven,
Speaker 1: and that was two buildings, right, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The second variable is how much would remain in the atmosphere,
Speaker 1: and then how much goes back to the earth. Yeah,
Speaker 1: no one really knows that at all. How much sunlight
Speaker 1: would be deflected? Again, just theorizing, and.
Speaker 2: You can go back and plug in these numbers.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The problem is if you're a detractor of nuclear winter theory,
Speaker 2: you would say, that's a guess, right, where'd you get
Speaker 2: that number? Yeah, you know, and you could take every
Speaker 2: number and come up with a different model for each one.
Speaker 2: They usually don't do that, but even still, it's like
Speaker 2: which one's going to be the one?
Speaker 1: And again it goes back to how much smoke would
Speaker 1: there be to begin with? Yeah, and then finally, when
Speaker 1: did it happen? If it was actually in winter, perhaps
Speaker 1: it's not so bad.
Speaker 2: Yeah, nuclear winter and winter ironically is the best case scenario.
Speaker 1: The best case scenario of the bad scenarios.
Speaker 2: Right, So they did initially back off of their findings.
Speaker 2: They said that it was there could initially be like
Speaker 2: a thirty five to forty degree drop in global temperatures celsius.
Speaker 2: So we're talking like seventy degrees seventy two degrees farentheight
Speaker 2: drop in temperatures.
Speaker 1: So that's about full on nuclear war.
Speaker 2: Yes, later on as they revised their findings and more again,
Speaker 2: more and more scientists got involved and studied this issue.
Speaker 2: They came upon what seemed to be a consensus that
Speaker 2: you could probably count on something like a fifteen degrees
Speaker 2: celsius drop in global temperatures, which would be substantial and
Speaker 2: could still have widespread effects. Right, So this from this debate,
Speaker 2: nuclear winner kind of got settled on. There was a
Speaker 2: scientific consensus that came about, and there was also consensus
Speaker 2: that not only would there be huge problems inland, there
Speaker 2: would be oceanic problems as well because one of the
Speaker 2: things one of the great casualties of detonating nuclear bombs
Speaker 2: is the ozone layer. The fire ball from the blast
Speaker 2: burns up nitrogen, converting it to nitrogen oxide, and nitrogen
Speaker 2: oxide just punches holes, basically chemically burns the ozone layer.
Speaker 2: So then when all that smoke that's acting as like
Speaker 2: an umbrella that's blocking out the sunlight falls back to Earth,
Speaker 2: all that particular matter falls back to Earth and is radioactive.
Speaker 2: By the way, now the sunlight that does come through
Speaker 2: is way hotter and has way more UV light than
Speaker 2: it had before the nuclear bombs went off.
Speaker 1: Because we had our little delicate balance that's now disrupted exactly.
Speaker 2: The problem with that for the oceans is that that
Speaker 2: UV light would likely be too intense for phytoplankton at
Speaker 2: the ocean's surface. Well, that is the keystone species for
Speaker 2: the ocean aquatic environments. The ecosystems all start with phytoplankton,
Speaker 2: and zooplankton feed on phytoplankton, Little fish feed on zooplankton,
Speaker 2: Larger fish feed on little fish, and so on and
Speaker 2: so on until so if you get rid of the
Speaker 2: phyto plankton, you're in big trouble. So there would be
Speaker 2: huge ramifications, and science came to a consensus on this,
Speaker 2: but again it was attacked very early on by nuclear
Speaker 2: proliferation hawks as basically being against the interests of United
Speaker 2: States national security, and then later on it continued to
Speaker 2: be attacked. It became a customary traditional flashpoint among conservatives
Speaker 2: as a great example of the links that hippie environmental
Speaker 2: scientists will go to to dupe the American public into
Speaker 2: being scared about nuclear bombs and just nuclear stuff in general.
Speaker 2: Like Michael Crichton famously attacked it in a two thousand
Speaker 2: and three speech, and he his whole thing. He was
Speaker 2: very famously a climate denier. He was a climate skeptic
Speaker 2: until his death as far as I know. As he did, yeah,
Speaker 2: and he wrote some great books, but it was also
Speaker 2: like contrarian by nature is what he said as well.
Speaker 2: But I get the impression that he tended to land
Speaker 2: on the more conservative, anti environmental side. And on this case,
Speaker 2: he also attacked the Nuclear Winner as well. And what
Speaker 2: he accused these guys of doing is creating science by consensus. Right,
Speaker 2: That to me is that's just like a one to
Speaker 2: two sucker punch. So the initial scientists that challenged Nuclear
Speaker 2: Winner said, you guys can't even agree. There's no consensus, Like,
Speaker 2: you can't be certain in what you're saying, so therefore
Speaker 2: we don't need to take you seriously. So they said, okay,
Speaker 2: you know what, We're going to get all these scientists
Speaker 2: around the world together to study this issue and we're
Speaker 2: going to come to a consensus. And when they did
Speaker 2: years later, guys like Michael Crichton said, you guys are
Speaker 2: practicing science by consensus and politicizing science. It's not real science.
Speaker 2: So it was like they were very much damned if
Speaker 2: they did, and damned if they didn't, and ultimately you
Speaker 2: just have to kind of decide is it worth the risk.
Speaker 2: Maybe we can't say for certain, Yeah, and at the
Speaker 2: time you couldn't say for certain. What's cool is that
Speaker 2: some of these same climate scientists are still at work
Speaker 2: and they have come up with fairly recent models, using
Speaker 2: very sophisticated climate models compared to the stuff they were
Speaker 2: using back in the eighties and even the nineties. Yeah,
Speaker 2: the stuff they're using now says, actually, we think nuclear
Speaker 2: winner might be worse than was initially predicted.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and even if it's not a full scale nuclear war,
Speaker 1: I think the worry there's not as much worry these
Speaker 1: days for something like that. What the worry is now
Speaker 1: is that some rogue nation gets a hold of one,
Speaker 1: or maybe even not a rogue nation, just Indian Pakistan
Speaker 1: drop a couple of nuclear bombs.
Speaker 2: So that's the model, and like that is entirely possible.
Speaker 2: I think a one megaton detonation is what they did
Speaker 2: this model on, and it was it had a substantial effect.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they said ten years of smoke clouds and a
Speaker 1: three year temperature drop of about two point twenty five
Speaker 1: degrees fahrenheit.
Speaker 2: Which doesn't sound like much. But if you go back
Speaker 2: and you read that scientist's study, his executive summary of
Speaker 2: the study, he points out that that kind of drop
Speaker 2: ultimately equals a shortened growing season by ten to twenty days,
Speaker 2: and that lasts ten to twenty days makes or breaks
Speaker 2: a crop like that means you can either harvest it
Speaker 2: or it dies before it matures and can be harvested.
Speaker 2: And so even just a couple of degrees can lead
Speaker 2: to widespread crop failure. Yeah, but this is just if
Speaker 2: India and Pakistan shoot fifty bombs at one another in
Speaker 2: a regional war. Yeah, it could have that effect around
Speaker 2: the world.
Speaker 1: So we mentioned Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those are the only
Speaker 1: places we can look. But like we pointed out, the
Speaker 1: bombs were so different back then, it's not the best comparison.
Speaker 1: But as far as looking at what kind of fires
Speaker 1: could happen, you can't tell a whole lot. In Hiroshima
Speaker 1: there were more fires than in Nagasaki, just because of
Speaker 1: the way the geography is in the two cities. But
Speaker 1: in neither case did they see a ton of secondary fires.
Speaker 1: Like it wasn't blacking out the sky, there was black rain,
Speaker 1: but apparently, you know, like a week later, most of
Speaker 1: that stuff had cleared up. But again that is you
Speaker 1: can't even really compare the two.
Speaker 2: No, it's a single twenty one kill a ton bomb.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, we're talking.
Speaker 2: Fifty of those going off in the same area.
Speaker 1: But that report that you mentioned on just like if
Speaker 1: Indian Pakistan, well how much was it ten mega.
Speaker 2: Tons fifty fifty or no, it was one megaton, So
Speaker 2: fifty of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.
Speaker 1: Well, it was enough to cause the Atomic Scientists Science
Speaker 1: and Security Board to move the dooms to clock two
Speaker 1: minutes closer to midnight. And the Doom's day clock is
Speaker 1: some people say it's good science, some people say they're
Speaker 1: fear mongering, But what it is is is it's a
Speaker 1: design that basically says, here's how close we are to
Speaker 1: destroying ourselves as a civilization. And there are a lot
Speaker 1: of factors that go into it, like biotechnology or cybertechnology,
Speaker 1: but the main two are obviously nuclear weapons and climate
Speaker 1: change are the two main things that factor into where
Speaker 1: the Doom's day clock sits. And I think in the
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties they've only changed it how many times? Eighteen
Speaker 1: times since it was created nineteen forty seven. Have they
Speaker 1: changed the hands on the clock? In the nineteen fifties
Speaker 1: it was at two minutes till midnight in the early
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties. The best I think it's been in the
Speaker 1: early nine nineties was seventeen minutes till midnight. Oh nice, Yeah,
Speaker 1: doesn't feel good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a.
Speaker 1: Lot of time.
Speaker 2: What are we right now?
Speaker 1: Right now, we are the closest we've been since nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty three. And on January twenty second of this year,
Speaker 1: it was changed to three minutes till midnight. Is where
Speaker 1: they sit, and they have a big had a big
Speaker 1: press release. I'll just read the opening and closing paragraphs.
Speaker 1: The opening paragraph in twenty fifteen, unchecked climate change, global
Speaker 1: nuclear weapon modernizations, and outsized nuclear weapons arsenals pose extraordinary
Speaker 1: and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity, and
Speaker 1: world leaders have failed to act with the speed or
Speaker 1: on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe.
Speaker 1: These failures of political leadership endanger every person on Earth.
Speaker 1: And then the final paragraph, and there's lots of fun
Speaker 1: stuff in between, Yeah, just like fart jokes and stuff.
Speaker 1: And then they close with in twenty fifteen, with the
Speaker 1: clockhand move forward to three minutes to midnight. The board
Speaker 1: feels compelled to add, with the sense of great urgency,
Speaker 1: the probability of global catastrophe is very high and the
Speaker 1: actions needed to reduce the risk of disaster must be
Speaker 1: taken very soon. They don't mess around. No, And even
Speaker 1: though that we've we had been doing a good job
Speaker 1: of reducing the amount of warheads between the United States
Speaker 1: and Russia, but things have slowed to a snail's pace now.
Speaker 1: From two thousand and nine to twenty thirteen, Obama cut
Speaker 1: only three hundred and nine warheads from the stockpile. And
Speaker 1: they're basically saying, we're not doing this as fast as
Speaker 1: we need to. Yeah, like we need to act now.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, there's other people who are saying we need
Speaker 2: to rebuild our nuclear arsenal because it's aging and rotting
Speaker 2: and will be useless by twenty twenty to twenty thirty.
Speaker 1: How are we going to drop nuclear bombs on people
Speaker 1: in the future?
Speaker 2: Right, it's weird, like some people are trying to reignite
Speaker 2: the Cold War.
Speaker 1: Well, trust we outs. I don't agree with it, but
Speaker 1: I know that most of those people aren't saying, hey,
Speaker 1: so we can bomb people, it's so we can keep
Speaker 1: each other in check, yes, which was the Cold War.
Speaker 2: We could also all over again get rid of nuclear
Speaker 2: bombs entirely.
Speaker 1: We could do that.
Speaker 2: And you know, Sagan's whole thing, I should say, And
Speaker 2: it's funny that he's kind of like the villain of
Speaker 2: this whole thing, of the whole nuclear winner debate, because
Speaker 2: he's such a revered figure, such a great guy. But
Speaker 2: he really, I purposefully made some serious missteps as far
Speaker 2: as publicizing the results went before they were fully in.
Speaker 2: But his whole thing was and if you read his
Speaker 2: foreign policy thing, his article, it's really really good. It's
Speaker 2: not too obtuse, so like it's kind of fun to read.
Speaker 2: But it's called nuclear war and climactic catastrophe colon some
Speaker 2: policy implications, and he says like, we don't know, you know,
Speaker 2: what the what the right answer is, We don't know
Speaker 2: if it's entirely possible that nuclear winner. Maybe our ideas
Speaker 2: are overblown or whatever. But he said, I'm not willing
Speaker 2: to take the chance, right, Why should we take the chance.
Speaker 1: That's his whole thing, like why risk it? Right?
Speaker 2: So his solution is, how about this US and USSR.
Speaker 2: How about you de escalate the arms race, deproliferate until
Speaker 2: you get down to a threshold that science has said. Okay,
Speaker 2: nuclear winner probably couldn't happen beyond this payload, right. Yeah,
Speaker 2: So even if all of the nuclear bombs in the
Speaker 2: world at this lower number were set off, we still
Speaker 2: wouldn't go into nuclear winter. But you guys can take
Speaker 2: out all of your major city centers and still fight
Speaker 2: your nuclear war, but the rest of the world won't
Speaker 2: won't be destroyed by it. Yeah, that was his solution,
Speaker 2: and no one took him up on it.
Speaker 1: I've never understood. I don't know, man, We'll do one
Speaker 1: on climate change at some point too. But I've never
Speaker 1: understood why people and I get the economics play factor,
Speaker 1: but why risking the future of mankind for your ancestors
Speaker 1: to follow is worth it.
Speaker 2: A lot of it is fear, Like a lot of
Speaker 2: these people who have over the last decades, you know,
Speaker 2: pushed for that kind of thing, like fear that you know,
Speaker 2: the US will be caught with his pants down, like
Speaker 2: genuinely feared the Soviet Union, and like their heart was
Speaker 2: in it like that. But I mean, if it's fascinating
Speaker 2: to me, this whole like basically secret publicity war that's
Speaker 2: been going, that went on throughout the twentieth then it's
Speaker 2: well into the twenty first centuries. Yeah, there's a book again,
Speaker 2: I think I mentioned it called Merchants of Doubt. Everybody
Speaker 2: should read.
Speaker 1: Yeah, good, and you know what, save your emails to
Speaker 1: me because you can still think what you want to think. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I just personally don't get it. I'm not going to
Speaker 1: throw stones at you say you're wrong. I probably should,
Speaker 1: but I won't because it's not nice to throw stones.
Speaker 2: It isn't chuck. Are you good?
Speaker 1: I'm great.
Speaker 2: If you want to know more about Nuclear Winner, you
Speaker 2: can read this fine article written by Robert Lamb by
Speaker 2: typing Nuclear Winner in the search bar at HowStuffWorks dot com.
Speaker 2: Since I said search bar, it's time for listener mega.
Speaker 1: Oh no, my friend, it's time for and D. All right,
Speaker 1: this is the time that we all know and love
Speaker 1: when Josh and I read out and say thanks, we
Speaker 1: give thanks. We should call this Thanksgiving and non administrative details.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, ready, no, no, that's okay.
Speaker 1: Because administrative details is such a weird name.
Speaker 2: This is long, it's meant to be so this.
Speaker 1: Is when we thank people for the very kind gifts
Speaker 1: that they have sent us over the months. And dude,
Speaker 1: I think this goes back all the way to January
Speaker 1: for me.
Speaker 2: Oh man, I've got one for Christmas cookies. Demona calin
Speaker 2: Tine and Grandma calling Tine.
Speaker 1: I think we always say her name wrong.
Speaker 2: By the way, No, I think she corrected us and
Speaker 2: said it was Valentine, So I think I'm saying it right.
Speaker 1: Mann's gonna be so mad at me.
Speaker 2: Calantine.
Speaker 1: All right? Is the administrative detail music playing?
Speaker 2: Sounds like it great? Can't you hear that?
Speaker 1: I'll get it started with. Richard sent us a guide
Speaker 1: to the round things of the Solar system.
Speaker 2: Very fun, very nice. I remember that. Yeah, Blair, send
Speaker 2: us a plug in key holder. You come home, plug
Speaker 2: your key chain in and you never forget it. It's
Speaker 2: pretty awesome. Actually, you can get them on Amazon Electric
Speaker 2: socket unplugged chain holder. Search for that. It will bring
Speaker 2: it up.
Speaker 1: That's right. I got a postcard, very nice postcard from
Speaker 1: Jean Pierre Bonasco and Stephanie Creek from Port Locroy, Antarctica.
Speaker 2: Nice. And it's worth saying again thank you to Mona
Speaker 2: Colintine and Grandma Colin tinme for our Christmas cookies. We
Speaker 2: look forward to them again this year.
Speaker 1: Yes, we certainly do. Uh Oh, we've gotten nugat, homemade
Speaker 1: nugat from Kristin Ferguson. Okay, it's so delicious.
Speaker 2: I am hooked on that stuff.
Speaker 1: It's great. It is she you can find her at
Speaker 1: Solace Sweets.
Speaker 2: Man, it is so good.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Christian's been sending us as homemade nugat for years
Speaker 1: and I was always like, I mean nugat, I don't
Speaker 1: know about that, and then I put it in my mouth.
Speaker 2: It's amazing stuff.
Speaker 1: It's really good.
Speaker 2: And then we also got some sweets from Dude Sweet
Speaker 2: Chocolate out of Texas. I think they might be out
Speaker 2: of Dallas. They made like they sent us really great chocolates.
Speaker 2: But they also make these incredible marshmallows too. They made
Speaker 2: a sweet potato marshmallow.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: And dudes at Dude Sweet Chocolate, thank you for those.
Speaker 2: They were amazing. You MEI was crazy for those marshmallows
Speaker 2: like I am for the nugat.
Speaker 1: That was quite the bounty. I remember that.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: As always every Christmas, our buddy Aaron Cooper and Kansas
Speaker 1: sends us great printouts of these great photoshops that he
Speaker 1: does of us that he puts online and.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you can see him on Internet round up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we even got t shirts this year of Shay Gevara,
Speaker 1: Josh and Chock. So Coop you're the best.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that is true, Coop. Mark Allen in the Trade
Speaker 2: Monkey team sent us some beautiful jewelry made by female
Speaker 2: artisans in Southeast Asia and traded fairly. The key.
Speaker 1: Our buddy van Nostrin send us a book.
Speaker 2: One which book.
Speaker 1: Well, he's always sending us stuff, so I honestly can't
Speaker 1: even remember which book, but we have like boxes full
Speaker 1: of things that he said.
Speaker 2: He sent us a CD of the Shags Philosophy of
Speaker 2: the World. You know, what's known as the worst album
Speaker 2: ever recorded. Yeah, it's got it in my desk.
Speaker 1: That's a since of humor.
Speaker 2: The problem is my computer doesn't have a CD drive
Speaker 2: any longer. Have you noticed that it's gone? No, Yeah,
Speaker 2: computers don't have those any longer. Try to find it
Speaker 2: on my computer. I defy you.
Speaker 1: I was like, what's that little slot? And you're like,
Speaker 1: that's where the tissues.
Speaker 2: Come out, right, it's the coffee cup holder.
Speaker 1: Our buddy is from Venice Sinking Band send us an
Speaker 1: LP sand in lines and a CD. What we do
Speaker 1: is secret and there are our friends from Athens, Yep, Georgia.
Speaker 2: Huge, huge thanks to Hillary loaves Are, who has sent
Speaker 2: us a lot of cheese over the last year, some
Speaker 2: of the best cheese Flathead Lake Cheese in Montana, which
Speaker 2: like they make a happy goodha that's to die for.
Speaker 2: It is very good at Flathead Lake Cheese. And she
Speaker 2: sent us some awesome t shirts that' say mouthfeel on them. Yeah,
Speaker 2: loves than our bar episode.
Speaker 1: She's the best. She and her husband might have been
Speaker 1: big time fans. They're very active on our Facebook page
Speaker 1: and they like drove to Seattle.
Speaker 2: For our show from Montana.
Speaker 1: Yeah she's a teacher.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they sent you me and Emily Earring. So
Speaker 2: thanks for that from all of us, right, Jerry got nothing.
Speaker 1: Uh, Tommy Lucrick, Tommy Luckrich, Lucrick Lettrich, he sent us
Speaker 1: a nice letter.
Speaker 2: The man whose last name you say four times.
Speaker 1: Well, he's the guy. He's walking from Seattle to New
Speaker 1: York City And if you want to follow this, I
Speaker 1: don't know, he might be there by now. Tommy Walks
Speaker 1: dot tumblr dot com, you can check that out.
Speaker 2: Okay, huge, huge thanks from me personally. Dolores No who.
Speaker 2: I don't know if you remember when we did the
Speaker 2: Hot Wheels episode, ohy do I I said that the
Speaker 2: hot wheels I would love to have was this like
Speaker 2: like station wagon camper that said good time camper on it.
Speaker 2: I remember she mailed it to me.
Speaker 1: That's pretty remarkable.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so thank you very much, laurs No, that was
Speaker 2: very nice of you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if anyone's listening, my favorite hot wheel was the
Speaker 1: one that had one thousand dollars stuffed in the body
Speaker 1: of the car.
Speaker 2: That's the good one.
Speaker 1: Stephan Brahm he sent us some currency banknotes, yeah, which
Speaker 1: I've never collected money, but he sent a nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: three dollar certificate, a nineteen fifty seven series two dollars bill,
Speaker 1: and an eighteen seventy four fractional currency ten cent note.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was pretty neat.
Speaker 1: I think you got the ten cent note, didn't you, because.
Speaker 2: We spied it up. I spent it on candy.
Speaker 1: No, what's this it's ten cents or it's.
Speaker 2: A fraction of a note. Meteorologist Michael Irb, who also
Speaker 2: moons moon Lights as a young adult murder mystery author
Speaker 2: send us a book of one of his murder mysteries,
Speaker 2: Kevin McLeod in The Seaside Storm. It's about a little
Speaker 2: weather detective. It's pretty cute.
Speaker 1: Jeff Payton sent us a book Darwin's Black Box.
Speaker 2: And Bethany at the Base Element the dot Base Dot
Speaker 2: Element at gmail dot com. If you want any of
Speaker 2: the flir to sell caramels, she sent us, we can
Speaker 2: highly recommend them. And I got one more from both
Speaker 2: of us. Chuff all right, Dan Kent name ring a bell?
Speaker 1: It does?
Speaker 2: He sent us the pints of Pliny the Elder ew Yes.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Dan, that's why it rings a bell.
Speaker 2: You're a top not human being. I think we met
Speaker 2: him in San Francisco to show yes.
Speaker 1: Thanks dude, the famous world renowned planning the Elder beer. Yes,
Speaker 1: which have finally tried it and it was delicious.
Speaker 2: It is dealers ship. Thank you very much. Everybody. We
Speaker 2: have more. If you didn't hear your name, hang tight.
Speaker 2: We've got probably a couple more episodes worth of administrative details.
Speaker 2: That's right, or Thanksgiving is what we're calling it now.
Speaker 2: And in the meantime you can get in touch with us.
Speaker 2: Send us an email to stuff podcast at HowStuffWorks dot
Speaker 2: com and as always, joined us at our home on
Speaker 2: the web, Stuff Youshould Know dot com. Stuff You Should
Speaker 2: Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
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