Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh
Speaker 1: and there's Chuck and sitting in for Jerry today is
Speaker 1: our great friend and co producer Dave c and the
Speaker 1: sea stands for cool. Say hello, David, everybody, that's pretty.
Speaker 1: That's a really great Dave impression. He's a he's a troll. Yes,
Speaker 1: I always hear him is wal wal wal walt wal Uh.
Speaker 1: Dave is great. I wish you all knew him, but
Speaker 1: we do, and so he's ours. You're gonna have to
Speaker 1: take our word for it. That's right, speaking of take
Speaker 1: our word for it, Chuck, I have to say to
Speaker 1: all the people who don't know much about Mount St.
Speaker 1: Helen's prepared to have your socks knocked off, or your
Speaker 1: lid blown or your skin seared off of your your muscle. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is a good one. This is uh. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is so bread and butter stuff you should know
Speaker 1: it is. I don't know why it took us almost
Speaker 1: sixteen years to get to it. And none of that
Speaker 1: margarine stuff are low fat. It's like full milk fat butter.
Speaker 1: Bread and butter stuff you should know salted butter, even
Speaker 1: you like salted Huh. It depends on what you're using
Speaker 1: it for. I like just plain unsalted butter, even on
Speaker 1: a bread and butter piece of like bread with butter. Yeah,
Speaker 1: mainly with like baking and cooking. It's like that's when
Speaker 1: it matters. Yeah, I got too. Um, what's your brand?
Speaker 1: Oh boy? It depends. I mean I love to get
Speaker 1: the hate to be that guy, but I dude, love
Speaker 1: to get the local butter when we get to our
Speaker 1: farmer's market and get it from our c s A.
Speaker 1: What's wrong with that? Well, I don't know. Can't you
Speaker 1: say parquake? Can you right? You must be a social
Speaker 1: justice warrior you buy local butter? Do you like that?
Speaker 1: What's the stuff? The Irish butter in the grocery store?
Speaker 1: That's my brand? Uh? Carry Gold? Carry Gold. That's good too,
Speaker 1: Like I've I've reached arched it, like I've literally researched
Speaker 1: but the butter because I want to get the most
Speaker 1: bang from my buck, and it is at the top
Speaker 1: of basically every list. It's of like any butter of
Speaker 1: any kind. It's really really good butter. Yeah, I totally agree.
Speaker 1: I love carry Gold. I take that stuff camping. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I carried it out in my pocket. Well, I like
Speaker 1: that you can get a tub. It's a smaller tub,
Speaker 1: but I do like a spreadable tub as opposed to
Speaker 1: a stick. I haven't seen the tub. We have a
Speaker 1: stick because we have a cute little butter dish, so
Speaker 1: we have we used the sticks. So anyway back to um,
Speaker 1: Mount St. Helen's the episode today. I was four years
Speaker 1: old when this happened, so I mean I didn't know
Speaker 1: what was going on, but I imagine you were like,
Speaker 1: holy cow, this is one of the most amazing things
Speaker 1: I've ever seen on my TV. Yeah, I was nine
Speaker 1: and I remember it being a big deal. But it's
Speaker 1: funny when I was researching this and then watching, UM,
Speaker 1: there's a really really great thing on YouTube that I
Speaker 1: recommend that A and He put out, You're ago it
Speaker 1: had to be. It was called minute by Minute Colin. Uh,
Speaker 1: the eruption of Mount St. Helen's really gripping stuff as
Speaker 1: a any used to do. You know, they probably still
Speaker 1: do that kind of stuff, but I don't know. Um,
Speaker 1: all of the media around it, I was thinking, like man,
Speaker 1: and I don't know if it was more regional or
Speaker 1: if it truly was nationwide. But I remember the eruption,
Speaker 1: but I didn't remember like the six weeks leading up
Speaker 1: to it, which was a very big deal. Yeah, although
Speaker 1: I think it was more of like a yeah, a
Speaker 1: regional thing for this the lead up. And then also
Speaker 1: if you were a geologist, a vulcanologists, a seismologist, anything
Speaker 1: that had to do with volcanoes erupting or mountains, then
Speaker 1: it would have been a big deal to you two.
Speaker 1: And it definitely attracted them from far and wide. And
Speaker 1: because there was so much warning, um, and it was
Speaker 1: able to buy it. I mean, Mount St. Helens was
Speaker 1: able to kind of draw to it like a magnet.
Speaker 1: All of these amazingly well trained researchers, Um, they were
Speaker 1: there when it went off. And it's probably the most
Speaker 1: best documented volcano in history because of that. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: because like you said, the Mount st. Helens is basically
Speaker 1: saying it's coming everyone. Would you like to document this? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm telling you again, it's coming, and I'll show you
Speaker 1: in lots of different scary ways that it's coming. And
Speaker 1: people left, people stayed, people came there, people like tourists
Speaker 1: came to see this thing. So let's get into it. Okay,
Speaker 1: so just a real quick refresher, we've done um volcanoes,
Speaker 1: and I think we've done super volcanoes too, because that
Speaker 1: sounds like us. Yeah, was volcanoes, seventeen super volcanoes. Okay.
Speaker 1: So we talked a lot about how volcanoes work in
Speaker 1: those episodes, So if you want to know a lot
Speaker 1: more in depth, go check those out. But just as
Speaker 1: a refresher for the specific kind of volcano that Mount St.
Speaker 1: Helens is. It's a strato volcano, and it's created when
Speaker 1: one younger plate is subducted under an older plate, and
Speaker 1: as the younger plate goes down into the bowels of
Speaker 1: the Earth, all of the rocket carries with it gets
Speaker 1: heated up. The same with water too, and that stuff
Speaker 1: travels upward because it's less dense than the surrounding mantle
Speaker 1: down below, and as it gets closer and close to
Speaker 1: the crust, it wants to pop out of there, but
Speaker 1: it can't necessarily, sometimes it can, and when it can,
Speaker 1: it just spews out all sorts of molten lava and
Speaker 1: that builds the volcano in a kind of a cone shape,
Speaker 1: which is what Mount Saint Helen's was up until May. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: it's a part of the cascade arc arranged there in
Speaker 1: the Pacific Northwest, and all of this happened, and you know,
Speaker 1: geologically speaking, pretty quickly. It happened over the course of
Speaker 1: about forty years in the case of Mountain St. Helens,
Speaker 1: which is pretty speedy. And uh, Ed helped us out
Speaker 1: with this. We did a great job on this article. Um.
Speaker 1: And Ed points out that you know in the Northwest,
Speaker 1: that's why you see so many you know, uh sort
Speaker 1: of coney mountains like that is because of this cascade
Speaker 1: arc and how these mountains were formed, you know, not
Speaker 1: too long ago, right, Yeah, forty thousand years ago, maybe
Speaker 1: less St Helens And I think the whole arc is
Speaker 1: less than a hundred right, um, so the whole thing
Speaker 1: that's driving Mount St. Helens. And apparently also there's some other, um,
Speaker 1: I guess volcanic mountains in the area, like Atoms. I
Speaker 1: think Mount Adams is one as well. But there's a
Speaker 1: there's a magma chamber somewhere under there, I think, um
Speaker 1: possibly miles and miles below the surface. But under normal circumstances,
Speaker 1: like I said, when a Stratto volcanoes formed, the the
Speaker 1: lava just kind of is able to find cracks in
Speaker 1: the crust and like it's it's released through there and
Speaker 1: it builds the mountain up slowly and slowly. But if
Speaker 1: there's not a crack in the crust, as in the
Speaker 1: case where Mount st Helens is um, that magma starts
Speaker 1: to back up. It hits the crust and it starts
Speaker 1: to back up below and all of a sudden you
Speaker 1: have a lot of stuff going on. That um makes
Speaker 1: things go kaboom when the right set of circumstances happens. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is this is pretty notable. This magma chamber is uh,
Speaker 1: well I is in was quite large and like you said,
Speaker 1: it's it's looking for a place to go. But if
Speaker 1: it doesn't have a place to go, what will happen?
Speaker 1: And as you'll see, this is what happened in the
Speaker 1: case of Mount st Helens is it starts bulging, and
Speaker 1: like the mountain, if you're a geologist, it's super exciting
Speaker 1: to see this happen. Um, even though it's very scary
Speaker 1: and dangerous. But when a geologist sees an actual mountains
Speaker 1: start to bulge out in a direction and we're talking
Speaker 1: you know, hundreds of feet of bulge over the course
Speaker 1: of a pretty short period of time. Then it's pretty like, Uh,
Speaker 1: it's it's a pretty notable thing. And that's exactly what
Speaker 1: was happening in the case of the magma chamber there
Speaker 1: in UH in Washington. Yeah, like this pressure is building
Speaker 1: up so much it's causing a boil on the mountain.
Speaker 1: The mountain grows a goiter basically, and that's just full
Speaker 1: of pressure and magma just waiting to go off. It
Speaker 1: doesn't always go off. And in fact Mount St. Helen's
Speaker 1: had two bulges also called crypto domes, which is pretty
Speaker 1: awesome UM, from previous volcanic eruptions. One was called Goat
Speaker 1: Rocks Bulge UM, and then the other one was called
Speaker 1: the Sugar Bowl bulge, and they just never like the
Speaker 1: magma found its way out other ways, but the bulge
Speaker 1: was left. This is a new bulge, and like you said,
Speaker 1: it was growing I think about six ft a day.
Speaker 1: Every day it kept growing another six ft, which is
Speaker 1: really fast for a mountain to grow. Uh. And that
Speaker 1: was one of the big signs initially that that something
Speaker 1: was going on. And and one more thing before we
Speaker 1: started to get into um Mount St. Helens itself, Chuck,
Speaker 1: I think we need to say like Mount St. Helens
Speaker 1: was big. It was a big eruption, but it was
Speaker 1: not the biggest eruption Mountain St. Helens has ever had.
Speaker 1: Apparently the biggest eruption it's ever came just about four
Speaker 1: thousand years ago, which is within um traditional like folk
Speaker 1: tale memory. Yeah, I mean it had been an active
Speaker 1: volcano for forty thousand years, but the big one before
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty was. Yeah, like you said, four, I was
Speaker 1: trying to look at a specific year, but let's just
Speaker 1: say four thousand years ago, because once you get back
Speaker 1: that far, you know who cares? Who cares? But it became,
Speaker 1: like you said, part of folklore. The indigenous people there,
Speaker 1: especially the pulla Up people, called the mountain LeWitt l
Speaker 1: O O w I T and there was a Lout's
Speaker 1: brewing company, so shout them out. This is one of
Speaker 1: those things where, uh, I thought, I wonder why, because
Speaker 1: there's been such a push to change names of things
Speaker 1: over the past like a decade or so, this is
Speaker 1: one that was. It seems so like sort of egregious
Speaker 1: that we should call it LeWitt and not Mount st.
Speaker 1: Helens that I'm pretty curious. I'm sure there's been pushes
Speaker 1: over the years to get it changed, but the Europeans,
Speaker 1: of course named it Mountain St. Helen's in after Captain
Speaker 1: George Vancouver. If that name rings a bell, it should
Speaker 1: gave the name of it because of a diplomat name,
Speaker 1: Alan fits Herbert didn't call it fits Herbert peak or
Speaker 1: anything like that because his noble title was Baron St.
Speaker 1: Helen's God. But here's the rub is that Allan fitz
Speaker 1: Herbert never even saw Mountain St. Helen's the mountain named
Speaker 1: after him, So like, I don't know, maybe maybe let's
Speaker 1: call this one LeWitt. Yeah, I think that's a great
Speaker 1: idea actually, And the reason they call it lewe It
Speaker 1: that that was she was named after Um, a like
Speaker 1: a famous volcanic fire tender woman, Um and low Itt
Speaker 1: and a couple of other men who fell in love
Speaker 1: with her and fought for her. Um became low it
Speaker 1: became Mount St. Helen's or lou It if you want
Speaker 1: to call it, at and then the other the other
Speaker 1: men who were fighting for became mount Hood and mount Atoms.
Speaker 1: They were smited by the creator God and turned into
Speaker 1: mountains for fighting Um. And there's legends not just from
Speaker 1: the pool up, but other indigenous tribes around the area
Speaker 1: that something really big happened, and it looks like what
Speaker 1: it is is a geo myth, which we've talked about before.
Speaker 1: And I think the Great Floods episode that has been
Speaker 1: handed down generation after generation that describes this enormous eruption
Speaker 1: four thousand years ago pretty good stuff. Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1: And it was a big eruption too. There's just one
Speaker 1: other thing. There is a layer of tefra of basically
Speaker 1: volcanic ash and debris and stuff that is so thick
Speaker 1: and so wide it goes up into British Columbia and
Speaker 1: sixty two miles away from Mount St. Helen. It's still
Speaker 1: twenty inches thick, almost two ft thick of ash sixty
Speaker 1: two miles away. That's how big that four thousand year
Speaker 1: ago eruption was. That's huge. And all this to say
Speaker 1: that Mount Helen's uh which has an asked, by the way,
Speaker 1: did you know that? Uh? Yeah, I did, you keep saying, Helen.
Speaker 1: I just wondered. I'm I'm being short because I don't
Speaker 1: want to take up too much time talking about Certainly
Speaker 1: that's good. That reminds me of the guy in college
Speaker 1: who fell on the sidewalk and his books splayed out
Speaker 1: and then he acted like he was reading. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: love that story. I forgot about him. Um, all of
Speaker 1: us to say is that Mount St Helen's had been,
Speaker 1: you know, active, had a long history of activity. So
Speaker 1: it's not like anyone ever thought, well, well, that thing
Speaker 1: is done and it's never gonna happen again. No, definitely not.
Speaker 1: Because also in the nineteenth century there was a lot
Speaker 1: of um eruptions too. There's a painting by a Canadian
Speaker 1: artist named Paul Kane who painted in eighteen forty seven eruption.
Speaker 1: So I mean start starting in the nineteenth century. Um,
Speaker 1: Mount St Helen's was documented pretty pretty clearly scientifically too,
Speaker 1: as as being an eruptive volcano, disruptive volcan you know
Speaker 1: you can almost say, all right, shall we take a break. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a nice prelude, I think so too. All right,
Speaker 1: we'll be back right after this geo. Okay, So we
Speaker 1: got a nice background on Mount St Helen's that had
Speaker 1: been very active for about or on a off, active
Speaker 1: for forty thousand years, uh, including I believe the last
Speaker 1: sort of big one was in eighteen fifty seven. Um,
Speaker 1: not too long after that, in nineteen o eight, about
Speaker 1: a million acres of land became part of Columbia National Forest,
Speaker 1: which was hence renamed Gifford. Uh a pin shot or
Speaker 1: pin show. I never know how to say that the
Speaker 1: Bronson Pinchot National Forest National forest, and that was in
Speaker 1: nine and Mount St. Helens is inside that National Forest.
Speaker 1: Um all this uh, this sort of a long way
Speaker 1: of saying. It wasn't like super populated. It didn't have
Speaker 1: wasn't surrounded by neighborhoods and suburbs and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: But there was something or is still something called Spirit
Speaker 1: Lake there um near the base of the mountain, which
Speaker 1: is uh, they have like youth camps there. People had
Speaker 1: cabins here and there. There were recreational activities that all
Speaker 1: over the place. So it's not like no one was there,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't heavily populated right well put so, Um,
Speaker 1: the whole thing starts. Actually even before the whole thing started,
Speaker 1: and I saw in nineteen seventy five the two volcanologists
Speaker 1: published a paper UM saying that it was very likely
Speaker 1: Mount St. Helen's was going to erupt in the twentieth
Speaker 1: century at some point, like a big one and five
Speaker 1: years later, in March eighty, the whole thing was kicked
Speaker 1: off by h four point oh earthquake, which is nothing
Speaker 1: to sneeze at, and it was at the mountain. Like
Speaker 1: this earthquake took place at the mountain, and all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, within five days there were quake storms. There
Speaker 1: was twenty four quakes of four point oh or greater
Speaker 1: within eight hours. When a volcano starts doing that and
Speaker 1: you're detecting it, you you, that's when the geologists come
Speaker 1: running from far and wide. Yeah, so they you know,
Speaker 1: the word gets out, and they did come running from
Speaker 1: foreig and wide and they you know, set up camp
Speaker 1: there at various places. Other just sort of um, as
Speaker 1: I learned from watching this uh any special that um
Speaker 1: there are like volcano chasers even that um, they hear
Speaker 1: about this stuff. They're fascinated by it. I guess it's
Speaker 1: just sort of amateur geo enthusiasts. And people started kind
Speaker 1: of coming in there because they got wind that something
Speaker 1: may be brewing at Mount St. Helen's including and this
Speaker 1: is you know, they're all kinds of people we could
Speaker 1: feature story wise, but one gentleman we are going to feature.
Speaker 1: His name was David Johnston UH, and he was a
Speaker 1: volcanologist at the U s g S, the United States
Speaker 1: Geographical Survey, and he was one of the UM. There
Speaker 1: were some great interviews with him in this A and
Speaker 1: E special. He was very young guy, UM, super excited
Speaker 1: to be there, and he was one of the ones
Speaker 1: kind of sounding the alarm along with his partner and
Speaker 1: this guy named Don Swanson about hey, like, you know,
Speaker 1: the s is getting real here everybody, and it looks
Speaker 1: like things like people need to start leaving. Yeah, like
Speaker 1: the thing is is there are the people who did
Speaker 1: live on the mountain were not the kind of folk
Speaker 1: who listened to like, you know, the governmentcil neton college
Speaker 1: boys or the government to be told like leave your home.
Speaker 1: And then also there was um those youth groups that
Speaker 1: were like you're going to ruin our week at Spirit Lake. UM.
Speaker 1: There was also Weyerhauser the first base exactly it's like
Speaker 1: a roller rink over there. UM. And then there was
Speaker 1: Weyerhauser who had a contract to be able to log
Speaker 1: on the on the mountain. They definitely didn't want to
Speaker 1: have to shut down operations. So there's a lot of pressure,
Speaker 1: a surprising amount of pressure, you know, more than you
Speaker 1: would think to keep them outain open, and David Johnston
Speaker 1: and Don Swanson and some of the other colleagues were like,
Speaker 1: you really can't do this, and they managed to convince
Speaker 1: the governor of Washington that it was the right move.
Speaker 1: And then later on, as we'll see, there was even
Speaker 1: more pressure to reopen because things didn't go as fast
Speaker 1: as everyone thought, and they managed to push that back
Speaker 1: as well, and as a result, David Johnston is frequently
Speaker 1: credited for saving thousands of lives potentially, which is pretty cool.
Speaker 1: I mean, and everything I've seen about and he was
Speaker 1: a genuinely great person and also like a really great
Speaker 1: pioneer in volcanology too. Yeah. Absolutely, um yeah. They did
Speaker 1: eventually set up what they called a red zone, and
Speaker 1: a lot of people did evacuate. Uh, there were some
Speaker 1: notable people who didn't. Um. Certainly, we need to mention
Speaker 1: Harry Truman. Um obviously not the president, but he was
Speaker 1: this old kajer who ran the lodge there and he
Speaker 1: became a folk hero because he famously thumbed his nose
Speaker 1: and stayed and said, you know, I'm I'm a part
Speaker 1: of this place. It's a part of me. If the
Speaker 1: mountain goes, I'm gonna go with it. Art Carney played
Speaker 1: him in the movie version. He was He got a
Speaker 1: lot of media attention along with his sixteen cats. Um,
Speaker 1: which is the only part of the story. Like, hey man,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm all for people evacuating and keep people safe,
Speaker 1: but I'm also like some old old mountain man wants
Speaker 1: to stay up there and go go down with a volcano.
Speaker 1: Like that's his right, but send the cats away. Don't
Speaker 1: say like I'm gonna go down and kill these sixteen
Speaker 1: cats at the same time. Yeah, it's kind of like
Speaker 1: being buried in like you know, medieval times and having
Speaker 1: your live horse buried with you. Yeah. I just I
Speaker 1: don't know. Man. Once I heard about the cats, because
Speaker 1: I was all into the sky, right, and then I
Speaker 1: heard about the cat I was like, oh, dude, you
Speaker 1: should have at least set the cats away. Yeah, no way,
Speaker 1: not not a lodge cajure. So um, Harry Truman will
Speaker 1: come back in. This is Harry Ard Truman, by the way,
Speaker 1: everybody said his middle initial to differentiate him. He'll come
Speaker 1: back in later. But so this mark the last thing
Speaker 1: that we happened on the mountain. March in eight hours,
Speaker 1: there's twenty four four point or greater magnitude earthquakes, and
Speaker 1: that brought everybody running. Um. This whole thing was so
Speaker 1: perfectly planned that on the day of the eruption there
Speaker 1: was the mineral and gem show in Yakima, like I think,
Speaker 1: less than a hundred miles away from Mount St. Helen's,
Speaker 1: So anybody who has any had anything to do with
Speaker 1: geology just happened to be in the area or was
Speaker 1: purposefully in the area. And then on March that's just
Speaker 1: getting more and more and more. There was an actual eruption, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: So this was I mean, compared to what eventually ended
Speaker 1: up happening, you could call this sort of many eruption.
Speaker 1: Even though it sent it made a big boom. Apparently
Speaker 1: it was a pretty cloudy day so it wasn't super visible,
Speaker 1: but the ash column went up sixty feet into the air,
Speaker 1: it's nothing to sneeze, and a new crater formed at
Speaker 1: the summit, which grew to about six hundred feet wide,
Speaker 1: so it was a major thing. There was another one
Speaker 1: on again throwing ash into the air, and this is
Speaker 1: like basically from that point through the big one in
Speaker 1: mid May, it was just constant uh warning, constant upheaval, mudslides, avalanches,
Speaker 1: craters growing, and like the mountain is saying like it's
Speaker 1: gonna happen people. This is not a false alarm until
Speaker 1: things calmed down, and that's what you were talking about earlier,
Speaker 1: Like things kind of settled down on what was that
Speaker 1: like May around around may to where the people got
Speaker 1: Auntie that were evacuated and said, hey, listen, we want
Speaker 1: to go back and check on our stuff. And the
Speaker 1: governor eventually was like, all right, I think it, you
Speaker 1: know at the time, and I think Washington still is
Speaker 1: a little bit of one of those like uh, not
Speaker 1: quite live free or die, but you know, like all right, listen,
Speaker 1: these people pay taxes, they want to go back to
Speaker 1: their homes, sign a waiver that you're not gonna sue us,
Speaker 1: and let him go back there. And that's what they did.
Speaker 1: They did. There's footage of them signing um waivers on
Speaker 1: the hood of a car with some obvious state lawyer
Speaker 1: in a three piece suit of canning people a pen
Speaker 1: being like signed here. It's really hilarious, but um they did.
Speaker 1: They started some people started to trickle in um and
Speaker 1: that's actually why there were you know, I think, and
Speaker 1: we ended up with fifty seven casualties. Seven people died,
Speaker 1: and that was one reason why it was actually that high.
Speaker 1: Could have could have been less, but bowl were allowed
Speaker 1: to trickle back in. They still kept like a perimeter,
Speaker 1: but I think it was kind of porous. If you
Speaker 1: wanted to get through, you could get through. And there
Speaker 1: are stories in that minute by minute episode of People.
Speaker 1: There's this one backpacker who is probably hilarious at parties
Speaker 1: because he makes like a funny a funny voice for
Speaker 1: the police when the police is talking, when he's recreating
Speaker 1: a conversation. Um, he's he's stuck through with friends. There
Speaker 1: are a lot of people on the mountain that otherwise
Speaker 1: might not have been had they kept it closed. But
Speaker 1: they did open it up a little bit, and it
Speaker 1: was because nothing had happened for a little while, and
Speaker 1: then about three days later everything happened. You said, you
Speaker 1: said S was getting real. This is when the S
Speaker 1: hit the fan. Yeah, well, I mean just prior to this,
Speaker 1: I guess let's let's back up one half second and
Speaker 1: let you know about what happened when David Johnson and
Speaker 1: Don Swanson, they had moved from their initial base at
Speaker 1: cold Water one, which was about I think eight or
Speaker 1: nine miles away. Uh, took their second station, which was
Speaker 1: called cold Water two, which is about five to six
Speaker 1: miles from the mountain. UM and notably it was on
Speaker 1: the northeast side of the mountain, which turned out to
Speaker 1: be the wrong spot to be UM. But you know,
Speaker 1: these guys knew what was going on. Uh. They know
Speaker 1: it's a dangerous job. And apparently they were swapping UM
Speaker 1: taking shifts. And Don Swanson got the call from Johnston
Speaker 1: and he said, hey, listen, I've got tonight and tomorrow
Speaker 1: if you come and relieve me the next day. And
Speaker 1: then on May eighteenth, nineteen eighty is when Johnston was
Speaker 1: there when everything went boom. Yeah, and I think there
Speaker 1: have been other colleagues and grad students and everything around
Speaker 1: cold Water too, and Johnston sent him away. He's like,
Speaker 1: this is outside the red zone, it's still potentially dangerous.
Speaker 1: There's no reason for more than just one of us
Speaker 1: to be here at a time, So you guys go.
Speaker 1: So at eight thirty two am on May eighteenth night,
Speaker 1: Mount St. Helen's like blew up. And there's like a
Speaker 1: typical idea that people have of a volcano going off,
Speaker 1: and most of the time it's shooting like a huge
Speaker 1: thing at ash and magma straight into the air from
Speaker 1: its top. But that is not what happened with Mount
Speaker 1: st Helens. Mount st Helens was a very specific and
Speaker 1: unusual type of eruption because it didn't go out of
Speaker 1: the top. It came out of the side, and it
Speaker 1: came out in what was known as a lateral blast eruption. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you know, like we said earlier, that pressure is
Speaker 1: building up uh a lot under the surface. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of moisture down there. Some of it was um,
Speaker 1: like you mentioned, from that initial uh plate subduction. That's
Speaker 1: called magmatic water. Some of it is just regular groundwater
Speaker 1: from from rain and snow and everything. Because it is
Speaker 1: the mountains, that's called meteoric water. And all of that
Speaker 1: stuff is just heating up. It's got pressure from below
Speaker 1: because it's heating, It's got pressure from above because all
Speaker 1: of that weight of the rock is just pushing it down,
Speaker 1: and all of this magma is just like boiling under there.
Speaker 1: But and I don't know we talked about this before.
Speaker 1: I guess it was in one of the volcano episodes.
Speaker 1: But it's it's not allowed to turn to steam because
Speaker 1: there's no room for it. Like steam is expansive and
Speaker 1: it can't expand. So it's just this superheated beyond the
Speaker 1: boiling point level of liquid that's just distributed all throughout
Speaker 1: the upper half and notably sort of the north side
Speaker 1: of this mountain. Yeah, and that that created that bulge
Speaker 1: that kept growing by about six ft a day. UM.
Speaker 1: That was the bultree. It is because like it's as
Speaker 1: violent as it as you can imagine that a bulge,
Speaker 1: and it's something that can make a bulge on the
Speaker 1: side of the mountain would be. And so under under
Speaker 1: other circumstances a plenty in eruption where where volcano explodes
Speaker 1: out of the top, like you typically think of that
Speaker 1: pressure that magma is going to basically force the top
Speaker 1: of the mountain open and that's how it's going to explode.
Speaker 1: This is not what how been with Mount St Helen's
Speaker 1: that kind of UM. I guess the hump was on
Speaker 1: one side. It was on the north flank, wasn't it.
Speaker 1: So it was on the north flank, And the thing
Speaker 1: that kicked off Mount St Helen's eruption wasn't the volcano.
Speaker 1: It was actually an earthquake in the volcano, and that
Speaker 1: that that earthquake caused the largest landslide and recorded history
Speaker 1: on Earth. More than half of a square mile of
Speaker 1: Mount St. Helen's suddenly vanished away. It just suddenly dropped
Speaker 1: off the side, the north side of the mountain. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's um like, you should really go check out
Speaker 1: the footage of this stuff. It's some of the most
Speaker 1: amazing like natural geologic disaster footage I've ever seen, just
Speaker 1: to see this mountain and then that you know, especially
Speaker 1: in the Anything to see people interviewed, uh describing like
Speaker 1: seeing this with their eyeballs that was it was just
Speaker 1: like it was incomprehensible what they were witnessing, like a
Speaker 1: mountain that large and and part of it just going
Speaker 1: away immediately again. And one of the reasons they were
Speaker 1: able to witness it, and we have such great documentations
Speaker 1: because at eight thirty two am, a pair of geologists,
Speaker 1: husband and wife geologists, happened to be flying in a
Speaker 1: plane because they had hired a plane to go look
Speaker 1: at Mount St. Helen's because they'd heard that, you know,
Speaker 1: it was there's some stuff going on, and they happened
Speaker 1: to make one more pass right as the mountain that
Speaker 1: earthquake dropped the side of the mountain. They were like
Speaker 1: right above it in a plane. As a matter of fact,
Speaker 1: you know, what's where's your quote? Should we read that? Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is Dorothy Dorothy Stoffel Uh in twenty nineteen. She said,
Speaker 1: the whole north half of the mountain that we were
Speaker 1: flying just five feet above, began churning, and a mile
Speaker 1: long fracture shot across the mountain faster than our minds
Speaker 1: could absorb. The north half of the mountain just became
Speaker 1: like fluid and slid away. Amazing. I saw somebody else
Speaker 1: describe as like a zipper opening along the mountain. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And and you know there there were amateur photographers around
Speaker 1: for some of the stuff. Um, some of these hikers
Speaker 1: like that guy you mentioned that was telling the story
Speaker 1: and finding voices, UM and volcano chasers like they got
Speaker 1: some some like some One guy got like twenty two
Speaker 1: pictures in a row and this is when it eventually blew.
Speaker 1: The other guy got like six or eight pictures. Uh.
Speaker 1: There was a family uh camping with their two young
Speaker 1: daughters and that guy they were you know on the
Speaker 1: north side, Um, you know, well below it but uh,
Speaker 1: you know, within the range. And he was like, you know,
Speaker 1: speaking to how it didn't blow from the top, he said,
Speaker 1: it looked like somebody shot a shotgun out of the
Speaker 1: side of this mountain pointed at us. So ash ash
Speaker 1: was raining down, but it was raining like at people
Speaker 1: and less down from the sky right exactly. It wasn't
Speaker 1: going up and then coming back down. It was coming
Speaker 1: straight at you if you were anywhere north of the mountain. Yea.
Speaker 1: And the reason why the north of the mountain was
Speaker 1: so dangerous because that's where that hump had been. That's
Speaker 1: also where the earthquake moved a good portion of the mountain,
Speaker 1: which meant that all that pressure that was keeping that pressurized,
Speaker 1: superheated water from boiling under the mountain was suddenly exposed.
Speaker 1: It was that pressure was gone, and so all of
Speaker 1: that incredibly hot water flash heated into steam. And when
Speaker 1: that happens, that expands. Like you said, the reason that
Speaker 1: one of the reasons steam can't exist in that situation
Speaker 1: is because it's too expansive. When it does have the
Speaker 1: chance to expand, uh, it does so with incredible force.
Speaker 1: And that's what happened. That's why Mount Saint Helen's blew
Speaker 1: out the side rather than the top because there had
Speaker 1: been a weakening and the pressure that allowed all that
Speaker 1: to just blow out and blow out it did. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it was um. If you look at it,
Speaker 1: it looks almost like a controlled demolition blast or something. Um.
Speaker 1: It definitely doesn't look like any kind of volcano blast
Speaker 1: that you might think of in your head. Um. It
Speaker 1: happened kind of all at once, and it was twenty
Speaker 1: four megaton blast, which I know everyone always tries to
Speaker 1: compare it to like Hiroshima. It was six hundred times
Speaker 1: as powerful as the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Good lord, But
Speaker 1: I mean that's what it would take to move point
Speaker 1: six square or cubic miles of mountain all of a
Speaker 1: sudden too, you know, And that that blast chuck that
Speaker 1: that twenty four megaton blast. It was described as like
Speaker 1: a fast moving cloud of heat and stones moving at
Speaker 1: at some points pretty close to the mountain three hundred
Speaker 1: miles an hour, heated to like six hundred and sixty
Speaker 1: degrees fahrenheit. I think that's like three degrees celsius, just
Speaker 1: blowing northward away from the mountain and everything within eight
Speaker 1: miles of that of the Mountain was in that blast zone,
Speaker 1: and if you recall correctly, David Johnston's um cold Water
Speaker 1: to camp was within about five miles. Yeah, he obviously
Speaker 1: didn't make it. Uh, they found I think they found
Speaker 1: pieces of his trailer like a decade later. H he
Speaker 1: had time to send out one signal which was over
Speaker 1: his radio Vancouver, Vancouver, this is it. The only person
Speaker 1: to pick that up was a Ham radio operator nearby,
Speaker 1: and they renamed that Arie Johnston Ridge in his honor. Um. Obviously,
Speaker 1: Harry Truman perished along with those sixteen cats, and he
Speaker 1: was close enough, uh to where I saw that. They
Speaker 1: said that he and everything around him was basically instantly vaporized,
Speaker 1: Like he wouldn't have felt anything. It would have happened
Speaker 1: his death and vaporization would have happened in like less
Speaker 1: than a second. Yeah, I have the impression the same
Speaker 1: thing happened to David Johnston. And also that rad that
Speaker 1: Ham radio operator who was volunteering to kind of document it.
Speaker 1: He documented David Johnston. Um get covered up, he said,
Speaker 1: Um the he said, gentleman, the camper in the car
Speaker 1: that's sitting over to the south of me. He was
Speaker 1: talking about David Johnston is covered is going to hit
Speaker 1: me too. And that was Jerry Martin, that Ham radio operator,
Speaker 1: and that was his last transmission. He was vaporized as well.
Speaker 1: Essentially everything everything north of the mountain within eight miles
Speaker 1: was just destroyed, just destroyed, like entire hundred foot trees
Speaker 1: that were like ten twelve feet in diameter, just completely
Speaker 1: flattened and also denuded of any bark on the way
Speaker 1: as well. UM. And this was just a blast that UM.
Speaker 1: The landslide that was created from that, the the earthquake
Speaker 1: that initially triggered the eruption UM that had in some
Speaker 1: incredible effects as well. Yeah, because what you've got, you know,
Speaker 1: beyond this avalanche happening, is you've got all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: all this heat happens in a place where there's a
Speaker 1: lot of snow, so that snow melts, that glacier ice melts,
Speaker 1: and you have flooding, and you have mud slides, and
Speaker 1: you have a word that I had never even heard
Speaker 1: of before Ed included it in here, which was lahar,
Speaker 1: which sounds like just a mud slide on steroids, like
Speaker 1: a mudside carrying ammunition with it. And this is just
Speaker 1: raining down everywhere and and like causing a path of
Speaker 1: destruction that hasn't been seen in like modern times in
Speaker 1: this country. Yeah, it was like it had so much
Speaker 1: power chuck that that that slide did that one part
Speaker 1: of it was carrying chunks of rock as big as
Speaker 1: five hundred and fifty eight feet or seven hundred and
Speaker 1: seventy across. That's as big as a fifty story building.
Speaker 1: It was moving rocks that size just fast as you
Speaker 1: can imagine, down the mountain into the valleys. And I
Speaker 1: saw it described as if you were watching it from
Speaker 1: a ridge, as some people were, like far away, you
Speaker 1: would see the cloud or the debris starting to come
Speaker 1: at you. It would disappear into a valley, and then
Speaker 1: all of a sudden it would come up over the
Speaker 1: ridge and keep keep going. It would. It was just
Speaker 1: filling valleys with rocks and debris. It's just it's it's
Speaker 1: unimaginable trying to grasp what happened. And it's even crazier
Speaker 1: that some people are actually they're watching this happen crazy.
Speaker 1: It is crazy. You want to take a break, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll take a break and talk a little bit more
Speaker 1: about the after effects right after this. Okay, we're back,
Speaker 1: and as Chuck promised everyone, it's after effect time. Well,
Speaker 1: we talked a little bit about it. Um. Obviously, Spirit Lake,
Speaker 1: which we mentioned at the beginning, which was at the
Speaker 1: base of the mountain UM, has a very strange effects
Speaker 1: on bodies of water. It Uh, it did two things.
Speaker 1: It made the lake larger, but it also made it shallower,
Speaker 1: because it just flooded all this water down there and
Speaker 1: raised it such that the outlet was basically dammed up,
Speaker 1: and so the lake got a whole lot bigger, but
Speaker 1: it reduced its depth by about eight feet. Um. I
Speaker 1: think five years later they built a spillway tunnel to
Speaker 1: control the depth of the lake. Um. Two hundred homes
Speaker 1: and cabins and about two hundred miles of road and
Speaker 1: railways were completely obliterated. Yeah. I also saw that lake
Speaker 1: was now two hundred feet higher in elevation than it
Speaker 1: had been before, as if like there was so much debris.
Speaker 1: It like raised the lake two hundred feet even though
Speaker 1: it also made it shallower. It's nuts, And I think
Speaker 1: it lowered the ultimate height of Mount Saint Helen's right. Yeah, Um,
Speaker 1: I can't remember. I think by like six meters or
Speaker 1: something like that. Some ridiculous amount of height just blown off.
Speaker 1: And that was another thing too, like the after effects
Speaker 1: of it um if you look at Mount St. Helen's
Speaker 1: today or especially like right afterward, UM, it was turned
Speaker 1: into like an amphitheater, Like the north side was blown
Speaker 1: out and the other sides were kind of curved around
Speaker 1: and what was neat is one of the huge after
Speaker 1: effects of Mount St. Helen's. One of the more positive
Speaker 1: ones is I saw it described as like a crash
Speaker 1: course um for vulcanologists and seismologists and everybody who are
Speaker 1: now just had this amazing natural laboratory to study in.
Speaker 1: And that the eruption, because it was the lateral blast,
Speaker 1: opened up like basically a cross section of the mountain
Speaker 1: that they could study. Now it's it's past history from
Speaker 1: the inside out, which I thought was pretty neat. And
Speaker 1: a young Trey Anastasia said, one day I shall play
Speaker 1: at the base of that amphitheater and bore people with noodling.
Speaker 1: They they there, No, I don't think so. I don't
Speaker 1: think there's anything there. How was this kidding? Oh wow,
Speaker 1: that was just completely made. I never will miss a
Speaker 1: chance to take a ticket fish with you. Uh so,
Speaker 1: ash is raining down and out. Uh, it literally darkened
Speaker 1: the skies. Um. When this ash, if you were close
Speaker 1: enough to it, it would literally burn you alive. Um.
Speaker 1: If you're far away, it can just create a lot
Speaker 1: of problems everything from uh, you know, just equipment not working,
Speaker 1: electrical outages and blackouts and brown outs. Visibility is obviously terrible. Um.
Speaker 1: As far as crops go, certain crops were wiped out
Speaker 1: by this ash and the toxic gases. Some of them
Speaker 1: did a little bit better because they just got a
Speaker 1: little bit of the ash and it um ash will
Speaker 1: help promote rainfall and hold moisture in the ground better.
Speaker 1: So apparently wheat crops and apple crops fared pretty well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was surprising. Yeah. I also saw and there was
Speaker 1: a lot of devastation. Any any big game animal in
Speaker 1: the blast zone. Was I said, big game animal by
Speaker 1: the way, was it was in the blast zone? Was
Speaker 1: was killed without question, But they were They were very surprised.
Speaker 1: Biologists who went in to investigate shortly afterward found they
Speaker 1: were like entire communities and ecosystems of smaller animals and
Speaker 1: plants and microbes. Fun. Guy that had survived just fine.
Speaker 1: And we're among the first to recallonize and we're part
Speaker 1: of the reason why um Mount St. Helen's ecosystem started
Speaker 1: to rebound so quickly. I mean, that's what will happen,
Speaker 1: right if if if the Earth ever just burns up
Speaker 1: into a fiery ball, that'll just become a big mushroom field,
Speaker 1: right probably, and then the animals that lived underground will
Speaker 1: come above ground and say it's our time, baby, I
Speaker 1: look forward to for some um what else happened? Oh?
Speaker 1: I saw that the ash cloud that that um that
Speaker 1: blew finally out of the top. We should say that
Speaker 1: the lateral blast was followed by a plenty in blast
Speaker 1: and that shot, like you know, that was the money
Speaker 1: volcano shot that everybody was looking for. A plume of
Speaker 1: ash and smoke rose eighty thousand feet into the air,
Speaker 1: and it was moving so fast that it circled the
Speaker 1: globe in fifteen days, came back to square one in
Speaker 1: fifteen days. And of course that was like affecting air traffic.
Speaker 1: Do you remember the icelandic Uh volcano that affected air
Speaker 1: traffic in Europe for like weeks. Weren't you stranded by
Speaker 1: that or something? Okay? Okay? Um it like they knew
Speaker 1: what to do in part because of how Mount St.
Speaker 1: Helen's affected air travel. At the time, they were like,
Speaker 1: this is brand new to us, um, but it helped
Speaker 1: lay the groundwork for understanding what to look for how
Speaker 1: to deal with that kind of stuff later on. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the um. The other thing I wanted to point out
Speaker 1: to about Spirit Lake was if you look at footage
Speaker 1: of the lake and now these kind of rivers that
Speaker 1: were just happening, and it literally like re out it
Speaker 1: you know, the Columbia River and the Cowlitz River in sections, um,
Speaker 1: but it looks like it looks like a logging operation
Speaker 1: is happening, um, and like you could almost and may
Speaker 1: have been able. Well obviously it has been too dangerous,
Speaker 1: but it looks like you could have walked over these logs.
Speaker 1: They were so like packed and these were just trees
Speaker 1: you know, an hour before. Yeah, if you could do
Speaker 1: that lumberjack log rolling thing, you could have probably made
Speaker 1: it across the lake. But there in that minute by
Speaker 1: minute episode, there was a pair of like high school
Speaker 1: sweethearts who have been camping and they had a harrowing
Speaker 1: experience because they they both got thrown into Spirit Lake,
Speaker 1: and um, the boyfriend was able to rescue the girlfriend.
Speaker 1: Is like the logs were starting to close in on him.
Speaker 1: He pulled her out from the lake and they were
Speaker 1: hanging onto logs when they finally made it out and
Speaker 1: were rescued. That happened like that happened to somebody. They
Speaker 1: were in their car. Oh is that how? And that's
Speaker 1: how they got in the lake. They were in their car. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they said it just picked him up and all that
Speaker 1: they were driving and then they were floating and they
Speaker 1: said that there you know there she said, like my
Speaker 1: instinct was to get out of the car, but there
Speaker 1: was like nowhere to go, right yeah, because there were
Speaker 1: trees everywhere floating around beside him, right yeah. And this
Speaker 1: is you know, these are just sort of That's what
Speaker 1: was so cool about the special is it really brought
Speaker 1: in the human element of these people that were around there.
Speaker 1: Um and they you know, they all survived because they
Speaker 1: were being interviewed obviously UM Dorothy Stoffel, who was the
Speaker 1: the geologist that was flying with UM. I guess it
Speaker 1: was her husband, Keith. Was that her brother her her
Speaker 1: husband Keith? Okay, Um they survived that plane flight, like
Speaker 1: they got out of there. There were stories of people
Speaker 1: that literally it was like from a movie. Drove, you know,
Speaker 1: a hundred and ten miles an hour, like out running
Speaker 1: this ash debris slide coming at right. Yeah, and some
Speaker 1: people didn't make it. So there was one guy who
Speaker 1: was chronicled in that that was driving as fast as
Speaker 1: you can in the blasts just caught up with him
Speaker 1: and buried him um in the in the ash um
Speaker 1: and he probably died pretty much instantly. But like again,
Speaker 1: that happened to people. There's very famous footage of a
Speaker 1: house just flowing down like a newly engorged mud slide
Speaker 1: e river moving so fast that you probably could have
Speaker 1: towed water skiers from the house. Essentially it was moving
Speaker 1: that fast just down the river. So I mean again,
Speaker 1: it was one of the most documented um volcanic eruptions
Speaker 1: of all times. So there's really amazing footage on there
Speaker 1: or just on the internet, is what I mean. Um,
Speaker 1: But that wasn't the last time that that Mount St.
Speaker 1: Helen's has erupted. I think it erupted a few times
Speaker 1: between nineteen eighty and maybe I think, yeah, and then
Speaker 1: the biggest one recently was between two thousand four and
Speaker 1: two thousand eight. Yeah, it started sort of getting a
Speaker 1: little more active again. Uh this time though, you know,
Speaker 1: one of the things that um to the benefit of
Speaker 1: the surrounding area when a volcano blows like that is
Speaker 1: that pressure is released and it's gonna take a long
Speaker 1: time to build back up to that level again kind
Speaker 1: of depending on what how it reforms on top of it.
Speaker 1: But this time apparently there are, uh, there are more
Speaker 1: ways for this pressure to be released. So I think
Speaker 1: it's just sort of the pressure is being released a
Speaker 1: little more gradually since the two thousand foursion too. But
Speaker 1: there they do say that like, oh no, like it
Speaker 1: will happen again, like things are uh, there is a
Speaker 1: new lava dome growing and the pressure is going to
Speaker 1: build up, and it could be in a thousand years
Speaker 1: or it could be in ten years. Yeah, we just
Speaker 1: don't know now, but they are studying it. Like there
Speaker 1: there's a lot of active research and study going on
Speaker 1: at Mount Saint Helen's now. Yeah, I believe, you know,
Speaker 1: the eruption was such a big deal that they've they've
Speaker 1: opened the U s g S opened a research station
Speaker 1: nearby UM and also that that two thousand four activity
Speaker 1: basically ran from two thousand four to two eight. Like
Speaker 1: you said, they've been studying the mountain closely. So there's
Speaker 1: amazing time laps footage of those four years, and it's
Speaker 1: astounding how fast and how big Mount St. Helen's just
Speaker 1: grows from that eruption activity. It's called time laps Images
Speaker 1: of Mount St Helen's um dome growth. It's on YouTube, UM,
Speaker 1: and I recommend checking that out as well. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: would just be careful when you google dome growth or
Speaker 1: bulge growth. Boy. So, man, we are so juvenile sometimes,
Speaker 1: aren't we? And by we I mean me too. Um.
Speaker 1: But like we said, Mount St Helens bounced back, Spirit
Speaker 1: Lake open back up and the cold Water two station
Speaker 1: has been renamed after David Johnston and there's an amazing
Speaker 1: memorial too. I saw on some trip Advisor posts that
Speaker 1: somebody so I was like, the one of the best, um,
Speaker 1: like not welcome center, but you know, information centers that
Speaker 1: the person's ever been to. So I would like to
Speaker 1: go there. Some cookies are en real? All right? You
Speaker 1: got anything else? I got nothing else? All right, We'll
Speaker 1: go forth and research um Mount St Helen's with an
Speaker 1: s UM. And you can start doing that by watching
Speaker 1: Dante's Peak. Since I said Dante's peak, it's time for
Speaker 1: listener mail. This is following up on an email that
Speaker 1: you particularly liked from our speectacular. Okay, hey, guys, thoroughly
Speaker 1: enjoying the most recent spectacular. The accents are comedy genius.
Speaker 1: Uh Meagle, do you want to pop in and say Hi, Hello, perfect?
Speaker 1: I'm gonna bring Megle back every now and then. By
Speaker 1: the way, I just want to prepare you in the audience.
Speaker 1: I wanted to address a couple of eighteen hundreds diction
Speaker 1: issues that call some puzzlement. Uh. When you got talked
Speaker 1: about toilet it's basically what Josh said. I've always thought
Speaker 1: of it as a refreshing as freshening up in the bathroom,
Speaker 1: washing your face and hands when first waking up, or
Speaker 1: going to bed. A double check with Marion Webster, though,
Speaker 1: and it's more generally dressing and grooming. That makes sense. Yeah. Sure.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, the strangers in the beverage from
Speaker 1: the toll House is a lot more puzzling. I had
Speaker 1: no idea what it meant, And although Josh's guests that
Speaker 1: beverage meant the pub was clever, it doesn't really make
Speaker 1: sense just as a reminder of the sentence is talking
Speaker 1: about some men drinking tea in an end and pausing
Speaker 1: to quote discover the sex and dates of arrival of
Speaker 1: the strangers, which floated in some numbers in the beverage
Speaker 1: end quote. I think I found the answer, though, guys,
Speaker 1: in a Dictionary of Scottish dialect, we love this stuff
Speaker 1: by them, this is amazing. Tea leaves floating on the
Speaker 1: surface of your drink are considered omens that you will
Speaker 1: meet someone new, So these tea leaves are called strangers.
Speaker 1: If you pick up a stranger and bite it, the
Speaker 1: toughness will tell you whether the new acquaintance will be
Speaker 1: male or female. Amazing. I'm gonna guess there's also a
Speaker 1: way to predict the date you meet this person, although
Speaker 1: I didn't see reference to that. So that's what the
Speaker 1: characters are doing, guys, using tea leaves to predict the future.
Speaker 1: By the way, other omens can also be strangers, like
Speaker 1: unburned candlewicks or sit on greats. I've loved the show
Speaker 1: for years, look forward to anymore. That is a great email.
Speaker 1: Nat Jacob's fantastic uh sleuthing and we are super grateful.
Speaker 1: Top to bottom start to finish. Wonderful email. Also just
Speaker 1: put so nicely to not like you big dummies. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because I got it pretty wrong. It was a terrible guess,
Speaker 1: but I mean that was really hard. Like you was obscure,
Speaker 1: you know very much? Anyway, I love knowing that now.
Speaker 1: That was one of my favorite emails. So thanks a lot, Nat.
Speaker 1: And if you want to be like Nat and get
Speaker 1: in touch with us in the best way possible, you
Speaker 1: can send us an email to Stuff podcast at iHeart
Speaker 1: radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio from our podcasts My heart Radio,
Speaker 1: visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows. H m hm