Guess what, mango?
What's that? Well?
All right, So we're in New York City this week, and one of the things I love seeing here is how many people read on the subway. I mean, you look around and it feels like every New Yorker feels like it's the perfect time to get their reading in. And actually sometimes I'm kind of jealous about this because they have this automatic reading time each day. But you look around the world and there are other places that do this too, and Brazil is actually a big supporter
of this. In fact, the country has started something called ticket books to promote literacy. Have you heard about this?
No? What's a ticket book?
So it's a free book that you can pick up just at a subway station, and apparently there's this Brazilian publisher that gave out ten thousand books. But the cool part is that the books actually double as subway tickets, so each book has ten rides and then a reader can either refill the book for free or pass it along to somebody else.
Oh that's pretty cool and did it get people reading? Yeah?
I think some. In fact, this was an intentional effort on the part there, because I believe Brazilians were only reading maybe like two books a year on average at the time, but the books handed out included everything from The Great Gatsby to Hamlet to Naruda love Sonnets to of course Garfield.
Garfield was a ticket book. Yeah, it's like a gayway drug to like reading.
But absolutely well, this is just the first of a ton of stories that we have today about Brazil, from you know, how a soap opera convinced the country to have less kids, to how a bunch of termites can help you make a better pizza. So let's dig in. Hey, their podcast listeners, welcome to part I'm genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good friend Mangesh Hot ticket there and on the other side of the soundproof glass helping himself to what he claims is
a Brazilian delicacy. That's our friend and producer Tristan McNeil. Now, if I sound it a little bit skeptical, it's because I'm basically watching a grown man drink liquid butter from a bottle, and actually he's only trying to frame it as some kind of cultural experience he's taking part in. And I got to be honest, personally, I'm not really buying it. What's your take on this, mega.
Well, I think it's definitely gross that hard the take is true, but you know, as weird as it sounds, I think we should actually give him like some partial credit on this one, because this is actually a thing in Brazil. Apparently in the northeast part of the country, bottle butter is popular and it's even a common souvenir for people who go there on vacation. So the key to remember is that residents actually use this butter as
a condiment, not as a beverage. So if you dine in the region, you'd probably find like a bottle of liquid butter on the table next to the salt and pepper, and you can just splash a little on your meat or rice or whatever, just for an extra kick of flavor.
I feel like that makes more sense than whatever Tristan is doing right now. So what's so special about this butter anyway? And maybe more importantly, why do they sell this in bottles?
So it's actually pretty funny. When I first heard about this, the first thing I thought about was ghee, which is this clarified liquid butter that you have in India. People started making gee because it was sort of this easy way to preserve butter in the days before refrigeration and in areas that are hot or unforgiving. If you clarify the butter and you remove that milky solid that's in there, and you just keep the liquid dairy fat that's left behind,
it doesn't spoil. And it turns out it's actually the same story here. Northeast brazila is dry, it's arid, so the cattle ranchers in the region stumbled into this same technique. It actually ends up being super regional. You can't find in other parts of Brazil, only in the northeast. And it's also an acquired taste. Unlike Gee, it actually has a few more notes to it. It's a little more cheesy. It supposedly has a strong barnyard aroma as well, which I guess is very acquired barnyard.
Yeah, I would say that, I'm not sure how you'd ever acquire that taste, but interesting. It doesn't seem to bother Tristan over there, though, And I'm grateful that he brought this stuff to our attention because it is pretty interesting, and because you know, love for bottled butter is definitely an unusual part of Brazilian culture that I had actually never heard about before, And that's exactly the kind of
thing that today's episode is all about. You know, it feels far too often that when it comes to Brazil, we either hear only the good or the bad. You know, like we read about all the tourist friendly things in the country, like the delicious food, the beautiful beaches, sambas, soccer, carnival, but you know, it also feels like we read about the depressing bits like poverty and government corrupt, rampant crime.
So today's focus, like, we really thought we'd move past those familiar talking points and think about the stranger side of Brazil, like all the unusual things about the country that you probably never knew about. So let's get into this, Like, what's something you were surprised to learn this week, Mango.
Well, I mean, there are a ton of things, but one thing that really stuck out to me is the fact that nearly two million Brazilian citizens are of Japanese descent. There and while that's still only a fraction of Brazil's population, which is roughly about like two hundred to two hundred and ten million people, it's actually the largest group of people with Japanese ancestry outside of Japan itself.
Huh. I actually hadn't heard that before. So why is that exactly?
Well, I guess Brazil has always been this melting pot of cultures from all over Europe and Africa, and this goes back hundreds of years. And of course there's also the native population that's there and the various Amazonian tribes. The country really is home to a little bit of everyone. But Asia's country didn't come until about the early twentieth century, and that's when tens of thousands of Japanese people began
to look for opportunities abroad. The first batch came over in nineteen oh eight, and then they settled in the south and the southeast parts of the country, where they started working on the coffee plantations. And then the nineteen thirties, the local state government in Brazil's north began offering free land to anyone who was willing to farm it, and
obviously that's an attractive deal to an outsider. So a second wave of Japanese immigrants laid roots in that part of the country, and now over a century later, the country has the world's second largest population of people of Japanese ancestry, or nikay as they're called.
You know, it's cool because one of the reasons we wanted to do this Brazil episode is because you know, we both learned so many fascinating things from the show we did on Japan a while back. So it's you know, it's neat that you found this kind of unexpected connection between the two countries.
It's funny. You know. We actually had this host in the office fair Tundy Thurston, and we were talking about aging pops, and I told them how Japan was adding all that process to food for the elderly so that they could chew and swallow food easier. I feel like there were so many facts in that that were really interesting. But what's sort of funny to me is that Japan and Brazil feel pretty far apart, not only in terms
of like culture, but stuff like climate. Like Japanese immigrants, you know, they wouldn't have been used to those like ninety five degree days and the average high in Tokyo, like it's only like seventy nine degrees. It's quite a difference between the climates.
Yeah, that's that's a serious adjustment. Do you get a sense for how Japanese transplants, you know, deal with this kind of newness.
I guess this is a coping mechanism for all of us. But it's comfort food. So Japan, of course has a pretty famous culinary tradition, you know, from their dining habits to meal time rituals, and so these early Nike communities in Brazil would actually hang onto those traditions as a way to feel connected to their heritage. But they didn't
live or cook in isolation either. Like overtime, Brazilian flats began to seep into these traditional Japanese recipes, and ingredients from the homeland that couldn't be found were often subs to do with things like cassava or fish from nearby rivers. But what's interesting is that like a few generations later, a whole bunch of Japanese Brazilians wound up reverse migrating back to Japan, and since they'd lived their entire lives in Brazil, they naturally brought a taste for all of
these Brazilian flavors and culture back with them. So in fact, there's this like thriving Brazilian restaurant scene in Japan now because so many people had migrated back there and they were nostalgic for the Brazilian food they'd grown up with. And I just kind of love that there's this like unofficial cultural exchange program between the two countries.
Yeah, that's really cool.
You know.
I actually have a different food collaboration that I want to talk about for just the minute, and this is the one between the fishermen of Laguna and Brazil and the wild dolphins who live off the coast there. So for the past one hundred and twenty years, the friendly Laguna dolphins have actually been lending their fishing talents to the coastal community there. I know that may sound a little bit weird.
Yeah, so how does this work? Exactly?
It's pretty amazing actually. So around two hundred fishermen take their nets and then they wade out into the water and you know, they're kind of waist deep at this point, and they form a line. But because the water in the area is so murky, they actually can't see where the fish are. So instead the fishermen wait for a friendly dolphin to give them somewhat of a signal, and so once they see one, make a sudden dive or
slap its tail against the water. The humans actually cast their nets and reap the rewards from there, and there's a ton to reap too, like actually, research shows that they can catch more fish and larger fish when they do, you know, kind of cooperate with the dolphins compared to when they work solo. In fact, some of the fishermen say that on days when dolphins aren't around, it's not even worth fishing at all.
So this sounds like a pretty sweet deal for the fishermen, But what is in it for the dolphins?
You know, It's funny because then the articles, the dolphins are almost always talked about like these deep dogs of the sea, like they corral the fish for the fishermen, but it's clearly benefiting them too. And I guess the theory is that panicfish become really disoriented when the fishermen cast their nets, and that chaos makes it easier for
the dolphins to gobble up the fish as well. And it isn't like every dolphin participates in this activity, like the helpful ones you know, kind of work alone or in smaller groups with the humans, But the rest of the dolphins steer clear all together. And as you know, as far as we know, nobody ever taught the dolphins to do this, so how exactly this practice got started it's still somewhat of a mystery.
I like that you're aware that some of the dolphins oft out of this experience.
Yeah, I don't want any part of it, which is pretty amazing.
But you know, while we're on the subject of bizarrely helpful animals, do you know that Brazilian termites are actually great at making pizza ovens?
That is not something I do, but I definitely need to know more now.
So I don't know how much you know about termites, but they really are these incredible engineers and construction workers. They carve out these super long, intricate tunnel systems for their colonies to nest in. But you've probably also seen those giant termite mounds is that they make, And I don't know have you actually seen those?
Oh? Yeah, no, it's pretty amazing to see the pictures of these.
Yeah, and they look like, I guess, like giant dirt cones or almost like big rocks smoke stacks. But the interesting thing is that, like, because most of the turmite tunnels are underground, if you cut into the side of one of these mounds, you probably won't find many termites in it at all.
I mean, so what's with the giant cones, Like it seems like a huge amount of work for not a lot.
Yeah, I mean, it depends on which termite mounds we're talking about. Like in the northeast of Brazil, where it's extremely dry and arid, the termite mounds really don't serve a purpose. They're basically just like enormous junk piles, and it's essentially all the excess bits of soil that the termites produce while tunneling on ground, and all of that just eventually gets like collected into a mound. You know.
While a termite worker is hardly half an inch long, like like, some of the mounds they build are actually like thirty feet wide at the base and they could be as tall as thirteen feet high. So not only
are they big, but there are tons of them. Actually this is a little off topic, but based on satellite images in the region, researchers actually estimate there are roughly two hundred million termite mounts and they're spread across an area as large as four thousand Great Pyramids of Giza, which, wow, is kind of a weird way to measure things. I don't know why. The fact I read said like, I don't normally measure things in Pyramids of Giza, but it's it's pretty fascinating.
I thought that was pretty standard now. But I mean, I'm guessing if it's that many and you can see the mounds from space, that the bugs have been doing this for a little while.
Yeah. There was actually this really neat study where researchers took soil samples from eleven different mounds and then they analyzed the sand grains from the centers to see I guess when these mounds had last been exposed to sunlight or at least the dirt inside. And the youngest mound they found was I guess it was started seven hundred years ago, and the oldest was almost four thousand years old.
That is incredible. But actually, I think the question we all want to know now is what does any of this have to do with pizza?
So this is a real thing, I promise, and it's not just this shaggy dog story. If you head to southern and central Brazil, where it's wet and grassy, you actually find a different kind of termite mound there, and these ones do serve a purpose both for the termites
and for pizza loving humans. So on the termite side of things, that the hollow mounds function as lungs for the colonies that live in the tunnels below them, and it's all this like porous soil and it helps them, I guess, keep their chambers ventilated, like the carbon dioxide is sent out and fresh oxygen comes in. But for humans, the good news is that once the colony dies out or follows the trail of food to a different location,
all these deserted mounds make perfect outdoor ovens. So in the past people used to cook all kinds of meat in these makeshift ovens, but today they're actually a really popular way to cook bread and pizza, especially when you're on camping trips or some other outing. And all you have to do is like cut a hole at the base of the mound, confirm it's empty, which is a pretty important part, and then light it up and it's ready to make food with.
Yeah. I think I'd have a hard time though, ever, eating something that was baked in a termite oven. To be honest with you, and I mean, I know you said the mounds are abandoned and everything, but I might still struggle with that. But thankfully, though, I know, Brazil has me covered because the country's actually been obsessed with pizza ever since Italian immigrants brought it over at the
end of the nineteenth century. In fact, in Brazil's largest city, South Pallo, you know, they're so into pizza there that it's said to be home to eight thousand pizza parlors, eight thousand, which is collectively that's enough to produce a new a million pizzas each and every day. And you know, some foodies claim Brazil makes the best pizza in the.
World, which is hard for someone like me to believe.
Yeah, well, I mean there is a downside to all that superior pizza because, according to a twenty sixteen paper and Atmospheric Environment, the restaurants use an estimated three hundred thousand tons of wood each year to keep their old school ovens nice and hot, and unfortunately, all that smoke results in some pretty major air pollution, and so the researchers say that even though most residents have switched over to biofuel for their vehicles, you know, the emissions from
all those wood burning ovens might undo all those positive effects.
I do find a problematic, right, like choosing between clean air or the world's most delicious pizza. It feels like such a Sophie's choice. But you know, now that we've talked a little bit about Brazilian cuisine and some animals that help put food on the table, why don't we switch gears and talk about the opposite kind of wildlife, the Brazilian animals that are more life threatening than life affirming.
Yeah, let's definitely do that. But before we get to that, let's take a quick break. You're listening to part Time Genius and we're talking about the strangest things you never knew about Brazilian wildlife. Now you may have heard this before, but Brazil is believed to have the greatest biodiversity of any country in the world, and it's largely thanks to it's also having the largest tract of untouched rainforest on
the planet. And while some of the animals there are dangerous, and you know, some are even deadly, there's one famous jungle resident that is far less dangerous than we like to pretend, and that's the poor misunderstood Piranha.
I love it. The humble man eating piranha. But have you ever seen those teeth? I feel like those are some fishes, you know.
I feel like you just wanted to say vicious fishes, but I did. I mean, the Farascia puranas has been greatly exaggerated for a long time now, like we think of them as these rapid flesh eating monsters. I'll just kind of tear you apart the second two hit the water. But you know, the truth is that most piranhas would never try to eat a human or any other mammal
unless it was dead or even dying. And for the most part they eat insects or other fish, and some species are purana or even vegetarians actually.
So I don't feel like I've heard that they're vegetarian purana out there. I feel like knowing that maybe like Annie's or some healthy brand should use them as their mascot.
It's pretty weird, but there is a species in Para, Brazil that only eats river weeds. Don't get me wrong. The pranas can still pose a threat to humans, and some swimmers in South America have lost fingers and toes in recent years, but I couldn't find any record of anyone ever being killed by piranhas, And it's really not that surprising when you consider that piranhas usually travel in schools of about twenty fish, which is way fewer than the numbers they need to take down a human.
So as morbid as it is, I'm curious, like how many fish it does to take down a human, Like Gabe once told me that, I think it's like a gallon and a half of water could kill me. So that's like a number I have in my head, and I kind of want to know how many piranha I need to avoid.
Well, fear not, because I did indeed pull the numbers and a quarter curator. Yeah, oh I didn't do this just myself, but there's a curator at the National Aquarium
in Baltimore. And so the estimate that they came up is that to strip the flesh from a one hundred and eighty pound person in five minutes would require somewhere between three hundred and five hundred hungry piranhas, which is way more than you would ever come across, even in highly concentrated regions like you think the Amazon River as an example.
So it sounds like it's highly unlikely, but I guess still technically possible, Like if you were like a Bond villain, you could head to Brazil, scoop up a few hundred piranhas, stick them in your pool, and then you've got this instant death trap.
I don't really think we should be giving anybody ideas, but that, in theory, I suppose would work. And in fact, it was a similar kind of stunt that gave the fish such a bad name in the first place, and all because you know, a few Brazilians wanted to show off for Teddy Roosevelt himself. And this happened back in nineteen thirteen. It was a few years after he'd left office. So the forward President decided to go on this expedition. He wanted to go into the heart of the Brazilian rainforest.
Of course, the locals knew that he was coming, and they also knew his reputation as this thrill seeker, and so to make sure he had an experience that he would never forget, the Brazilians arranged a demonstration for him. And this was on the banks of the Amazon River. And the guys warned Roosevelt, you know, and his really about the fact that they shouldn't wade into the water there or else they'd be immediately eaten by this small,
ravenous fish. And of course, as the Brazilians expected, Roosevelt scoffed at the idea that any fish could be, you know, that dangerous, especially if they're that tiny. So the guides gave him proof. They brought an old, sick cow and drove it into the water. Then, to the horror of everyone watching, the piranhas attacked the cow and stripped it to the bone within just a few minutes.
Oh, I feel like as a Hindu, that's particularly disturbing. But it's obviously the stunt. Why were there so many of them just waiting around in one place, Well, because it was a total setup. Like weeks before Roosevelt arrived, local fishermen had caught hundreds of piranha and then they tossed them into this area of the river that they had isolated.
With giant nuts. So weeks go by, and then the guides that you know, gave their warning at that part of the river, and they knew that there were hundreds of traps, starving fish just waiting to put on a show. But of course Roosevelt, you know, and all these reporters that were with him. They didn't know any of this, and they thought they had witnessed the most shocking natural display of aggression in the animal kingdom. And now you can bet they wanted to tell the same story when
they returned to the US. In fact, Roosevelt released the book the next year called Through the Brazilian Wilderness, and in this book he describes piranhas as quote the most ferocious fish in the world. You know in Hollywood actually kind of took it from there, and for the last century, the piranha's status says, this fresh water killer has gone mostly undisputed until now. I guess, well, yeah, and I'm trying to do my part contributing to it.
Well, here's something that sounds like it should be a myth, but and I even kind of like, hope it's a myth, But it's actually true. Sometimes it rains spiders in Brazil and so on. A in certain parts of Brazil, the sky will actually open up and hundreds or even thousands of spiders will rain down on the residents below. And before you tell me I'm making this up, you should actually look it up online because there are a bunch of different videos. For full disclosure, it's not like the
spiders are tumbling out of the rain clouds. It's more that the wind is carrying them on their webs. But for onlookers, the effect is sort of like a storm of spiders.
So how does this work that there could be thousands of spiders in one of these showers? I mean, not only does that sound like obviously a ton of spiders, but how does that work? Because I thought spiders lived on their own, not in these giant colonies.
You're right, So most spiders do keep to themselves. In fact, out of the forty thousand or so known species of spiders out there, only twenty three of them are social. And so one of these species lives in San Paolo and the surrounding towns, and there it's pretty common to see spiders just sailing through the sky en mass. And the problem for humans at least is that these colonies build these huge sheets of webs in these tree tops, right, and in order to trap enough insects to keep everyone
fed in this social group. They're just massive. So the webs can stretch from the ground to as high as sixty five feet, and they seriously contain thousands of spiders, each of which is I guess roughly the size of a pencil eraser, so not that big, but a lot of them. So when a strong enough wind comes along, the webs are knocked loose, and then a mob of these deeply confused spiders are just sent hurtling through the air, and uh, you know, it's not a great day for
anyone when it's raining spiders. But speaking of not so great days, Brazil has actually had a stretch of those recently in terms of politics and culture. So even though we're trying to keep things light today, I do think we should spend just a few minutes to kind of spotlight what's been going on there.
Yeah, I feel like we probably should. But before we get to that, let's take one more quick break.
Okay. Well, so if you keep tabs on international news, there's a good chance you've heard the recent concerns about Brazil's newly elected president Bolsonaro. Many of his views tend to be extreme, to put it mildly, and the measures he's enacted since taking office don't really bode well for the country's cultural institutions. For example, one of his first actions as president was to dissolve three of Brazil's ministries the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Social Development and to
merge them into a single department. And while we don't actually know how that will affect government funding for cultural institutions, artistic communities in Brazil are really bracing for the worst.
Yeah, that's you know, it's especially upsetting when you think about how much they've already suffered. You know, I'm sure you remember this, but it was just last fall there was that fire that destroyed Brazil's National Museum, and this was a collection there that contained more than twenty million artifacts.
You know, they amassed this over the course of the institution's two hundred year history, so it was just devastating and tragically as much as ninety percent of the collection is thought to have been lost in this fire.
Ninety percent. It's really awful to think about, like everything that was lost that night. Like I a should remember reading about that museum and how they lost this massive collection of art from different indigenous peoples that were spread across Brazil, so it was like costumes and personal belongings, but also audio recordings of languages that I believe had died out. So you know, it's super tragic and all of that has gone now along with many of the other relics of South American culture.
Yeah, it's true, you're actually looking on the bright side of this. I was happy to see that multiple campaigns have since launched these efforts to digitally recreate the museum collection. And this was using decades of visitor photos. So if you've ever made it there on vacation, you can actually submit your shots online at the museum's website. And actually there's a good chunk of the collection that made it through the fire, un skate, and this includes the oldest human fossil found in Brazil.
Well, that is good news. I'm curious, though, I sort of lost track of that news story. Did they ever figure out what started the fire? And please don't say, Billy Joel.
You beat me too. Well, investigators never reported an exact cause for the blaze, but official speculate it may have been just like a short circuit or something, and apparently that had been known for a while, like things like exposed wiring and that the museum didn't have fire doors
or a sprinkler system. And that might be the saddest part of this because according to Smithsonian, the National Museum's full annual budget, it was one hundred and twenty eight thousand dollars, but hasn't received that amount since twenty fourteen.
In fact, last year at the museum received only thirteen thousand dollars, and in late twenty seventeen, the museum's finances were in such poor shape the curators turned to crowdfunding, you know, to repair and exhibit that had really been infested with termites at the time.
I mean that that is frustrating, and I just can't believe those numbers, Like the fact that they were only getting what was it, thirteen thousand dollars and that it didn't have a sprinkler system like that feels unimaginable for a national museum.
Yeah, I mean, the federal government had actually been divesting from the museum for years, so this isn't a new thing. But I also read an interesting article in City Lab that suggested something else. Apparently part of the problem is that modern Brazil doesn't feel very rooted to its pass So I pulled this quote from the article. Here's what it says. We live in a country that has a
weak connection to its history. In advance of the twenty sixteen Summer Olympics, Rio Desan Eiro and the Brazilian government spent billions on these costly development projects, opening new landmarks like the Museum of Aqua Rio, which is the largest aquarium in South America. Meanwhile, the city has allowed several other museums and historic structures to just decay. In particular, we have little concern for educational and cultural resources provided
for those living in poverty. So the thing is, you know, we talked about Brazil as this melting pot of cultures, but it's interesting to think about how a place becomes a melting pot in the first place. And in Brazil's case, it was a pretty violent process, and it sounds like that left the national identity pretty fractured in some very real ways.
Well, I feel like we've gone a little bit negative here, but I feel like we can turn that tone around with some Amazon surfing.
Amazon surf very talking about online shopping or like riding on a surfboard down the Amazon.
So definitely the latter surfing the Amazon River. And this sounds insane, but a couple times a year, a massive twelve foot highwave flows in from the ocean, and for a brief period afterwards, twelve foot highwaves form in the Amazon, some of which go on for hours and travel unbroken for miles on end, and there's this great local legend about them. Apparently they are caused by three mischievous kids that travel up and down the Amazon playing pranks on
each other. But what's crazy is that the locals call it Porto Rocco or the Great Roar, because supposedly you can hear it coming for up to an hour before the waves arrive.
Oh wow, so this has to be an incredibly strong wave, I would imagine, definitely.
And the wave is so powerful that it pulls trees and structures from the shoreline and pulls the debris along with it, which also makes for primo surfing conditions I'm guessing.
But no, I like, do people really serve this thing?
Yeah? So people do surf this thing, This tidal wave thing happens regularly enough that there's even this organized event to celebrate its arrival. It's called the National por Roca Surfing Championship, and each year surfers from all over the world take part in it to see who can ride the monster wave the longest. And the current record holder managed to ride along this wave for over half an hour and he traveled just under seven and a half miles total. Isn't that ridiculous? Wow?
That is that is impressive.
Anyway, I feel like it's a fascinating fact, but we should ride it straight into the fact.
Off, what do you say, let's do it.
So here's a strange thing I actually dig. Apparently Brazil has one of the largest cashew trees in the world, and it's actually a tourist attraction and big enough that they charge admission to it. This mutant tree stretches over two acres or roughly five football fields, and it's about the size of seventy normal cashew trees. Apparently the tree
has two weird mutations. Not only do the branches grow sideways instead of growing upwards, but when a branch gets super heavy and it touches the ground from all the fruit on it, it ends up setting down roots and spawning another part of a tree.
All right, Well, here's one thing you can't do in Brazil, at least not legally, and that's use a tanning bit. So the country banned them for cosmetic purposes back in two thousand and nine.
You know, we started with the book theme and I thought i'd bring it back Brazilian prisons are so overcrowded that they've instituted a system where they'll take four days off your sentence if you read a book and write a report on it. You do max out at twelve book reports every year, so each year you can take about a month and a half off your sentence. But what I found most interesting was that some of the titles that are popular are not things I would have expected.
So in this article I was reading, it listed Gone with the Wind as one of the most popular books and Lame Miz as well.
Wow, all right, Well, Brazilian soap operas are credited with getting people to have fewer kids, believe it or not. In two generations, apparently the country went from having seven kids per family to just two. And from the way The Atlantic describes it, you know, shows don't make a
whole lot of sense. They've got these needlessly complicated storylines filled with sex and scandal, but the families also have tons of possessions and very few kids, And the result is that people have been more obsessed with capitalism and money and have actually grown to see big families and constant childbirth as being less desirable.
Well here's another fact. I didn't realize. Did you know that Brazilians believe that a fellow statesman of Theirs, Alberto Santos Dumont, beat the Ripe Brothers to flying his plane, and I guess he flew sixty meters in his airplane in front of a French crowd in nineteen oh six. I believe. But when it was pointed out that the Right Brothers had beat him by a few years, Brazil actually stuck by their men. They insisted that the rip brother's flight wasn't powered and it was only possible dude
to really strong winds. And the BBC reports that that's actually how it's written in their history books. They don't really give the Right brothers credit.
You know, a long time ago, we did this episode where we talked about Snake Island. Do you remember this?
Yeah? I remember. It was terrifying that this was that island that had no people and thousands of deadly snakes on it.
Right, that is exactly right. And you know the snakes were lance head vipers. And you're not legally allowed to go to the island without a doctor with you. And there are reasons scientists go, I mean, the venom might be used at some point in creating anti cancer drugs. But here's the most strange part about all this is that people do sneak onto the island and they bag
the snakes to sell on the black market. So not only do scientists abroad want the snakes, but animal collectors want them to and they end up fetching anywhere between ten thousand and thirty thousand dollars for these things.
Thirty thousand dollars, and those snakes are so terrifying, like just how venomous they are. But it does feel good to know that if someone tries to sell me one for forty thousand dollars, I know they're ripping me off. So that's right. I think you can take home this week's trophy and all your snake facts.
I feel like save you a few bucks on that one. Well, I know there are other facts about Brazil. We had a lot of fun with the episode this week, but we always love hearing from you. If there are facts or stories that you'd love to share, you can reach us part time Genius at iHeartMedia dot com or hit us up on Facebook or Twitter. But from Gabe, Tristan Mango and me, thanks so much for listening,