Life in the Plastic Palace

just this morning? I didn't count, but I thought about it, and I thought, well, if I were to just try to live a plastic free existence, I would say that about seventy of everything that I touched that was surrounding me would just disappear, and I'd be left with like a shell of my house and like, you know, maybe one last item a glass you Yeah, yeah, I mean I was. I was looking around myself, and it's pretty startling because like even like now, since I'm using a kindle,

it's like I'm reading on plastic. I'm I'm certainly we're doing all this research and writing on plastic for the most part. Occasionally we have an actual book thrown in there um or some printouts that came from a machine that was made out of plastic, but they're plastic is just all over my work life and then my my hobbies. I'm like you know if I if I'm painting, at least do these little migment miniatures that I paint were

made out of metal? But now it's cheaper to do them out of high grade resins, So they're they're made out of plastic. Um. The cats they're pooping into plastic boxes, they're eating out of plastic. I'm eating out of plastic um. Sometimes there are sometimes glass. I do use glass for the food. But but still you go and you buy plastic and everything, but you know, everything's like wrapped in three different sulfane wrappers. You're not careful, and uh yeah,

it's just everywhere. I mean even your clothing. To write, there are certain types of polyester um, and we think of polyester is being like really seventies thing, but that the fact of the matter is that there are types of polyesters that are really lightweight that you wouldn't even know um are in your clothing. That's plastic, plastic components in otherwise metal looking objects. I mean, how much of

our our vehicles are filled with plastics? Earphones plastic, the earbuds we stick inside of our bodies are made out of plastic. Surgical implants of various kinds are made out of it. We store everything in it, we we lie down to sleep in it. If you have one of those those cool race car beds. Um we have. We have remade our world into a plastic line. We protect ourselves with it. Teflon if you wuning teflon, that's plastic, also used to store like many volatile substances like acids,

um as well. I mean, it's it's everywhere. And uh and the really amazing part too for me, because you know, we're stuff to blow your mind, so we really you know, we want to focus on that that mind blowing aspect of any topic we cover, and certainly plastics may not sound that exciting, but think about it. It's something that you know, you go back a couple of centuries and uh and and there wasn't plastic everywhere. We were having

to depend on other materials. And now plastic completely envelops us, completely surrounds us, and there's no turning back. It's a huge innovation. Uh. There's a lot that is actually democratizing about it. We'll talk about that later. Uh, but of course there are some drawbacks to it, and it's sort of one of those things that once you have this technology, and you open Pandora's Box. It's not like you're gonna go backwards and say, you know what, let's just start

putting milk into the glass and jukes again. Yeah, you can start doing it on a you can try on a local level. And certainly i'd look to hear from anyone who has given up plastic completely, um because because again that would be it's more of an effort than you would think. And you're wearing moccasin's right now, right, Yeah, even her shoewear would be affected. So I mean, it's but certainly on a larger level, on a cultural level, it's just impossible to go back these substances that we've

we've taken. It's like, like you said, it's like a Pandora's box. It's like it's like a magical genie has given us a gift, and then we just side we might want to take it off, and we realize it's fused with our skin and in some cases, all right, well, let's talk about the ubiquity of plastic. In terms of

some statistics. It turns out that we make one and fifteen million metric tons a year, the equivalent of the weight of three hundred and forty seven Empire state buildings, and ten per cent of that makes its way to the sea. And what gets to the sea has been tossed off by ships and oil rigs, and the rest comes from floods and sewage. Yeah. Yeah. And then of course that plastic winds up wrapped around sea animals or or in their bellies more off the not or just

floating in giant heaps on the surface and the beaches. Yeah, and which is nothing is more depressing, by the way than walking down a stretch of beach and looking out at the horizon and just taking in the wonder of nature and then stepping on a lighter or you know, six pack ring. It really is depressing. Um. And then we Americans produced two hundred and forty pounds of plastic per person per year, so that's a little statistic for you.

And four hundred billion plastic bags are discarded worldwide every year. That's another thing to keep in mind. Little plastic bags get to the grocery store. But again, if you travel back, uh, you know, a couple of centuries, you're not going to find this situation. You're not gonna find plastics everywhere. Um. One of the more fascinating um little stories of the genesis of plastic um comes to comes to us from an article called Plastic Fantastic by A. Jennifer Kahn for

Mother Jones Um. And in this article she she mentions how in the eighteen fifties you had this, uh, this major manufacturer of Billard's equipment. You know pool. You know you're shooting pool. You're you have these pool balls and you have to everyone know foot pool is. But but to to play pool, you have to have these these objects. Right. Well, in the old days you had to make the Billard balls out of ivory, okay, and you can only get like eight balls out of a single large Asian elephant tusk.

And while these used to their elephants everywhere they were, they were easier to come by. But by this point, uh, they were hunted to near extinction um for their ivory. So I mean more importantly that that is the whole extinction, near extinction of the Asian elephant. There. That's certainly a the more pressing concern. But for the purposes of this story, where are they going to get more Billard balls? They're like, well, that sucks with the elephants. But man's got to play

play billards, and billards is our business. Ladies got to wear a corset another thing. So they need a material to replace ivory. So manufacturer Michael Pellan offered a ten thousand dollar reward to anyone who could create an artificial material that mimicked ivory. So it needs to be pliable,

it needs to be durable and um. And this was the the actual quote is that if any inventive genius would discover a substitute for ivory, possess possessing those qualities which make it valuable to the billard player, he would make a handsome fortune for himself and earn Austin's serious gratitude. And so New York chemist John Wesley Hyatt steps up and uh, and he creates this compound called celloid. Hi. Who,

I'll have it right here, Yeah, go for it. And so he brings these selloid balls to Michael Pellan, presumably collects the reward, and we have billards to this day and a few elephants. And this is the first sort of tinkering that we see with materials to try to replicate other sort of items like ivory. And then you have Charles Goodyear who uses volcanization to process natural rubber. Now he discovered this in blimps and begin hunting them for their plastic, right blimp? No, No, I have that

that wrong. Yeah, the blimp started hunting him. No, I was thinking like the like the Goodyear blimp is a natural creature that is hunted for sport and for its precious plastics. Yeah, but that's not the case. No, it's not. It's not. But that is one of the reasons why you rarely see them in the air anymore, right, because

I've been hunted down pretty pretty much. But um, but he did use this volcanization process for Nepal rubber, and this actually paved the way for something called thermo setting, which melts materials and allows them to be molded into a solid shape. And you get about six or seven

different people who are tinkering with this process. But it's not until nineteen o seven when Leo Hendrick Bakeland improved phennel formaldehyde reaction techniques and invented the first fully synthetic resin to become commercially successful and trade named it bake Light, which you may ring a bell for people, doesn't ring a bell like that, you're standing out the old timey phones um like with a rotary dial. That's like a big white product. Oh, let's see, I think bakel I

hear bake light. I just think easy bake ovens. Plastic. Yeah, but fast forwards one and you begin to see that there are more and more products that are using plastic, particularly when the US military begins to replace some metal parts of plastic ones. And we're talking about anywhere anything from like bugles to actual combs, because before that, combs were made out of rubber, and before rubber, they were

made out of ivory. Actually, and people are creating a lot of these by accident too, or just they're they're tinkering with existing formulas. N thirties British researchers um more or less accidentally in the created polyethylene um. So I'm and you see see a lot of that. Like if you look at the list of plastics, there's a long list of various very important plastics, each one with with certain terroistic characteristics that make it ideal for certain purposes.

So let's go a little bit into the basics of how it's made. Plastics are made from oil, and oil is a carbon rich raw material and plastics are large carbon containing compounds. Uh. Plastics are polymers, large molecules made of repeating units of smaller molecules, and these smaller molecules are called monomers, and these are chemically bound together. And a polymer is like a chain in which each link

is a monomer, So think of it that way. Um, All plastic is made of carbon, and man made plastic uses carbon derived from oil, while biopolymers, which we'll talk about, or bioplastics use carbon derived from natural materials. Now, one thing to keep in mind about the about the plastics made from petroleum and and fossil fuel components. They're not huge consumers of those, uh, five of the five percent

of the energy and uh. And originally, like some of the earlier plastics were made from coal tar, which is a waste product from from coking coal for incineration. So um so so. And that was another thing to keep in mind about why plastic exploded all over the place. It wasn't. It wasn't because someone said, hey, here's a really expensive means of creating something that doesn't work very well, let's replace glass and stuff with it. And no, it was super useful in in in various areas. But also

it was cheap to produce. You could produce more or less as a byproduct of other activities. Yeah, it wasn't basically like captains of industry stepping back and from the factories, they're saying, hey, what's that what's that steam or that smoke, and can we somehow harness it into something else? So as you say, it is a byproduct types of plastic polystream which you probably know is styrofoam, uh, polyvinyl chloride PVC, like in pipes um you often see that, and plumbing

and poly vinyl led down chloride thram wrap. UM. You mentioned kevlar. There's dacron, which is a coating on pianos and guitars. Polyesters on pianos. Yeah, I know. See again, your your piano would advantage. I would have thought that, hey, the piano, that's a high grade item made well, even the keys, you're not making those from ivory these days, right, right, So your piano would vantage too if you were trying

to get rid of all plastic around you. Uh teflon polar fleeced again, that's the type of lightweight polyester and um in thermoset or thermosetic plastics like polyurethane um, and that isn't everything from garden houses, two shoes, and truck seats. It's everywhere, all right. So there's just a quick intro into our plastic palace that we've built for ourselves, and we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we're going to discuss some of the ramifications of living

in that plastic cow All right, we're back. So, yeah, we've created this enormous plastic world for ourselves. It's great. It's made out of everything from PVC to to kevlar. It's durable when we need we needed to be durable. It's resistant to acids when we needed to be resistant to acids. It's bendable when we want it to be to be bendable. I mean, it's it's it's it's really killing it. Really. It is one of those things that's a material that is truly innovative, that you can put

your imagination into and make anything out of it. The problem, of course, is that some plastics don't even break down for about a thousand years. So obviously a lot of the junk that we're creating, and I say junk in in terms of like bags and things that we tend to throw away or we think that we're recycling and it's just going to be it's a one to one proposition where this bottle will be recycled again into another

bottle is not necessarily the case. Yeah. And also when you're dealing with a thousand year period for it to break down, um, then you're then then it's not just a matter of oh, the snack cake was in plastic and now that plastics around for a thousand years. It's also like I bought this stool at the furniture store. It's made out of plastic, and I'm getting a lot

of use out of it. But then if you could end up throwing it away in ten years, uh, fifty years, if it's thrown away at the end of your life, if it maybe the last two generations, it's still potentially winding up his junk somewhere and continuing to just exist. Yeah. And even if you were to recycle it, um, you're essentially re melting like say bags and recasting the plastic. And according to the United States e p A, manufacturing new plastic from recycled plastic requires two thirds of the

energy used in virgin plastic manufacturing UM. And another problem is that the polymer chains break during the process, resulting in a lesser product. So again it's not apples to

Apple's process and it can only be recycled so many times. Also, I wanted to mention that a two thousand and eleven North Carolina State University UM study published in the Journal of Environmental Science and Technology found that a biodegradable plastic called pH BO emits more methane than food waste or newspaper in landfills, and because it decreate degrades much faster, the newspaper will emit that methane in a matter of

years rather than decades. So it's also a question of making stuff that that can break down in a way that UM is sustainable for us. Yeah, because you know want situation where you're solving one problem, then you're creating another that that tends to be with why these things ago? Yeah, And then compounding that problem is that the EP estimates that two thirds of landfills do not have methane collection capabilities.

So not only are you creating more methane, but you don't have ways to collect it and to make sure it doesn't go into the atmosphere. Of course, the big thing that I'm sure it has come to a number of people's mind already is is b p A. That's a big deal these days. I mean, if you're buying something, the plastic item to put food in or drink out off you, you're probably looking to make sure that it's

b p A free well. And b p A is something that is short for bicenol a, and it is an estrogenic chemical, and those types of chemicals are chemicals that are body's mistake for the natural hormones and the estrogen family, leading to concerns that it can have harmful effects um adverse fact effects excuse me, on fetal and

infant brain development, as well as an increased tendency towards obesity. Okay, so this is really ties into our our fears and and legitimate concerns about about the obesity epidemics, particularly in the United States. The idea that we're eating horrible food that's making us fat, and we're also eating it out of out of out of these uh, these plastics that are essentially giving our body what it thinks is estrogen and contributing to that obesity right, and and this is

not a black and white issue at all. In fact, if you think about it, um the plastics have been in use or wide use for about fifty years, so we don't have all the data yet, but we obviously has been We've been collecting them, are collecting that data, and there's a lot of information is coming out that uh could play into some fearmongering. So we don't want to necessarily do that, but we want to try to hit some points and get a clearer picture if we can.

We will not come away from this discussion saying whether or not plastic is harmful for us definitively into what extent um, but we can at least sort of touch on it. There's a two thousand and eleven study by Paul Terry and jenkin Chen at the University of Tennessee, and the studies called most plastic products released estrogenic chemicals

and UM parnables. Blogger and chemist Christine Lepisto actually talked about this and when of her blog posts, she said the study found that over seventy of plastics leached leached estrogenic chemicals UM in a wide range of plastic products right off the shelf, both with or without package contents, and then she said that when the plastics were stressed by simulations of typical real world situations like dishwashing or microwaving or exposure to sunlight, that percentage actually increased of

the plastics tested. So, in other words, all plastics may leach chemicals that mimic estrogen and UH to a pretty large extent here. So we're gonna throw a little bit more stats and studies at you just so that you guys can kind of get an idea of what's going on here. UM. B p A and rat studies. There are a ton of them, UM that are pointed on

to all sorts of problematic scenarios. One of them is a two thousand intense study of pregnant rats that were dosed with either one point two or two point for microgram grams per kilogram per day of b p A, and the b p A was actually fed to them in the form of sessame oil, and those doses are well under the dose of fifty kgs the established amount by the e p A is being safe for human

consumption or exposure. And they found that the male children of those rats fed the bp A lowers fertility in adulthood, and that the effect they persist for at least three generations. So what you're seeing here is um in a fact

that can carry through generation to generations. So if you extrapolate that with a human, you could say, okay, so if someone were to be exposed to be p A, that at child's grandchildren, even though they were raised in a psyche pure environment, their genes actually maybe a bit distorted or changed because of that exposure to b p A. Because if that's the extrapolation, we're taking this the data from rats and trying to figure out how it affects

us um that, then this is really interesting. At two thousand and ninth study of rats looking at endocrine disruption found that when pregnant rats were fed b p A and another group were fed oral contraceptives that have estrogen eminem uh, it was actually the contraceptives that caused genital mut mutation and reduced fertility and female offspring, while the

female b p A offspring rats were unaffected. Okay, so this is mudding the waters a bit um, I don't know what to be afraid of now, Well, right, um, you know we're not obviously going to start feeding all, you know, each other oral contraceptives. But they were trying to use a control there, So estrogen being in oral contraceptives was the control to see, you know, what was going to fuss with the system. More turns out it

was the contraceptives. So then two thousand eleven Forbes magazine, there's a article very interesting that says, majestically scientific federal study on b p A has stunning finding. So why is the media ignoring it? Yeah, it's a great article.

And the and in the article they quote just in Tea Garden um it was part of that study, and uh, Tea Garden says, in a nutshell, we can now say, for the adult human population exposed to even very high dietary levels, blood concentrations of the bioactive form of b p A throughout the day are below our ability to detect them, and orders of magnitude lower than those causing effects and rodents exposed to be p A. So what they had done in a twenty four hour period they

had actually taken human volunteers and fed them foods that were you know, exupposed to be p A out of can so on and so forth. So it was very intentional exposure to b p A. And then that was interesting to say that those those b p A levels just weren't detected and it was very different from what was happening with the rats. So it's telling us a

different story. Oftentimes, we will, you know, look to animals to try to give us some sort of sense of, um, you know, what sort of chemicals or environmental conditions could possibly affect us as well. But the jury is just still out on whether or not or to what extent

b p A affects us. That being said, certainly, you start reading all this stuff and and I know, for my own part, I think, well, I'm just gonna steer clear of the b p A stuff when possible, just to be on the safe side, right Sure, which makes sense, and it's good that they took it out of baby bottles, and because certainly that those are developmental times that you wouldn't want any exposure, you'd want less exposure. Um. But where we really see the canary in the coal line

again is with the animals. And we see this in a very concrete way because a canary in the coal mine sometimes has plastic inside the canary and the belly of the Canary. Yeah. According to Mother Jones, uh, in an article called Where Plastic Goes to Kill Each year, undegraded plastic chokes to death some one hundred thousand whales, dolphins, seals, manatees, plus an unknown number of sea turtles and about two

million birds. Yeah. I mean, and uh we we sall some some articles too where they provide photographic evidence of what this looks like like all the plastic pieces that were taken from a turtle stomach or or or a necropsy of a of a I think one of them was an albatross. Ironically enough, that contains all of this plastic,

these plastic pieces that just wind up there. And it's just really disturbing to to think of it, because I mean, we've what we've all seen like footage of oh, there's an animal and it got its neck cotton m a six pack ring, you know, but it's even and that's certainly disturbing in and of itself, but but then to see that it's just winding up inside the animals and causing all this uh, this discomfort, it's uh, it's really sober.

It was it the albatross too. They were talking about the the young before they reach four months of age aren't able to regurge tate, so whatever they take in cigarette lighters or whatnot just kind of sits in their

belly for the rest of their lives. Um it's real, yeah, chief, So it does remind me of the Simpsons episode where um, it's a Lisa episodes of some people might have missed it, but where Lisa gets uh Montgomery burns the evil millionaire to the open recycling plant and uh and and she thinks she's she's changed him because he hit rock bottom, he lost the plant. Now he's reached into recycling, he's

into making the earth better. And then it's revealed that his big plan for the plant and is that he's going to take all these six pack rings and he u has them sewn together into a giant net that they then roll out into the ocean and just catch all of these of it like everything from whales, the squid, and just rolling him in and then turning them into this this grotesque meat paste. So wow, all right, well yeah, yeah, there's thanks for the uplifting a bit there. Um. Okay,

so obviously there's a trade off here. Uh, you know, we've got plastic in our environment. It's not going away. Um. There is a certain amount of adaptability that it provides us in convenience in our lives. Um. You know, it's used in cars. It makes them lighter and more fuel efficient, which is very important. Um. And it makes our existence less cumbersome and safer. And I'm thinking about that in

terms of like something like as basic as an ivy bag. Right, that's no longer glass, and it's portable and it's not something you have to worry about in an emergency situation. Um. And it is somewhat democratizing. I mean, you think about this. These products are made cheaply and they're available to nearly everyone. Think about if it's an eighteen twenty one and and you're trying to better yourself in society, it takes a lot of money to go and get a comb made

of ivory. Yeah, so you're walking around with BedHead all the time. Um, you know. But you know, I make light of that, but seriously, this is something that would would have marked been an outward mark of the halves and have nots. So we just take this for granted that all these different products and materials are available to

us and it is somewhat democratizing. And as we touched on earlier, I mean, and then the medical industry, plastic is everywhere and is often involved in in in UH, in gadgets or to or procedures that would just not be the same without plastic. And we have plastic implants, we have plastic surgical tools, and then when you get into the electronic equipment, certainly plastic is a key component.

The next time you're the doctor's office, look around at all the plastic and try to imagine getting your check up or procedure done without it. So that actually correlates to to life expectancy, right, And I'm gonna get a heart transplant if there's not plastic available or these tools to make it happen. Um. All right, So when we talk about all of these this this junk, all of this plastic that we've created, and how it has democratized

our lives or its has changed us. Um, everything that we discard seems like an abstract notion until you start thinking about something called the Great Pacific garbage Patch. Yes, and this is uh, this is an idea that that's certainly captures the imagination. Because I know when I think of it. I imagine like some Godzilla sized plastic heat or just like an island with its own like plastic monsters living on it out in the ocean. That will

show actually pretty close to what it's becoming. Right, And but it's also been kind of a sticking point um in arguments about the arguments that basically come down to to what degree we should care about pollution and the planet, where people are like, oh, the garbage patch is just made up by by hippies. It's and then and then other people on the other side is no, it's a it's a real problem. In the other side, well, let's

see some photos of it. And this this kind of back and forth that's kind of waged over the past seven or eight years. I feel well, and there's this idea that there's there's it's not just one patch either. There are several patches um. But what we're talking about is the Texas sized garbage patch in the North Pacific Gyre, which holds an estimated three million metric tons of mostly plastic trash, six times the mass of the plankton found there.

And most of this is broken down into microplastics that chemically bond with PCBs DDT. We know this is deep, right, and endocrine disruptors to make this area a million times more toxic than surrounding areas. So the problem here is that those little plankton sized flakes that have broken down are then mistakenly consumed by jellyfish and small fish that are are then consumed by larger fish which that are

then consumed by us. And so you have so and then we up with little plastic pieces and the remnants of plastic inside the entire food chain. Yeah, but okay, here is the silver lining here, and I love there has actually been a bacteria found or several that consume plastic. Okay, this and this reminds me to some of the like talking about oil spills and the idea that oh we

do have. You can see some bacteria that is developing the ability to consume petroleum uh and so it stands to reason that that they also will eventually uh and and are developing an appetite for plastic as well. Well. And you know, of course there are some concerns with this, but for the most part, this is really incredible news and you know, there needs to be a lot more data involved with it, and uh you know, in terms of trying to figure out whether or not this is

a good sustainable solution. But I wanted to mention that Yale has an annual rainforest expedition and laboratory where they let students venture into the jungles of Ecuador to search for plants and then culture the micro organisms within the plant tissue and um one of the students brought back a fungus that they found love of too much on polyurethane.

So and there have been several different um as I say about tiers that have been found too much on plastic, but I really wanted to talk about this one because it's called Pestelopotopas microsphora, and it is the first one that anyone has found that that survives solely on a steady diet of polyurethane. And it gets even better because the fun guy can survive not just on plastic alone, but also in anaerobic conditions without any sort of oxygen.

So then you start to think about landfills and how they're basically airless and this is the perfect condition for this sort of fun guy, so they could just run wild in a like a tightly packed down landfill and just eat all the plastic cup exactly. I mean, this has a ton of promise. But then, of course there are some people who would say, okay, so now that you have this fun guy that you know, is it breaks down uh plastic and eats it. What happened if

you know this goes palace. We live in the plastic palace, and we're celebrating the emergence of the back of a plastic eating back period. Right, So then you're going to the Michael Crichton route and you start to think, okay, well, in the hospital setting, you certainly wouldn't want, you know, the the new hip that's going into your body to to have some sort of um bacteria or you know that would break down that hip or anything else really in any of the tools that are going to be

used on you. Yeah, the figuring I just painted. It's bad enough I have to worry about the kitten eating it. I don't want to worry about bacteria eating it as well. Yeah, it's it's very interesting proposition and if you want to read more about it, you can check out the paper. It is called biodegradation of polyester polyurethane by Endo Fight It fun guy. Wow, to think about polyester too, being susceptible to this. So many great garments. Half of that's right,

it would take out all the second hand stores. Yeah, the big take home out of all of this. Again, we've we've built this, this plastic palace. We've build this plastic lives for ourselves. It's it's everywhere, and we cannot go back. We can't just decide we're not gonna do plastic anymore. It's just not gonna happen. But what we can do is we can of course manage it. We can develop better ways to break down the plastic that

we have. We can depend more and more on bioplastics that are made from things like like corn and uh another, biological agents who are not having to depend even a little bit on petroleum and and and also just become smarter with our use of it, realizing that once you create something out of plastic, it's not necessarily something that can then be recycled and made hold again. It's you need to think of it as a real investment of

you know, even if it's a small one. So if it's you know, something like if it's a if it's a choice between taking sixteen snack cakes and individually packaging them and then putting them in a larger package. We should we should air on the side of putting them all in a single bag. You know, just all the little things that add up to the whole of just using less plastic, using it in a smarter manner, and

using more sustainable plastics. Yeah, so there you go. That's that's a good reminder next time you go to the grocery store or you're sorting out to the plastic in your life and wondering if everything's realatting recycled into what degree we have control over the situation. Yeah, I mean one for me, I've been trying more and more to avoid individually packaged snack items, you know, because I mean

it's attractive on one level. You're like, oh, I can buy the bag of snack Micks, or I can buy the bag of six bags of snack Micks that are small and they fit easily into your lunch box. Or I can take just a few seconds and and or or heaven forbid, use a little will control and take the whole bag of snack Micks to work with me for the week that never but but still I can certainly divide it up. I don't I don't need the

other little pre made bags already there. But anyway, so plastics aside, Let's let's call over the robit and uh read a little listener mail. All right, This one comes from Jackie Jackie Ritson and says, greetings, Uh, first the tried and true cliche awesome podcast. Just listen to the cracking episode and have a couple of comments. Personally, this is my favorite apparently mythological creature. I suspect this comes from a combination of twenty Leagues under the Sea awesome film.

I always I watched the Disney movie a lot growing up, and you was always enamored by the scenes with the squid uh and Pirates of the Caribbean, which also fetched the cracking um. And she continues. The reason I say apparently is because I have a strange desire for one's beat to turn up as proof of their existence, which, as we discussed in the cracking episode, that's uh what some archaeologists are up to as well, curious into the is to the existence of a possible um prehistoric cracking.

She continues, Anyway, you made a comment early on about how cephalopods were essentially mythical until the eighteen seventies or of sometime around then. It reminded me of one of the stories in Kim Newman's book Hound of the of the the Ubervilles, all about professional professor Moriarty. A great read. Uh this uh my favorite, the Red Planet League, in which the professor seeks to destroy his nemesis, the Astronomer Royale or the Astronomer Royal, I'm not sure. I can't

remember his name at the moment the professor plans. The Professor's plan involves the use of some rather ugly squid. Uh but more I shan't say. Well, that's my email again. Great podcast. I'm off to listen to the one on Gigantis. Um I had to skip ahead, I mean to the Krackens cheers, uh Jackie so uh yeah, so there's some favorite Krakens that just reminded me of the artwork that you sent the other day of the silkenferred. Yes, yeah, if you uh I put we post ended up posting

it on all the social media things. So go back and look at that if you get a chance. It's pretty pretty wild. It makes it look like a p you want to own. Yeah, I mean, really, you add some fur to it and it's amazing what can happen. It's it's funny because it reminds me of a dream that my wife had. She had a dream where she had like a kid in the sized octopus that was furry and um, and then her brother was trying to

take it from her or something but brother. Yeah. So so anyway, I always great to hear hear from from listeners, and especially there with with their own like personal likes and dislikes in their own nostalgia might happen to be relearning a particular topic. So so that's great. Thanks for writing us. If you would like to write us, particularly if you have comments about plastics plastic in your life. Have you managed to free yourself from plastic? Do you

think it's even possible? How much plastic is in your life? What is plastic done for you? Um? What are you doing to try and uh curb your plastic usage? Then right into us. You can find us on Facebook and tumbler as stuff to blow your mind, and you can also find us on Twitter where we are blow the Mind and you can also dry that's a line at blew the Mind at discovery dot com For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.