Are Feral Children Real?

You can get tickets on Ticketmaster. And on May twenty third, we're gonna be in Cleveland and you can get tickets there at playhouse Square dot org. And then there's one more, Chuck, that's right. We're gonna wrap it up in Denver, specifically Inglewood, Colorado at the Gothic Theater on June twenty eighth, and possibly adding a show on the twenty seven. Stay tuned for that, yep. And you can get ticks at axs dot com. So come see us live. We'll have a

good time. Come on out. Welcome to stuff you should know from HowStuffWorks dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. Son Josh Clark's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, I almost forgot my name for a second. There's Jerry. It is a little weird. Jerry Jerome the Germster Roland kaboom, how you doing fine? Jerry stops snorting. I have a complete whip flash over this topic. Ok of what and you know why I have? I have just doing this topic after what the story is behind it? Yeah, I still kind

of like shudder. So should we even talk about her twitching? Yeah? No, here's the story is. And I think it was two years ago now, rightly, yeah, two years ago in March, it'll be two years At south By Southwest in Austin, Texas. We were going to do a live podcast, which we've done there before. It's always been great. Yes for this one. We had a bar that we were doing it in that was set up with a lot of events all day long, and we thought, Okay, no big deal, we'd

like bars, we're closer to the booze, no props. But what they failed to do and failed to tell us was that they did not clear the room after the hippie jam band beforehand, and so what ended up happening was we ended up doing a live podcast in front of a noisy, crowded bar full of drunks, with about seventeen stuff you should know, fans upfront trying to listen, turning around and shushing the people at the bar. And it was about as fruitless as a shift could get.

And this is the part I feel though worst about a couple of hundred real deal stuff you should know, listeners standing out on the sidewalk in the hot sun, unable to get in. Yeah, it was all around maybe our third worst show, but I know VidCon is up there in the top three, right, Yeah, I'm just putting a phantom show in to hold the number two slot

because I'm sure there's one I've blocked out too. Just so you guys know, VidCon and was bad because we did a show in front of about seventeen people maybe, and we worked with eleven of them, although we did get to meet Taijon day that day. Oh true. So anyway, we did feral children in front of a crowded, noisy bar full of drunks, and you and I we've been doing this for so long and we have such great

you know, unspoken eye contract eye contact chemistry. Sh don't speak it that I remember looking over at you, and our eyes both said skip through as much of this as possible. Let's get the heck out of here as soon as we can. I cocked it. We did it in like twenty two minutes. I believe it was supposed to be at least forty five. We were talking like the guy from the old FedEx ads from like the early eighties. Oh man. It was truly truly a miserable experience.

So it's taken a full two years until I could wrap my head around actually doing this again. Yep. So here we are. We're gonna do it, Chuck, and it's gonna be great because it's just the three of us today. Yeah. And that's also where we had that too drunk guy, Oh yeah, remember him. That was a bad jam all around, and that's where I lost my hat. That was the worst trip ever, what's really bad. It really just sucked

all the way around. We considered burning Austin to the ground on the way out of town, but I did so. We're glad we did because we've been back to Austin a couple of times and we're always happy to be there. Now, this is not Austin's fault. No, but we just didn't want to have any memories of it. Aye, I hear you. So we're talking fearal children. And even if you were at that show, this is probably really the first time you'll hear it, So it doesn't matter, and we're gonna

start in Moscow. In the late nineties, there was a big, big problem that had developed from the dissolution of the USSR, namely that the fabric of society had largely disintegrated in a lot of ways, and one of the results of this was that there were a lot of families that were broken up for one reason or another, and a lot of very young children from what I see, something like two million of them living on the streets of Russia. In Moscow, of course, being the biggest city in Russia,

it had the largest problem. And one of those kids was a little boy named Ivan Mushikov and nailed it sure. And Ivan was six in nineteen ninety eight, they estimate, And he was a little different from the rest of the children living on the street at the time because he was what you would was widely considered and actually example of a feral child, because not only was he living by his own wits, from the age of four

to six on the streets. He was leading a pack of stray dogs that protected him as well, and he

had been fully absorbed into their pack, into their society. Yeah, so, as the story goes, like you said, he left home at four and was basically just another one of the begging children on the streets until he started to feed a little bit of the food he would get to these dogs, and the dogs they trusted him, they befriended him, and you know, you hang out with dogs long enough and give enough food, all of a sudden they say, hey,

you know, we're pals. And they literally took him in as one of their own and would show him, would guide him to the warm places to sleep at night, underground, your heated pipes and things like that. They and they lived together for a couple of years to the point where the cops could not get close to this kid

because of these dogs. Right, So they finally apparently baited some traps and got the dogs just systematically away from Ivan, and they finally had him cornered, and he snapped and growled and barked at the social workers who were advancing on him to get him and to take them off of the streets and into a group home, and they were finally successful. But they said, like, this kid was acting like a dog with its back against the wall,

and they got their hands on him. They put him into a group home, and he was actually a success story. He managed to become enculturated into human society as a result of just being taken over by the state. But he is one of these He stands as one of the very few documented examples of a feral child. I mean, there have been stories all throughout history people have been fascinated with this notion, whether it was Mowgli in the Jungle Book, or stories of baboon girls and ostrich boys

and bird girls. And then you know, they give them these names because that's who they eventually take up with, and they're very compelling stories. But and in fact, I think at one point there's a taxonomist named Carl Andaeis who he's credited who created the tree of life. He actually established a whole separate category Homo ferus, which was literally a different variety of human being because they didn't

even think at one point that they counted as humans. Yeah, there was a time when this is all very much discussed and talked about what exactly feral children were who they represented in One of the competing theories is that they were like basically like sasquatch. Like if we found sasquatch, you'd be like, oh, there's we need to expand the tree of life to inclin. Dude, these cousins to homies

Homo sapiens. That's right. So Romulus and Remus were Another very famous story too that Romulus, the founder of Rome. He and his brother Romulus and Remus were cast out by their uncle, their wicked uncle, and they were raised by wolves, I believe, according to legend. So yeah, there's this long standing legend of children of wild children, feral children being raised. But for the most part, it has existed in legend. It's not like there's all these great

well documented cases. There's just enough documented cases. There's just enough tantalizing evidence that science has remained interested in this idea of what are feral children that it's just kept it's kept it going, and still to this day we don't really have enough evidence to say definitively feral children are this, or more to the point, feral children tell us this about ourselves, about human development, But there are documented cases. Ivan Mushakov is not the only one. Yeah,

and this could happen in a lot of ways. What would cause a child to become separated from their family and end up with a pack of monkeys or wolves or ostrich It sort of depends. It was one girl name Emiyata Emiyati who survived a boat capsizing. It killed her friends and left her stranded in nineteen seventy seven in the Sumatran forest. Eventually, she was found in the early eighties living with orangutangs orangutung. I think she was living alone. She was mistaken for an orangutang. Oh I

thought she had taken up with them. No, that was what I saw. That actually makes her kind of different as far as feral children concerned. She was living by herself. Oh. Interesting. Other ones have been taken in by everything from pigs. This girl in China, Wang Shingfing was discovered living with pigs. She had been nursing on a pig, later fed as a pig. And that's one of the more depressing cases of straight up abuse from parents. Yeah, her parents were

unable to raise her. They were both cognitively impaired and they basically left her with the pigs out back, and the pigs ended up raising her for years. There was another girl, and this is if this is even more depressing, frankly, there was a girl named Jeanie that was a pseudonym.

Obviously I don't know what her real name was, but she's very well known as Genie, who was raised back in the nineteen thirties or forties, I believe, locked in a closet for the first ten from age two to age twelve, she was kept away from hum in society. So rather than being kept away from human society by being stranded in the wilderness or being raised by animals, she was left by herself and as a result, she

developed a feral nature as well. So there's basically like three categories that develop when you're looking at stories of feral children, and Genie would be one that's called isolated. There's also or no, she would be confined. Imi Yati would be isolated where she was just stranded in the woods and lived by herself. And then the third category would be among animals like Ivan Mishchikov. Yeah, and we're gonna talk mainly about the ones who live among animals.

Because the other two are just some of the you know, worst cases of abuse and neglect you could imagine. And it's not like the ones who live among animals are fun. But at least they have their pack of dogs and they're not like chained in a closet, you know, right, that's the the weird silver lining it. What would you want to be taken in? What kind of animal? Dogs would be pretty good? Yeah, yeah, you know, lots of apsos. Yeah, I could probably become the leader of that pack. I

think monkeys would be pretty great. They would be. But they're also man. Those things will bite you. Well, they'll bite their own, do they It depends if you say something wrong. I would get along. They would they would just pick my nets and they would love me as their own. In my jungle book story, do you wait a minute? Do you have knits now? Occasionally? Oh? Man, should we take a break? Yeah, I think we should.

All right, let's take a break, and we're going to talk more about feral children right after this, So Chuck. One thing that one of the big reasons that feral children has really kind of kept the interest of science over the years, especially starting in about the eighteenth century on is that they provide this the idea that they provide a window into human nature. Right, They're like a natural laboratory. Nobody's gonna say, hey, get that kid away from its parents. It's one and a half years old.

Now throw it out into the forest, and then we'll come back and get it in twelve years and see what happens with it. You just can't do that. Even back in the eighteenth century, they wouldn't have done something like that. It was just too unethical, right, Yeah, So the idea that there are children that this actually happened to through you know, no scientist's fault. They can be

studied and they could answer conceivably some questions. And some of the questions are things like language acquisition, like do we go through what's called a critical period where we either learn language or we don't, And if we don't, then we've and we missed that window. We'll never be able to learn language even a native language, let alone a second language like you and me are having trouble

with these days. And then another is well, basically any any way that they differ from a normal kid, like their behaviors there, the way they carry themselves, all this stuff you could say this clearly stands for nature or nurture. Bam, that's right. And when these kids are out, at least the ones with the animals, they become as much like these animals and sometimes even physically as as they can. They a lot of times, like even the dog boy would bark. There's another a dog girl that we'll talk

about later, she would bark. Some would chirp like birds. Sometimes they would run on all fours like a dog, or clean themselves like a cat, and they would eat raw meat. They would sleep on the floor because of the way, like you know, going all fours, their bodies would actually change in a lot of cases, like their knees would become just super tough from running around on their knees, or their teeth would become sharp from eating

bones like an animal. So sometimes they were super fast, sometimes they might and a lot of this stuff is anecdotal, but you've heard stories about them developing even like keener senses of smell that they're animals that they live with have, which is amazing. Yeah, there was a kid named Jean Delige who is five in Liege, Belgium, which is why

he's called John of Liege. But he and his whole village moved to the woods because war was taking place, and once the war subsided and they moved back to their village, Jean stayed and over time he became like a feral child, and he was known to be able to root out like truffles and stuff from the bases of trees just with his nose. Again, it's anecdotal, but it's a pretty good story. Yeah, And I mean some of them could climb trees like an animal, or sleep

in a tree. Some could run on all fours faster than their counterparts could run on two legs. So the really remarkable stories over time that have been collected. But again the problem is this, these are a lot of these stories, like Jean Deligia's story comes from the sixteen twenties, so there are some modern ones, but there's plenty of ones that came between this the eighteenth century, the seventeenth century, and like the nineteenth century or even early twentieth century.

And the stories are almost invariably so fantastic that they defy belief. Yeah right, especially if you're a scientist. Start hearing about these things like so, wait, the kid could outrun a human, but on all fours. That doesn't make any sense. It's just basically not possible. And if there were enough people who are eyewitnesses to this and who documented it independently, then maybe it would get some credence.

So there's this whole problem here where feral children the stories are so fantastic that science wants to believe it, but they don't know what to believe. And it does turn out that there's actually been plenty of cases of fraud over the years where I mean, somebody said, hey, I think the best way to get famous is to make up a feral child story. So I'm going to

do that. Yeah, and one dude, foresure did that. Mister j Al Singh in the nineteen twenties found two young girls, a toddler eighteen months old and an eight year old in India and claim they were raised by wolves, named them Amala and Kamala, and said they prefer raw meat, walk on all fours, they howl at the moon. I can't get them to walk upright or speak, you know, like a human being would speak. I was about say,

speak English, but it was India, sure, uh. And they had books written about them and it was sort of a big media sensation until people started poking around and said, well, these girls are real, but you know what, they weren't

raised black wolves at all. They actually had developmental and birth defects, and he would eventually admit that, and then we start learning that in a lot of these cases, although not all, a lot of these cases are kids with autism or or other developmental birth defects that they just maybe at the time didn't know how to deal with or how to categorize, or just would straight up

lie about. Yeah, there's there's this this line in here that says that the the investigation into feral children's kind of revealed that you could also call feral children's stories stories of amazing survival of attempted and fanticide. Basically that that accounts in some people's minds, and this is not a new idea. Going back a couple hundred years, some people have said, you know what, I think, I think all of the stories of feral children are probably true.

But they weren't really raised by wolves, or they weren't necessarily raised by wolves, or they hadn't adopted wolf like behavior. They were kids who had cognitive impairments and intellectual disabilities, who had been left to die and friend for themselves in the woods by their parents, had grown wild and then were Somebody came across them five or ten years later and mistook them for a wolf boy or an ostrich boy or a wolf girl or whatever animal you

want to call it, or loss opso man. Some people think that accounts for basically all stories of all of the older stories of feral children. I think that's definitely debatable, but that's when one camp. Yeah, here's another case. Misha the Wolf Girl nineteen ninety seven, Monique Misha Difonesca. Even though she's not Italian, she actually published her memoirs about the Holocaust called Misha Colin and memoir of the Holocaust

years basically you mean her memoirs, that's right, memories. She said that Nazis killed her parents in Brussels when she was seven. She set off on her own through Europe, ended up in the Ukraine, and then a pair of wolves brought her in and she lived with them for years. Published this story. It was a big sensation, and like I said, this was in the nineties. It turns out she made it all up, which was I mean disappointing in that she could have been a real good case

study and ended up just lying about it all. Yeah. She said that she told the Belgian press that her she had made it up, but that her story was her way of coping with what had happened to her. In reality, like her parents had been killed during World War Two, but her grandfather raised her and by all accounts he was not a wolf at all, just a dude with a beard. Yeah. There was another famous case that's not necessarily fraud, but just isn't very well documented.

A woman named Marina Chapman who supposedly was left in the woods after a kidnapping that went bad and was raised by monkeys and eventually became a housewife in England and published her story with the help of her daughter. I think again, in the nineties, the nineties must have been super hot for feral children memoirs. I guess that was probably some stupid Jerry Springer or something. I'll bet it was. The people were you know, it was his influence,

the Springer influence. Yeah, should we talk about should we take a break of talk about Peter the wild Boy first? I think Pete deserves his due before the break. All right, we'll talk about Peter the Wild Boy. Then this was a true one, because there are a few cases which are verified. This is the summer of seventeen twenty five in the forest of Hertzwold, near Hamil in northern Germany, which we know has no bodies of water near it. This landlot, he was about twelve years old, walked on

all fours, fed on grass. He would run up trees. He could not speak the language, and then he became hereto known as the wild Boy of Hamilon, and achieved such fame at the time. After he went to the house of Correction for a little while, the king, the Duke of Hanover and King of the UK, said, George said, you know, bring him to me. Basically, they trot him out there like a spectacle, essentially, dress him up in a little boy's outfit, sit him down at a table,

and of course he acts like an animal. And then George is like, you know, take him away. He discussed me right, so he wasn't like. It wasn't like put him back in the woods. Once he was brought to court, he was under the King's care, and he was they attempted to tutor him. Not only could he not speak German. He couldn't he couldn't speak any language. He just basically grunted right, But he was basically under the royal largess.

After that point, they baptized him, they dressed him up, they cleaned him up, they tried everything they could to teach him. But eventually they were like this, this kid can't be taught. We don't know what we're doing. We can't get through to him. So let's send him over to London. Apparently they'd heard about him in London, because I mean, you noticed that the Duke of Hanover in Germany was also the same person who was the King

of the United Kingdom. Didn't that seem odd to you? No? Okay, well, at any rate, he had a connection to London. So London heard about Peter the Wild Boy and they went crazy for him. They're like, send him over here if you guys are sick of them. So Peter the Wild Boy made his way over to London and became like a sensation, but basically had like the same experience there. Everybody wanted to be around him. They saw what he was actually like and they were like, Okay, I don't

want to be around this kid any longer. Because he's grossing me out. Well, yeah, except for the Princess of Wales. Caroline said I want him and give him to me, and so they did, and she persuaded the King to allow Peter to move into her place in the West End, and he was basically like a pet for her. Yeah,

he would still insist on sleeping on the floor. They would dress him up again in his little green and red suit every day like little Lord Fauntleroy still tried to tutor him, baptize him, taught him the manners of the day. They taught him to bow and to kiss the hands of the ladies in the court, and he was a sensation there for a while and was the talk of the town. And they even painted a very famous painting of him and put it on the King's

grand staircase at Kensington Palace. Yeah. So again though he kind of I guess, lost his luster as far as the courtiers were concerned, and he was sent off to live on a farm, and again he was cared for by the Crown. I think he got like a thirty five pound pension for the rest of his life, thirty five pounds a year maybe, And he was just taken care of by a kindly old farm owner. The problem is is he would well, he had a good life.

Supposedly he liked gin a lot, right, yeah, man, and he would clap and sway to music and dance basically until he would just fall over. He'd be so tired. So he was like me, Yeah, he was having a good time out in the country. I think it was definitely more his speed than say, like London. The problem was he would wander off sometimes, so they eventually after he was arrested a couple times and thought to be

somebody who was undermining the state like a spy. Basically, he was fitted with a leather collar that basically gave instructions to anybody who found him if they brought him back to this farm, they would be rewarded for their troubles. And he lived a long life still. Yeah, he died at like seventy two years old in seventeen eighty five.

And the story actually has an interesting ending. Not too long ago, a historian named Lucy Worsley did some investigating and saw this painting that we mentioned at Kingington Palace and said, hold on a minute, I think he may have actually had this been suffering from Pitt's Hopkins Pitt Hopkins syndrome, and it's an intellectual disability and character rise by developmental delay, breathing problems, seizures, epilepsy, and these facial features that it looks like he had in this painting,

like he was short, he had coarse hair, droopy eyelids, thick lips and club fingers and everything kind of led people to think, well, wait a minute, this wasn't a fairal child at all. Again, it's another case of mistaken developmental delay. Yeah, that's what they think. Unbelievable, it really is. Now you want to take a break, Yeah, we'll take a break and talk about a pretty remarkable story, the story of Oksana Malaya, the Ukrainian dog girl. And okay, Chuck,

we're back and we're in Ukraine. Now. I don't know if you noticed. It's not bad. So there's this girl. She's probably in her mid to late twenties by now, but at the now today, yes, I think she's like thirty five. Oh really, I thought this article is way more recent than that. She was born in November in nineteen eighty three. Oh okay, yeah, she's old. So this wow,

this is a very old article. So at the time of this visit with her that the article is based on, she was twenty three and she was living in Ukraine, but she had been raised on a village, on a farm, actually in a village called Novaya Blagoveshenka nailed that one too, I think, so in Ukraine, and she was raised there, not by her parents, who apparently they discarded her like so much human garbage, but she was raised by dogs,

a pack of dogs that lived on the farm. After her parents left her out one night and didn't bring her in, she just stayed outside for basically the next I think five years, living with the dogs who took her under their care. Yeah, her parents were severe alcoholics and didn't even notice she was gone for a while,

and so yeah, she stayed there. She lost what little She was three years old, so she only had a little bit of language at that point anyway, so she had tapped into a bit of that critical period, but then lost that after becoming a member of this dog pack. Yep. So again for five years she lived like this, basically living on raw meat and scraps. Being a member. I didn't get the impression that she was the pack leader, but a member of the pack of dogs, and finally

a neighbor's like, okay, it's been five years. I got to call somebody. So the neighbor called the authorities, and the authorities came out and got her, and apparently they didn't do a very good job documenting when she was found. But later on the people who worked with her all basically very roundly said, like, yes, this girl behaved exactly like a dog, which she slept on the floor, she walked on all fours, she ate raw meat, she would bark at you, she would she just had the demeanor

of a dog. And so this is actually one of the more documented cases. It's also a case that turns out was it turned out about as well as you could hope for from a situation like that, because she managed to, like ivan, to be inculturated into human culture, human society over the course of years. Yeah, I mean she I don't know if she's marry now, but she got a boyfriend at one point, learned to speak intelligently.

Seems about as well adjusted as you can be. At the time of this article, which was now a while ago, she was working on a dairy farm. But at this time, which was like I said, this was quite a few years ago that they wrote this, but she was deemed to have the mental capacity of a six year old because a child's college named Lynn Frye ended up doing a lot of interviews and tests with her, and she

had a low, a dangerously low boredom threshold. Could count, but couldn't add, could not read or spell her name correctly. And she said that she would still like when she was just feeling bad or whatever, she would still go off in the woods by herself because that made her

feel better and more calm. Right, And so her case is one of the ones that's pointed to is evidence that there is a critical period and that it can be got and back if it started because she was beginning to be verbal, like you said, when she was left by her parents, and then she managed to get it back. So they think that that's evidence for the critical window period. And you can see videos on YouTube and pictures of Alexander the Dog Girl, and it's pretty

remarkable to see. She was on a Ukrainian TV show and I think it ended up. I think Discovery Channel did a special on her that used that footage. I don't think they did any new footage but just really really amazing to look at the footage of her running around like that. Yeah, it was like she knew that that was socially unacceptable, they were saying, but she could

still do it. Yeah. That also is a check in the box of people who say, like, there's this thing where if that critical window is if it happens to pass over a period where the kid is being encultured by a non human culture, sure they could conceivably adopt the behaviors or learn those behaviors just like they would learn human behaviors, but they're not surrounded or interacting with humans.

They are surrounded by and interacting with wolves or ostriches or chickens or whatever, so they're actually they're not mimicking it, they're actually learning this behavior. So goes one school of thought that is kind of a subgroup of the critical window people. Yeah, and there's some people that have thought, I think incorrectly. There was this one psychologist named Bruno Bettelheim that said, basically, all of these examples are children

with autism who are abandoned. Sadly, a lot of them probably were, but there have definitely been enough cases that weren't to know that it's not always the case. Yeah, So as it stands now, apparently the sciences science believe that for a little while, the Bruno Bettlheim theory that it was just all cases of mistaken identity were just children with cognitive impairments or developmental disabilities who'd been abandoned

by their parents. But they're I think the science, the scientific community who studies this kind of thing are kind of coming around to say, like, well, you know, we actually don't know, and that's probably not that's probably just too broad of a statement. That probably covers a lot of them, but clearly it doesn't cover all of them, because Ivan Mushikov was not cognitively impaired and he was clearly a documented feral child. There's another There was another

one from the eighteenth century the seventeen thirties. I think Memmy LeBlanc, who showed up in Champagne, France, and they taught her to speak French. She wasn't cognitively impaired, and she eventually told them that she gave them enough clues to figure out that she was a Huron Indian who been captured by slavers and escaped from a shipwreck and made her way to France and showed up as a wild child there, so she wasn't cognitively impaired at all.

There's there's just too many examples of ones that are probably true that weren't cognitively impaired, but we're still clearly feral, feral children. Yeah, to say Bruno Bettlheim was right. Yeah, I mean it's a shame because there is so much you could learn. It's a shame that so many of these stories turn out to be dead ends or these really sad stories or fakes. Yeah, because if they were true, we'd be able to say this is a great, perfect

natural laboratory for human development. Yeah, but they're just there. We don't know enough to base it on that, And that's not necessarily the case across the board. Like j al Singh and Kamala and Amala, they wrote like textbooks on their case Unfounded it turned out. So I think science has kind of learned to say this is really interesting, but we don't know enough about it to really extrapolate onto the larger the larger human race. Yeah, yeah, but

it's still pretty interesting, dude. Yeah, I had a script idea. I'm not going to reveal any more of those on the show, though, because I think people are ripping me off. Okay, yeah, definitely the Sharknado people did. But I will just well, no, I'm not gonna say anything. Okay, don't don't keep it under your hat, and we'll announce it when the thing's in production, which will never happen. You don't know, so

you got anything else, No, let me say this. I will sell this idea for one thousand dollars to a Hollywood big shot. Oh wow wow, but you have to pay before you hear the idea. I think that's good man, because those Hollywood big shots they will they'll trick you. We'll try it. They'll be like, go ahead and tell me. Okay, Well, if you want to know more about feral children, there's actually a lot more cases that we didn't get to cover, like Shamdeo who was raised by wolves, and Suji Kumar,

the chicken boy of Fuji. They all have pretty astounding names, but when you start to dig in, they're actually all pretty depressing cases. But it's really interesting stuff. So dig into feral children by jumping onto your favorite search engine today, because oh no, there is an article on how stuff works isn't there. Yeah, well you can check that one out too. Yeah. And since I said that, it's time for listener mayo, I'm gotta call this one proud pothead

anonymous proud podhead, so he's not that proud. Hey, guys, long time listener. I want to let you know I'm a chronic pot user for most of my life. I'm not condoning the use of marijuana. Individual results may vary, but here's my story in my mid thirties of smoke pot on an almost daily basis since I was sixteen. I have no medical reasons to use it, and I am also not in a state word as legal. But I enjoy it similar to the reason people enjoy alcohol.

I am not a frequent drinker. I enjoy nice bourbon every now and then. If I can't recall the last time I was drunk, it's just not my cup of tea. I view pot as a luxury, though, so if money becomes tight, it's the first thing to go. I did not smoke for an entire year to save money for my wedding. I smoked daily and then would not advise us to many smokers. But most days I start and end the day with a bowl. Almost ninety five percent of the time I'm driving, I'm stoned. All right, dude,

maybe you shouldn't say that, yeah, or do that. But I've never been in an automobile accident, never wrecked a car, never received a ticket, never follow an entrance claim. I've never damaged any vehicles, own a house I bought my mid twenties, drive a nice sports car, pay my Texas, Texas, pay my taxes. He pays his taxes in Texas. I've never been in trouble with a law and have a successful career as a chef, worked long, hard hours. Most people would enjoy drink after a long day. I enjoy

a bullpack. That's funny, Like he could have just summed all this up originally by saying, hey, guys, I'm a chef. The no, A lot of chefs are drunks. Oh yeah yeah, and a lot of them are just you know, regular, awesome, normal people without vices. Yeah, actually that's not true. All chefs have vices, hardcore gambling, et cetera. I would do a lot of chefs. They're a different breed. They're good people, though,

Oh sure, for sure. Yeah. Anyway, back to the email, But in my state, I'm still viewed as a criminal, which to me makes no sense. Although I never travel around with my pot, I do have to buy it and drive it with it home. I'm always incredibly nervous. I could end up in cuffs during that drive. I'm glad times are changing, though, and I wait the day when I can smoke I legally in my state. I just want to say thank you for not putting Pat pot.

What is going on with me? Pass from Texas. We just cracked the coat subliminally, not putting pot in the same category as methamphetamines and speaking the facts rather than a bunch of untrue propaganda. Yeah, except when it comes to chefs, and we're just paint everybody with the same broadbrush. Chef's newer. Thanks Pat from Texas. We appreciate that letter, that anonymous letter. If you want to get in touch of this anonymously, we will keep your name secret. How

about that? Tell us whatever? You can tweet to us at Josh M. Clark or s Y s K podcast. I also have a website you can visit called ru Series Clark dot com. Chuck is on Facebook at Facebook dot com, slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's an official Facebook page for Stuff you Should Know too, called Facebook dot com slash stuff you Should Know. You can send all of us an email to Stuff podcast at HowStuffWorks dot com and has always joined us at our

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