Chuck and Josh Bust a Few Everyday Myths

out and kick myths when we bust them. And that's a great idea, you know, yeah, like we could blow certain things up we had to. We could have like a little assemblage of people who kind of help us out sometime and maybe spin off and get their own shows. That's not a bad idea. I I'm gonna wear a beret. Yeah, I'm gonna do it. I've been thinking for years about whether or not to just go ahead and wear a beret out in public. I do at home very frequently. I would you should only wear a bret if you

grow a Walrus mustache. That would be a good look. Maybe I'll go back to classes too, might as well. Huh, what will you do? I don't know. I think we're onto something, though, I'll just say my same affable self and with a slightly more stylized haircut. Ye. All right, I think we're on is something. Let's pitch it to the bosses. Yeah, which company? Uh? Yeah, I don't know. Discovery. Yeah, that's a good idea. Okay, the myth dudes. Yeah, yeah, that's a great one. All right, So Chuck, I'm gonna

make a million dollars. You are, uh, you're feeling pretty good? I am. I'm glad. How are you? I'm good to your Mickey Mouse t shirt is cheering me out? That's good? That something is I'm cheerful. Okay, good. Um. I don't really have much of an intro for this, aside from I don't know if you know this or not, but I have a little video series that I do. It's

called Don't Be Dumb. This is virtually a podcast version of that show that It struck me like that as well, but even better than that, it is one that we're doing together. Yeah. And I think there was a couple of these you've actually covered too, right, Yeah, Like, um, is your blood blue in your veins? Boiler? Yeah, we don't want to actually, you know what, you should go ahead and cover that one, okay, because I think you're

the expert. I've always heard I'm pretty far from an expert man in elementary school, that your veins, your blood is actually blue because see it right under my arm there in my forearm. You can see it. It's blue until it reaches like if you get cut, and when it gets oxygen, boom turns red. Yeah, and it's it's supposedly your veins that are blue because they're the ones

that contain deoxygen eated blood. Right, that's what I always already used up from your organs and tissues and it's on route back to your lungs to become oxygen need it again, Right, that's not true. There's no part of again, Chuck, I'm not in next saying David Rerenzo in the fourth grade lie to me. Yeah, he's a dirty liar. David Renzo. Um that your blood at no point is ever blue. The the more oxygen it has in it, the deeper the red. Right, But there's no blue blood in you.

The whole thing is that in an optical trick. Right. So your skin um is translucent see through, and it really doesn't have a color. It's your fat that gives your skin its color, and fat tends to have a kind of a crazy effect on light, like it scatters it in all sorts of different directions, right, and Um, depending on how deep a blood vessel is, that will have an effect on what color that blood vessel looks like, because some colors of light, some wavelengths are reflected better

than others. Right, So if you have a blue blood vessel, it's usually very close to the surface, and that means that all of the red light has been absorbed and what's being reflected back and kind of scattered about is the blue. That's all there is to it. There's no blue blood in your veins. It's just the collusion. And your family comes from wealth. Well that's more of a figurative thing. Okay, Yeah, I think it would be pretty creepy now that they think about it, if everyone had

like red streaks of veins running through their body. Yeah. I think we're just so used to seeing blue if we saw red all of a sudden, it would be creepy. Well, you can't see, I mean some veins are red, you know. Depending on the depth as well, Um, you can see some red veins every once in a while, or red blood vessels, but for the most part, the ones that really stand out are blue. You don't think they're creepy in and of themselves. Yeah, yeah, I think it's a

little creepy. It is a little creepy, but anyway, the point is you don't have any blue blood. It's all just what color is absorbed in, what color is reflected by the amount of fat in the depth of the blood vessel. Okay, I hope some kids are listening to this one. Yeah, and if they're not, hey, you can go watch Don't Be Dumb on our website. Yeah, and I think most of these I did. It's like it all goes to elementary school. Then you hear from various

kids or sometimes teachers. Yeah, get it wrong, you know? All right, I got one for you. Um, I'm gonna go with the body. You lose most of your heat through your head. Have you ever heard that? Oh? Yeah?

This one goes back to, uh apparently two things. Some experiments the Army did in the nineteen fifties where they dressed up volunteers to give them a little whirl at Arctic survival, and there was a special field trip there was, and they put them in the big survival suits, you know, super warm, put them out in the in the cold.

But they left their heads uncovered, and so most of the heat was lost to the heads that ended up in an Army training manual survival manual from which said of body heat comes from the head that you lose that's true, Then it is not true. The reason they lost all that body heat through the head is because that was the only part that didn't have anything on it. It's as simple as that. You don't lose I guess actually your head, your your face, and your chest are

a little more sensitive. It's a temperature change. But um, that doesn't mean that you lose more heat there than you lose the same amount of heat. Um. No, more than your body heat is going to go through your head because it's proportional surface area. Your head makes it about ten percent of the surface area of your body. Therefore you lose about ten percent of your body heat through that. You like, do the same experiment with a ski mask on and naked from the waist down and

see if you don't get arrested. Yeah, well, a few things might have happen in that situation to stay there and waved all. It's an experiment. You're doing great. They're not gonna say you lose most of your body heat through your genitals. In that case, I think had the Army been a little more swinging back in the fifties, you never know, they may have come up with that experiment and that would be the myth. So we're not saying don't wear a two out in the cold. You should,

just as you should wear your parka. Yeah, just bundle up, bundle up. Buttercup, you got one. I do have one. Okay, I like this one. I know you don't, but I didn't know this. Um, Mount Everest is the tallest mountain in the world. You didn't know that. That wasn't true. I think that's the one I heard early on as just that, like little kids love saying things like that, they also love saying and that's actually not the case. I've never encountered that little kid. Yeah, I need that kid.

It was also David Arinzo Man, that kid, he's on the ball. He was terrible. Um, so the the A lot of people are saying, well, what is it then, what's the tallest mountain? Hold your horses it is true the mountain Everest is the highest mountain. It's just not the tallest mountain, right because of the way geologists, uh and geographers measure mountains. So from sea level, yeah, that's highest. Highest is the amount of the mountain that is above

sea level, and Everest has that one licked. It's the highest mountain at twenty nine thousand, twenty nine ft above sea level. Right. Yes, But to measure which mountain is tallest, that goes from the base of the mountain to the summit, and in this case that's uh, mounta KaiA in Hawaii. This thing is huge. That makes it the tallest mountain,

even though most of it is underwater. If you took away all the water and the idea of sea level at all, and just measured this mountain from the base to the top, you have a thirty three thousand, four hundred and sixty five ft tall mountain, which is it's about four thousand feet higher than Everest. That's substantial, right, But above sea level as far as highness goes, it's only seven ft high. Yeah. But I kind of feel bad for mounti Cab because it never gets to the

dew it deserves because of all that stupid water. And there's another way to mosure the mountain to um by the distance from the center of the Earth. You know, the Earth is not a perfect sphere, and it's widest ad its circumference, i e. The equator UM. And there is a mountain and equador Ecuador called the Chimbararro and it is um a great many meters which I forgot to write down from the center of the Earth. Wow.

So if you if you think about just the if you cut the earth, yeah, cut of mountain in half, and we're able to core the Earth at the same time, you would see like, oh, this mountain is further than this one. That makes sense. It makes sense in a in a geo geographer's way. Yeah, I think um also to the although there's really not a gage for this,

but just how striking a mountain might appear. You probably should go with kill human Jaro because it rises from the flat plains of Tanzania and that's like the only thing out there. If you've ever seen pictures or been there, it's pretty amazing. And it's not like Everest doesn't stand out. But when you're in the Himalayas, you're a little bit taller than your brother's next door. But kill Himanjaro is at nineteen thousand when everything else is flat. That's pretty remarkable,

just rising right up from the plane. All right, So go mountains. Just just watch what you say. Everybody is the point of that and tallest highest. Choose your words carefully, all right. This is a good one. And this is one that I think most everyone believes that the Great Wall of China is the only man made object visible from space. I did this one. Don't be done too,

did this is? I love this one? Yeah, this one is wrong on every level because not only can you see other things, you can't really see the Great Wall of China. It's doublet wrong, right, So um, you can, like you said, see other things that There's also a big problem with this is the idea that you can see the Great Wall of China from space. Well, we're

in space exactly. That's pretty broad. There's all sort of like lower Earth orbit is a hundred and thirty five miles above sea level um and apparently from lower Earth orbit you can see all sorts of things with the naked eye, and if you have binoculars you can really see stuff like trucks, and things like that. But you can see airports, dams, um, you can see roadways. Cities are obviously very clear, especially at night, so there's all

sorts of stuff you can see. Um. One of the things you have a tremendous amount of trouble seeing and that you can't see with the naked eye from space is the Great Wall of China, the one thing that they say is the only thing you can see. Yeah, how about that for irony and and why, Chuck? Well, one reason is because it's um, it's made up of rocks local to the area, and so it kind of looks like everything else in the area. It blends in

just has had. Yeah, and it's big and it's long, so you would think, I mean, I see where the rumor got started, because it's one of the great wonders of the world, and it is huge in scope. It's long, but it's narrow. It's like thirteen thousand miles long, but it's like thirty feet across, So it's long, but it's not necessarily big. You know where this one got its origin in? And uh, no one knew at that point. No, it was Robert Ripley and Ripley's believe it or not.

Wrote in a column that you can see the Great Wall of China from the moon. That's what it was, and everybody just thought it was true because everybody so yeah, everyone's so gullible back then. Uh. And it wasn't until um NASA's astronauts made it to the Moon that they were able to confirm that, no, you can't see the Great Wall of China. But the Chinese didn't believe it until they sent their own people into space in two thousand three. They were pretty bummed too. Uh, you can't

see anything man made from the moon. That's way up there, they say. Um Alan Bean and Apollo twelve astronauts said, the only thing you can see from the moon is a beautiful sphere, mostly white, some blue, patches of yellow, and every once in a while some green vegetation, but nothing man made at all. So um, but that's where the or the original version of it was, you could see the Great Wall of China from the moon. Then we went to the moon and it was downgraded to

you can see it from space. Yeah, and then you know they now they're trying to prove, like I think, the Chinese took photos from lower Earth orbit and they were like, you see there, you can make out that's the Great Wall of China. But um, you know it took like hunting and pecking and poking around and like a hundred millimeter lens. I think, so it doesn't count. Doesn't count if you can't see it with the naked eye from lower Earth orbit, you can't see it from space.

Dang straight eight. Okay, I got one for you that supposedly you've never heard, and we're gonna get to it right after this message break. Okay, so let's talk about this one. Have you ever heard uh, like on a trip to like an abbey or monastery, this is where it usually comes up as a kid like stained glasses maybe thicker at the bottom, or leaded glass and windows.

That glass is a very slow moving liquid. No, I hadn't heard that, and I can tell you had I been on that field trip, I would have yelled at the docent for lying. Really yeah, even at that age, yeah see, I would have gone wow, Yeah, even at that age, it would have been like, that is preposterous. Well, you, sir, are much smarter than I was at that age. It is not a slow moving liquid at all. It is an a morphous solid. I've never heard that before. Yeah,

it's it's not the same. It's not a liquid, it's not a real solid. But I've never heard somebody call it a slow moving liquid and explain like wavy glass like that. Yeah, well that it comes from how it's actually was made. Back then, up until the mid eight hundreds, Uh, there was a process called the Crown method where you blow the glass, flatten it out, heat it, spin it um mechan on the bottom. Oh no. Uh. And you've got a sheet of glass and it's pretty cheap, but

it's rippled and some parts are thicker than others. And when you look at nature. I have the windows of my house do that some of them? Yeah? You me and I lived in a craftsman that was like that. Yeah, and they were the wind blew right through. Yep. It's pretty weird. Uh. So the difference in liquid and solid is all about molecular structure. Uh. Solid has arranged molecules and a crystalline structure. When you heat that up, the molecules are going to vibrate and then it will eventually

reach a melting point when those little structures break down. Uh. Liquid but comes to solid when it gets cooled, and if you super cool a liquid, it will remain that way. Um beyond like the freezing point. So glass is an a morphous solid. It's not quite as organized as the crystal, but it does not freeze, so it's more organized than a liquid. So like in any form, in any version of its solid form, glass is an amorphous solid, not just when it's wavy. I think it's just an amorphous solid. U.

We need to do one on glass. It's pretty remarkable. We could tag team it with our mirrors. My my hometown was the It's like the capital of the glass capital of the world, the Glass City, the Glass City. Uh gotta be proud of something that and Tony Pecko's So we got a few more, but I think we should take a little message break and then we will wrap it up. Okay, what else you got, I've got one? Um So, Uh have you ever heard that if you see a little baby bird on the ground, you you

pick it up. That's it for that bird, Like you've just signed its death warrant because your stink is on the bird, and when the mother comes back, it'll smell the fact that humans touched this bird. And now it's spoiled somehow, and the bird will be rejected by its mother and starved to death. So you pretty much have to take the bird indoors and raise it as your own child. I've heard that. Actually, yeah, did you ever

do that? Um? Well, I've told the story about when I accidentally killed the bird as a lifeguard, when I drowned it. I think I've told it. I found a bird in the pool and rescued it out, and the bird was still alive, but um seemingly dehydrated. So I got a straw and would you know, get a little liquid and the straw and the bird would peck at it and drink. And I was like, man, this bird is thirsty because it's just drinking, drinking, drinking. It drank so much water it died, man, And it kept going

back for more. And I thought I was doing the right thing. And the bird is quit moving. And here's the funny part of the story. All these kids, I'm surrounded by like twelve year olds at this pool and I pick up the bird and I noticed it's like kind of fat and bloated. Now. And when I picked it up and with any I didn't even squeeze it water shot out of its mouth like a squirt gun. The kids that screened in horror because over the course of six hours, I drowned this bird that I took

out of the pool man drownded on land on dry land. Yeah, it's one of my great all time awful stories. I never did that. Yeah, Um, I've raised squirrels before, little squirrelings. But Umi has a pretty good story of like picking up a little bird that she found on the grass that you know, obviously was going to die if she

didn't care for it. And she was a pretty little kid, um, and she got ahold of the phone number of a local VET and started calling them and asking them what to do, and then she go do what they said, and then she'd call them back again and go do what they said again. And apparently her mom figured out what was going on. I was like, stop calling this vet.

So she found the number to another VET started calling them, and then she called like one and then called the other, and she kept pesturing these people and they're trying to help, apparently, but they're also like, this bird's a goner. So they said,

you need to keep the bird warm. So this is at a time when microwaves were pretty, and so she she didn't kill the bird in the microwave, but like, this bird spent a few seconds in the microwave eating and she got it out and um, it was warm, and she wrapped it up and and took care of it and was really like stressing, like I really wanted this bird to live and was doing everything she could and it just didn't work out. Man, you mean I can't wait to see you again. We actually share the

very horror horrific stories. The point of this is that neither one of you should have touched this bird in the first place, because it was probably in the middle of a flying lesson. Yeah, it has nothing to do with your human stank and the mother's rejection. Um yeah, that's another is probably trying to fly and the mom was probably nearby allowing that to happen. Yes, So you come along, you see a bird, You assume it fell out of a nest, right, and you pick it up.

And two things just happened. One, you interrupted a flying lesson and kidnapped a baby bird. And to um the idea that you couldn't just put that bird back down after you picked it up because your smell is on. It is totally false too, because birds don't have a very good sense of smell. Yeah. In general, your average yardbird isn't going to know that you had your stink on it or care. No, we're not dirty to them, No, and even if we were, they couldn't really smell us anyway.

So the whole concept of um, the that a mother bird will reject her little birdling what are they called when they're a little like, you know, uh, baby birds, baby birds. Yeah. The the idea that a mother will reject a baby bird I think was probably developed to keep little kids from touching them, probably so in interrupting a flying lesson or whatever. Yeah, so maybe we should

not encourage or discourage people from saying this. Yeah. But at the same time we kind of backfire because it's like, oh, well, I touched it. Now I have to kill it in the microwave. I have to to try to take care of it to death. Yeah. And we were both had our hearts in the right place too, except that was like eight y Yeah, um, all right, I've got one. Uh And this one I actually did not know until

I studied this. Chameleons I've always thought changed their color to blend into their surroundings as a form of camouflage. That is not so they do change color, but it has nothing to do with that. Um. It is physical or emotional changes. Um. They're like they want to fight, they may want to make love. Uh, it depends. But it has nothing to do with I'm gonna be green because I'm in the grass, or I'm gonna be brown because when your deck. No, because they're already pretty camouflaged

as it is. UM. When they when they change color, they kind of go the opposite of being camouflaged and suddenly they're bright orange. Um. And they do that by using chromatophores, which are pigment containing cells that can move and bend and change to expose one pigment or another. And they have layers of these chromatophores that work together

in the same way that paint kind of mixes. So you have a layer that's yellow and a layer that's red, and like these cells will overlap and all of a sudden, the chameleons orange. Yeah, it'll just send a signal basically and open up the paint can sort of like we described in the octopus the Coolest animal Ever. It's the same deal chromatophorce, and but they're not. They don't do it to camouflage themselves. They do it to fight, Yeah, whereas the octopus does do it to camouflage. Um. Yeah,

so how about that? Still a cool animal, very neat to be able to change color. But that commercial that you see with the chameleon changing color to blend in with the backgrounds is a lie. I can't remember that. It's a pink commercial, is it? Yeah, of course it is. I think you have one more, don't you? Or do you have two more? I have one more? Let's hear it, Chuck, you've got one too? Three four? Five senses sight, smell, uh, touch,

hearing and what am I forgetting? Taste? Taste? And then the sixth sense, which is the one that lets you know when somebody's looking at you, even when you're not facing them. Yeah, like eyes in the back of your head. What is that Someone's why? I don't know, man, there that will be understood within our lifetime. But there are actually way more senses than that, depending on who you ask, maybe as many as yeah I saw, I saw fourteen

to one two. Um. And those five that we mentioned are now these days referred to as the classical senses, but you can take basically human senses and lump them into two categories. You have intero exception, which is our sense or awareness of how we're feeling on the inside, and our ex tero exception, which is how we sense

the world around. It's like temperature or something like that would be our our sensitivity to temperature would be an exteroception and sense, whereas our awareness that we have to pee or our sense of balance would be in ter reception.

All right, that makes sense, doesn't it. Yeah. Um, some of the other senses that we have, uh, in the skin, we have five different types of nerve endings just in our skin, So you can sense heat, cold, pain, itch, and pressure, and you can even sense heat without touching it. So that's its own sense. Oh yeah, yeah, like that. It's a different receptor when you touch a hot stove is when you put your hand near a fire, and

so those are two separate things. I just assume that there were more of them involved to a lower degree. But it's a different thing. It's a different thing, that's really yeah. And that's a more recent finding too. I think, um. Supposedly, our ability to sense that we need to vomit is one its own thing as well. Um, hunger or sense of hunger. Sure. Um. Basically there's a whole world of sense experiences that we have that we've just totally overlooked

as senses. Yeah, you know, like I feel hungry, just I'm just hungry. It's actually an actual sense. Pretty neat, I think it is, uh, and I bet you they're gonna further. It's not like they discover more, but as they dig in, I think they find that they can break it down more specifically is what it is? Right, It's not like, oh, they just discovered you could feel fire when you're near it. They said, oh, we discovered it's an actual separate thing and touching fire. Yeah yeah,

you got anything else? Oh, I got plenty else chuckers. And if people want to hear them and see me act like a strange weirdo, really pretty it's one of the best things. Thanks man. You can check out Don't Be Dumb on our website, Like, you really should watch this people, because I don't think you understand when Josh says watch me being a weird you think, oh Josh is being silly. No, he really is playing this very odd strange character, and that is you know of the enjoyment.

Thanks man. And then the other is you've learned something. Okay. Uh, So since I said don't be dumb, that means that I should also tell you to go check out this article on how stuff works dot com type um false facts. I think we'll bring this article up because there's a couple of we didn't We didn't get to like every top ten list. Yeah, I think we We've had covered those previously, but if you want to begin to taste,

it's on there. Uh and uh, since I said search bar, that means it's time now, friends for a listener mail. I'm gonna call this anti joke. Hey, guys, just listen to the Joke Podcasts, which is our live show that we did called is there a Scientific Formula for funny podcast? That's right. My friend Derek and I are a huge joke fan. It's punsters and what have you. One of our favorite jokes is actually called an anti joke. It's called that because it's so ridiculously not funny and unexpected

that the funny part comes from people's reaction. The rest of us call it irritante. So well, I'm gonna tell the joke. Get ready to be irritated. Guy walks into a bar and pauses, and at the end of the bar there's this dude with a big orange head. The guys just kind of sitting there, and the guy asked the bartender, Hey, what's up with the guy with the big orange hed over there? It's kind of weird. He says, Oh, dude, you gotta hear the story. Go down there, buy him

a drink. He'll tell it to you. I guarantee it. So the guy walks over and the dude with a big orange het says, so, I don't know what you're doing. You probably want to know the story behind my head here. And the guy says, well, yeah, if you know mine, I'll buy you a drink. And he was like, all right, cool, So gone over to million times. It's basically, here's a story. I was walking on the beach one day. I stubbed my toe on something. I look down and there was

an antique brass lamp. I picked it up and dusted it off a little bit, and uh, this enormous genie pops out. It's a magic lantern. The genie says, you release me from my ten thousand year imprisonment. I'm forever in your debt, and I'm gonna grant you three wishes as a token of my gratitude. And the man at the bar was like, wow, what happened? Man? This is incredible, and how did you get the orange head? He's like, well, just listen. I said, all right, I got three wishes.

I guess my first wish is gonna. I want to be really rich, fantastically wealthy. And the genie says, all right, your wish is granted. All of a sudden, I have rings on my fingers and a crown on my head, my wallets full of cash. We call these a t M cards and credit cards. I've got a AMEX black and indeed to a mansion, and I'm totally loaded. That's so, I said, man, this is amazing. Um. I guess for my next wish, I want to be married to. Let's just go ahead and say, the most beautiful woman in

the world. I want to be married to Kate Upton. Boom. Kate Upton is on the beach. The genie says, your wishes granted. The ocean's part and there she is, in her bikini, walking towards the guy with the wedding ring on and they're married. Is that the person that the guy who wrote this joke did? He pit Kate up. She's not the most beautiful woe in the world, but she's on my mind. And uh so there's Kate Up. Then they're married. It was incredible and rich and he's rich.

And the guy said, all right, you got one more wish. What's your wish going to be? So in the bar, the man with the big orange head stopped and took some beer. He is, all right, now, I think this is where maybe I went wrong. I wish to have the big orange head. And that is the anti joke. It's not bad, well you laugh through it, except the punchline. Well, I think though, um, the telling of the joke, because

usually what right I have to say? Like, you are one of the better joke tellers I've ever met my entire life. No, really, you really are. That's from Patrick and Derek. The anti joke, I think, I think the I think the punchline or the anti punchline. It's not that it wasn't funny, it just needed like a little drumming up, like he needed to continue the stories slightly more like Okay, So for my third wish, I said, I want to have a giant orange head, okay, rather

than I think this is where I went wrong. I wished for an orange head. It fell out of the arc of the story, the flow. Yeah, if they had said it in the same way, I think it would have been fun. All right. Well I improved a lot of that, but I actually did read that last bit as he wrote it. So I'm not going to take credit for ruining the who was that the road in Patrick road end? But it's Patrick and Derek or the jokesters. So thanks, thanks Patrick, Thanks Derek. Um, seriously, that wasn't

irritating at all. That was a fun thrill ride. Uh. If you can think of an anti joke that's actually worth writing in, we want to hear it. We're always good for a good joke or good t joke. Um you if it's pretty good, maybe we'll read some on the air. What do you think I can read jokes that could have a whole different podcast called Chuck Reads Jokes. Well, I'll sit here and quietly while you do record those. Um, you can tweet to us. You can tweet your jokes or anti jokes to us. S Y s K podcast.

You can send us uh anti jokes by posting them on our Facebook page Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know, UH, You can send us an email. Stuff podcast at discovery dot com, and as always, you can hang out at our website, UH stuff you should Know dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com. Jack Thords has

quickly become the online shopping destination for guys. Here's why everything on the site is up off as a listener of stuff you you know, you can skip the membership waitlist and get instant access, So check it out, dudes that sign up dot jack threads dot com, slash no Stuff