How Ebola Works

can go into their lobby. There's like a lobby museum, a couple of stories with a lot of interacting, interactive exhibits and um you me and I went and she tried on one of those biological safety level four suits. Oh yeah, yeah. I got a very cute picture of her in one. They probably swallowed her up. Yeah, they had extra small. I think I have one size. Yeah, it was just kind of drooping down. But it's a really neat museum. If you're ever in Atlanta, I strongly

recommend going to the CDC. Yeah I'm gonna wait. Well, not that I'm paranoid, because we'll talk about how you can get ebola, but it's still uh, you know, I'll just I'll just wait. I don't really blame you. Yeah, I mean those two patients. There are two patients in Atlanta right now for those of you who have been under a rock lately, UM, who are being treated for bola, apparently successfully through a UM at the time, an unapproved drug um or therapy, i should say. And they're at Emory,

though they're not at the CDC. The CDC is only dangerous because you know they keep antraks and unlocked refrigerators and that kind of thing. Yeah, and hey, we want to thank Jerry for speeding this one through. Uh we got a lot of requests to do this, obviously because it's timely, and uh we waited a week and there's been some new developments and there will be more in the coming weeks obviously. But um, we're recording this today and it's coming on on Thursday, and like it's Tuesday,

Today's yeah, so bam, it's dropping, that's right. Um. So there's people in Atlanta with ebola right now, and those people came from Liberia. There are a couple of missionaries and they were flown back to America to be kept in isolation units in Emery with controversy surrounding that move. Well, yeah, because if you're a utilitarian philosopher, that was a monstrously stupid thing to do, to voluntarily bring ebola into the

United States. Yes, and you you there's a good chance that you will save the lives of two people, but you also threaten the lives of several hundred million people who may not have ever otherwise been exposed to the virus. So I'm not one for like panic and especially not fomenting panic. Um. But just if you if you understand utilitarian philosophy, it doesn't make any sense whatsoever. But we're compassionate humans, not robots, so utilitarian philosophy doesn't usually go

over that. Well have you seen Contagion? Yeah, I think we've talked about that on the show. Reading all this stuff really like, Solderberg kind of nailed it. Yeah, he did. And uh, I believe in that movie it became airborne though, which is was it a bowler in the movie? Well, no, I don't think they was something similar. Yeah, I don't even think they named it because so they could take a little bit of fictional license, or maybe they named it, but I don't think it's a Bola but you know,

started with a fruit bat and you know transferred. We'll get to all that stuff. Yeah, that one scene where Gwyneth Paltrow is that fruit bat on her face and she can't get it off. Very scary movie though, Man it is Outbreak was pretty good too. I haven't seen it in many, many years, but I liked it at the time. It's all right, it was okay, not as good as Contagion. Dustin Hoffman plays an epidemiologist like no other. Okay, so let's get down to it. Man, let's talk about

a bull. It's uh, as far as discovery goes, it's a relatively new player on the deadly virus infects a scene. Yeah, I guess we should go back to nineteen seventy six. Um. It's actually named for and I didn't know this, the Evola River in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which UM imagined that river didn't see a lot of traffic anymore with that name. But it has nothing to do with the fact that they discovered it in the river or

anything like that. It's just the region. Yeah, and at the time that country was known as Zaire And even still there's a strain of Ebola known as zaire type ebola, and it's the deadliest of all. Yeah. Each of the five strains are named for the origin country or area. And uh. In this case, a man named Mabolo Um sought treatment for a fever in nineteen seventy six. Uh. They thought it was malaria, which a lot of times

they still mistake it from malaria or other diseases. So they treated him with a shot of quinine and said, this should make you feel better. Let me reuse that needle because of sire and we're underfunded medically speaking. And uh that of course sprea. And before you know it, relatives friends after performing burial rituals where they have close contact with bodily remains and fluids, people started dropping like flies. It's really scary. There's so and then that was they

think he was patient zero. At the very least, he was an index patient, which is the patient zero is like the first person to ever contract it, and an index person is the first person in an outbreak. I believe it's possible that Maballo is both. He could be patient zero and the index patient for that particular outbreak,

but the patient zero for all of ebola. Yeah, and in this case, in of the three and fifty eight people died and uh, it's kind of a near simultaneous outbreak happened in Sudan, and of the two and eighty four died in Sudan, which is pretty good because it generally kills about Okay, so that's Sudan type bola. It's less deadly than Zaire type of bola. Game, yes, but even still you're talking it's way better than But consider this, chuck,

I looked this up. You know, the influenza um of uh, the Spanish flu, I think is what it's frequently Back then, there something like I think twenty million to forty million people died in one year across the world. Wow. Okay, the the average life expectancy in the US dropped by ten years that one year because of that one flu. It had a mortality rate of only two point five percent.

I bola has a mortality rate of n Well. Yeah, that's why it's so frightening, because if it became airborne or aerosol and widespread, it's could eradicate, like the planet, pretty much of human being. Luckily, it's only been shown to be able to spread via aerosol, like through the air among monkeys. That's kind of cold comfort though if you think about it, because we can get it from monkeys, and if monkeys can give it to each other like that,

then who that's terrible. That's bad stuff. The reason why they think a bola has not spread as one because you can't catch it through the air, but also kind of chillingly, it kills people too fast for them to infect that many other people. One of the problems and you you you've mentioned it in that story about Maballa patient zero or at least the index patient from ninety six.

UM in Central Africa, there are a lot of burial customs that require, like you said, the family and friends of the deceased to wash the body sometimes to clean the waste and food out of the body, and um to not use protection or gloves or anything like that. Like contact with the body is key, right, It's a

part of the ritual burial. And it's still it's like even during this outbreak now you have like World Health Organization people going from village to village saying do you have any dead that we can take away to bury and they're like, no, no one's died here, and they're literally hiding the bodies because they don't want they're they're deceased to not be honored in the way that they

should be based on custom and tradition. The problem is that this custom and tradition is also simultaneously spreading the Ebola virus. Yeah, I mean just something like that. If they could just talk them into at least like wearing gloves or something like, any little bit would help at this point. Yeah. So, um, you said there's five types

of ebola. Yeah, I guess we should talk about the philo virus family, because Ebola is a virus, and it is a philo virus, which isn't that different from any kind of kind of virus actually, but it is a worm like particle that's described as hooked like a shepherd's

crook or a six or you. But you mentioned the five ferent types and they're named after the region of their origin, desire and pseudan strains that we talked about, the Bunda Bugyo, the Thai forest formerly the code Duvoir, and the rest In type as in rest in Virginia, which is uh, you might think, yeah, but it's true. Yeah, there was a shipment of crab eater monkeys that came out of the Philippines, which is the origin of the

rest and type E bolavirus um. And they were sent to U LAB, a testing facility in Rest in Virginia, and um, a bunch of the monkeys started dying. Actually two shipments I think of monkeys died from this. And in the second shipment, some of the monkeys infected some of the humans, and the humans contracted the virus, but nobody showed symptoms. So we found out that the rest and virus humans don't respond to. Yeah, it's not deadly at this point at least, which is great. Um, it's great,

but when less deadly of bolivirus is definitely good. Yeah, seriously. Um. All of the genetic information though from uh, the bola is comes from RNA instead of DNA like US humans. And it's really pretty basic. Compared to US, if we have three billion base pairs of DNA, they're only about nineteen thousand number of RNA and a philo virus, which

is uh, you know, it's pretty basic. Yeah, And the RNA actually is basically like with any virus, it's just there to say, here's the instructions to replicate me, and uh, here you go. And they the virus. The Bola virus spreads like any other virus, where it basically enters the cell. It injects that RNA, which in turn hijacks the processes of the cell and turns it from its regular duties

into becoming a replication machine for the virus. And it turns out all of these UM, all of these different virus particles viryons I think is what they're called UM, and those things eventually overwhelmed the cell. And if it's an enveloped UM virus like a Bola, that means that the virus can go in and out of the cell membrane because it's surrounded by like a fat, lipid coating UM. It can go in and out of the host cell

without destroying the host cell. A naked virus goes in, injects its stuff, it takes over the host cell, which makes so many that the host cell just ruptures. And then that's the way that the the other viruses are released. With the bowl of virus, it just basically secretes in a really gross way. But a cell that's been hijacked

secretes new UM BOWLA viruses. Yeah, and it uh, I mean a lot of this is still a mystery that we're figuring out, but they do know that it can infect a lot of different types of cells, but mainly attacks the immune system and then from there travels to the lymph nodes and then the spleen and the liver through the bloodstream, and once it's in those cells, it's

going to release a bunch of nasty chemicals. They think it's related to the closest to the measles and the momps actually, which um, all that stuff is helpful and trying to figure out yours. So they think from what they understand of the E. Boulavirus, Now, as you contracted through contact with body fluids and it gets into your mucous membranes or breaks in the skin, and once there it shows a preference for immune cells. Like it goes

after talk about an aggressive virus. It goes after the very cells that are meant to destroy it and it

messes with them. Depending on the type of cell, it'll either make their function go hey wire, which accounts for like a huge immune response, or it will shut down like an immune cells defenses right, So it makes your immune system go hey wire, but also prevents your immune system from mounting a defense, which is why you're in so much trouble if you contract a bowla because it just goes after your immune system, and then once your immune system is suppressed, Uh, it goes after other cells

like epithelial cells or endothelial cells, so like connective tissue cells or um neurological cells, cells that line them the interior of your blood vessels, which makes your blood vessels weaken and start to bleed internally. Um. And it then it like you said, it goes into your liver and your spleen and just hijacks everything they're ultimately leading to tissue damage and then organ failure. Yeah, that's how you will eventually die as multi organ failure in shock. Um.

And you know you mentioned the the antibodies. That's typically how they test for ebol anaus to looking for the antibody instead of the virus. But like you mentioned, it may have suppress the immune system such that they can't even detect it. And the only test they have are expensive and they're tough to transport, require machinery, So it's not the kind of stuff that uh, they're sending over

to Western Central Africa for the most part. Yes, sadly, so it makes it the fact that it's in um often very remote locations, that the outbreaks have been kind of um uh contained. I guess they've been relatively small. Um I think something like people out of outbreaks since nine Yes, I have three thousand cases in two thousand deaths and that's up to the minute, like that it includes this current outbreak. Yeah, this was like from three

hours ago. So that's I mean, that's if a lot of people, especially if you live in Central or West Africa. But if you're looking at the grand scheme of things, especially for as virulent as this virus is, uh, that's not that many people. So the fact that it's so contagious that it's hard to get and that it's hard to detect makes it very difficult to work on a bola, work on a vaccine, work on a treatment for it,

that kind of thing. Well, and sadly, like I know this isn't across the board, but pharmaceutical companies developed drugs that will make them money. Uh, they're not in it for curing the world of rare diseases that number in the hundreds or low thousands. And basically there's it's it's stuff to admit it, but there's not a market for these vaccines, a money market, which is a big failure

for humanity. Yeah yeah, Well it takes the threatened life of two American missionaries to really get the pharmaceutical industry going. That's exactly what's happened. All right, Well, let's um take a break here and then we'll talk about some of the actual symptoms right after this message. Okay, you're gonna know if you have ebola. Well, actually you won't know

for a little while. It's what's kind of scary, is it may it may think it's something else, but when it enters your body, Uh, it's gonna kind of just sit there silently for two to twenty one days, typically about four to ten, and then you're gonna start noticing fever's headache, chill, um joints aching, You're gonna be really tired.

And then that's when you will likely be misdiagnosed, right with malaria or something else, maybe dingay fever, uh, maybe yellow fever, but typically malaria is the one that they go with because the Central and West Africa, so you know there it's lousy with malaria anyways, and it looks exactly like malaria. It's after a couple of days of showing symptoms that it starts to become apparent that possibly

it's a bowla. And the reason why it's because you take a very sudden, very sharp term for the worse. After after the first couple of days of showing the normal flu like symptoms, Yeah, then you're gonna have um, bloody diarrhea, jaundice, really bad sore throat, you're gonna vomit, You're not gonna be hungry. And then once you have symptoms for about five days, about fifty of the victims will develop rashes on their shoulders and like chest area.

And that's the second stage. There's still yet a third stage. It's about this time where um, you if you are going to have a large amounts of bleeding, this is where it's going to start to happen after several days. UM. Apparently, in very aggressive cases of ebola, like the Zaire type, you can die like in six days after symptoms, which is extraordinarily mind boggling lee fast for something like this, UM. And the thanks to our friends at the movie Outbreak.

When people think of a bowla, they think of people like squirting blood out of their eyes. Um, there is typically some sort of internal bleeding with Ebola. It is a hemorrhagic fever. After all, about fifty percent of patients will have this bleeding, mainly in the gastro intestinal tract. So, but it's not gonna it's not coming out of your

eyes or anything like that. But it is a result of the Ebola virus going after those endothelial cells, those cells that UM make up the structure of the blood vessels, and going after the tissues and the organs and UM just degrading them. Basically. It's also a part of your immune response. Like you can have an over inflammation as a result too. So all this stuff is adding up to you bleeding internally. And we should say, though, chuck,

like you're not gonna bleed to death. Um, people who die from a vote bullet typically die as a result of UM that internal bleeding may lower their blood pressure

and they'll die from hypotensive shock. Yeah. So, I mean what happens is your your your blood tries to clot thanks to proteins, and there's so much clotting going on and so many proteins hard at work, it can't keep up essentially, and once the tissue damage starts, those proteins are busy and you're bleeding is uncontrolled at that point, right, and it's very sad result. Speaking of proteins, ebola makes a two types of this, one specific protein a glycoprotein,

and one is pretty straightforward. It allows the ebola to move in and out of a host cell. The second use of them, the it's called secreted glycoprotein s GP. That stuff basically goes out and hushes the immune response. It says, you'd be quiet, be still, and it just basically goes in shuts down the The antigens is what they're called, that come after things like ebola and kill them, and it basically just ties them. It ties them up, in gags them. Wow, I know. And that it's just crazy. Yeah,

I mean, it's a nasty, nasty virus um. What we know about it right now is and this is one of the other scariest parts is that, uh, they are still not for sure where ebola hangs out for the years that it lies dormant in the world, because it doesn't go away. That went away, it wouldn't come back. It just means it's out there somewhere in a reservoir and a host. It is a zoonotic disease, so it occurs naturally in animals, but obviously it's transmitted to humans,

and like I said, it doesn't go away. What they have to look for and what they've tested and killed scores of animals doing, is to see if an animal can survive the virus, because if they can survive the virus, they are a good candidate to be the host a reservoir. Yeah, exactly. Um, So they've tested all kinds of animals and what they're pretty sure of but still not a cent sure of, is that it is the fruit bat. Yeah, it looks

a lot like the fruit bat. The reason that they've been having such a hard time finding it is because from after the six outbreak, Ebola just like went island until the nineties until there's another outbreak in the nineties, which is really suspicious as far as epidemiology is concerned, because that's not supposed to happen. So it made them think that maybe there was some exotic animal or exotic

plant or something that was acting as the reservoir. Um. But now they're starting to think more and more that yeah, it's the common fruit bat. Yeah, because they fruit bats can have the virus and not get sick. And that is uh. And they've you know, fruit bats are in locations where they have the index cases. Yeah, pointing towards the old fruit bat. Yeah. Plus you can get they've shown um that ebola can be transmitted through bat guano, which is bat poop, which is what happened in uh contagion.

Was it bat poop? Yeah, that's scene where um Gwyneth Paltrow's is eating a bowl of bat poop on a bat. Spoiler alert, I think it was through a bat through a pig that eventually found this way to a restaurant. Yeah. Yeah, The way that movie unfolds at the end, man is

just chilling. Yeah. So, like we said, we know how it's transmitted, uh event through first human animal contact, then the infection, and then through you know, bodily fluids and secretions and uh dirty needles is the biggest culprit though, and depending on how you get it, uh could affect

the outcome. If you have gotten it through a needle, you have on chance of dying since nineteen seventy six, Um, if you've gotten it other uh like through other contact, um, it can be about eighty percent, So I guess that's where they come up with the rate. Yeah, I think the hundred percent rate was for the outbreaks specifically. Yeah, a hundred percent of people who transmitted it via needle

in that outbreak died. That is insane. Yeah, and uh, the incubation period is different to three to six days for a patient if you're stuck with a needle, versus five to nine for intact exposure. Yeah. So, Chuck, we're gonna talk about how to prevent the spread of ebola up next, and what's going on right now with possible cure.

So so, up until recently when we had these patients shipped over to America, your only chances of contacting ebola's if you went over to Central or West Africa, um, which a lot of people do, a lot of people live there as well. Uh. And they suggest that if you find yourself over there, you not dwell in forests or caves because that's where the fruit bats are. Well. Plus you can contract it from guerrillas and stuff too. Sure, so you shouldn't eat bush meat, shouldn't touch dead guerrillas,

shouldn't touch dead animals, period, try and limit that contact. Yeah, that's probably a good idea. And of course, UM, if you're over there working as a healthcare worker, or if you're just over there working or living, you should avoid any kind of reuse needle because that's your guaranteed to get it. Almost So we mentioned already the burial practices that are becoming a vector for disease, the spread of Ebola UM. There's also a couple of other factors that

are coming into account. They the they think that if the fruit bat is the reservoir for Ebola UM, then the reason that it's spread because it was always just in Central Africa before. Now suddenly it's in West Africa. The March two thousand and fourteen outbreaks started in Guinea UM. They think that it's because the fruit bats migration patterns might be shifting because of climate change, so that could

be fostering the spread of ebola. One of the other problems with this is that UM there's a very widespread lack of trust for the governments of West African countries and UM, so there's a lot of misunderstanding, misinformation. There's

very little trust for the World Health authorities. UM, there's very little trust for the government some of the governments are using it as political tools like um, yeah, and I think Sierra Leone they call it East Bowla because the government in power their main opposition strongholds in the East, so they're blaming the East on a bullet. It's just there's a lot of stuff going on over that it's not helping with this particular outbreak right now. Yeah, that's

really sad. Uh you mentioned about it. Start This the strain or this outbreak started in Guinea. They think they've traced traced it back to patient zero, two year old patient there. It was about eight months ago. Um, they think that this toddler died. They she suffered from fever and black stool and vomiting and then died on December six of last year, even though they don't know how she got it. And then shortly after her mother died

on December. Then her three year old sister died on December twenty nine, and then her grandmother died on January one. And this is all in the village of I know, I'm probably gonna butcher this, but it's Meliando and Guika do nice. It's my my best effort there in Guinea. Yeah, And then that's that's the area is really close to the Sierra Leone and Liberia borders, which explains a lot.

And then it spread outside their village to people that attended the grandmother's funeral because of course, again they had close contact with the body. And then two of those funeral attendees brought that back to their village. Than healthcare workers there and family members got sick, and healthcare worker and Guika do is Uh was suspected to have triggered the spread to three other villages in February of this year.

And that just shows man again, just like in contagion, it's just like from person to person, and all of a sudden it's in places nowhere close to where it started, and then all of a sudden, it's in places not super far from where it started. Did you know that there? Did you hear about the health care bots that caught the outbreak before the announcement there? There's these bots. I can't remember the name of the company that runs them, but they're basically just their job is to just scan

the internet, scan journal articles, scan um news. They're probably hitting the deep Way, by a guess, and they are looking for any and all mentions of things, um, that have to do with outbreaks, I think health care stuff in general. But nine days before the announcement by the Guinea authorities, Um, these bots caught this outbreak in that area nine days. That's pretty impressive stuff. And hopefully we'll come in in handy further down the road when people

learn to trust that. Yeah, but still, this one's been the worst yet. And one of the scariest reasons is because it's happening so fast. Um, the common methods we have for dealing with it aren't working quick enough. Well, the common methods we have for dealing with it are as follows. Like you said, there's no there's no way to to well, there are, there are ways, there's tests that show this is a bowla. They're tough to get to these areas, so it's mostly you know, um, shoe

leather diagnoses I guess um. And then the other aspect of it is that there's no treatment aside from rehydration, Like consider that chuck. Like, if you're struck down with a bowla, guess what treatment they give you? Ivy fluids. That's it. They isolate you and give you ivy fluids to try to replenish what you're vomiting out, diary ng out and um losing in sweat. Yeah, that's the treatment. Well it was until about five hours ago. Yeah, yeah, this UM. I wish we had some sort of a

news wire. Jerry knows one. Remember when I went do Do do and then that she had one accompanying and and it might not even be out yet. So let's debut it right now, Chuck. This is fresh off the wire via CNN. UM. What they have now are an experimental serum um called z MAP and it's made by MAP Biopharmaceutical. UM. I'm not sure where they're located, but there's another another one called Kentucky Bioprocessing, which manufactures another

version of the drug. And they're the ones who are making this brand new, very experimental drug, and so new, so experimental that this week the World Health Organization had to get a group of ethicis together to say, should we use this stuff? Because the normal testing process is way way longer than what they've got time wise, so can we speed this through? Should we use it? The WHO panel said unanimously, yes, it's ethical. We've got to

do something. I think the u N came on board just a few hours ago as well, and so they treated um the two Americans Dr Kent Brantley and Nancy right bowl they are recovering. But sadly, Miguel Pijaris, the Spanish priest, died this morning even though he was treated with the z MAP as well. So it has a two thirds success rate at this point so far. But that's the deal with experimental drugs is they don't know if it's gonna work, or how it's gonna work, or

who it's gonna work on. Um, it's a it's sort of an ethical quandary because if there's already people saying, well, you've used it on these Americans, Uh, why haven't you used it in Liberia? It's sort of a no win situation this early because if they had died. Uh. And this is from Paul root Wolp. He's a director for ethics at Emery here in Atlanta. He said, you know, if it had killed both these Americans, people wouldn't be saying anything. But because it worked, they're saying, why isn't

it being used in Africa? He said, But if we would have taken it to Africa and it killed them, they would have said Americans are experimenting this drug on poor Africans. Well, the way they've done it then is exactly right. They experimented with Americans and then ship the rest of it to Liberia. The Liberia has the remaining stock of z MAP right now. There's no more of

it in the US. It's all in Liberia. Yeah, they applied for it, and they're like you said, they've got it all and they're already out and uh it takes a while to make. Well, it's they've figured out some ways to make it even faster. So what um z MAP is is called a monoclonal antibody treatment therapy. Basically, um they they introduce something like ebola into in this case, a tobacco plant, and they create antibodies. The plant creates antibodies to the virus, and then they say, okay, these

are the antibodies we need for ebola. Let's synthesize them. And they make synthetic antibodies, and they take those synthetic anybodies, the monoclonal anybodies, they inject them into you, the ebola patient, and these anybodies go in and mimic your body's immune response, which in turn mounts a real immune response and then fights off the BOWLA virus. And they only just use it for a BOWLA. They try this on cancer, on

all sorts of other viruses. So monoclonnell anybody therapy isn't new, but using it against ebola, the specific one for a bola is new. And then also using tobacco plants as the the source of the antibodies, it's fairly new too, but it makes it so that you can turn it over a lot faster. Pretty cool stuff. Yeah, that is very cool. Uh, but like we said, it's so new. I mean they've literally just treated these few patients and um, one of them died. So, uh, the jury is out.

In the coming days, we're gonna learn a lot more about z MAP so hopefully it'll save Liberia. Yeah, they've I never knew this either. An out break is considered over after there's been forty two days straight, which is double the incubation period um without any new cases. So um, everyone's hoping for that forty two day period very soon. I'm hoping for it. You got anything else? No, did

we ever mentioned Marburg virus? No, that is a cousin that is also deadly right, it's the other it's the other Nona bowl of virus and the file of virus family. It is deadly, but it's extraordinarily rare. It's named after a German town where there is an outbreak in the sixties because of some monkeys that were shipped for testing. Wow, so I guess it's a disease naming convention. Here is it they? Or everywhere? Is it? Name it after where

it started? Bola Marburg? Yeah? Here? Yeah, there you have it. That's up to the date. Ebola info. Yes, I don't have anything else. You don't need to know, but you know what you guys, if you want to follow this, um, we should follow up in our video series. You better believe it that you can find on our YouTube channel. UM. We use that. We take you in the studio to kind of follow up on some stories, talk about news

the items, or make corrections. It comes out every Monday. Yeah, and you can go to see that at I think it's our YouTube channel, Josh and Chuck. Yeah, so we'll follow up on this as things develop. Good thinking, Chuck. Uh. If you want to learn more about the ins and outs of ebola, you can type people into the search bar How stuff works dot Com and since I said search bar, it's time for a listener mail, I'm gonna

call this uh guy making a move. Oh yeah, So Corey Barker wrote us in and says, Hey, I just want to thank you guys, um, first of all for all the hard work you do, and also for inspiring me to make a move in my career. My day job involves a completely ridiculous amount of driving. You guys have always been instrumental in keeping me awake. Um. I've had people tell me on and off for years, you should do radio, because Corey's got a great voice, he said.

I would always kind of scoff and think how impossible that would be. But recently I decided that I would try it out. I invested in some decent studio recording equipment, made a few audition tapes I guess digital files, and as of last week, I signed my first audio book contract. Yeah that's awesome, Like, I'm gonna do this. You can? Is it that easy? Yeah? Well, I don't know if it's easy. I think you have to add some talent.

But I think there's plenty of course self published authors on Amazon, and they're looking for people to make audiobook versions of their stuff. That's awesome. Well that's what he did, he said. He said, we deserve a lot of credit, since if I didn't listen so much to audio while driving, I would never have decided to take this plunge. Anyway, I decided I would try to repay a slight amount of what I've received from you guys by creating an ad that you could force all the Other Stuff podcast

to play. I think this is a good idea. If you like it used as much as you want, I surrender all rights, keep on trucking. You will always have at least one listener, and that is Corey Barker. Uh And he said, ps a side to start writing again as well, thanks to you guys, because your episodes have spawned some amazing short story ideas. So Corey, let's go ahead and hear your ad for stuff you should know right now. Enrich your mind, explore new horizons, and learn

about the world around you. Stuff you should know Tuesdays and Thursdays on how Stuff Works dot com. Man, how about that? Thank you, Corey, good voice. I don't blame you. We're gonna totally oppress the other podcast with this. Yeah, And I told him to listen out for this, and he wrote back saying, I'll make sure I have an extra pair of underwear to change into for when I get this air awesome, which is really gross stuffing into your front shirt pocket. Oh my gosh, the clean pair, chuck. Okay.

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