How Gold Works

was a close one boom and they stamped it. Yeah, s Y s K. Actually they said s N s K right now. Wait, s Y s N is what we get from people a lot sometimes, And I'm like, you know, no starts with the K. One of them does, one of Yes, it's not stuff you should know? Is right? It doesn't make any sense. How do you doing? Oh? I'm great man? Are you okay? Good? Um? You want to do this one? We're talking about gold? Yeah, man, I've got a little bit of an intro. It might

be a stretch. We'll find out. Okay, that's here. Today's January, tomorrow's January Day. It is Big Newton Day. And also on this day in history, in the Mayan general, fire is born. Uh conquered the Mayan city to Call, which was recently rediscovered, well not recently, it's been rediscovered, the rediscovered anyone. Uh and Uh. What this did was it enlarged the kingdom of King spear thrower Owl. The Minas

had the best names, great name um. And all of this was going on in the heart of the Yucatan Peninsula. If you went just a little to the north, you would run into another group of people called Aztecs, which were actually the Triple Federation, is what it's what they're really called. Um. But if you were to stumble northward and run into the Aztec Empire and ask for gold, what they would give you is what they would call excrement of the gods. Do you want to try to

pronounce it? Yeah, I'm gonna go with teo would. I think that's pretty close. I think you may have done it, Chuck. I think the last part is I love that language. It's similar to like the some of the native languages we heard in Guatemala. The that's because they're mine, yeah exactly, but it's got that same like I don't know. It's

very staccato. It's kind of cool to hear, I think, right, like the Mayan City, the heart of King, spirit thrower owls um empires tetotactan, right, which sounds pretty close to that word tilt, which means excrement of the gods. And that's what the the the Aztecs considered gold. That was a holy metal, a very very precious metal in every sense of the word. And by three sight a d they weren't the only ones to have loved gold for a very long time. No, Egyptians were all over it.

They thought it was also divine. Wait, hold on, how would you rate that intro? I would say that was on a scale of what one to ten, I was one to twenty. I would give it a solid like sixteen. Wow, thanks Chuck, higher than you thought, way higher. I thought I was gonna get a ten. That's why I extended it. No, no, no, um. So the Egyptians, like I said, they also thought it was divine of the gods, indestructible and uh they called

it uh. I guess Nube and ub and if you know of the African region in Northeast Africa, Nubia or if you're a fan of the rap group brand Nubians, sure you would have heard of this. I was actually yeah, yeah they were and um that that that name so holds today because of the original original Egyptian word for gold and um. Africa, of course, has always been a major supplier of this stuff. Yeah. One of the first world Nubia was I guess, yeah, like the first heavily

mined area for gold um. And then on the periodic table, the shorthand for gold is a U, which I've never understood until I realized that it's Latin, which makes a lot of sense. I thought it would be g O right, right, you had something like that. No, No, we had to go with the Latin or um, which means um shining dawn. That's nice. Yeah, And we said all this to say that people have loved gold for a very very, very very long time. Can I drop one of the stats

of the show for me? Right when I saw this, I was like just gonna say this is this is the fact. I think it's pretty good. I told Emily this last night, and she was not as impressed as I would hope. She would have been Um forever and ever, all the gold we've ever mind from the beginning of time, time is only a hundred and sixty one thousand tons, Yeah, which sounds like a lot. Yeah, that's a lot of gold, right for all of time. That's not a lot of gold.

They compare it to something like aluminium. We we get a five point six million tons a year in the United States alone of aluminum. And again, a hundred and sixty one thousand tons of gold is all that's ever been mined. Yeah. And the secondary stat that comes later, which I'll go ahead and ruin now, is of all the gold we've ever found is still around, We've only lost or cannot account for fifteen percent of the gold since the beginning of time. It's pretty good. Well, that

is pretty good. And it suggests two things that William Harris points out. One, Um that means that if you are wearing a piece of gold jewelry, it may have belonged to somebody else a very very long time ago. Uh. And two where exactly did they get that? Who are they getting these like, um, gold masks and headpieces and stuff of milking anch of time and then melting down and reselling them. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's efficient and it's good because gold is really bad for

the environment, as we'll see you later on. But it's really recyclable though. Yeah, it makes you It makes me wonder, like how are they acquiring that? Yeah? What is your wedding ring? Sir? My wedding ring is platinum. Platinum. It's lovely, isn't it. It's very nice? What is yours? Oh? Minus? I think titanium. It's very cheap. And it's like that I could. And it's actually my second one. I lost my first one and inside of a turtle, inside of a turtle. I have no idea where it is. Maybe

it's inside of a turtle. But I luckily I like had the old email and I just sent like the same order for the same ring, and boom, I'm married all over again. It's it's a second time. Did you guys have another mini ceremony? He's just like, you need to buy another damn ring? Yeah? Alright. So, um, that's a lot of gold stats. And as I've been trying to um hammer out people of like gold for a

really long time, let's talk about your gold shower. Speaking of hammering out, though I knew one more cool little fact gold one ounce of gold. One ounce of gold can be drawn out into a fifty mile wire or hammered into a sheet five millions of an inch thick. So it's really well we'll get to all this, but it's it's not only, you know, a beautiful thing for jewelry, but it's super handy and malleable and chemically inert and all these great things you can do with gold. Yeah,

because of its property. It also makes it kind of ironic that the Egyptian is considered it indestructible because one of the more malleable medals around. It's so malleable that it has like almost no practical purposes as far as like hammering things go, Like you make a gold hammer, you're dummy, you know. Alright, so element number seventy nine, let's let's get in it. Okay, So gold again, uh? Was people go back to the Egyptians because they were

the first ones to have like gold fever. Well, we've actually found evidence of gold being um smithed i guess um during the transition from the Stone Age, the Neolithic Age to the Bronze Age, which is the first metal age before Bronze even right, some some places that had easy access to gold like Bulgaria. I believe in a four thousand BC. Um, we're already working with gold long before the Egyptians ever cut their hands on it. Yeah.

And the Egyptians, um, like you said, they really had an appetite for the stuff um Hira glyphs as early gold, and by b C they were it was like currency basically in Egypt. Well, yeah, very much so, Um, it was not that I don't know did they actually minted is for is currency? Uh? The Egyptians, Yeah, I don't know if they minted it. I don't think the menting

came until the Greeks and Romans. Actually King Crosius, the ruler of ancient Lydia, which is a loss of list A, really he was the first two mint in mint gold currencies. Gold coins um in widespread use in sixt but it was the Greeks and then the Romans that really started to mint about a hundred years later though, So that's that's a pretty nice jump on things. He got. He was like, Hey, I like to look at this stuff. I'm gonna put my face on it exactly, and you

guys are going to use it. Yeah. By five fifty, the Greeks were doing it. Uh and then um, the Romans of course, with their more sophisticated ways, followed suit. The orious coins called Yeah, they've pro used millions of them. Those are the ones that they find, like just some farmer in like Devonshire in England, we'll dig up like a chest filled with these things. Yeah, because the Romans were everywhere they were, and they minted a lot of

these coins. So as they're doing this, the same thing is going on about the same time in South America because they have a lot of gold there as well. And what's it called the Middle Cicon Era. Yeah, I couldn't tell if it was Cicon or Cissan. I bet a Cissan Sisson. I bet it's not unleven hundred And this is modern day Peru. They there has been, there have been a lot of gold artifacts found in that region. So they were usually crazy, for sure. The Peruvians were

crazy about it. The Inca like masks, ornaments, chalices, stuff, and their specialty was hammering gold into sheets and like wrapping stuff in it, like creating gold leaf. Interesting. Yeah, they were pretty good at that kind of thing. Um, and then you know there's already a certain amount of gold fever over in Europe. I think the the English minted their first gold coin in the mid century, alright, the same with the Florentine du get. Yeah, those were

both about the middle of the thirteenth century. That's a popular coin. It was still is it among collectives? Um, So there was people in Europe were exposed to gold. They like gold, they wanted gold. Over in Central and South America, Over in Asia they also had the thing for gold. But the Europeans were one of the first to say, Hey, let's see where the edge of the Earth is and if there's gold there. And one of

the first people to do that was Marco Polo. And strangely, a lot of people hate Christopher Columbus or think he was one of the more evil characters in history. Possibly rightfully so. Um, but you can actually trace the infection that Columbus released, literally and metaphorically back to Marco Polo, because apparently there's evidence that Marco Polo directly inspired Christopher

Columbus to set sail in search of gold. Yeah. Growing up in history class, you always learned about the great explorers, and the more you learn about it, like the real histories, as you get older, the more you learn that many times they weren't just sailing upon the shore with like by a bouquet of flowers to deliver most of the time, I would say, you know, it was usually and they were in conquer mode. Uh, for one reason, to spread Christianity,

as the Spaniards really wanted to do. Yeah, that was the cover story, the cover story. But King Ferdinand in fifteen eleven also sent word quote while you're there. Well I added that part. While you're there, then start quote get gold humanly if you can, but by but at all hazards, get the gold. So I mean that was

definitely a charge. And thanks to the travels of Marco Polo, the book that he wrote where he talked about palaces of silver and gold, Uh, you know, people thought it was just like the streets were lined with this stuff in the New World. And I mean imagine though, if you were one of the conquistadors who started sailing um west and you ran into the Maya or the Aztecs or the Inca, and you saw that they had all this gold, you would think, well, this is all very

much true in this place gold city. So let's kill all these people and take their gold, and there was actually a famed gold city, El Dorado. They're all looking for exactly like everyone was looking for Eldorado. And apparently every time a conquistador would find a significant seam of gold, they found El Dorado, and everybody else would come and it becomes like a boom area. But of course it

was a mythical city, right, Yeah, it was just like legend. Yeah, and probably the closest thing to it obviously not a city built of gold, the closest thing to it. It was in Brazil, in the meanest Gurai region, Minas Gerais. That looks good, freaky Gervais. We've been doing this like five years in our pronunciation is maybe even worse rather than better. Actually, we have a listener mail today where someone lauds us just for taking a chance and being

willing to be creative. Corrected, thank you, I'm glad to hear that. I'll read that one at the end of this one. Yeah, that was in Brazil, and uh, there was a lot of gold there and they were the largest gold producer by seventeen twenty years. They became the world's largest gold producer because of this area, using, of course, slave labor panning for gold in sort of rudimentary ways. Not good. No, we're not too far removed from that now. No,

So onto America, North America, California, the gold rush. Like the point here is is that gold has rewritten history and how we form societies because of the search for gold. Yeah, it's like spread people out over the world and intermixed and inter intermarried and inter did it. And you know, like we have entire groups of people ethnicities who are

the result of gold. The gold rushes. Um, California gets a lot of press obviously because by the end of the first year of the gold rush afterwards discovered in eighteen eight, five thousand people were mining there. By the end of the second year, forty people were mining there. But North Carolina actually was the first American gold rush. Yeah, and like you're saying, California gets all the all the attention.

San Francisco forty Niners are named after the gold rush. Um. There was that great Scooby Doo episode with the minor forty niner, remember him, a scary guy. Yeah. When you think of gold rush, you think of California, or I also think of Delawaga. Yeah. Yeah, he was the mayor of Delanaga was the one who said there's golden then our hills. Oh really yeah, it was the mayor of Delnaga. I had no idea, Stas Todd something. I think have you ever panned up there in Delnah? I did that

when I was a kid. And you know it's fun if you're a little kid, right right, You think you're gonna find a little gold flag and it would be rich, or you just might find a little gold flag. And if you do, you won't be rich. Yeah, you're going to find it doesn't buy you virtually anything. But you were saying, North Carolina doesn't usually get much attention, and that was the first gold rush. Yeah, up until the

eighteen thirties. In fact um, they supplied all of the domestic gold that was coined here at the U. S. Mint and Philly came from North Carolina, or North Kakaki as we like to call it. Who calls it that? You never called it that? Uh? Have you ever heard it called that? I have. There's a tribe called quest Song. Oh really, I can't remember what it is, but somebody calls it North Kakillaka and Compton take a check. Check it out. No, I didn't make that up. Well, I

just wrapped you did your j tip. So uh yeah, we talked about the gold rushes in the US. There was also a big one in Oz. Yeah, we can't leave out our Ozzie mates. No, um hello Australia. Yeah, they're like we got tons of gold. They're like it's so hot. I watched Mad Max the other day, by the way, all the way through the original it was, and it was, um, I don't know. Road Warrior got most of the attention because it was bigger and more of an action adventure, but Mad Max was a really

dark kind of revenge the exploitation movie. Yeah, it was really good oxploitation osploitation. So was that the one where the guys in the personal helicopter is that road Warrior Mad Max? That's road Warrior? Then it's like, I mean it was when Mel Gibson was still a cop and he was you know, there was this biker gang led by the toe Cutter, and you don't it something cool? You know justin my friend his uncle is was the toe cutter in Mad Max? Wow? Is uh man? I

can't remember his name? Now uncle U uncle toe Cutter? Now I can call him that it said, it say, isn't as Christmas talking? Oh, I can know. He just sends toes every year in the little card. Oh man, I can't remember his name now Uncle yeah, Uncle toe cutter. I think that's the better day. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah. So Australia has this huge gold rush um in the what eighteen fifties, Yes, Edward, him and Hargraves found gold in New South Wales Bam gold brush. A few years later,

South Africa steps onto the scene. Eight George Harrison. Uh, he uncovered gold in South Africa? And what how many contributions has that man made humanity in his hundred and sixty years? I mean he wrote here comes the Sun. He discovered gold like a hundred years before he was born, Not a hundred, but hundred years for he was famous about the same time, about a full century. But down South Africa is the leading gold producer in the world. Oh today it is, wow, followed by the United States.

In the United States, Nevada is the number one gold producer these days. You mean Nevada Nevada? Alright, So let's talk about how you get gold onto your finger. It's not as easy as you would think, but it's well it's at times drudimentary and at times a little more sophisticated the whole process. Yeah, and it come likes to say the least. Yeah, I mean like it really shows how much we want gold. Yeah, it's sort of like

fracking in a way to the one method. Alright, So what you gotta do, there's diff You gotta start by prospecting, which is the act of looking for gold, right, And that's what you would call an old grizzled dude with the pack mule up in the hills in California prospect or. Yeah, that's what you call a geologist who finds gold. Today too, they're still called prospectors. And I guess the idea is

that what are the prospects for finding gold? I'm sure that's where it came from, right, So their prospecting, that makes a lot of sense. I've never thought about that. So back in the day, there was a lot of luck involved, uh, looking around for it basically where you think it might be. These days it is way more precise. Um, they have equipment that can tell you if there is likely gold there, and then well here's the thing is, there's gold everywhere, but it's just not concentrated enough to

be worth mining. Yeah, that's an excellent point. In most cases, it's a visible but it's still present in the soil. Isn't it crazy? Invisible gold in dirt and rocks. Yeah, or it's in gold, schlagger, that's crazy too. It's like they're just throwing it away, throwing away, you're drinking it for a premium price. It's crazy. That's gross. That was like a college thing. Oh yeah, schlagger, jagger, maister anything that sounded like vaguely Germanic. That was a college thing,

maister brow. Um. So where they find gold and heaviest concentration is when they will say, all right, you know what it's worth setting up a mining operation here. Um. There may be other metals there, like silver, which is great. Yeah. A lot of times gold is combined with silver in an ore, which I'm sure you're just like, okay, great, that's fine with me. That's twice the value, right, well, not twice the value, but one in three quarters times

the value. We could figure it out. So they drill down to obtain samples, um, analyze it see if there's enough gold. If there is, they're going to set up a mining operation there, right, there's not They're gonna move on and look at another place that they think they might have a lot of gold. Yeah. And then depending on how the gold is present in the area. UM, there's basically two ways. One is the load a load deposit, which is it's combined with rock or or and it's UM.

It can be at the surface or underground. UM. And with a load deposit, basically you just want to blow things up when you find gold like that. If it's at the surface, you're gonna use what's called an open pit method, which is basically just drill a bunch of holes into the ore the gold or put some explosives in there and bloat up and then haul the ore out. Yeah.

I mean your goal here is just to make I mean, if they could load up that huge boulder and take it and do it need or somewhere else, they might, but they're just trying to make smaller rocks excellent point for transport. UM. And then if it's underground, If the load is underground, they'll dig a shaft down to it and add it. You go down to it, and this is shaft. I'm sure they go down to it and drill holes all the way through that ore rock um

and those holes are called stokes. Then they packed those full of explosives and blow it up. So it's basically like the open pit method, but underground because then they just truck that or out and off to the um extractor.

That's right. If you're in Delonaga, Georgia, or maybe at a river and Utah, why not, why not give a Utah shout out, you might look for something called a placer deposit, and that is when you find the loose gold um in a stream bed, you know, the little flakes for the little chunks of little nuggets in a mountain stream or a beach, and uh, this is where you would pan and you you know, you scoop it up in a pan and you shake it in the Yeah, a lot of water because gold is is more dense,

so it's gonna sink and collect at the bottom of you a little screen that separates everything and then you got a little bit of gold hopefully, and then the sixth graders are all very happy. That's right. Or I'm egine. If you were a prospector in California back in the day, you could do quite well as a banner. Yeah, you look around and be like, it's mine, it's my gold, all right, So then you have to extract it. That's the next step. Right, So you've got all these big

rocks that you've blown up. Uh, yeah, I guess this is mostly The first couple of steps are from load deposits. You have a bunch of rocks, You put them on a on a conveyor belt, and they go into a machine that's appropriately called the crusher, which breaks the ore into gravel. Then you take that gravel and you put them into drums with a bunch of little steel balls. Spin it around real quickness. Steel balls collide with that gravel and they turn it into basically like a powder,

and you add water to that powder. You form a slurry, add cyanide to that slurry and exposed it to oxygen, and all of a sudden you're starting to extract gold from ore. Yeah, the pulp. Basically, the gold in the pulp dissolves with that chemical reaction, the side and side and O two and uh, the little carbon in there, like tiny little carbon grains, and um, the gold is gonna adhere to it. They have They like each other very much, so they're gonna get together in party for

a little while. Then you filter that and you have gold bearing carbon at this point, still not pure gold, right, so it's gold with carbon. Then you move that to something called a stripping vessel. They put another solution, a caustic solution to separate the gold from the carbon, have more filters to filter out the carbon, and so now you have actual gold bearing solution. But you're still not done. And this is my favorite part. Yeah, this is pretty cool.

It's called electro winning, which thank god, Charlie she never heard of this because this whole thing would be even more annoying. But um, you put you put the gold into a cell with positive and negative terminals, pass an electrical current over it, and the gold separates uh from the carbon solution or the gold bearing solution, and is attracted to the negative terminal so much so that I

get the impression that basically becomes embedded in the negative terminal. Yeah, I kind of wondered, because the next step is to actually melt that negative terminal along with the gold, right, and then you begin to separate the two. Basically, you pour off the negative terminal metal metal, maybe steel or something like that, Right, exactly. Um, so when you smell, and I thought smell it was just melting, Like why they add the s because it's not melting, it's smelting exactly.

So when you pour off the steel, I guess maybe that comes off first, and then what you have left is relatively impure gold, but as close as you're gonna get it in the extracting process. You pour them into bars called door a bars, and then you ship them off to the refiner. Yeah, and that's not the bar that you will see in die Hard three. Um, this is a more impure door a bar. Sure, still nice to have one. Yeah, I'm sure you can be the

look at me. Um okay. And then you need to refine gold from that point once you have it in its uh purest impure form. So imagine the process that we just went through. It was like add this, subtract this, remove that, but add this, and then like the gold that here this, and let's burn the whole thing up until it gets melty. Still impure, it still has to be refined. So um, when refineries get gold dory bars. They also frequently when you sell your your gold to J. D.

Wentworth or whoever. Um, they take all this gold scrap and send that off also to these um refineries which are all which also served as recycling centers to basically, that's like the saddest shipment. Yeah, it's just full of people's like lost hopes and dreams and wedding rings and gold bracelets, anniversary bracelets. I'll just sent back to be

melted down because of the economy. Um. So when they throw all this into the same they add a little bit of soda ash, a little bit of borax, And honestly, what camp borax do, um and the soda ash and borax basically filters out impurities and then what you have left most of the time and they use essay tests to uh to to figure out the purity. But um, they you have about ninety nine point nine percent pure gold and that's usually what they stamp on the bar

that they pour. And those bars are called ingots. Yeah, those are the ones you'll see in the heist movies. And um, if you have ever seen Diehard three and you see them loading up these ingots into big gym bags and then throwing them over their shoulder and running out, that is uh not possible because each one of those bars weighs twenty seven pounds. So if you have fifty of those in a bag, like Jeremy Irons might Jeremy

Irons not a strong man. You're not gonna throw that on your back, like three pounds of gold and like go running up a bunch of stairs and out of the New York Uh. Where is it the New York feder Yeah, supposedly they're in Fort Knox is where they have all the gold, and he was talking last night about that. She's like, let in summary safe to have all this golden one place. I was like, well, that's why they say, like it's built like Fort Knox. It's

like it's super secure. She's like, yeah, but what if you know some terrors just bombed it. She's like, you could just bomb it and then sneak out of there with the gold. And I went, you just wrote Diehard three. She's like, is that what happened out? That's exactly what happened. But I think she makes a good point. I was thinking last night to like, if we have all this gold, and if it is all there, just keeping it in two places, it seems I don't know, it seems unusually

like tempting fate. I I think I agree with Emily. Yeah, six billion dollars worth of gold at Fort Knox. You know, my friend, is that more now? Dude? So when when Harris wrote this one gold was forty two twenty two an ounces and ounce. Right now it's six hundred and sixty seven dollars and forty nine cents and ounce. What So that means that if Knocks holds a hundred and forty seven point three million ounces of gold, the gold is worth two five point six billion dollars just sitting

there and Fort Knock this article. Like, No, I think gold went up in the last couple of years because of the economy. Everybody flocked to gold. Demand increased, and so the price did. It's so amazing to me after all these years, gold is still like people hoard it. Yeah. Man, When gold prices are low, you're very smart to invest in gold because there's always going to be another economic downturn and the prices are always just gonna skyrocket. You got a couple of in gets in your closet. I

have them. I have them strapped in my leg. That's how I have a limp. That's how we walk. Funny um, alright, so during the refining stage, we should point out that a lot of times they will um because gold is so soft pure gold is, they will combine it with other medals to form alloys. And that's why you will get something like white gold, which is gold combined with nicol or silver pladium. A red gold is golden copper. That's pretty and I've ne seen red gold on them.

They seen roads gold surely all my fans. I mean it has like has like a just a slight pink hue too. It's very pretty stuff. I'm not big into gold, like as far as jewelry. Yeah, no, I'm like you. Uh. And then of course you have to talk about a carrots caritage, and that is how much gold is in the object compared to like silver, nickel or whatever else is in that alloy. And interestingly, um, different countries have

different preferences. Here. You always hear about fourteen carrot gold in the United States, which is only fifty eight point five percent gold. Apparently in India they're partial to the twenty two carrot and uh, which is ninety one point seven five percent gold. And the Europeans like to take that middle road and hit eighteen carrots Yeah, that's very strange, and I don't understand what it is. I can understand price being a factor, but maybe it's very odd to

me that like cultures. Yeah, so it's twenty four carrots is percent gold obviously, Yeah, and in for twelve carried is fift and about two thirds of all the gold is uh jewelry, Yeah, which makes sense. And what's interesting about the jewelry is that it's still basically produced as it has been for hundreds or thousands of years, um, using the same techniques, virtually the same tools. I mean, I'm sure they're manufactured much differently, but they are kind

of the same thing. Yeah. Um. And while jewelry accounts for what do you say, two thirds use, there's a lot of other pretty interesting uses for gold to electronics use a lot of gold and a lot of other rare earth minerals like um. Uh. Apparently gold is very very conductive. It's more conductive than any metal except for copper and um silver. But it has a leg up on conference silver and that it corrode. It's very difficult

for gold to corrode. So that means that if you want something that's gonna last a very long time, and be conductive. You might as well use some gold, so they do, and things like processors and hard drives and that kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean you you might see gold on your headphone plug. Your headphone jack might be gold plated because it's if it's higher end, they might use gold conducts electricity therefore sound better. I have seen that. I just thought it was like fancy high

end or something. Uh. Here's a cool stat because they use it so much in electronics and microelectronics. NASA use more than forty kilograms ninety pounds of gold on the construction of the Space Shuttle Columbia. Right, that's pretty cool. FA electronics, And they used it as a reflective surface. They use gold film. Remember, you can be gold into like a point um point one five millimeter thin sheet. It's amazing. So it's light at that point, highly reflective,

effective against radiation. Yeah, so that's pretty awesome. Um. You also use it for crowns. Yeah, they still use gold crowns suddenly, I guess, and I imagine it because it's not reactive because when things are reactive, especially with cooking, it will make things taste terribly. Like there was something called a fish fork and it was made of silver, and apparently if you had this thing, it was like a status symbol or whatever in Victorian the Victorian era.

But it also did have a practical use in that silver didn't react with um lemon juice, which is often used to serve with fish, so it didn't affect the taste. I imagine that's probably one of the reasons why they use gold and crowns, so that you everything doesn't just taste back because it's not reacting with anything because it's

chemically inert. That's a good point, yeah, because you don't want to be eating something and think, oh man, my new gold tooth makes this Telapia tastes like squid, tastes like squid. I don't know, that's not so bad. No, I like squid. But if you're eat in telapia, you don't want to eat squid? Do eat squid? Will you eat octopus? I mean I'll eat all that stuff to a certain degree. I mean like Emily when it comes to calamari, she will only eat like the things that

look like little onion rings. As soon as it looks like the little miniature creature, She's like, that's for you, And I popped that in my mouth. I will probably both, especially eat squid. You we won't eat octopus because of

Remember one of our friends had a friend. They told us a story that their friend was a cook for some couple down in the Caribbean and the couple like caught an octopus and was going to cook it, or they gave it to the to their cook to cook, and the cook was going to put it in the pot alive, and the octopus was wrapping its tentacles around

the woman like, please don't kill me. And she said it was, you know, like one of the worst things that ever happened to because she did it anyway, like you literally when you literally have to fight to put the animal to their death. And and then so that combined with I think being inspired to go research octopi and finding that they were very intelligent and just like, I just can't eat those anymore, which is because there's they pop up. It's some pretty delicious dishes, I imagine,

but they're a very smart animals. And he's like, I'm just gonna eat them animals, just stupid ones. Right, Yeah, I could see that I would be traumatized, Oh my god. Yeah, because it was like no, yeah, I would just walk slowly into the ocean until it released itself and swam away. Yeah, you'd be like the Woodsman and snow White, like I don't know what happened to it. But then you start to walk back and the octopus reaches up with one hand and holds your hand. He's like, I want to

be your pet. I don't want to go back to the sea. Just don't cook me. Don't cook me? All right? Where do we leave off food and beverage. You can get it in gold slagger, in certain jellies, gold by the way, not octopus. Yeah, yeah, yeah, um. And that that's all just for marketing and making things. It really is. You know. They have like the World's most Expensive Sunday or the World's most expensive tells always got gold flakes. It does so much so that I think we've talked

about this. They have another category for world's most expensive non gold because it's like any smoke, can you know, spit out a hot dog and relish and then put gold flakes on and be like World's expensive hot dog and that doesn't really you know, So then that means some of the gold that we've lost that has been pooped out. Yeah. So that's sad, is it. I think so, since it's you know, so limited and supply and bad for the environment to get well, I guess we should

talk about that. Yeah, we probably should, because I was very surprised. I mean, I've heard that gold was bad for the environment, but I didn't realize this. You want to you want to tell one of the facts of the podcast. Yes, it is like most mining operations, um, not great for the environment. In order to get just one ounce of gold, you have to get out two and fifty tons of the rock and ore and a lot of times um well of course, just the cyanide,

which is never great when you're introducing those kind of chemicals. No, and apparently they take this affluent, right, yeah, refluent and they dump it out in the ocean, which probably affects OCTOPI. Yeah, it's like, hey, here's a bunch of cyanide water, and I'm sure the ocean will eventually like even things out, But for that local area where it gets dumped, that can't be good. Of course not. And that's why there's a group, a nonprofit called Earthworks that runs a campaign

called no Dirty Gold. So I imagine if you have a gold wedding band and a blood diamond on your finger, then uh, you just like you're that's a double whammy's hatrick? Yeah? That well, now hatrick could be three, so not in this not in this case. Okay, that's as good as you can get, as bad as it gets. So we should talk a little bit about gold. Although I think we should do a full podcast in the gold standard at some point. I know we've touched at some point,

let's do it. But um, the gold standard was, wasn't it like, uh, every dollar amount like was that you could print, there was a certain amount of gold that had to be in reserve that matched that. Is that what it was, Yes, exactly, And if you had a bunch, if you had enough money, you could go up to you know, the Federal Deservance say I want to catch this money out for gold, and they had to give it to you by federal law. And that was from

nineteen hundred to nineteen seventy one. When didn't we just start pretty more money than gold and said we should abandon the gold standard? Yea, And I think when you detach your currency from gold becomes a fiat currency right to the whims of the market. I seem to remember discussing this sum in one of our econ podcasts way back when, maybe even audiobook How the Economy Work. Uh, the super stuff got into the economy, that's what it's called. Um,

that was a good one. Um. So two thirty six tons of gold are uh being so called hoarded by people in governments. Um, is that all two six tons? Yeah, it seemed like if if there was still of the hundred and sixty one thousand tons. Yeah, if that doesn't seem like much, But it doesn't. It's a lot of jewelry being more. Yeah. But um, they think there's actually gold out and outer space, you know, and some of these big asteroids flying by that are chuck full of

minerals and other metals. Um. There was a near Earth asteroid rendezvous spacecraft passed close enough to the asteroid arrows to actually send back data and um, they think the arrows might have as much as twenty billion tons of gold, which would probably really drop the value of gold here on Earth if anyone ever got their hands on that. How many How do you go about capturing an asteroid? I wonder we've we did a podcast on asteroid minding.

Remember is that the same thing? Okay, that's what they would do. Well, I retreat, Then we should just do that. I could do that. Senders will us up with a lasso, a golden lasso riding a jackalope and attach it to the jackalobes tale and ride it back to Earth. You got anything else? I don't, Well, that's uh oh, I have one more thing I want to recommend. Um Harris didn't mention this. One of the other really bad environmental impacts of gold is illegal gold mining. Apparently, um Guiana

has a lot of illegal gold mining. And one of the things that you if you're an illegal underground gold miner, you're not going through this elaborate extraction and refining process. You are basically taking your ore in. You're refining or extracting on site using mercury. Mercury is what they use. So there's not only a lot of like illegal, horrible for the environment gold mining going on, there's also a lot of mercury mining and a lot of mercury like runoff.

So there's mercury poisoning all over Guiana right now. And there's a really great article may have one appealed to I found it puels or dot org, but it was originally in Harper's That's where I read it. Gold Guns and guaren Pierros. That is g A R I M P E I R O S. And it's by Damon Tabor. Good stuff, awesome. Article is so engrossing, one of those that makes you want to like not ever use gold

for anything. Uh, it has that effect a little bit, but it's it's more just completely fascinating, like you can't believe that people are doing this. Yeah, and child labor two, right, isn't that a big problem? I think that's part of it, but more um, it's just you are you really risk death in these like called wildcat camps, these illegal gold mining operations, because I mean if some in the mercury in the guns, and you know, people staking other people's claims,

bad bad news. So there you can gold gold. If you want to learn more about gold, you can type that words into the handy search bar at how stuff works dot com. And since I said that, it's time for a listener mail Josh, I'm gonna call this the ten Commandments of Chuck and Josh, although there's only eight. Um and this is from Professor Tom uh, guys, I teach a communications course at an area of community college

and UH and in universities. I often recommend your podcast in my classes, especially to students that seem to love learning but may have not been encouraged by family, your friends. UM, I'm hoping that they may pick up a few important life lessons from you guys, as well as interesting guys. Here a few life lesson highlights that I think you guys display. Number one, normal guys can talk about something other than sports. It's true, I don't know sports. Number two.

Good presentations begin with an attention getting introduction. Josh will tell you this is sometimes easier said, been done. Yes, that's absolutely true. Um, if you don't know something, UH, look it up. And if you're looking it up on the internet, check more than one source. Life lessons this this this guy is really paying attention to what we're doing. Yes,

learning involves mistakes. Number four. Take a shot at pronouncing new word to get wrong, venture I guess, share a new hypothesis, then invite feedback, which is the important part. Karen Pierro's number five. You don't have to make fun of people to be funny. If you absolutely must mock someone mock yourself. You're fit at that. Number six, It's okay for guys to have a variety of emotions. There's nothing unmanly with being sensitive or expressing emotions other than anger.

It's even healthy for guys to talk about their emotions. Chuckle. Do you like the new Rosy career? Yeah? Number seven, it's worth the effort to be respectful of others. Sometimes you have to stop yourself before you make an off hand joke, which we do. Um. Sometimes you have to use a term that is more accurate up to date, which we try and do. Sometimes you have to remember what it feels like to be seen as different and see if your language could be more inclusive or encouraging.

Even if only one person in your audience notices the efforts, It's worth it, man, This this is my conscience writing. And number eight, curiosity can last a lifetime. And that was the last one, and he said, guys, there's a lot to be said for teaching by example. Whether you realize it or not, you're doing it every week, and he goes on with an interesting ps from Professor Tom. Yes, if you have my gay male friends and I got talking about your show. We tried to figure out which

type you would be if you'd been born gay. It was unanimous. Chuck is clearly a bear. If you have a gay brother, Chuck, I have a few friends who would like to meet him. I do have a brother, but he's not gay, and he would not be a bear. He's he's prettier than me. He is very pretty. You would actually love my brother. Yeah, he's got great hair.

I thought you guys would know with like knowing that you were being stereotyped by a bunch of gay guys standing around drinking beer at a bar called the Whole Performing Stuff you Should Know podcast analysis, What a world, Thanks Professor Tom. Yeah, that's a great email. That was a great email. We gotta print that one out frame it Um. If you ever do an analysis of stuff you should Know, we want to hear what you've can concluded. Um, you can tweak to us if it's a short conclusion

at s Y s K Podcast. You can join us at Facebook dot com slash Stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email to uh Stuff Podcast at Discovery dot com, and you can join us on our website always the Home of Stuff you Should Know That is stuff you should know dot com. Hey, and don't forget to watch our TV show Science Channel Saturdays. It didn't be in Eastern That's exactly right. Dot com For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it How stuff works? Dot Com Brought to you by the

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