How Military Snipers Work

be a good sniper. Actually, I think we could reasonably trade off with that, you know, I mean, wouldn't you eventually become envious? Like you know, I'm tired of spotting. I want to pull the trigger. What's it like like, um, Michael Douglas's teenage daughter in traffic thinking about shooting heroin? You know, she starts out snorting it ends up shooting it just because she's around it so much. I imagine the same thing happens to spotters they've been so you

want to kill. I would just be good on the team, you know. I can. I could lay somewhere for hours at a time without moving. I'm sneaking quieter. You're not allowed to be asleep though, Okay, yeah, it would be a problem. So, Chuck, we're talking about military snipers. I have a slight intro for this one. Alight, it's not really an intro. It's just an interesting fact. And I don't even know if it's true, so facts probably the

wrong word. But have you ever heard the old old adage, the old superstition that you're not supposed to light three cigarettes off of one match. I've never heard that. Actually, well, it's a superstition and it is. That's just the real thing, And apparently it has a fairly recent origins World War One. Actually, it's that recent twentieth century um and it was based on the idea that if you're in a trench and you lit a match, you caught the attention of a sniper.

You lit your first cigarette, the sniper takes aim with the second cigarette, and then when you're lighting the third cigarette, sniper fires and that guy is dead. I like that, Yeah, I buy that, until it's bad luck to like three smokes off of winds one match. You know, a lot of those phrase origins are military in nature. When you when you go back and look at him, and I buy that like a wall. Yeah. Yeah, that's Military's Army. Yeah, Silent Scope. Do you ever play that game? No? Is

it a sniper game? Is it good? It's great? I mean it's a stand up arcade game. I prefer the sniper rifle on um Golden Eye yep. And I play the Call of Duty game and it's to have a sniper level where you have to take out this one guy and account for the wind and all that. And it's thrilling to me as a gun hating, peace loving liberal hippie aging hippie. I still love it. Man. There's something about it that's why little boys like playing with guns. Well,

that's why you picked this article. How terry sniper's work this week? It's interesting this is a Chuck Bryant special, meaning that you picked it, not that you wrote it. Um, and uh, this was a Robert Valdi's special. Huh. This guy got to the bottom of it, interviewed an actual former Army ranger sniper. That enhanced it a lot. I think definitely. The guy was anonymous and everything, which is

pretty awesome. Yeah. So, um, let's talk about sniper's chuckers, right, there's a I guess we can we can reveal the end the button of the article, right that where the sniper wants everyone to know, we're not just like these assassins that happens once in a while but very rarely, and we have many, many other jobs. And probably the biggest job that a sniper has is just reconnaissance, like going and gathering information by being behind enemy lines and spying on the enemy for days on end and then

reporting back what they see that. And they're highly highly trained for that. They're not just highly trained for shooting. They're highly trained observers too, yeah, big time. And but if duty calls, they can uh, if they don't have a specific assignment like to take out whatever this general is, they can't have what they call targets of opportunity, And that's when they can really take the wind out of

the sales of a battalion. If all of a sudden the officers standing there, then he's not standing there, or like the communications guy goes down, or later on even some dude doing like you know, guard duty. Yeah, or equipment. We found out later in this article actually and we might as well spoil that. Yeah, this is not even a human that's a material target. Yeah, like blow up their generator or their ammunition bay or just anything that

would wreak havoc agree and make their job harder. And then uh, I guess also because of this effect that the effect that a sniper has is um. It's not just um physical e g. You know, blowing someone away, but it's also mental um and um. It has a real dampening effect on morale. I would imagine the psychological

effect is probably pretty huge. Yeah, because you know, one of the things about snipers is that you don't know they're coming, and you don't see just all of a sudden, the guy next to you is dead, and that's going to shake you, especially like you said, when there's targets of opportunity it happens randomly, or when it's like a very well chosen person like you said, like an officer, somebody who's like, you know, kind of the moral spiritual

leader of the team is suddenly dead. That has a big effect, which makes UM snipers what are called force multipliers, meaning just a one or two people UM can have the effect of a you know, a big platoon you know, charging in and shooting people. Yeah, and I always say band name a lot, but if you're in a heavy metal band. In your name isn't force multiplier, you might want to think about changing it, Yeah, unless it's master

it on. They have a good name, so yes, they they're actually trained to UM, to spy on the enemy and and learn who the officers are, which is you know you've always heard you're not supposed to salute in the field of battle because it's pretty much that giveaway. But these guys are trained to look and stare and

just you can tell. They can tell at least who the higher ranks are by the way they carry themselves, by what they're doing, by the way they're acting, and they're trained to pick these people out and then pick these people off, Chuck. There's a couple of other UM assignments. I guess the sniper can land or positions that they play roles. That's the word I'm looking for. There's the famous Overwatch position where they're like up in a bell tower, clock tower or something like that with a just a

three and sixty degree view of the battlefield. That's just taking people off like um prior to the Nation in Inglorious Bastards, saving Private Ryan because remember he took him out through the scope yeh, I remember only in the movies, but that was pretty cool. Yeah, only in the movies or World War two. Um. And then that that's called the overwatch position. I don't remember if I said they're not.

And then there's a blocking action, which is, um, basically you are again up on a roof, but instead you're helping to defend a position rather than maybe take it. Right. Right, Yeah, you're helping out your buddies that are in the hiding in the farmhouse below, right, because this is World War two. Right, that's exactly right. Do you want to go ahead and reveal the big secret about snipers, the supposed lone gunman? It's not true. It isn't true. Have you've seen the

movie Shooter? Did you see that with Marky Mark? No, I hate him. I don't hate him. No, I don't, I I don't. I liked him in um three Kings. Yeah. Yeah, I haven't seen The Boxer yet, but I'm sure i'll like it. The Fighter the same thing, uh, and I have. Uh. Well, yeah, well, Shooter is actually I had very low expectations and ended up being a pretty decent movie. And um it is buoyed by the great leave on Helm of the band

my favorite group ever. He's an actor in that. I thought Tom Berenger was it, No, No, No, no different movie. I think that might have been called Sniper. Tom Berenger wasn't in that movie. So Leave Leave On Helm was the He's the old timer who who apparently had something to do with the Kennedy assassination too. Huh oh yeah, man, he's been in lots of movies. Boogie Knights loved him

in Boogie Knights. He was awesome in that movie. Okay, okay, alright. Yes, snipers working teams always, They never ever ever go alone. It's not the way that military sniper units act. Yea. They are, um so much so that their sniper rifles are considered crew served weapons, like a you know, one of those heavy machine and it's like belt fed bullets. Yeah, it takes a defeat it bullets and one guy to

shoot it. That's a crew served um A weapon. Yeah, obviously, UM so is a sniper rifle, not because it takes two people to shoot it, but because it takes two people to shoot it accurately, which is the whole point it is. And uh a spotter is uh from what we gather sort of a sniper in training. Um, you will act as a spotter and the hopes that one day you will actually be the sniper and lead your own team and the sniper. I mean we're calling it a team. It's two dudes, the sniper team. I'm sorry.

The sniper on the team is really the one in charge. They're the one that he's to leave on helms of the band helm. They get the orders, uh from from the higher ups. They determine like the best route to get there, the drop off points, all that stuff, right, And I guess we should go ahead and walk through the process because those are the first two steps. Let's do you determine your drop off point for your objective, which isn't gonna be you know, fifty yards away from

your objective. It's gonna be miles and miles away. Probably, Like a day's walk is a good bed, Yeah, you're gonna spend a day walk in there. You want to get a good setup position and and verify that you can camouflage that spot. Like, yeah, you're always thinking ahead. When you're on your belly and you're you want to move to your second position. You don't just say all right, that looks decent over there, You've got to look at everything around it, what's in your way to get there,

because you're gonna be belly crawling. And then when you get there, what you can use to camouflage yourself. Uh, they're gonna establish an escape route very important, and a fallback position in case you get separated from your buddy. And then you gotta locate your target, grab the gun and get in position, right and um, getting in position after you locate the target is probably not what snipers do. They probably get in position and then locate the target.

Would say, you know, if they're shooting somebody's specific, like maybe they arrive at the location of where they're you know, going to be shooting the person or whatever. But you're going to sit there, possibly for days on end. And by sid I mean late flat on your stomach. What is that prone or supine? I think prone? Prone, I

think curses. So the spotter is going to be on the ground right next to and slightly behind you, basically trying to line up their spotter scope, which is way more powerful even than the rifle scope, as close to the barrel of the gun as possible. Yeah, in the same line as it and basically say okay, I've got this guy and he is, um a thousand meters away. Yeah, the wind is blowing at like six knots from the northeast, it's sixty five degrees, it's got a barometric pressure and

a temperature of this humidity level is this? So you'd make a great spotter. See all that. So all that comes into consideration when you're trying to you know, you're shooting oftentimes from a thousand yards away. Yeah, a thousand yards. Well, remember, um, I think to become a sniper for Delta Force, remember like it was yards minimum you had to you had to have like eight or nine or nine accuracy from yards. We talked about it. That was a while ago though.

So the sniper, how do they This was a cool thing because I saw it on YouTube. This thing creates a vapor trail the bullet does. Yeah, the spotters not just you know watching. And also we should we should say that if you're there for days on end, um, the spotter and the sniper will probably trade off spot or duty just so one can get rest or something like that. And then exactly, um, but yes, when the

time finally comes and the shot is to be taken. Um, the spotter watches to make sure that the sniper hit the target. And like you're saying, a bullet, the bullets that they're firing out of these fifty caliber guns are seven point six too. Yeah, that's a big bullet. Those are the ones that look like missiles. They move through the air um in such a way that they create

a vapor trail. And the army ranger who was interviewed for this article says, like it it looks you can see through it, but it's distorted air, which I'd take to mean like the matrix. That's exactly what it looks like. Oh, you've seen it, well, it's on YouTube. Yeah you can see. I mean you gotta look, but you can see it, and it looks like the matrix thing and all the other movies that copied it is like a hugely exaggerated obviously,

but it sort of looks like that. It looks like, uh, the ABYSS, the little blob from the ABYSS traveling through the air, cavitating the air? Is that the word I think? So? Um so yeah, then the spotter says, you missed. That doesn't happen very often. No, it doesn't um. But if it does happen, these botter says, Okay, we need to move it this way a little bit. Yeah, maybe down a little probably uses more specific jargon than that, maybe down a little, and then another SHOT's taken and then

another shot. Um. And the spotter is also going to be the one who's carrying, like, um, something like an M six teen or an M four some other assault rifle. Because if somebody comes up on you, as anyone who has ever played any video game when you're in hand to hand combat or close combat, uh, this sniper rifle is the worst weapon to have. Of all, you want the automatic assault rifle. That's what you want. And that's

me in those games. I'm the one turning around fumbling trying to reload while the guy's dispatching the face inter shooting me exactly. And the relationship between these two guys is obviously very key because they're spending hours and days and days at a time with each other in very close quiet quarters. Trust is huge, obviously because their lives depend on each other and they usually don't have a

lot of support from their unit. They're out there alone protecting their unit and their unit and platoon is depending on them. If you screw up, a lot of times your platoon is is not in good shape afterwards. So very high pressure job, right, they're doing recon or they're doing um, spearhead demoralization through selective assassination something like that. Right.

Um so yeah, they're they're like if the snipers out there, probably shortly after a platoon is going to be on their heels and the sniper has to relay whatever information he's taking in. Um so yeah, if he screws up, it can be problematic. Sure, Um you want to talk about the rifles. Yeah, they don't just pull a rifle off with shelf at Walmart and and go hide in the woods, although some guys have. Remember Seemo Hia who

seem O Hia the White Death. Oh yeah, yeah, well sure he had his plain old bolt action hunting hunting rifle. Any from five cool with it? Uh These days, Josh, it's a little more uh specialized than that. Um there a lot of times it's called an M fourteen with match grade upgrades. And match grade means that some professional gunsmith is hone this thing to within a good centimeter. You like that of accuracy? You were you were waiting for a better reaction than that. I didn't know if

you thought that was a real word. So I think match grade means like, um, like a shooting match like competition grade. Yeah, probably because they use very similar rifles for competition shooting. Yeah, where they're hollowed out. Yeah, that's Olympic. I never understood that. I love it though. The guys who ski and shoot, yeah, what's the point of that, I don't know. I like it. They should add like they should snowboard and shoot and just do all sorts of things. You go up to half fife, then you

stop and you take a couple of shots. Yeah, kite sailing and shooting. Yeah, And I'm sure there's some great history to that, but I don't know it. So match grade guns and also match grade handmade ammunition. So I mean it's all just like very detailed that like that's hollowed out. It's light. It's usually fiberglass because you don't want the wood to warp, and UM ends up being extremely accurate. The barrel doesn't touch the rest of the gun.

This is cool. The free floating barrel. It touches as little as possible so that the initial explosion from the bullet being fired causing the recoil in the barrel that it doesn't kick as much, and just the rifles accuracy yeah, disadjusted plus move maladjust to any kind of movements. Ben Yeah, which is why they use more often than not bolt action rifles, which had disadvantages in that you have to load a single round, shoot it, and then unload that shell,

reload another round. But um, their motto was one shot, one kill, so one shot is usually all you need. But they do sometimes use the semi automatic rifles, but which you have there are shells flying out of the gun, which is not very smart. Right. Either way, you're gonna be detected with movement possibly like when you do the bolt action that's moving, that flying shell that's moving. But the automatic or semi automatic rifles have more moving parts

than a BOWLT action. Checkers tend to prefer bowlt action. Yeah, although they said they can their shoot it's their choice. Shooters preference, Yeah, sniper's sniper's choice between eight and fifteen grand. These things costs. Yeah, it's kind of pricey, but they look really cool. Yeah, they do. Uh do we talk about the scope, No, we haven't yet. I mean, we talked about how the the spotter has a superior scope. But yeah, the scope on the sniper rifle usually has

about a ten time magnification power. It's just you know, telescope, a high powered telescope, mini telescope sorry, with um crosshairs on it. Called redicules, right, is that what it has pronounced? A targeting ridicule, ridiculation ridicule. I didn't know how it was pronounced. I kept saying articular, and then I thought it was ridicule. Uh, what you're looking at when you're aiming though, Like we said, there's all sorts of variances in the wind and everything will change the path of

your bullet. But um, you're looking at the point of aim and the point of impact, and if you're firing from six yards away, it's not gonna be what you're aiming at. And this is accurate even in that Call of Duty game, like you aim at the dude's head and then you end up shooting like three ft to the right of them, and every one goes, what was that? And then it's over? What's over? Well, that little round is over. If you don't get the guy, you're done.

You can't get off at a second shot. What happens. I think you gotta start over so they don't come at you or anything. No, no, they come at you and then you start over eventually. But so you have to aim over aim a lot of times because of things like gravity. And that was the fact of the

show to me. The gravity one. If you drop a bullet, If you aim a gun a sniper rifle and then shoot it level to the ground and you drop a bullet at the same height as the barrel, they're both gonna hit the ground at the same time because of gravity. That's that's the fact of the show for sure. Um, Chuck. What you're talking about can be adjusted for in the scope through the ballistic drop compensator, which is a little dial so you don't have to go redo your whole

scope settings and all that. You can just adjust it up or down or left or right just a little bit to compensate for gravity. And um. The other like wind and that's what you see him doing. Yeah, they're like, you know, wind it two nots you seed Markey, Mark, go click, that's all you need to do. That's it.

One little click, gun shoots itself, not true. Um. And then there's also these things called Gillie suits, which, um, anytime you see a sniper or you don't see a sniper, and then all of a sudden he stands up from the leaves and brush and all that in front of you and he's wearing what looks like leaves and brush. That's called the Gillie suit, which has a pretty cool

little history to it. I like it. Go ahead. So gillies um were the Irish game wardens Scottish game wardens from days of your uh, and basically their job was to keep an eye on the landowners um game right while game that he liked to hunt um and the gilly once in a while would have to basically catch a deer or something like that, say bring it back to the castle for the landowner to hunt in a mock hunt and kill the deer. But he couldn't just kill the deer and bring it. He had to bring

it alive. So this meant days of stalking a deer, staying completely silent, camouflaging himself with stuff found in the in the local environment, and then waiting for a deer to walk by in jumping on it, grabbing it. Can you imagine these dudes and then dragging it back to

the castle for this mock hunt. Yeah, so think about how despised the nobleman must have been for his little mock hunt in between glasses of sherry of a deer that the Gillie caught with his bare hands after waiting two days for it to walk past him, you know, and then they just killed the deer like when they bring it in because like his gout and his flaring up so you can't even get out of his chair. So yeah, it's like early internet hunting. Oh yeah, God.

They outlawed that pretty quickly, thank goodness, because it was awful. I almost had to write an article on that. Did you get out of it? Yeah? I refused. I said, you know what, I'm not even gonna put this out there as something that exists. And they went, you know what, you may be right on this one. And then like two weeks later they outlawed it controlling the flow of information. Huh no, you know nice. I didn't want I didn't

want it happening. Yes, I stopped internet hunting single. So the gilly suit is what they call what the sniper wears now because of that cool history, and it's usually like really reinforced on your torso because you're gonna be crawling a lot, probably padded to help you out with comfort, and you know it's not like you're really comfortable. It's

padded for comfort. Padded for comfort, and you've got a netting all over you so you can work in twigs like what you don't want our straight lines like the antenna from your radio or the muzzle of your gun, because nature didn't have straight lines like that, right, So they make gilly suits for their guns. Yeah, um, can't you see them having like it's the Special Ops barracks, like gilly suit contests, like who's got the best one? Oh, that's elaborate, you know. Yeah, yeah, I can't believe you

work that rock into it well. And when I envisioned that SIT's that skit they like are putting the medal around the winter and then a guy just rises up behind him that they're never He comes off with the back of his Gillie suit and steals his metal. Uh we'll speak King of Special Ops. These are Special Ops teams and uh Sniper teams are all a part of Special Operations and they train all the time. If they're

not training specifically for a mission. They're studying the mission, and their goal is to know every single thing about everybody on that mission and memorize it, because if you're caught, you don't want to have paper saying these are signals, these are call signs or whatever, because I could just think, you know, like being caught with the paper like this is Corporal Todd Thompson's call sign ACE, you know, and then the enemies like this, who's this Todd Thompson? Why

do you get ACE? That's the coolest one, right, because he's the best one. Uh. The U S m C is known even though all military branches have sniper teams and schools, the Marines are obviously because they're the Marines. They have what's known as the best school, the U s m C. Scout Sniper School in the Marines actually may have been the origin of the snipers in the U.

S military. Yeah, the leather necks, the original guys who used to ride around in the eighteenth century on ships were um often tasked with basically sniping from crow's nests um other people on other ships during battles. I don't think I knew what the leather necks were. Yeah, their Marines, Well, I knew that, but I didn't know that it went back that far. Yeah, nine eighteenth century. Well back then they actually had next made of leather, right, that's pretty

cool human leather. Um, it is the best school, like I said, and if you get in, even fewer graduate because it's not just about being a good shooter. You have to have the right temperament. You have to be calm and not like some hot head. You have to have confidence in your decisions, confidence in your in your spot or yeah as this as this um this niper who was interviewed for the article said he basically like, you can't just be calling back like can I shoot

this guy? Or you have to make the decision and make the right decision and confidence in your decision so that you can say I am going to shoot this guy. It works well alone and their little report card growing up was probably a key for a future sniper. So it's a two month course, Josh. Here at the Marine Corps, Uh, they train in three main um disciplines marksmanship obviously, observation, and stalking. Yeah, and let's talk about can we talk

about the games? I think we should like the Kim's game. Yeah, I didn't see what that stood for I don't know why they made it all caps because it's Um. It's named after a Rudyard Tippling book Kim, So it's not a boy's name, UM. And he was an Irish orphan who grew up in India, was trained in intelligence and in the book they would give him um trades of like stones and gems and give him a minute to look at it and then take it away and say what did you just So that's what the Kim's game is.

It's very similar to that. It's based on that. Well, go ahead, explain it. Well. It teaches observational skills, right and basically um with this game, Uh, the guys in sniper School are presented a tray and it has you know, fifteen twenty things on it, and they're told to look at it for you know, thirty seconds or a minute or something. Then the trays removed and they say what

did you see? And say there was a paper clip? Right, You can't say well, there's a paper clip because they want to leave it to the guys who are analyzing the intelligence you're sending back to determine what it was you saw. So you say, well, I saw a piece of wire bent around into um an oval three times or something like that. Ever slip and you can just

say paper clip. But and then as as school goes along, the training, this observational training through the Kim's game apparently gets more and more difficult, where they show you something in the morning, then you go out and practice all day, and then at night they say, write down what you saw this morning. Yeah, and they'll add more things and give you less time to look at it to begin with, Because when I first read it, I was like, that's not too hard. It's like a wine cork and a

paper clip and uh and a CB radio done. But then as it gets harder, I was like, oh, there's a method here, right, and not being able to call something what you know it is like, how would you describe a wine cork? I would say I have thousands of these around my home. Lungs are coated with the dust of them. I could say it's a cork in a spherical cork with a red stain on one end. It would be tubular, wouldn't it tubular? It wouldn't be spherical,

it wouldn't be conical. And then right now there's someone standing behind it's the gun. Yeah, exactly, we'd be the worst sniper team ever. Actually. Um. And then another another good game I guess you could call it is how they trained to stalk, right, Yeah, that is really cool. So stalking is moving from say your drop zone or wherever, to the place where you're going to set up without

being identified, without being seen or noticed. But you have to make your way there and there may or may not be people watching you, are able to see you, but you need to get to the point you need to get to. So you have to practice that. That's called stalking, and they practice it by basically saying, Okay,

here's a nice grassy field. Um, you guys stay here, and we're gonna put two people a thousand meters away and we're going to look for you, and you need to make it within a hundred and fifty meters of us without us seeing you. And they're looking for you. Not only that, they have two people out there in the field looking for you walking around. So apparently that's like real life on hyper drive that never ever would happen.

But I guess the idea is if you can pass that, then you know you'll be fine out in the field. It's like we're an ankle, which makes sense. And then they have to take a shot from the hundred and fifty meters with blanks, obviously, and then they have to

move from that position. They have to take the shot without being detected, and then move from that position to another position and take another shot without being detected, which apparently you very rarely, if ever moved to another position and take a second shot, and you definitely are never within a hundred and fifty of your target. So they overtrain, which is a good thing. Another little game they play

is is just strictly observational from a distance. They will hide things in a field, very small things like a ballpoint pin hanging from a little shrubbery brush, and you get out there with your spot or with your scope and binoculars and you gotta pick this stuff out. And basically just canvas, you know, he said that. The guy

in here said. You just block off one little, small, tiny block at a time, stare at it through your binoculars for five minutes, then move on to the next little block until you find something and chuck you were talking about when they were um with gravity is one of the biggest problems for accuracy, right well, there's there's a a unit of measurement that snipers use to adjust for these variables. It's called minute of angle m o

A and UM. Apparently one point zero four seven inches UM for every hundred yards is the the the inaccuracy that's going to develop as the bullet travels. Right. Yeah, So if you're a thousand yards away like they say you can be, or more, you could potentially be off by ten inches, which means you could potentially miss your target altogether unless you account for wind and humidity and barometric pressure and temperature, the temperatures. I thought this was

very interesting. Cold air is denser, which means it creates more drag, right, which is pretty cool. You have to account for that UM and then the other one UM. Depending on your distance. UM. Someone may or may not hear you. If you're six hundred yards away or more, potentially you are not going to even hear that little sonic boom crack because the bullet leaves the muzzle at the speed of sound. You won't even hear that. So you could be eight hundreds away and dudes could be

standing there. And that's when you see in the movie that they see the little buff of dirt behind them and they're just like what was that? Yeah? So six is where the seven point six two millimeter round is dragged into sub sonic speed, meaning it travels less than the speed of sound, meaning it makes a sound where anything over that is like you said, suddenly there's just bullets appearing. And the guy who was interviewed from this head a great quote. He said, Um, you can basically

just take shots at somebody. And the guy who has interviewed for this article had this great quote. He said, if you're shooting at a target eight a thousand meters out, you could be shooting at that person all day long and they don't even know they're being shot at. Why are these oil cans exploding he hates them? Uh, Yeah, that's pretty cool. And that's a very good place to end because the goal of the snipers to not get caught, so they want to get as far away as they

can from the target while still being within an accurate range. Done. Done, Do you got anything else? I got nothing else? Military snipers if you were expecting like the DC sniper or um Charles what was his name, Whitman, Yes, Uh, they're not military snipers. Although Charles Whitman was in the military. He's in the Marines, remember in full metal jacket. Yeah it wasn't Oswald too, or no, yeah, he's a marine too. Do you have it? Yea, I think they were both

sharpshooters too. Do you have it? Well, okay, those are okay, Well they made an appearance then all right, okay. If you want to know more about snipers, Um, you should type in snipers in the handy search bar how stuff works dot Com and has some cool flash games inside of it and very cool links and cool pictures and if you're into that kind of thing, you're gonna love this article that's Snipers in the search bar at how

stuff works dot Com. Since I said that, it's time for listener mail, Josh, I'm gonna call this from a fan with MS multiple score rosis. I have a very very good friend of mine that has MS and it was afflicted with it later in life and is late twenties. I believe it's very sad, but so she writes, Um, Josh and Chuck, perhaps I could tell you about the fact that I've been living with MS for over twenty two years and I found it a nonprofit called soft

Serve matters that will empower people with chronic analysis. But maybe I should leave with I was listening to is Bhuton onto something with their gross national and happiness because I feel the need to tell you I believe that some people are just born with the happy gene. I am living proof of that, having started it in kindergarten um.

In spite of the fact that I have a decreasing have had decreasing abilities since my twentieth birthday, and a six figured debt that my husband and I accrued while getting our advanced degrees, I am uber happy. Or maybe it's just a denial to all of these challenges. My default is happy, happy, joy joy. I made that reference just to amuse you. Uh. It may have something to do with the fact that I come from a family of armchair comedians and married a man based on his

humor alone. Well not really, but doesn't that sound good? We have a nine year old who is freaking hysterical. Nature or nurture, I ask. I'll go with nature since it supports my theory, though clearly nurture as a major player. So while I figure out the approach to email you guys, let me just say I love your work. And for the administrative section of this email, I employ to check

out these links. And she has a blog that I would like to pug and it is M S l O L dot WordPress dot com and that is Amy G and Amy. Like I said, my really good friend Billy has MS. So it's very uh dear to my heart cause and anything we can do to help you spread the word, just email us back and we'll do so cool. That was a good one, Chuck, Thank you, Thank you Amy, thanks for being an armchair comedian yourself. Yeah. Yeah, okay, Um, and I guess thanks to your whole family for that

really husband good. Yeah. If you find something funny that other people may not, we love that stuff and we want to hear about it, Um, send us an email with it to Stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow, brought to you by the rein into two thousand twelve. Camry, It's ready, are you