Octopus, Octopi, Octopod, Octopuses

waste stuff. But he turned forty yesterday, so we went out at a nice dinner and then you know, went out afterwards. Italian. Yeah, Italian. Can you create a little hazardous waste of our own? It's gross, it is I'm sorry. Um, well, I'm glad you made it in. I'm here, man, I'm Ready're sitting up right, as I said, and seated across from me. Yeah. So I'm gonna tell you a story, Chuck, please try not to fall asleep. Okay, there's an octopus that you probably have never heard of because he got

almost no press coverage whatsoever. But his name is Paul. You have, yeah, the World Cup octopus. Okay, Well, I forget you do lots of research most people haven't heard of this octopus. Right. His name is Paul, and he lives in the Sea Life Center in Germany, a German town that I am not familiar with. And um, he had a tendency, believe it or not, to pick the winner of the eight final World Cup matches in two thousand. Yeah, I didn't heed like pick up whatever flag he picked

up or something. No, it was they would present him with two boxes with the muscle in each box and you know one box that would have like you know who's playing who? And he ate the muscle out of the right box every single time. In my mind's eye, he waved a little I just totally created that or he sucked it up in his beak because octopi have beaks, and I'm going to say octopi. I think probably most of this pod has, but I'm gonna go with octopuses.

Octopuses is a way to go. You could also say octopods. Um, there are at least three plural forms of octopus, so you could say cactuses. I guess cactipods maybe. Yeah. I don't think the pods would transfer over because octopi are cephalopods, right, which means head foot. It means head foot, literally means head footed, and that means when you look at an octopus and all you see is a head and arms. And that's why. That's whether whether you get that name

all right? And um it turns out that the area of its eyes are not its head. Chuck. Oh, really, as far as I understand, what's that? That the the big part that you would think is its head, it's its mantle. Okay, we're getting ahead of ourselves. So you

want to classify this thing a little better. Yes, we're going to classify it um as the phylum mollusca um with snails and slugs and clams and things like that, and um in the ass of Cephalopoda, which along with their buddies the squid, and like nautilus and things like that. But they don't have um like an outer shell like a lot of moloks too, No, or an inner shell, which apparently squid have as well. And we'll we'll get

to that though, and why. But what they lack in you know, what they lack in um shellness, they make up for in spunk and pluckiness. Because they are probably the most interesting mollusks of all. Dude, octopuses are extremely fascinating. Then that's why I picked him. We don't do like And this one is on cats. I mean, I love cats, but they're not fascinating. Cat lowers are gonna hate you, um, but octopuses are definitely fascinating endlessly to me at least.

And uh, since you mentioned the mail, I guess we should talk about that. Well. Yeah, if you look at an octopus, you see the eyes, and there right behind the eyes, it looks like its head. Now, the eyes are actually attached to the head. And what's behind is called the mantle. Yeah, and the mantle is where all of its internal organs are stuffed in. Everything is in that bulbous sack, the anus, the gonad. Uh, the posterior salivary glandges giggled when you said anus and go next.

Good lord. Sometimes I lets walk past her in the hall and just be like anus, go nad until start to doing so. Everything's up in there, right, yeah, digestive gland right, the anus, the gonad. Right, she's still laughing. And the mantle is like an extremely strong muscle. And part of the reason for that is as to protect all those organs, obviously, and it also helps with um respiration. And there's also a funnel. This is awesome too that um, we will get to you later. Yeah, it's gonna come

up here there for funnel. If this for Peewee's Playhouse, that would be the secret word of the day. Yeah, well let's just make it that, okay. And also they call that a siphon. And then, like you said, we'll explain what that does, but we should talk about we should just go and lead off, I think with the most fascinating part of an octopus to me is the camouflaging abilities. Yeah. I was gonna say it's blood was blue. Well, you know what, go ahead and say that. That's good.

That's pretty cool. Blue blood. Alright, Well, your blood is red as his mind, as is all of our listeners, because we're American, that's right. Um, And we're not wealthy, but um octopi apparently are because they have blue blood. And the reason our blood is red is because we have an iron um iron containing protein called hemoglobin that

binds oxygen together in a bloodstream for more efficient delivery. Right, Octopi have blue blood because they have a protein in their blood called um hemocyanin, and cyan is another name for blue, and their blood is blue because hemocyanin is uh copper based, right, it's a copper based protein, and I guess that makes the diff It makes all the dif. But that's really interesting because you pointed out something that has to do with one of their most saying features.

It because they have low oxygen levels. They have three hearts, yes, yeah, two pumping pump blood to the gills, right, and then one handles the rest of the body. That's so awesome. It is nature finds a way always like, you know, another heart. Six hundred million years, we're gonna be three hearts. Uh. So that is awesome. But back to what we were saying, which I think is the most awesome, the color changing Well it's not mine. The color changing camouflaging ability of

the octopus. If you've never seen it, go to YouTube and type in octopus color change. Dude, it's unbelievable. There's there's there's there's one. It's like fifteen seconds long where the beginning of the shot you literally are going like, all right, where's the octopus and then it's you know, part of this reef. It shoots off, changes color and like under a second, which it can do and then attaches to another reef and boom, it's that color and

looks exactly like that. Read it's mind blowing. Yeah, and we have no idea how it knows what color to change two right now, we don't know how it knows, but we know how it does, right exactly there. Uh, it's through chromatophores, right, yeah, that's the secret. Okay. So chromatophors are little cells that have like three pigments sacks

in each. It's a very tiny pigment sacks that depending on the muscles surrounding the cell um, whatever color needs to be featured is expanded or contracted, so the other two will be hidden while one is is expanded. And that's a cell as I said, just means it's very very tiny, and the octopus's skin is covered tens of thousands of them, right, and each one is controlled by a different nerve, right. Yeah. And the way they put in the article to understand how that works is pretty good.

I think Jennifer Horton did a great job. It's like if you put a few color section of rubber band and then you stretch it out in an instant, it's gonna look completely different. Color wise, and that contracts and it's gonna be very deep color and that's what it's doing. Bread it's over a larger surface area too. Yeah. But since each crematophores is controlled by its own nerve um, it's own nervous system, right, No, the nervous system controls

each one independently. So it's like the nervous system is going, Okay, you're gonna end in this crematophori right in tens of thousands of them, so you have all these mind boggling different combinations. So the color change can be very It's not just like Okay, I'm going to be blue now, it's it's like I'm going to be speckled like this coral reef that you were just talking. I'm gonna look exactly like whatever I'm next to, or a sandy bottom. And it also doesn't hurt that they have um, what

are they called the little mirror like reflective ritophores. Yes, yeah, they mirror the surrounding environment, so that helps. And then for the texture, they have projections called pope on their skin and they can actually change textures to blend in as well, which is these videos on YouTube. It's insane. It doesn't look like nature should be able to do what these things do in a second and really awesome. At least one researcher UM said that chameleons camouflages hum

Drum by comparison. Have you seen, though, that one chameleon on YouTube with the different colored sunglasses. I think it is. I got the impression that that was a photoshop something. I didn't know that they could change that quickly. But they still got nothing on these octopuses. Okay, so even if it were photoshops, they still learn as good as an octopus, not by a long check those out, um, so chuck. One of the well, the main reason why

they can change colors not so they can be on YouTube. Um, it's so they can evade predators, right yeah, and hunt better and hide for prey and stuff like that. Um. But one of the one of the I guess, one of the characteristics they're most famous for, um is for evading predators is their ink, right yeah. Octopus can blow a bunch of ink in your face. Yeah. And you mentioned the siphon funnel earlier. They use that in conjunction with the ink sact, so they'll spit out some ink.

Which itself would be just like a very concentrated ink blob or yeah, it could be like little globules. Yeah, they'll do that sometimes. Um they I think, what do

they do that too? Yeah? Decoy, But if they want to like evade something, if they're in a major threat mode, they'll squirt out some of the ink and then shoot out a big puff of water from their funnel that they're holding, and all of a sudden that creates the big like James Bond oil slick probably actually would be more like a cloud that you can't deep horizon oilson

it was all octopus that wasn't. The ink though, also contains a trio synaise and that impairs taste and smell so that you not only if you're a predator like your shark, let's say, not only can you not see your you remember the things in the nose of the shark. Yeah, that'll affect that and they'll just get all wacky and they won't know what to do. It starts swimming around in circles and smoking cigarett It's frantically exactly get a

little upset with that. So um, especially with the kind of nervous system that octopuses have to have to um for each chromatophore to be controlled by its own nerve ending um to be able to release in that kind of stuff that this process is that an octopus goes through. It shows that they do have a big central nervous system, but they also have like a pretty decent sized brain

as well. Right, Yeah, and you know, um, before we move on from the disguising thing that the brown octopus, we should point out kind also contorted shape to look like other things. And they think that it chooses what to look like depends depending on what's going on. Like I think the example in the article was um, damsel fish. Yeah, confronted by a damselfish, they'll all of a sudden be like form of sea snake because the damselfish is afraid of the sea snake, and the octopus will look like

a sea snake. It's like, it's crazy. You have seen the se snake video? No, did you watch any white snake videos today? I love white snake though. So, an octopus's brain is um proportionately speaking, in some cases as as big as the mammals um or a bird's. Birds don't have the smallest brains well, and it's definitely the most evolved of the cephalopods for sure. Yes, smartest of a lot from what we can tell it is. And um, again they the nerve endings that we were talking about, UM,

the central nervous system. I keep wanting to say, nerve endings. The central nervous system. UM is separate from the brain. Right, Yeah, that's what they They've learned through studies show that they like what may happen is they operate independently. So the brain will like send the order out to do something and then just kind of take it off at the list, and then each arm has its own nervous system and

it will decide how to accomplish that. Tabs right. Apparently three fifths of the nerves in the octopus's body is in its arms and its tentacles, and there's eight independent nerves systems. Because Chuck tell them how how they figured out that arms have their own system is mean. It sounds very mean. What they did was they severed the nerves and the arms from the other nerves in the bodies and brain, and then they tickled it and then

they found out with some delight. I would imagine that Look, they're still ticklish even though their brain doesn't know this is going on. So that's how they proved it. And these researchers were pretty, I guess a little intrepid because the arms are very powerful. It's almost all muscle um, and they can since they don't have any bone in them, and there's tons of muscle and nerve endings, and they can um do just about anything, including go semi rigid

and bend at a spot like we can bend our arms. Like, yeah, it is very They were talking about in here wrestling sharks, and if you want to also delight yourself, go to YouTube and type in shark battles octopus And this octopus is like camouflage and this shark swims by like a decent size shark, and all of a sudden, this octopus just like leaps and wraps this thing up and and the shark cannot get free. Do you see this? Like massive strong shark like wrestling, and the octopus will not

let it free. So you know, octopuses have a feature that we're going to get to in a minute, um that I find as unsettling as anything, which one the beak. Oh yeah, but first let's talk about the eyes while we're on like the basic physiology of it, right, Yeah, they're kind of like our eyes, right, they're they're actually

better than our eyes. They have eight layers of um of films makeup like their corny, I guess, or what would be our corny and their couge too, because they need to capture more light because it's dark down there. But actually, camera manufacturers figured out that they could basically replicate an octopus's eye, uh cornea for camera lenses, and the actually led to a huge decrease in um the

cost of cameras. Yeah, because before you had to have eight different lenses because lenses blurred, so you had to have eight different lenses to to kind of work out that blur. But that's all. That's pretty big, big camera. And they figured out after replicating octopus eyes that they could do it for a lot cheaper. So by bye octo lens, No, hello octo lens. They still use eight they well know what it's now as an octopus is lens octo lens, So it's good bye octo lens, Hello

octo lens, right exactly. Oh. The other thing too, Josh I found remarkable is you always see octopus. It's kind of like you know, monkey in their way along the bottom very slowly. They can jet like twenty if they need to, which is forty kilometers. Bro, that's really fast, it is. And and remember we were talking about the siphon. That's how they do it. They suck in a bunch of water into the mantel, seal it off, and then blow it out the siphon and they can angle it

and steer themselves that way. Right, Yeah, that's crazy. At the very least, they can shoot in the opposite direction. Add up to twenty through water by the way, yeah, which is this isn't through the air. No, they don't shoot out of the water. Wouldn't that be a weird world if you just looked out in the ocean there octopis jumping out. I remember the first time I saw

the shark breach on the Discovery Channel. It was like mind blowing for me when the shark leaps from the water, completely out of the water, the great white I have not seen that. Yeah, it was one of the It was one of the like money shots for Planet Earth that caught it on like the super slowm camera. It's pretty remarkable. So should we talk about where they hang out their their life, basically their little solitary octopus life. Yeah, and I didn't realize that, although now that I learned it,

it makes sense. Octopuses live um on their own. They pretty much only are around other living octopuses when they mate, and even that's kind of a letdown. Um. But yeah, and they live by themselves in uh den's. Wherever they happen to be living right then is called their den.

And that can be anything from from uh, you know, beneath some rocks to an old jar or something that made it down to the bottom of the floor of the ocean floor if it's a small one obviously, but they can squeeze into some pretty right areas because again they have no bones. Um. But they change location like every couple of weeks, and no one's ever been able to figure out why they do that. Yeah, that's for some reason that struck me as sad. But I don't know.

I just picture like the lonely octopus getting lonely, paranoid octopus getting sick of his den and like moving every two weeks. But maybe just wants to change the scenery, he knows, uh, And octopi generally walk right. Yeah, they use their suckers. Everyone knows about the suckers on the underside of the arm and they helped to propel it a long on the bottom of the ocean. And those little suckers are really, really sensitive. They have ten thousand

neurons apiece. So while they're swimming along and or walking along the ocean, they're also like checking things out with their suckers, like food and stuff like that, or threats. And we should say at this point that we've been talking. We probably should have said this at the beginning. But if you are an octopus nerd um, we've been talking the entire time about the nonfinned octopus insurrate, not the much rarer and less discussed and less studied serrate or

finned octopus. I didn't look up a picture of those you know what they look like either. I feel bad for those guys because they don't No one ever talks about them. Well, they keep to themselves. Yeah, like I'll octopie, So chuck. We've gotten to the point now where the the most unsettling part of any octopus for me emerges,

and that is the beak. It's awesome. Octopus is squishy, boneless, uh, muscular, little weird things have a beak very similar to a parrot's, from the center of the underside of their head where all their legs come together. Yeah, it's in the up inside the mouth, and they don't have standard teeth per se, but they have the beak and they have something called

a radula, which is a barbed tongue. And so basically they'll use the beak to crack a clam open and then they'll use the radula to like scrape out the meat like a little finger to scoop it out. And then the last thing I want you to say, because that's that's really awesome the cell very pepia. Yeah. Yeah, that's like this, um it's a bone. It's it's like a tooth covered organ that they can shoot out from

between the beak, which by the way, is surrounded by lips. Yeah, they can shoot it out and drill into a shell. Like a shell they can't open. They'll just drill into it and suck out. Have you seen Starship? Ah, yeah, you remember the brain worm or the brain but yeah, it's based on the brains. Out to remind you of that. I think it's pretty cool. That they have those just

those little it's like a little Swiss army knife. They're depending on what they want to use or what they need to use, they can just like use whatever tool that's inside their little mouth. And when they come upon pray, most likely what they'll do is they'll wrap their legs. They'll catch it like in a net, and then pull it close to them and and just envelop it completely and just go to town with it on with the

beak right or one of the other tools. The other cool thing too about the salivarry papilla is that or papilla is it peppi or papilla papilla, tortilla tropella. Uh, they secrete that that thing secretes something that erodes the shell. So if it's like a really tough clan to get into, while they're drilling in, it secretes this thing that like erodes the shell as it's digging in to make it easier.

It's just another amazing like evolutionary feet to me, How did you know octopuses were so interesting to select this article? I didn't. I think always thought they were cool looking. And I just happened upon the article and read the first page and it's like, yeah, this is the male pillow octopus. Gotcha, Yeah, we should talk about that. We definitely will. We will talk about that guy with reproduction,

how about that. So first we're gonna talk about being born, and that feeding goes directly into that appropriately enough, because octopuses are masters at metabolizing food. Actually, an octopus, by the time it dies, it will weigh one third of all the food it's ever eaten. It puts food to the use. That well, yeah, and apparently, um, a young octopus grows body weight, increases its body weight five percent daily.

That's crazy. And they don't know a lot about the the little baby octopus, but some of them, they do know, will like kind of float near the ser po says, tiny, tiny little specs and as they grow, they start to fall. And then some of them though, are born uh slightly larger like on the sea floor. But they're like they're on their own once they're born. That's yeah, once the well, let's let's talk of us back it up, reproduction, Chuck, how is that little thing born? So tell tell everybody

about the male pillow octopus. Well, the male pillow octopus is uh, one of the cool things about it is that it's tiny, tiny, tiny, Um. How big is this thing? About a cent a couple of centimeters, a couple of centimeters long, weighs less than a graham the trick and you think, all right, and that's cool. There are small things in the world. I think I've eaten one of those.

The trick is by accident. Okay, never again. Uh. The trick is though they the females of the same species are more than six ft long and way a hundred pounds. There's forty times the size of the male. Yeah. And Jennifer Horton put in a perspective of here, that would be like, um, one of us asking out the um, well, asking out right? We put that in air quotes a woman five times four times, four times as as large as the Statue of Liberty. Proportionally, it's a lot of women. Yeah.

But so you might think, well, how in the world would these things mate if this octopus is so much bigger? What happens in the case of the male pillow octopuses? He will um, he has an arm. All octopuses, and well, all octopus have the arm that contain the sperm. Is that right? Yeah, it's called the heck toe Cautus hectocotalus, and instead of doing what some octopuses do, which is to put that with the woman, they will actually break it off and just say here, just take this and

use it whenever you need it. Please don't hurt me. And then then then they swim away and die. Well, the males actually um die within a couple of months after um reproducing once, so they pull off their hectic. It's like a naturalization class in here. Hector catillus hectic catillus, thank you um, and and giving it to the to

the female, which she just stores in her mantle. Yeah, she keeps it until she's ready to have babies basically, so then she lays the eggs, takes out the sperm arm the little magic wand the hector catillus right um, and then basically just spreads it over the eggs to fertilize them. Or there are some species of octopi that um where the hectic catillus is inserted into the females overduct,

so there is some sort of sexual act. The traditional thing that you think about happened sometimes in before we move on from the little guy though, the little pillow case guy, I'm sorry the little pillow guy, there's no case. He also has been known to rip off the tentacles of a man of war and use it as a sword to protect himself because he's like build up a resistance to the poison. I love this little guy. He's

like the fiercest little beast in the ocean. And what's interesting is he's not supposed to be doing that because that's tool use. Yeah, we there was, actually, um, I think like a couple of months back, there's a big sensation on the internet about an octopus being filmed using coconut shell halves as portable, like story portable habitats. I guess, so we just carried around then every wants while to look around and like get under it. Um, it was

pretty cool. But animals aren't supposed to use tools right now, they're not, but octopie do. Yeah. So, like you said, they'll have the little egg hatch and the female will die as well after hatching the egg, which is really sad. And yes, but she protected the entire time. Yeah, she like blows water over it and keeps it nice and clean, and she might be she might be caring for these eggs for between two to ten months. And she's not eating at all. And then yeah, and then once they

start to hatch, she's out of there. She may not she doesn't die quite then, but she's gone. So they're solitary. She's aside from the moment when they're mating and the moment these eggs hatch, they're on their own, like octopi or solitary animals. Well, and not a very good chance of survival either, right, don't want of them die? Yeah. With the giant Pacific octopus, which can grow up to I think six pounds. Um, yeah, they um, they have a one percent survival rate for going from hatchling to

ten millimeters just a ten millimeters. Yeah, tragic. We need Sally Struthers in here. What else we got, Oh the personality stuff, that's pretty cool. Yeah, well we were talking about them, you know, using tools. They're not supposed to do that because they're cephalopods, so they're supposed to be stupid. They're all, you know, mating and eating and evading. Maybe right,

but octopi kind of buck that trend um among even cephalopods. Yeah, they found some that have some can open jars, have learned to open jars pretty much outside of their tanks. Well that too. They found some that have gotten outside their tanks and like gotten into the food bends. And then they found some that can open jars, some that can work mazes, some that know like to pick a red ball over a white ball, some that can call

the World Cup. Absolutely So. Octopi aren't supposed to have personalities, um, but we have come to realize that they largely do thanks to the work of a marine biologists named Jennifer Mather, right, Yeah, she and Roland Anderson are two biologists that um kind of got the feeling that they might, you know, from seeing all these things in these aquariums, that they might have a personality. And that's kind of a hard thing

to test, but they did. It was the other guy's name, Roland what Roland Anderson Anderson, He was the one who was tending or he worked at the Seattle Aquarium. And he found out that the keeper's name three um species of animals, I think it was otter seals and um their giant pacific octopi. And normally like that, you don't you reserve naming an animal based on his personality, And since octopuses aren't supposed to have personality wanted to know what's going on, so he went and found out, and

he found that um leisure suit Larry. Apparently this is a very um, touchy feely octopus. When the handlers would get in it's its tank, he'd just be all over im like, hey baby, how's that going? Um? And then Emily Dickinson was so shy that she eventually had to be replaced because she just high but behind the artificial barrier, like would never come out and look just like it too, so people didn't even know. And then she wrote poetry

as well, sad poetry, but good stuff. And then there was Lucretia mke Evil, right, and the one destroyed her tank, the interior tank, so she was obviously pretty feisty she was, and apparently they were afraid to get in there with her because again, this giant Pacific octopus, they can grow up six hundred pounds, So if you have a mick

evil one, it's trouble. Well. And once you see this video that wrestling a shark, I would be like, I'm not going anywhere near that thing, right, So they Anderson and Mather decided to come up with some I guess some stimuli I think they opened the cage. They put a brush into the tank see what they would do,

and I can't remember. There was another one. UM. And then they figured out that these these octopus showed nineteen distinct behaviors and they put it into three buckets, right, activity, avoidance, and reactivity. So what happened, well, what happened was they figured out that these these octopus actually were showing personality, like they had person like an octopus would you could say this octopus right here, number eighty nine is going to do this if we do that, but the octopus

in the next hank over, we'll do something different. That's personality and octopus aren't supposed to have that. They also the same group. UM. I kind of looked over the article. It's in the February two thousand seven issue of Natural History. Right, they found that, UM, a couple of octopuses played and they gave him a prescription bottle filled with like half filled with water. A couple of Yeah, they really played.

They got really lethar as We kept that. UM. They would play with it like they were bouncing a ball in their tank. Yeah, these little guys are awesome. The girls, Uh, the other cool thing that they did, the octopuses did in these tests was they wanted to see how they did with problem solving, and so they like wired clam shut so they couldn't because traditionally they'll break the clam open and scoop it out. And they wanted to see if the octopus would just be like, I'll just need

something else. I can't get into this one right. No. Now, what these things did was they said, Okay, I'll get up my drill and even though this is not how we get into clams, I'm gonna drill into this clam. And not only that, but after a few tries, they figured out the best point at the clam to drill in to get the best meat, like right there in the center. They figured all this out. Unbelievable. They're very smart, very smart. You could play cards with an octopus. There's

been octopus gangsters before. Oh yeah, so they're very smart. Sure. I mean you have to have an organized brain, an organized mind to participate in organized crime, I would think, so. Yeah. I hope everyone found this as fascinating as I did. I hope so too. All they have to do is go and type in octopus, changed color and there's just like scores and scores of videos, and you can also read this very comprehensive article that was exciting how octopuses work. Remember,

you can say octopuses octopi. As a matter of fact, I think everybody should walk around and call them octopuses when they're corrected. You could like, no, jerk, you can say octopi octopuses. Can't we all get along? And I found out because these other two jerks told me, right because they some jerk wrote an article, and they'll be like, well, you're a jerk for listening to those two jerks, and it'll just go downhill from there. I wonder what the

octopus's garden is. You know that Beatles song that Ringo sang. No, of course you done. Uh, yeah, I'd like to be under the sea in an octopus's garden, I guess. Oh, is that the name of that song? Yeah? I thought that was from the Little Mermaid soundtrack that's under the sea. Yeah, it's a different song you just said. Oh. Well, if you want to learn more about the octopuses, or the Beatles or the Little Mermaid, I'm pretty sure you could find something about all three of them on our site.

Just use the search bar at how stuff works dot com. And now it is time for listener mail. Yes, Josh Andy and Houston says this, Hey guys, huge fan. After listening to your customs podcast about bringing items from embargoed countries, took me back to some stuff if I did in college. During the Columbus day break in my freshman year at Clarkson University, twenty miles from the U S Canadian border, Buddy and myself decided to go to Montreal for the day.

Once we got there, we bummed around the city and bought some Cuban cigars, which is I guess what you do in Montreal. We decided that if we'd wait until we got back to campus too, and we decided that we'd wait to get back to campus to enjoy them. We pulled off the bands and figured we'd be just fine. We got to the border and the officers asked us why we were in Canada for six hours, and we just said tourism. We were then instructed to pull into a garage so we could get searched. I guess two

college kids hanging out in Montreal. Returning relatively soon through the red flag, we were told to exit the car so the dogs could check it out. We were brought inside and asked if we had any illegal substances, which we quickly handed over the cigars and were terrified. They said we could be charged with willingly smuggling illegal items.

Uh and since they pulled the bands off, that could have charged them with altering illegally altering material with the intent of bringing it into the USA, which is exactly what they did. And uh, he said. In the end, they let him off with a warning and his Buddies cup holder is still broken to this day from the car search. We were so angry at customs that we decided to spite America by blasting Rush the whole way home. It seemed funny at the time, so I guess they

blasted Spirit of Radio and said Bill smoke something. Yeah, that's Andy and Houston think in Houston, Houston, Texas. That is what he said. But he went to school twenty miles from the Canadian border, a little shady. If you asked me, I wonder he's thrown up red flags talk about climate change. Oh well, if you want to shame me for that terrible pun, or you have a story you want to share with us. You've got anything. Let's

plug Atlanta first, Okay, yeah, go ahead. We are having our Atlanta All Star Trivia event, which is hopefully going to kick off a nationwide tour. And it is going to be October that the Five Seasons Brewery West Side. Sometime in the evening. We'll get a time stamp soon. Just show up some time after six po Yeah, I would say it probably right in there. And should we announce our special guests? I think we can now sure? Yeah, dude, we got some three. We got three people verified. We're

very excited about. So go ahead. We've got John Hodgeman. John Hodgman is coming to Atlanta just to play. He's not just going down the block like New York. He's coming down to Atlanta to play with us. Also from Brooklyn, uh, the esteem Joe Randazzo, who is the editor of the Fine Fine Onion newspaper, Yes, America's finest news source. Joe

and John are both coming down. And then as of yesterday, we landed local legend Dave Willis, who is the co creator of Aquitine, Hunger Force and Squidbillies on the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim Absolutely and we are super super psyched that Dave is joining us and we're working on a couple of other people. But if no one else shows up to me, that's like, that's a stud team right now, that is a stud team. We'll see if we can beat everybody. I don't even care about that. I'm just

excited to get those people together. I'm gonna keep my mouth shut about Ohio Virginia presidents. Okay, okay, we missed that one. So if you want to come play trivia with us and Hodgeman and Ran Dazon Willis, Um, we're gonna be hanging out Five Seasons Brewery on Wednesday, Oct It, and just send us an email about whatever you want. How about that? Use your creativity. We have no thesis

for you today. Um, just wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it to stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com. Want more how stuff works, check out our blogs on the house stuff works dot com home page. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you