SYSK Selects: How Gold Works

w Chuck Bryant. We're doing this again. It's been a little while. It's been a little while, but it's still stuff you should know that. I thought the name had changed since we took our little Christmas break. Don't you remember our race to the patent office, right, trademarket again at the eleventh hour. Yeah, that was a close one. Boom and they stamped it. Yeah, that'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, it starts with a K. One of them does one of Yes, it's not stuff you should know is because it doesn't make any sense. How are 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, let's here. Today's January. Okay, tomorrow's January

fig Newton Day. It is Big Newton Day. And also on this day in history in the Maya in general, fire is born. Uh. Conquered the Mayan city to Call, which was recently rediscovered, well not recently, it's been rediscovered, the rediscovered a new one. Uh. And Uh. What this did was it enlarged the kingdom of King spear thrower Owl. The Maya's had the best names. That's pretty 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 do. I think that's pretty close. I think you

may have done it, Chuck. 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, spear thrower, owls um empires, tetoto acton right, which sounds pretty close to that word teo quilt, Yeah, which means excrement of the gods. And that's what the

the Aztecs considered gold. It was a holy metal, a very very precious metal in every sense of the word. And by three sev 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 still one to one to twenty. I would give it a solid like sixteen. Wow, thanks, Chuck, higher than

you thought, way higher. I thought I was going to get a ten. That's why I extended it twenty. No, no, no um. So the Egyptians, like I said, they also thought it was divine of the gods, indestructive 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 haven't 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 well, 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 mined from the beginning of 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 that 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, it 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? Where are they getting these like um gold masks and headpieces and stuff of ancient time and then melting them 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 did yours? Oh? Minus, I think titanium. It's very cheap. It's like take too though with that I could. And this is 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 the 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 we've been trying to um hammer out people of like gold for a really long time, let's talk about the history of gold show. 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 and nert and like all these great things you can do with gold 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 dumb, you know. Yeah, alright, so element number seventy nine, let's let's get in it Okay, so uh gold again. Uh was people go back to the Egyptians because they

were the first ones to have like gold fever. But 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 got their hands on it. Yeah.

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

the minting came until the Greeks and Romans. Actually King Crosius, the ruler of ancient Lydia, which is a low civilization, really he was the first to mint in mint gold currencies gold coins um in widespread use in sixty b C. But it was the Greeks and then the Romans that really started to to mint about a hundred years later though. Yeah, so that's that's a pretty nice jump on things he got. Yeah, he was like, hey, I like the 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 they were called, Yeah, they produced millions of them. Those are the ones that they find, like to some farmer and like Devon Shy in England will still find 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 Skon Era. Yeah, I couldn't tell if it was Cicon or Cissan. I bet at Cissan Sisson, I bet it's not. Um a D nine to eleven hundred and this is modern day Peru. They there has been, there's been a lot of gold artifacts found in their region.

So they were usually like crazy for sure. The Peruvians were crazy about 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. Yeah. I think the the English minted their first gold coin in the mid century,

the same with the um Florentine du get. Those were both about the middle of the thirteenth century. That's a popular coin, it was still is is it among collectors? Sure? 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 a 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 only it was 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 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 in 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 this. Treets were lined with

this stuff in the 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. What 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 become 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 Minat Gurai region, Minas Gerais. That looks good, freaky Gervais. Oh, we've been doing it's 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 invent in Brazil, and uh, there was a lot of gold there and they were the largest gold producer by sea. Twenty years. They became the world's largest gold producer because of this area, using of course slave labor painting for

gold in sort of rudim entry ways. It's not good. No, we're not too far removed from that now. No, so onto America, North America, California. The the gold rush, Like the point here is is the 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. Yeah. Um, California gets a lot of press obviously because by the end of the first year of the gold rush, afterwards discovered in eighty 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, Yes, a scary guy. Yeah. When you think of gold rush, you think of California, or I also think of Delonaga. Yeah it was Gei. Yeah, he was the mayor of del on Goo was the one who said there's gold and then our hills. Oh really yeah, it was the mayor of Delanica. I had no idea. There was todd something. I think. Have you

ever panned up there in Delana Huh? I did that when I was a kid. And you know, it's fun if you're a little kid, right, you think you're gonna find a little gold flak and it would be rich. Or you just might find a little gold flak 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 in Philly came from North Carolina or North Kakaaki 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 check a check it out. No,

I didn't make that up. Well I just ran 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 ee exploitation movie. Yeah, it was really good ozploitation. Osploitation. So was that the one where the guys in the personal helicopters, that road Warrior Mad Max. That's road Warrior.

I don't think I've seen Max. 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 know what it was something cool, you know, justin my friend. Yeah, his uncle is that was the toe cutter in Mad Max. Wow is uh? Man, I can't remember his name now, uncle, Uncle toe Cutter. I didn't call him that, that's what it saysn't as Christmas talking. Oh, I can know. He just sends toes every year in a little guard. 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 Ham and Hargraves found golden New South Wales Bam gold brush. A few years later, South Africa steps onto the scene eighteen sixty eight. George Harrison, 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. Yeah, not a hundred, but hundred us for he was famous right about the same time, about a full century. But down South Africa is the leading gold producer in the world. Oh today it is, oh wow, followed by the United States. In the United States, Nevada is the number one gold producer these days. You mean Nevada, Nevada. All right, 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 rudimentary and at times a little more sophisticated. The whole process. Yeah, and it complex 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. Yeah, alright, So what you gotta do there's different.

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 geologists who finds gold today to 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 maybe 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 invisible, 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. That's crazy. That's gross. That was like a college thing. Oh yeah, slager, yegger, maister anything that sounded like vaguely Germanic. That was a college thing, maister brow. Um, So where they find gold and the 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 of valid. I don't know, 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 going to 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 ore, put some explosives in there and blow it 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. Yeah. Um. And then if it's underground, if the load is underground, they'll dig a shaft down to it and add it. They go down to it, and this is a big 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 stops. Then they pack 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 Dlonaga, Georgia, or maybe at a river and Utah, why not why not give a utash 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 or 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 going to sink and collect at the bottom of your little screen that separates everything. And then you've got a little bit of gold hopefully, and then the sixth graders

are all very happy. That's right. Or I imagine if you were a prospector in California back in the day, you could do quite well as a panner. Yeah. You look around and be like, it's mine, Yeah, 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 a pally 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 expose 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 greens, 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, acoustic 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, by right exactly. Um, so when you smell and I thought smelt 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 do a bar. So you're still

nice to have one. Yeah, I'm sure you can be like look at me right, 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 melting. 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 serve 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 pot, 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 to to figure out the purity. But um, they you have about ninety nine 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. No, 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 Reserve Bank? Yeah, supposedly they're in Fort knox Is where they have all the gold. Yeah. Emily was talking last night about that. She's like, well, that be 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 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 a gold and I went, you just wrote die Hard three. She's like, is that what upen 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 think I agree with Emily. Yeah, six billion dollars worth of gold at Fort Knox. No, No, my friend was 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 sixteen hundred and sixty seven dollars and

forty nine cents and ounces. So that means that if Fort Knox holds a hundred and forty seven point three million ounces of gold, the gold is worth two hundred forty five point six billion dollars just sitting there in Fort Knox. Art No, I think gold went up much in the last couple of years because of the economy. Everybody flocked to gold. Demand increased, and so the price did 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 downd turn and the prices are always just gonna skyrocket. You got a couple of and gets in your closet. I have them. I have them strepped on my leg. That's why I

have a limp. That's how you 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 solift pure gold is, they will combine it with other metals to form alloys, and that's why you will get something like white gold, which is gold combined with nickel or silver pladium. Red gold is golden copper. That's pretty and I've never seen red gold on they seen rose gold surely at all my fans. I mean it

has like it has like a just a slight pink hue. Two. It's very pretty stuff. I'm not big into gold, like as far as jewelry, Yeah, I know, I'm with you. Uh. And then of course you have to talk about carrots carritage, 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 it's very odd to me that like cultures, yeah prefer it. So twenty four carrots is percent gold obviously. Yeah.

In in fourteen or twelve carrot is fifty percent cold and about two thirds of all the gold is uh jewelry. Yeah, which makes sense. And what's interesting about the jewelries 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 of nearly two thirds, 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 olver and that it corrodes. 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 in 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. Yeah, conducts h electricity therefore sound better that I just thought it was

like fancy high end or something. Here's a cool stat because they use it so much in electronics and microelectronics, NASA used more than forty kilograms ninety pounds of gold and the construction of the Space Shuttle Columbia. Right, that's pretty cool. Fat electronics, and they used it as a reflective surface. They use gold film. Remember, you can 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 cuddenly, and then I imagine it because it's not reactive, because when things are reactive, especially with cooking, it will make things taste terribly. Yeah, that's true. 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, right, so that you everything doesn't just taste bad 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 you 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. Right as soon as it looks like the little miniature creature, she's like, that's for you, and I pop that in my mouth. I

will probably eat both, especially eat squid. You we won't eat octopus because of Remember one of our friends had ad and 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 her 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 intelligents, like I just can't eat those anymore, which is said 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 the animals just stupid ones. Right, Yeah, I could see that I would be dramatized, 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 Schlagger in certain jellies gold by the way, not octopus. Yeah yeah, yeah, um, And that that's all just for marketing and making things fans. It really is. You know. They have like the World's most Expensive Sunday or the world's most expensive salary 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 old 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 experienceive 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. I guess 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'd 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 there's the cyanide,

which is never great when you're introducing those kind of chemicals. No, and apparently they take this affluent, right yeah, or a fluent and they dump it out in the ocean. Oh really, 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 dumb, 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 against hat trick. Yeah, well no, hatrick could be three. So not in this not in this the 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. Yes. 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 reserve and 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? Yeah? 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 man, how the economy were uh the super stuff guidet to the economy, that's what it's called. Um. That was a good one. Um. So two d thirty six tons of

gold are uh being so called hoarded by people and governments? Um? Is that all twoty 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 worn. Yeah. But um, they think there is 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 I mean, 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 would send Bruce Willis up with a lasso, a golden lasso, riding a jackalope and attach it to the jackalop's tail and ride it back to Earth. You got anything else? No? 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 of peels. I found it on peels or dot org, but it was originally in Harper's that's where I read it, gold Guns and Gumpiers. 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 engross, 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 was part of it. But more um, it's just you are you really risk death in these like they're 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 go, 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

or friends. Um, I'm hoping that they may pick up a few important life lessons from you, guys, as well as interesting facts. Here a few life lesson highlights, So I think you guys, display number one, normal guys can talk about something other than sports. That's true, I know I like sports. Number two. Good presentations begin with an attention getting introduction. Josh. Josh will tell you this is sometimes easier said than done. Yes, that's absolutely correct. 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. If you get it wrong, venture a guest, share a new hypothesis, then invite feedback, which is the important part. Jerem Pierro's number five. If you don't have to make fun of

people to be funny. If you absolutely must mock someone, mock yourself and you're good 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 and to 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 or 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 is my conscience writing. And number eight, curiosity can last a lifetime. And that was the last one, and he said, guy,

there's a lot to be said. We're 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've 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 here. 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. Um, if you ever do analysis of stuff you should Know, we want to hear what you've concluded. Um. You can tweet to us if it's a short inclusion 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 stuff podcast at how stuff Works dot com and as always, joined us at our home on the web. Stuff you Should Know dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radios How

Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H