Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray. It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you should Know? From house Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's all right, this is stuff you should know. Let's get to the intro. Yeah, Jerry said, we're wasting too much time at the beginning. Yeah. She said that she wished she had a third mix so she could ask a question every once in a while so we could get to the intro. Right, So
what you have for lunch? Josh? I have not eaten lunch yet, actually, CenTra. I had a Gara Deli square chocolate caramel in sibs for I had a baby baby ruth. Um. I a granola bar courtesy of Discovery Channel. Thank you, yeah, raising d bar. Um. I had a cherry coke and um, that's healthy. My think that's it I've had forever. Had a green apple and some almonds, yeah, and green tea. You're all about the almonds right now, aren't you. It's a super food that reminds me. I've got to give
you a recipe for roasted almonds. One of my friends told me last night it sounds really good, don't you just roast him? Well, there's some other stuff mixed together, so Alton Brown recipe. He's on the Alton Brown diet. I watched me the Seaweed Salad last night, and I was just like, he's gonna weep at any moment. Jerry is so frustrated, right she is. Her calf muscles are about to burst out of her legs. Well, maybe we should send her to Vegas. No, no, no, I got
something else, Chuck. Yes, did you know that National Gang Week has come and gone? Is there such a thing that just ruined the whole thing? Well, Josh, tell me about National Gang Week? Okay? Um. National Gang Week is when all of the gangs around the United States get together and come up with a clever, pant plan to murder unwitting and innocent people. Some of the crips and the bloods get together. One imagines what the Mongols and the Hell's ain't jewels and M fourteen, M thirteen, I'm
gonna get shot in the head for this again? What is it? I can't remember? Like MS thirteen? Sure, man um. Anyway, all the gangs get together and they come up with the plan that they're all going to perpetrate this year.
This December. It was a baby, a fake baby or possibly a real live baby if they had any female gang members who are willing to give up their infant child for a little while in a baby seat on the side of the road, covered in blood, although uninjured, just just kind of doctored to look like they're bleeding in an effort to trap female motorists. Who would you know, inevitably stop female what female motorists? Yeah, that curse my thick tongue. Um. The drivers by, not to be confused
with the drive by, which is a gang activity. Um, the too to trap female to risks um who would stop and try to, you know, see if the baby's okay, help it? And then out of the bushes comes from gang members who beat and rape and murder her. That sounds to me like an urban legend, Josh too. Two police departments issued warnings about this. Really, this past December is so ridiculous. When pressed about their sources, they both said, you know, actually we can't verify any of this, so
don't pass it along. It was just an idea somebody had, Yeah, you know, the other big gang. When I remember hearing this one myself was if someone flashes their headlights at you and you flash them back, then it's a gang and they'll turn around and follow you and kill you. The one I heard was, um, if they if you see somebody driving without headlights on and you flash them, they'll turn around and kill you. It's part of a
gang initiation. It's so not true. No, it's not. And what we're talking about obviously are urban legends, but more specifically, the article is called how Urban Legends Work. We decided to call this podcast, why do we Believe Urban Legends? Yeah,
you know, yeah, we'll get to that for sure. I mentioned Vegas early on though, because of the very popular old story that the man goes to Vegas and he chats it up with a nice lady at the bar and goes back to the room with her, and then he wakes up dazed and confused in a tub of ice the next day with a side hurting and uh with a note saying call nine one one and clearly his kidneys have been removed. Yeah, upon examination, as kidneys are removed. This actually gave me a moment of terror, chuck,
because if you remember in the organ donation podcast. We talked about a guy named Mohammed Seline Khan who had his kidney removed, and I thought, Um, did we get taken and pass along bad information that tom she right? Turns out Tommy was right. I went and double checked his sources, and I saw a picture of the guy with like the huge sewn up um incision where his kidney was removed. It was an ABC News story. Yeah, yeah,
that was real. That is pretty much fair fiable, right, But that that story was around long before that happened to him. Yeah, And I think we even um postulated that that urban legend gave rise to actual fact, right, Yes, yeah, and that does happen. Sometimes life imitates art and the other way around. Sometimes it's uh, something from a plot of a horror movie, or sometimes an urban legend is inserted into the plot of a horror movie, like the
hook Killer. You want to tell that one? Well, yeah, that one's been around since the nineteen fifties when um teenagers first started going parking, which is when they would drive out to inspiration Point and and make out neck and m The story goes that the they hear the story, it's always some someone who's escaped from an insane asylum
back when you hooked hand hooked hand. And then the they hear someone scratching on the car and they don't do anything and they just leave and they get home later and find that a hook is sticking into like the door handle. Not no, and it's a that and the biggest one, the Vegas kidney one are considered cautionary tales. Right. You have very common hallmark of many urban legends that
they are called cautionary tales, right. And and most cautionary tales also involve some sort of morality twist to him, right, Like in in the most extreme cases, the guy who was in Vegas who was chatting with the girl was actually married and he went back to her hotel room. So the moral of the story is don't cheat on your wife, right, or else something really horrible is going
to happen to you. Uh. In the case of the teenagers in the fifties, um, it was teenagers necking as you put it, old man, um and uh, the the the more, the moral of the story is don't have premarital sex. Right, we'll go park your car and do things like this. You shouldn't know, um nothing right, So the the the What's interesting about this is that urban
legends um reflect our own morality, our own values. Think about that, from the fifties to the when the first folk folklorist um I Guess chronicled that Vegas kidney story. Right in forty years, it went from necking to cheating on your wife, right, And one could argue that our values had expanded like that or devolved to that same degree in that same period of time. It's a good point. Yeah, did you hear a bunch of them when you were
first going to college? When I look back on some of the stories I've passed along as fact, I couldn't be more ashamed I heard these. I never passed them along. You didn't. Even if I didn't pass them along, I believe some of them. Yeah, that there's a couple of
common ones. One is the be careful if you're in a dorm room man with someone you don't know, because you wake up every day and feel all groggy and like you've been taking advantage of for a very good reason, because your roommate was knocking you out and performing indecent acts on you. What you slept not true very much an urban legend, as is the the if your roommate
kills themselves, you get straight. A's that quarter, which I have to say, forms the premise of one of the greatest um Zach Morris movies of all time, what's that Dead Man on Campus? Dude? Did you ever see that? No? That was a great movie. That was the plot though, Yeah, that was the whole plot. He smokes a bong in that movie. It's kind of startling for having grown up on Saved by the Bell? Oh he is that his character name? Is that his real name? Yeah? I don't
remember his real name? Oh? Zach was his character? And Saved by the Bell? Is Zach? A blond guy? Zack? If you're listening, um, send us an email telling us your real name. Now we we'll look it up in a second, So don't bother email. I prefer an email from him. Okay, So um, Chuck, Like, we said that these things kind of tend to reflect our own morality, our own values, and you said they reflect our fears, and that's absolutely true. There's a lot of urban legends.
I would even say the vast majority of them have to do with some sort of fear, right right, And that's one reason we pass them along is because they resonate with us. We have loved ones in our lives. There's people we care about, or at the very least, we're having a good day and we don't want some stranger to fall into some horrible misfortune. So we pass
these along. And if they're passed along to a person who maintains the same kind of fears and maybe the same level of fears and the same um dope believability um, they'll absorb them, fear them, and pass them along themselves. Many times, it's also regionalized, so what maybe if you're in Seattle, it could be a neighborhood in Seattle where this happened. If you're in Atlanta, it could be East Lake.
So they get regionalized, and all of a sudden you think, well, I it may not be true, but I should tell my friends this um on the internet, such as in an email out just in case, because it's happening right here, right and because it's in a place that you can visualize, it has that much greater of an impact on you. Fear. Once again, sure, I mean, if you can visualize your fear, you can fear even more. Yeah, good point. Thanks, that's
gonna be on my tombstone. Should we talk about some some dead giveaways that you're in fact hearing an urban legend and not the real thing. Tots, Uh, it happened to a friend of a friend. That's the classic definite is what they call it. And actually, um, if it happens to a friend of a friend, usually when you pass it along, you're not gonna say a friend of a friend because you just immediately lost credibility right there. Um, so you're going to say it happened to my my friend,
Chuck's friend, or it happened to Chuck's friend. You know, Chuck, it happened to one of his friends who neither one of us have ever met. Right. That that personalizes it a little more, brings it home a little further. Or if I were a real liar, right or really desperate for attention, I would say it happened to Chuck, even though Chuck told me it happened to a friend of his.
But I'm just gonna gloss over that part because I really want you to believe what I'm saying, because if you believe what I'm saying, then I can more easily believe what i'm saying, Right, and people innately want to believe their friends when they hear things, and people innately want to tell a good yarn. So a couple of those together spin a good yarn, and then, uh, is that what the it's called spinning yarn? Put those two together and you get urban legends. Yeah. I actually remember
the first urban legend I heard. And my buddy rad in Montana, my best friend in high school, actually Radford. He uh he told me, I remember this so distinctly about the Eddie Murphy and the elevator. It used to be Reggie Jackson before that. The story is the lady gets on the elevator and it's it's some African American with his large entourage or a dog. It's a dog. It's a dog. Dog. Yeah, it's the crux of it. Okay, well,
and see it changes. That's the hallmark of an urban legend to it changes per story, but the lady will clutch her person fear, and then later on she finds out it's at a hotel that her hotel stay was paid for. It's like, courtesy of Eddie Murphy. We got the best laugh I've had in weeks because we scared you. Oh yeah, that's not how a mom told it. She said that, um, and I think, if I remember correctly, she told me that it had happened to a friend
of hers or someone she works with. Friends. Well, that's what Rat said. I remember it was his mom, someone his mom worked with. Well, in this case, it was Lionel Ritchie or Reggie Jackson. I think the other variation I heard was Reggie Jackson, Lionel Richie. I never heard Eddie Murphy. But he's in there there in like a very nice hotel that allows huge dogs, and the guy has a dog with him, so he's he's even more intimidating, and uh, the the woman is trying to avoid eye contact,
is scared clutching her first, that kind of thing. Um. And then all of a sudden, the guy goes sit lady, and the woman sits down in the elevator and the guys like I was talking to my dog. And then her hotel stay is paid for by Reggie Jackson or Lionel Ritchie or Eddie Murphy or one imagines P Diddy, yeah, or jay Z. But I just rad, if you're listening, you lied to me, buddy, way back when when we were eating turkey sandwiches after school. You lied to me,
I remember distinctly, and I'll never forget it. So, Josh, that was a lot of time to uh, to give up the one dead giveaway friend of a friend. So we'll go through some of these other ones quickly. Actually we already did. There are many variations. That's a dead giveaway. The topic is one that is often on the news or one that people gossip about. Yeah, that's a big one. Like we Got Stuff podcast, got a forwarded email about
UM census workers. Yeah, yeah, the census is about to happen, so now don't open your door unless they have a confidentiality agreement and certain other things. They'll murder you. Yeah, we got it this morning. Okay, was that when that ironic? Yeah, but that actually happened when the census worker we thought was killed, but it turns out it's a suicide. So oftentimes it will spin off of a real news story
and get morphed. Yeah, which is kind of scary because a lot of urban legends have been portrayed as fact in the news the newspapers. Well, that's another reason people believe them is because they trust the news when they ought not, which is sad because really, frankly, you shouldn't. You shouldn't. You should take all news stories with a green as salt. You know, it's just some dude or chick reporting something kind of file a story, just like we do. We get things wrong all the time. Clearly,
why shaking your head? Just people know, we call ourselves out. But it's true. I think it's funny that we do that, and we need to do that because in the in this day and age, pretty much our entire job, or at least a significant portion of it, chuck is avoiding giving out false information. Yeah, we have to go through and verify it, which is getting increasingly harder. Yeah, we try, We definitely do. We were talking about pop culture, and sometimes movies will work it in or the other way around.
In the movie Goodwill Hunting, remember they tell the story about the guy who gets pulled over by the cop because he's drunk, and then an accident happens in the cop as to run to the accident, and the guy jumps in his car goes home. The cop comes the next morning and the guy denies that he was ever out drinking until he looks and notices that in his driveway he had jumped in the squad car by accident. Not true, but it's an urban legend. It was in
good will hunting the Simpsons, which one. You know how you always hear the story about like a mouse in a in a coke bottle? Remember the Simpsons when they Barney and Homer visit the Duff Brewery and the guys on the line fills on the line checking the bottles as they go by. He's like, good, good nose, good needle. And then he turns his head and like Hitler's head, it goes by the bottle. That's a good one. Did you see the YouTube clip of Hitler finding out that
Scott Brown won the Massachusetts Senate seat? I did? You sent it to me? Good? Is that an urban legend? Or did Scott Brown really win the Senate seat? He really did? I thought was made up? Um? Oh, there's a pretty It's pretty much impossible to trace the origin of a um any urban legend, really, no one ever
knows where they come from. One of the reasons why is because it follows oral tradition or it used to generally right right folk It is folklore, and it's actually studied by cultural anthropologists and folkloreist, which I think is probably a sub set of cultural anthropology. UM. And the the Hey, Dave, have you seen the Encyclopedia of Urban Legends? No. I used to have a cartoon book though, of urban legends. It was pretty cool, nice. Well, the Encyclopedia of Urban
Legends is fairly anthropological in nature. It's pretty thick tone. It's on Google Books. We can check it out. But the author of it, Jan Harold brun Van, Harold, why are you doing this to me today? Are you talking to your mouth or to me both? Um? The the author Jan Harold brun Van Um kind of laments that the the internet has removed that aspect the oral tradition
by digitizing it. And now I'll just click forward and and uh broom Van suggests that the golden age of uh of um urban legends was the sixties of the eighties, although they've been around a lot longer than that, right, yeah, since the thirties and forties. I said, I found even further back than that. Um. Apparently at Scott Fitzgerald and the twenties referred to contemporary legends the the the critic took to mean the same thing as an urban legend. Sure.
And then even before that, I think in uh the eighteen nineties there was a French columnists who asked to cities maintain folklore just as rural areas to interesting the answer that is a big fat yes obviously. Yeah. So that's when they were actually called out as urban legends. Like we said, it goes back centuries tradition of folklore. Historians are big on verifying and writing things down, and folklore's tell stories with their mouths. Yeah, like we do, right,
that sounds like a T shirt. Folklore's do it with their mouths. Um. And like you said, check, these things go back centuries, if not further. Um. And again, all legends reflect um, the feelings, the fears, that kind of thing of the culture at the time. So we're before uh, in the you know, pre industrial age. Most fairy tales that had something bad happening to them, we're set in the woods, like Handling Gretel or snow White or whatever.
These fairy tales were set in the woods because the woods were still very scary places, filled with bandits and bears and scary monsters, super freaks. Yeah. Yeah. One thing I thought was interesting is the famous website snopes dot Com clearly can put an end to a lot of these Internet if you're smart enough to good look at
Snopes these Internet rumors that get started. But one thing I thought was interesting was reading this article is that Snopes evidentally gets a lot of angry emails because people want to believe their friends so much that their friends not made this up, that they will email Snopes angrily and say, you're calling my friend a liar. This really happened. He said, it happened to his best friend, and snubs
just like doubt. They even respond to those, and they like, send us your address so we can send a guy to come hit you with a tack hammer. Right, and I have some swamp land in Florida, I can tell you exactly. Um. We were talking about the origins of these things, chuck right. Um. Right, So folklore's anthropologists and uh, pretty much any smart person can point to actual advance that are maybe misinterpreted or expanded upon become the source
of urban legends. E g. Uh, temporary tattoos laced with LSD. Right, that could have been birthed out of the real practice of a chemist who make LSD would oftentimes put it on I guests still do put it on like a stamp with a cartoon character, and so that might have gotten confused with um temporary tattoos. So the word spreads and all of a sudden, And what I love is that the story goes is they give them these LSD tattoos to get the kids hooked on LSD, which is
just silly. Yeah, it's not physically addicted ing at all, north psychologically addicting. I imagine it's much more psychologically aversive than anything I'm getting nostalgic Halloween. Lots of urban legends around Halloween. Yeah, with the tainted candy and the razor blades in the apple. You know it's crazy is we were talking about how the Oregon thief actually probably got the idea from the urban legend. There have been instances of people tainting Halloween candy after the the urban legend
was around. Interesting, most of the ones that have like razor blades, and I have to say this is from Snopes. There's a pretty long article on Halloween candy with razor blades and needles. But um, most of the ones that have actually been perpetrated were hoaxes or they wanted to get attention or something like that. Um, but poison candy actually does. It's come up many many times around Halloween, and you know, in non Halloween days, the other three
sixty four days where kids have died. Apparently, yes, and this is not an urban legend. Apparently uh in. I don't remember what state it was in, but a friend of a friend told me, um that a little kid died after getting into his uncle's stash of heroin, and so the family actually sprinkled his candy Halloween candy with hero with heroin from the uncle's stash to protect the uncle. Uh to make it look like somebody had poisoned the kid with with heroin and that really happened. It happened.
What if Snopes is wrong about all this stuff? I don't know. I've had that horrible feeling before, horrible thoughts, sat upright in bed, been like tis roll pops, Like Snopes is just this one dude, He's just like this inclusion, he's like the wizard behind the curtain. That'd be pretty cool. I guess we should point out a few of these email urban legends, just so you don't forward them around to your your friends and family. Be wary of anything
free obviously that's a that's a dead giveaway. Usually. Well, that's just like the pigeon drop. Yeah, sure, yeah, you just you if anybody starts talking to you about money and you've never met them, you don't want to respond, right. Another dead giveaway, Josh, is if you ever get an email that starts with a line if you for this email, colon, or if it says this is not an urban legend, colon,
then it's probably an urban legend. Yeah. And then of course there is a the famous Nemon Marcus cookies email, which I've actually received. I have received this one as well. I've never made him of you. No, well, they're just regular cookies. Tom Harris is they're delicious. I think he made them before this article. That is research pal. Yeah, well,
detail this one. This is a very famous one. So back in I think the nineties, uh late nineties, there was an email that was sent around where it talked about the Neiman Marcus chocolate chip cookie recipe which made
some delicious chocolate chips they say, or chocolate chip cookies. Um. And a woman apparently asked for name and Marcus, uh somebody at the store to give her the recipe for the cookies and they gave it to her, but they charged her for it, they said to fifty And when she, you know, gets her bill later that month, she sees that they charged two hundred and fifty dollars instead of two dollars and fifty cents for this recipe. The woman
finds it outrageous. Contact Name and Marcus and they're like, well, our cookies are really good. We're not going to refund your money. Uh. So she decided that to get them back, she would forward the email with the recipe and an email to everybody and spread it around to get back at Niman Marcus, you were my crutch, Chuck. Not true, Josh. They didn't even make the chocolate chip cookie at the time.
In the eighties it was Mrs Fields, not Name and Marcus, and before that it was the Waldorf Astoria Hotels red velvet cake. Take that. Stupid people who believe forward an emails who I'm sad to say, not only did my mom pass along bunk information with the line old Richie slash Reggie Jackson story. Um, but my dad, I found out,
is a birther. Really are you kidding me? Yeah, he's not in any kind of structured to organized capacity in As a matter of fact, he wasn't even aware of the term birther, but he believed af forwarded email that was birth in nature, which again that was a real occurrence. There were people out there who wanted to see Barack Obama's birth certificate claiming he was not born in this country. Is originally said that his birth certificate was doctor that
he was really a born in Kenya. Um YadA, YadA, YadA, and therefore he shouldn't be president. Right, But the the that has taken on a life of its own, so out of this original idea, it's become an urban legend and a forwarded email urban legend, which are really the dregs of urban legend society because you're not even taking the time to spend a good yarn at that point. No, and that's why um brun Van was saying, like it
was best from the sixties of the eighties. You know, there's there's spider eggs and bubble yam and co can's hanging from car doors and the calls coming from upstairs and the great part about it was that everybody was personalizing it because it happened in East Lake or it happened in Peoria, Illinois, depending on where you are, And so there was it took effort, and there was there was personalization done to it, and so people were engaging
in oral folklore tradition without even realizing it, and it kept it alive and vital. Now it's just forwarding. That's it. Well, you and I remember clearly. I remember Rad lying to me in the night that I'm sorry ten or eleventh grade. You remember your mom telling me stories like I remember this specifically in his kitchen. I remember that day specifically, but I don't remember whatever Jack asked for? Did me? The the gang headlight thing? Should we talk about a
couple of real ones real quick before you wrap it up? Yeah? These are great, Chuck. Chuck found some on cracked dot com and uh, the more fantastic ones we actually did go and double check with Snopes, the big fat guy who doesn't check any thing. Right. Yes, okay, so Chuck take it away. Well one of them, um has happened recently? Is that the famous Halloween when there's all manner of Halloween ones like we said, where someone hung themselves in their yard? Yeah? We when what podcast? Did we talk
about that? I can't remember. I can't either, but we definitely did. And the story goes that someone hung themselves and people thought it was a Halloween Halloween decoration, so they the body stayed there for several days until they realized it was real and this actually really did happen. Yeah.
And then there's the uh, the one about the couple who spend the night in a hotel room and they can't figure out where the stench is coming from, and when they finally go downstairs to ask for their money back the next morning, the hotel management investigates and finds a dead body under the bed. Apparently it's happened a bunch of times. Kansas City, Atlantic City, Florida, California. It's
very distressing. Yeah, and and the Cracked blogger makes a good point that in these cases, in just about all of them, what's insane is that the people spent the night in the room the whole time, the variably and they're so great. Tell him the best one, Cracked is awesome. They're so funny. Yeah, I love that website and that it's one of your faiths. Uh, the fun House Mummy,
this one is the best one ever. Uh. The myth is that a prop at a carnival was Um, I guess in the in the scary fun house was not a prop mummy, but it was in fact a real dead body. So if this story couldn't get any more fantastic, you're wrong. Right, here's how the urban legend goes. Um. The crew for the six Million Dollar Man was filming an episode and they needed a fun house, so they went down to Long Beach to the New Pike Amusement Park, right, and there was a dummy hanging in the shot, and
the director filmed the shot. Apparently it was like, I don't like that dummy. There's somebody get rid of it. Some guy goes to grab it, the arm comes off, and they noticed a human bone inside. Right, You thought, wow, that's pretty realistic. Yeah, And so they did a little more investigating and figured out that it was a real corpse, a mummified, embalmed human corpse that was actually hanging in a fun house being that people took as a dummy. Right,
six million dollar Man, Chuck, is this true? It is true? Isn't that crazy? And it doesn't in there because apparently the body, the undertaker had done such a swell job with the embalming process that he put this body on display for a matter of years, could pay a nickel to come see this body. And then two guys that worked for the amusement park or no traveling carnival disguise themselves as what his brothers his brothers to come claim the body, and they actually stole the body and it
traveled around the country, eventually ending up in Long Beach. Yes. What's even more amazing is that we know whose body this is. Yes, we do. It was a bank robbing bandit named Elmer McCurdy who lived out his violent career at the about the turn of the last century, early twentieth century. Uh. He was killed in the shootout for forty six bucks and two jugs of whiskey. Uh. And like you said, the undertaker did such a good job in balming him. He charged people in nickel to come
look at this bandit. Uh. And that was that. So when they finally laid him to rest, I think in like two thousand six. Really, no, it couldn't have been. No, No, it would have been a couple of years after the six million dollar man thing in seventy six. Okay. Um. They they supposedly put cement over his casket so that nobody could dig him up and do the same thing all over again. Yeah, true story. Yeah. So Cracked actually has a about eleven of them over the span of
a couple of articles. And then I saw other sites that said they had real ones. But um, again, you can't always believe everything. I don't know if I believe Cracked. No, that's why I went and checked it out. It's snops and they they had the same story, uh different, slightly different, but all the facts were the same, same name, same everything. Friend of a friend. Yeah, is that it? That's it man? I mean we can go on urban life. Yeah, we could just could be in eleven our podcast. Um, but
let's not make it that way. Now, if you want to learn more about urban legends, you can look it up in the handy search bart how stuffworks dot com. Chuck, it's time for listener mint. Now. It's not Josh what We are not going to do listener mail today because we are going to plug this thing like a finger and a dike. So Chuck, go ahead, then, if you're going to do that, let's do it well. First of all, we want to plug the new science podcast that we talked about for a while. And it is called Stuff
from the Science Lab with our comrades. Robert Lamb, who you might remember from doing me Rendition the reading of the Jack the Ripper letter. Yeah gotta, he doesn't do that voice in the podcast, so unfortunately. And Alison, they do a great job with science e stuff. Hell of in ea there. And we're going to plug Strickland's podcast tech Stuff. Even though he talks smack about us, he really does. Then this we are going to plug stuff
he missed in history class with our colleagues. Now Katie used to be Jane and Candice now it's eighty and Sarah Dowdy full time. They do a great job. And what else do we have? High speed stuff? Yeah, Scott and Ben Scott and Been do a great auto podcast, very funny. Ben and Matt also do stuff they don't want you to know it video podcast on conspiracies, which is awesome. Yeah, Coolest Stuff on the Planet is another great travel video podcast. And what are what are we forgetting? Yeah, Sminty,
our sminty gals. Yeah, how can we forget? Sminty? Did you see that email we accidentally got that was intended for them? Today? Uh, stuff mom never told you of course? Is uh the some people liking it to the female version of what we do. Yeah, they have a huge cult following to do. They're great, they're really funny quality stuff. Oh, of course there's stuff Genius and brain Stuff, both of which a feature. Are a Steam founder Marshall Brain Yeah,
and Stuff of Genius is really short. And if you're into like cool monty python esque graphics, don't like it. Yeah, And of course there's the blogs always. You can just type in the blogs at how stuff works die com. Right, plug fest is over. Plug Fest is over. You haven't done in a while. If you want to send us an email, we probably will do reader mail again right
starting next week. Okay, if you want to send us an email on absolutely anything, you can wrap it up 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 how stuff works dot com home page. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you