Soaring to the Sweater-Powered Ozone Layer With Our Pinkies OUT

Bye.

Hello and welcome to another episode of That's Absurd, Please Elaborate. It is a show with four words in the name that maybe you've listened to before, but if you haven't, I'm one of the... Am I two of those words? I think I... I would be elaborate and please. I don't know. But... I'm Trace Dominguez. I thought you were going to pick just like that and please. I'm that please. I'm that please. And I'm absurd elaborate. Julian Hugen. Honestly, that.

Kind of works. I like that. Absurd and elaborate. Happy Pride Month. We've said it a lot. Anyway. If you haven't listened to the show before, this is a podcast. Welcome. It's a new format. And you listen to the show, and you send in questions, and we answer.

them using science research. I thought you were about to give a step-by-step guide on how to consume a podcast. You put on headphones or you go on a long drive. Maybe you're commuting. Maybe you're cooking. I like to listen to them while I cook. Chores, commutes, you know.

Just anything but silence. Anything but my own thoughts. Oh, definitely not my own thoughts. Can't have that. Please no. Can't have that. Never. Never again. Not even once. My own thoughts. Not even once. There's like an Onion article. picks best podcast to listen to for a 10-second walk to take out the garbage, and I felt personally attacked. Yeah, that sounds correct. You ever put one in, like you do something, you walk outside for 30 seconds, throw the trash away, walk back.

And two minutes later, I was like, I'm going to call my mom. And it was like a long drive. And an hour later, I listened to two minutes of the podcast. Anyway. We're going to tell you about some science of random questions that people have sent us. Those questions are usually ridiculous or far out. If you want to send us a question, you can find it down in the show notes. You can call us to send us a voicemail, all sorts of different things.

Okay, Julian, what question were you sent this week? My question comes from Madeline, who sent in a voicemail. Cool. Hi, I'm Madeline from Wellington, New Zealand, and I was wondering... Could humans ever actually evolve to have the ability to fly? And I don't know why I was thinking of this. I think it was a shower thought. But I noticed go at TikTok, actually.

and it was like i don't want the ability to fly it sounds like hard work i have the ability to run but i don't run everywhere so it's kind of like a second part to the question is

How hard would it actually be to fly? And would people be able to actually use it on a regular basis? And I'm talking like wings or like magnets or... i don't even know how we would actually evolve the ability but i mean just taking from nature probably wings but yeah i don't know that's my question um does this solve anything

gotta sneak that in i like that she made herself laugh with that as well i do love when the giggles are coming out early like hold on guys hold on hold on strangers for the internet let me share this so madeline let's

dig into it uh i think it would be instructive first to look at how flight has come about before right oh god are you gonna bring in aviation into this we're not talking about airplanes we're no julian not Yeah. Okay. Jeez. Calm down. The fortunate thing about flight is we don't have to, you know, blue sky it. But like other things have done flight. already yeah true and it may be instructive if we look at how they did it first to figure out how we might do it so traits

Four separate lineages have evolved the ability to fly over the course of life on Earth, as far as we know. Oh, okay. Do you know what they are? Well, there's hot air balloons. There's... There's... That time that Harry Potter blew up his aunt. That was a big one. Which is sort of like a hot air balloon. There's a flying car. There's that one. There's broomsticks, clearly. And the Dementors fly, but mostly in the movies. They don't really talk about that.

Okay, so, no, but seriously, though, Harry Potter is kind of not. Harry Potter's loud as cool as it used to be, thanks to the dumb author. Happy Pride Month, I'll say it again. Yes, okay, so I'm thinking... like a leather winged kind of bat situation. Seems like that would be an evolution. Uh, slash. Yep. Yep. So Kyroptera.

Bats, correct. Yeah, like mammals that fly like that. I would think then birds, of course. Pterodactyls are not dinosaurs, and so I would think that would be a separate category. Pterosaurs. You've named all the vertebrates that can fly. There's an invertebrate that can fly. There are many invertebrates that fly. What am I thinking of? Like jellyfish? You're going to feel so dumb when I tell you the answer.

Stupid. Okay, just tell me, because I'm not going to. Insects. Oh! Yeah, okay. Yeah, those things. I am going to feel stupid. I was thinking of, like, invertebrate, but not exoskeleton invertebrate. When I think invertebrate, I just think blob. Yeah, and you went to jealousy. That's not what I should be thinking. I just went to the aquarium this weekend, Julian. I don't know.

I don't know. I love that in your head, flying jellyfish was a completely reasonable thing. They do talk about how they fly, like they fly in the water. Yeah, they kind of like pump the water as they move along, right? But they don't fly through that. air. Well, what's the difference, Julian? Water is just thicker fluid. Yes, they're both fluids, but one's a gas, one's a liquid. They're both fluids, Julian. Okay, well, let's start with insects, right? They were...

The first to develop the ability to fly. Yeah, first and most populous. Yeah, that's a big reason, actually. It's funny because before insects had the ability to fly, you know, their ancestors.

developed this incredibly useful ability. They are not that well represented in the fossil record. There's more arachnids, and then all of a sudden... sometime 300 to 350 million years ago, bam, they developed the ability to fly and there is this explosion of evolutionary radiation because it was... so so useful and the reason that is is because they managed to basically find a new niche that nobody else had explored yet and and had been able to take advantage of and that was the sky so

Can you imagine there was a time here on Earth, you know, some 350 million years ago, where there's just nothing in the sky. Yeah, nothing above you. You'd be standing on the ground, and above you is nothing. No birds. Just weather. Yeah, weather. No birds. No bugs. I guess it would make it easier if you were really nervous about bugs because they would always be at your feet. You'd just be like, no! Get off!

You wouldn't have to worry about them flying into your eyeball, which they always do. Yeah, straight for the eye. Or the nose. Ugh. Any orifices. Yeah, what's up with that? I don't know. Why not? You know, trying to exploit that niche. Get in that niche there. Get in that niche. Right, so insects were the first to develop this ability to fly.

competing theories on how they actually basically sprouted wings and started being able to use them, right? Because here's an important thing to somewhat answer Madeline's question and that is evolution is a tinkerer. Usually it's much easier to take something that's already adapted, maybe for something else and just kind of massage it into doing a new thing. That's called an exaptation, by the way, when you have a structure that's originally.

Adapted for one thing and then it becomes co-opted for something else. Right. So the leading idea of how insects developed wings is the...

Turgal hypothesis. So the idea is they used to have these membrane that started growing off the back of their body called the Turgum, and these membranes originally were useful for maybe gliding, and eventually they became... attached to muscles and actually could move around and and they could actually fly about so once they colonize the air they like i said go through this

evolutionary radiation where they develop into all these different forms because they're so wildly successful and well we're kind of stuck with them forever since now humans obviously are not going to be exploiting a new niche because insects have gotten there and then

Other vertebrates got there after insects. And the next that developed the ability to fly was what you mentioned, the pterosaurs, the non-dinosaurs that can fly. Yeah. So pterosaurs first came about in the late Triassic period, about 225 million years ago. And we used to think that they were kind of ungainly and not very successful flyers, maybe more gliders, but more recent evidence.

actually supports that they were very adept flyers. And I mean, they lasted for about 140 million years before the mass die off, you know, the KT extinction. So they were very, very successful. And I started looking at pterosaurs thinking, well, is there maybe some indication of how we might develop like pterosaurs? And...

One thing that I always think is funny about Pterosaurus is that they're basically the fanciest animal that's ever lived. Right? Because when I... I have a pee at the front of... my name, but I don't even use it. They always pee silently. It's true. So a pterosaur, their wing is attached to what is essentially an extremely long pinky finger.

Right? So they're just constantly being like, hello. Pinky out, exactly, right? Like when you drink your tea and you have to have a pinky out to be fancy. That's why I'm saying pterosaurs are the fanciest animals. So fancy. Pterosaurs. Yeah. This is, again, another example of evolution being a tinkerer, right? If you look at the bones in a pterosaur's wings, you see a lot of homologous structures to the arm bones that humans have, right? They're the same basic structure and layout.

out but they're squished and stretched and morphed but it's almost all pretty much there just adapted to support this big membrane that goes from the tip of their very very long pinky you know down to the back of their body right down to like their hind leg area there is though one new bone that they developed oh yeah

Of course, because they're so fancy. They're so fancy. I hope it's the fancy bone. It is kind of like another pinky pointing the exact opposite direction. Okay, they're so fancy. They have two pinkies. They're so fancy. It's called the tearoid bone, and it's just this...

little extra kind of finger-like looking thing that's pointing back towards their shoulder. And that helps support the membrane on the front of their wing. Maybe give them a little extra lift and a little extra maneuverability. But again, we're not seeing like...

a whole new structure that turned into a wing. They've just developed like, Hey, this one little extra bone that supports the little extra membrane. And that's over like 140 million years of flight. Yeah. Right. And I think to your point, If there was a reason for them to have evolved other things, the tinkering would have caused that to happen. Like you would have had an animal that used their wing in a different way and then maybe had offspring over time.

that would have made that way more robust and evolved some kind of adaptation there based on a mutation. And since we don't see that, it seems like it's pretty simple. They did it. It worked. They kept doing it. By the way, the pterosaur bone structure also supports one hypothesis of how they started flying in the first place, right? Because there's a couple different...

approaches that have been proposed to how different animal species started flying. They could either start out as arboreal species that maybe jumped from tree to tree and they glided to help them out. maybe escaping predators or just moving around or there's the ground up theory where maybe they would run and chase after prey or maybe they were trying to escape another predator and leaping into the air and gliding to get some distance maybe

help them with either of those things, and eventually it developed onto full-on powered flight. Because of pterosaur bone shapes, we think they probably were ground up. So they were on the ground, and they kind of waddled around. Yep. And over time, that waddle got some extra skin when they started.

Yeah, maybe they were trying to catch those flying insects that were around, you know, and this ability to leap and glide helps them. And eventually when they could actually fly completely on their own power, they were much more effective at hunting these things. be also effective at getting away from their own predators.

Neat. These things are hard to know. We can only really infer. But we have found fossilized pterosaur tracks that imply that they were actually pretty nimble on the ground. And that, again, supports this ground-up hypothesis that... They started on the ground and jumped and eventually developed the ability to fly. So that's good news for us. They also could be flipping huge. They are huge. I've seen some of those at the museums and at the zoo.

You know when they have like a dinosaur exhibit? The pterosaurs, they had one in the valley when I was living there. And that pterosaur, you can see it from the road. It was like 30 feet high or something. 10 meters. I think that's good news for us because we're also pretty big.

Right? Yeah. So if we were to, as Madeline is wondering, if we ever had the ability to fly, would we have to shrink or anything? Maybe not. I mean, there are other things that would help us get into the air, like having hollow bones, like pterosaurs. had, right, to make us lighter. But it's good to see that, like...

a truly huge animal could still take wing. I think the largest, one of the largest pterosaurs is, I'm not going to be able to say this, Quetzalcoatlus. Oh yeah, you got, that's pretty good. That's right. Thank you. That's pretty close. Thank you. That's Quetzalcoatlus. I mean.

I don't think it's a qua. I think it's just a kuh. Kuh? Banner style. Well, even then, right, because that's adapted from Aztec. Yeah. Like, when we say axolotl, right, that's... Yeah. I hear native speakers say... It's a shuh sound. That's... Terrible pronunciation, right? Yeah. Like, it's supposed to be, like, astrolog. Yeah. Yeah. So, anyway, who knows? I'm probably super wrong. But the point is, the Quetzalcoatlus...

Might have had a wingspan as big as 35 feet or 10 to 11 meters. Wow. Just huge, huge. So good news. You know, maybe that's one. Being big doesn't mean we can't fly. Now, they had other adaptations that also are super useful for flight that obviously we don't have right now. They had a keeled sternum. A what now? A keeled sternum. Because there's two boat words in there. There's keel and stern. And so I was very confused by all the boat terminology. Nope.

Nope, not nautical. We're still still aviary. But keel, it's the same idea as that structure on a boat. Right on a boat. It's like a big vertical plank going under the hull. Right. And it helps with stability and actually propelling boats, as we learned in a very. early episode of this podcast. But for...

birds and for pterosaurs that have these keeled sternums, it's again like a big protrusion coming straight out of the middle of their chest, this big flat thing that pectoral muscles can attach to. And that really helps with that flapping.

downstroke. That's so important for the way these animals had the ability to fly yeah it's it's interesting because you think of like animals that have evolved really strong jaws they have to have like gorillas or pandas or whatever you know they chew a lot of cellulose they have ridges on their head where they have really strong, wide bones in their heads to, like...

The muscles need a place to attach to. Exactly. I think a lot of people forget that when they think about the structure of like, oh, you just put wings on their back and then they can have a six pack ab and fly around an X person. Yeah. And it's like, no. Where's that wing attaching to? You need some ridges. Angel would not look good.

Exactly. Exactly. I mean, we'll dive into this after we go through the history of flight. Oh, really? Oh, good. I'm sorry. I keep jumping in. How we picture humans flying. When you start to realize, like, what we need, it gets really ridiculous. Okay.

So the next animals that developed the ability to fly, of course, were birds, the avian dinosaurs. Trace, true or false, birds did not exist at the same time as T-Rexes. I thought there were birds. Yep. So true. There are. True. Wait, no, false. False. They did exist. Well, the double negative. That's hard.

I shouldn't have asked it that way, but I was too late. I was already into it when I realized it was going to be tricky. But you're right. I think it's this really common misconception that, like, during the age of the dinosaurs, right, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous, you just had... dinosaurs and then the meteor hit and then birds after that somehow right and that's

Not the case. The little dinosaurs feathered up and started flapping around and singing. But avian dinosaurs existed at the same time as other dinosaurs like T-Rex. There were small winged flying dinosaurs as far back as 150 million years ago were the first dinosaurs. transitional species that's often pointed to is Archaeopteryx. Yeah. Which has some bird features like feathered wings that look like they were used for flying, but also like a long bony tail.

more similar to other theropods and raptors so these early birds though like archaeopteryx have that problem of not having a keeled sternum the same way that we don't have one right right They're, again, another case of evolution just being a tinkerer. So we think that these early birds had to fly with more of like a breaststroke kind of motion, not like a straight up and down flap. Whoa. So super inefficient, relatively speaking.

Yes, exactly. And eventually, you know, they evolve that keeled sternum and that more up and down flapping motion because these things take time. Yeah, the first ones that had the ability to fly didn't have that efficient motion yet. Cool. And finally, bats.

Chiroptera, right? These are actually the second most diverse group of mammals. Did you know that?

I didn't know that. No, that's surprising to me. Yeah, they're super successful. And again, a big reason of that, we think, is because of this ability to fly and their... exploration of a niche that wasn't really filled and that is being nocturnal predators of insects yeah they were like okay guys let's look at this market see if we can find some competition research you know figure out where their niche is that we can we can plug into turned out nighttime insect hunting, flying.

Combine those. Yep. Just take that over and bam. Same thing as Ray Charles being like, I can mix gospel and pop music and rock. That's going to work fine. Ray Charles is the bat of what I... Nothing to do with vision, though. I don't want people thinking I'm making that connection. That was not a pick that I did on purpose. That was great. Okay. Besides.

Plenty of bats can see. That's a common myth, right? Yeah, that's actually a problem with pop culture. So bats went that arboreal route instead of from the ground up like the pterosaurs likely did or even... the birds that we know today likely did, they probably started...

as mammals that were climbing trees and maybe jumping from one to the other and gliding. And then eventually they developed true powered flight. Their closest living relative, as far as we can tell, is something called the Colugo. also known as the flying lemur, which, as my source here says, which does not fly and is not a lemur. Okay, that sounds right. But if you want some great Google image results, though, look up the Kalugo.

Colugo. C-O-L-U-G-O. C-O-L-U-G-O. Colugo. Oh my, what the heck is this? Isn't it, it's so derpy. Wow. Wow. If this animal had a voice, it would sound like this. Hello! Hi guys! What are you guys doing?

Why didn't you invite me to your birthday party? Actually, I'm not a lemur. Yeah, that's the Kalugo. They live in Asia, the Philippines. Never heard of them before. But always... a delight to discover a weird new animal they're great they're really good i love it yeah so again Another case of evolution being a tinkerer, bats have a lot of homologous structures with our arm structures, but their hands basically grew to be enormous and webbed and connect to their hind limbs with...

a big membrane of skin. And that's how bats got their wings. And because of these basically fingers that go throughout their wings, which birds don't have, they're actually quite nimble flyers. It makes them great. for hunting insects, especially, you know, at night, moths fluttering around and changing direction rapidly. Bats are super well adapted to this because of that wing structure. And also bats developed an extra bone that helps them fly.

Oh? Yeah, the calcar, which is kind of like the pteroid bone in pterosaurs, except it's coming off of their hind ankle, and it just supports, like, the little membrane between their back legs. But again, another point where it's like they didn't develop a whole new limb that became wings. At most, they just have like a little extra bone here or there. It's much, much easier to reappropriate things.

Then create new ones. So with all that in mind, how would humans develop the ability to fly if it were to come about? Which, to be totally upfront, I don't think it's ever going to happen.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that one's not going to come about. It's fun to think about it. That's why you listen to this show. Right. So, Julian, we need a really strong sternum. Yes, there's that. Right. So let's let's imagine. the scenario where this would come about, right? Here's the main reason I don't think humans are ever going to develop the ability to fly. And that is, we're too dang smart. What?

We're not dumb enough? If we were dumber, we could fly. That's what I think. That's disappointing. That's what I think. And I'll explain why, right? These animals that have developed the ability to fly, they did so... Because there were pressures put on them to change, right? They were forced to take to the skies like insects, right? Because that was unexplored. Or they had to catch these insects, right? But...

Unlike us, they couldn't develop any tools, right? They didn't have these super useful but quite small hands. that can build tools that can catch stuff. We can make traps or nets or whatever, right? They had to take their hands, their pinkies... and stretch them out and then put a big membrane between them and their ankles, right, so they could take wing and catch their prey. So... Hot. I...

Yeah. Or in the case of bats, right? The whole hand had to become that support for the wings and skin stretched between all that. I think our hands are way too useful. for us to re-adapt them into something else where along the way they're going to be less useful. You know what I mean? I mean, yeah.

You don't think that we're going to grow a big membrane that stretches along our entire rib cage down past our butt into our leg area? I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm just saying if that were to happen, would that make us more fit? To survive. To do the rest of our survival. No. Not in the current evolutionary environment. If for some reason we water world it up and, you know, there was there was no land to speak of and somehow but there were a lot of, you know, I don't know, really good.

air currents that could keep us alive and warm or so you know like i'm just making i'm obviously making stuff up but there'd have to be a completely different planet for us to have to survive on it and evolve something like that right and again i think we'd have to lose our brain's ability to creatively problem solve instead of adapting biologically, like other animals throughout history have had to do in order to meet these changing conditions. We just change the world around us.

To make it suit us. Yeah, if there was a water world, we would just get Kevin Costner to be in it. Exactly. And his fabulous hair. Ugh. Even when wet. Doesn't make sense. Yeah, so I think for humans to fly, first off, I think we'd have to be dumber. I mean, that makes sense. I get it. I get it. I know it's a weird conclusion, but that's where I'm going with that. I like it.

And then, yeah, something would have to force us either into the trees again and jumping from tree to tree and gliding around, much like... our our kalugo friends do until we maybe develop those membranes that make that more advantageous and then from there go on to be more like bats and actually have the ability to power those membranes and fly or

Or maybe there's, yeah, like a predator on the ground that's chasing us and we have to leap into the air in order to escape them. Julian, or you really want to get big on TikTok and the way to do it is to have wings. There's no niche on TikTok for flying TikToker. It's true. I mean, there are people that fly planes, but that's not the same. And I'm sure you follow all of them and know all of them or whatever. Wait.

So you're implying that social media niches are equivalent to ecological niches that people can then exploit. Are they not? I think this is true. You know, since we're doing podcasts, maybe that'll help us trend more towards echolocation like that, right? Since we're doing an audio medium. Yeah.

that people don't need to see. Maybe if we podcast for long enough as a species. Yeah, that'll do it. Our eyesight will just get worse and worse, and we'll just listen to each other. That's right. We're helping humans become more bat-like.

We're doing our part. Sounds perfect. As podcasters. Again, let's game out this scenario, right? We're dumber. Yeah. I think there's more predators on the ground that are chasing us around and driving us into the trees. And this is true. for millions of years, right? And we eventually develop these membranous structures between our arms and our ankles. that help us glide around. And yeah, the first flying humans, not great flyers, kind of like how Archaeopteryx was flying with the breaststroke.

structure until we eventually developed keeled sternum so humans of the far future that can fly they'll have to have basically a Big chest sticking straight out. Chest ridge. Yeah. Just a big chest ridge and a ripped back. Ugh. Just like a sack of pythons rippling around when you put it on a flat. The future manosphere. is going to be weird.

And actually not that different from now, to be honest. Like not that different from how weird it is now. You mean stupid and full of predators? And body dysmorphic, unfortunately. Oh no! The only people who will be able to fly are... Manosphere podcasters. Shut it down. Shut it down. Shut it down. We're terminating this line of thought. Just hordes of Joe Rogan swooping down on people. Everything is brownish.

orange it's terrible oh what have we created they're immaculate and for some reason shaped at the bottom and underneath Yeah, that's weird. That's bad. It's like a blanket that's too small, you know, pulled over a bit. I don't quite get it. Just let the under chin hair grow, manos. Anyway. Manos. That's why it's the manosphere, right? Yeah, because they're manos. Because they have two manos. Two hands, yeah. Two fancy hands with membranes stretched across their fingers. They're so fancy.

This is the future in which humans will evolve flight. They'll be stupid. They'll be chased by predators into the trees. And they'll probably eat bugs, which we know the manosphere hates. Oh, too bad. Bugs are really nutritious and sometimes they're pretty tasty. And a lot of people eat them already, by the way. This is a tangent that we talk about sometimes, you and I, privately. Yeah, a lot of people eat them. But people be eating bugs. People be eating them. That's a thing people do.

Oaxaca, for example. Yeah. Which has a lot of native people still. Crickets are a big part of that cuisine. And they're delicious. I've never had them. I respect their ability to fly too much. That's why I only eat chickens. Once you lose the ability to fly, you're fair game. Wow. Wow. Is that the end of your answer? I think so. That was pretty insane. I didn't know where that was going to go. So let me recap. For Madeline's question is what would have to happen for us to fly? And...

If we had the ability, how hard would it be? So how hard would it be? Oh, it'd be very difficult, especially like we mentioned, you know. early days where we weren't well adapted for it, where we were taking what we had and just trying to make it work, it'd be much more difficult. Although I did find people who studied, you know,

proportions of bird wings and body sizes. And they came up with a figure on how big the human wingspan would have to be. This is Ty Hendrick, a professor of biology from UNC Chapel Hill. And he says that a... five foot tall, so one and a half meter person who weighed 155 pounds or 70 kilograms. So they're quite short and stout. Yeah, a little smaller than the average on both ends. Short King. They would need a 6 meter or 20 foot long wingspan. What? That's too much wing. That's...

Quite large. We're back to episode 10 or whatever with the giant head balloon. Like there's just too much skin. Yeah, you'd have to have the fanciest pinkies. Oh, so. Fancy. Imagine drinking tea with a pinky that was three feet long. Yeah. That was a meter, a one meter pinky. Oh, the fanciest. I'm imagining a pterodactyl tea party spelled. P-T-A. And they're all drinking, but they're all knocking each other's cups over.

Yeah, honestly, I think that would be great. If there's an artist in our audience, please draw that for us. Monocles and top hats. Yeah, they'd have to have a top hat. But the top hat would have to be balanced because they don't have... rounded heads don't they have like kind of ridge heads so they have like a top hat balanced on their ridge

They have like a big like prong like structure come out the top of that. Maybe you could just slot like ring toss style hat over it. Yeah, exactly. That'd be so funny. Also, pterodactyl tea party. Great band name. With a P for both. All P's, yeah. Pterodactyl tea party. And the party would have to have a T after the P. Just to be confusing.

Wow. Okay, well, thanks, Madeline, for that question. We really appreciate it. Let's take a quick break, and then I'm going to do something even stupider. I don't believe you. Did you know there's a paleoanthropologist who hunts fossils in conflict zones? That's just one of the amazing stories we're sharing on Going Wild, the award-winning podcast produced by Nature on PBS, hosted by me.

wildlife ecologist, Dr. Ray Wynn-Grant. In the brand new season of Going Wild, we're highlighting some of the coolest champions of nature, like TikTok's black forager, Alexis Nicole Nelson, and Pulitzer Prize winning science journalist, Ed Yong. to explore what led them to create change within themselves and the natural world. Get inspired. Follow Going Wild with Dr. Raewyn Grant on your favorite podcast app.

Welcome back. I hope you had a nice pee break, everybody. Now it's time. When you say pee break, do you mean a tea break? Because there would be like a P-T. So they had tea, but they really... You don't pronounce the P. It's just the T break. Both. I hope they had time for both. Now, Trace, what's your question? My question comes from Philippe, who asks... How many sweatshirts would you have to remove to inhale a lethal dose of ozone created by static discharge? Yeah. And then he elaborates.

Yes, you read it right. Oh, good. Here's why this question. Last year, they were in the process of removing their sweatshirt when they heard the sound of static discharge. So like that crackling sound. And then a smell came with it. And my first thought was I just smelled ozone, the distinctive smell of burned electronics. Today...

The same thing. A big whiff of ozone. Static discharge can be thousands of volts. Ozone is toxic. So how many sweatshirts would I have to remove to get a lethal dose? I know it won't solve anything. Ellipsis. Bummer. I don't know, unless you're ready to say goodbye to this cruel world in the most circuitous way possible. Right. You really want to build the ozone layer back up as best as you can. So you're just whipping those sweatshirts off. So.

Yeah, I read this and thought, this is absurd. Sure is. Julian, can we talk a little, just a little, really quickly tell people what ozone is? Oh, yeah. So in hockey, there's three zones. There's the D zone, the neutral zone, and the offensive zone. All right. All right. That was good. We had to do it. Okay. Yeah.

For real, though? For real, real? For real, real. Not for play, play? It's O3. Yes. It's three oxygen atoms bonded together. Yeah. And what's interesting about that is oxygen likes to only form two bonds. with things. So ozone, it's kind of cool. It's got like a bond that bounces back and forth, right? You've got like one oxygen in the middle and then the two on the sides keep like bouncing back between having like a double bond or a single bond. It's the most Los Angeles

atom combination in the world. It's a throuple that is constantly deciding whether it's going to stay together or not. One of the oxygen is like... What are we? What's happening? And the other two are like, we're fine. Me and the other oxygen are fine. We were fine before. We'll be fine after you leave. Yeah. But because of that, it's really great.

at absorbing like ultraviolet radiation, right? Correct. And it forms a protective layer of the atmosphere that keeps us from getting over UV exposed down here on Earth. Yeah. And that's why a hole in it is a big problem. Right. It's constantly being formed and also destroyed in the upper atmosphere of our planet. And exactly to your point, it stops UV light. When UV light hits it, it breaks apart and goes back in.

more stable atoms and then becomes ozone again under various conditions. So one of those conditions is running an electric motor or a static discharge or some kind of air-gapped static. And the reason is electrolysis is a good way to make ozone. Electrolysis being electricity running through a medium in this case. If you were to like run an electric drill. which I think is a really great way to make a bunch of ozone. And that smell that happens when you're running an electric drill, that is...

Ozone. That's what it smells like. I didn't know that. A lot of people associate it with after thunderstorms. Lightning. There's like a smell apparently associated with that. I've never noticed it, but some people say that. But yeah, it's pretty cool. You didn't know that about electric? Yeah, because they have brushes and the brushes develop oxidation and then they'll run the electricity and they'll break it all apart and they'll end up with some ozone, which is pretty cool. Yeah. Cool.

But ozone, to Philippe's point, is toxic. You don't want to drink in a lot of it with your nose. Ozone exposure decreases lung function, aggravates asthma, throat irritation, cough, chest pain, shortness of breath, inflammation of lung tissue, and a higher susceptibility. of respiratory infection. It is not good for human tissue kind of across the board. It can cause asthma and harm tissues.

But it breaks back down again to O2 pretty easily. That's fine in the environment. But in your body, that leaves like a free radical oxygen, which, as Julian has said on this podcast many times. Loves to just go and rip things off of other atoms when they're not stable enough. Oxygen's pretty greedy like that. So O2 or ozone won't kill you in small amounts, but it can damage tissues. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration requires an ozone output of indoor medical devices to be no more than 0.05.

parts per million. So pretty small. I needed to find out how much ozone would cause toxicity. Like if we're trying to figure out how much ozone will kill you, we know it hurts you. We're not trying to hurt you. We're trying to kill you. Oh, thanks.

So, we know we need to exceed... It's the tagline for this podcast. We're trying to kill you. We know we need to exceed .05 parts per million. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or... OSHA requires that workers not be exposed to an average concentration of more than 0.1%. parts per million for eight hours in a row. The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH, recommends the upper limit of also 0.1 parts per million. So we know we need to exceed that.

It was really interesting, actually, to read the NIOSH stuff because they have this publication where they collect all the things that are harmful or deadly just in general. That's like part of their mandate because, you know, some company, i.e. a human being who ran a company, subjected their...

workforce to that thing so they collected what it was that they were doing this is like aaron brockovich stuff where they were like hey you're doing this and it's killing your employees and so nyosh goes and says like here's how you're killing them and how to not kill them by not doing that

please pretty please uh and their ozone page says that ozone can cause a pulmonary edema Oh. Yeah, it can be bad. It caused it in welders who had a severe acute exposure to an estimated nine parts per million ozone. What, so like 90 more than the maximum allowed? Right, yeah, 90 times the allow. Yeah, and this, again, I say this, and it's a little sad, because this happened. happened to people. Yeah. This was a study in 1957, a write-up of something that really...

happened. It wasn't actually a study. It wasn't like scientists were like, let's expose these welders. There was somebody on a job site was exposed to this enough times that they wrote up a case study. So recently I was watching with my wife, one of the two.

Two documentaries that came out about Ocean Gate. Yeah, yeah, I haven't watched it yet, but I've heard a lot of people talking about it. And throughout the whole time, the founder, Stockton Rush, is talking about like, well, we're not going to let all these regulations get in our way. And I said, I turned to my wife and I said, OSHA regulations are written in blood. And at the end of the documentary, somebody else went...

OSHA regulations are written in blood. And I'm like, good, it's not just me who understands this. These things didn't come about because somebody was like, oh, what if, you know, we just made it harder for businesses, right? Like, well, what if it, no, like... People got hurt or people died. And that's why these limits exist. Exactly. And so these welders...

had severe acute exposure to an estimated nine parts per million of ozone. They had a blood vessel burst in their lung and they probably died. They did have a 1937 study. And that one, the scientists probably actually did do this thing because it was about. animals, unfortunately, but they wrote that 15 to 20 parts per million is lethal to small animals. This was again a 1937 study and a write-up in 1963 guesses that 50 parts per million for 60 minutes would be fatal.

Okay. 50. Okay. So 500 times. 500 times what you would want to have. So let's say we have this perfect storm, which is sort of an ozone pun. So we've got a 10 parts per million of ozone and a person who's just like really susceptible to that because there's no way we're going to get to 50 in an easy way. By the way, parts per million, if you're not aware of what it is or if it's confusing to you, think of it like a percentage.

10,000 parts per million is like saying one one hundredth, right? Because it's parts per million. So 10 parts per million is like saying 0.001% of the air is ozone. It's not a lot. percentage means like parts out of a hundred exactly right like that's literally what it means like right so that's just just orders of magnitude less than like percentage yeah the word percent as in

Per 100. If you understand percentage, you understand parts per million already. Exactly. So in our case, we would need to make about 0.01 liters of ozone for every liter of air. that we have for this person stripping off their sweatshirt, which is still a freak sweatshirt accident. Like, no matter how you slice it, that's a lot of ozone. That's a lot of sweatshirts. Yeah. So now we know what we need to hit. Like, that's the goal. We're making that much ozone, and we need to know how to get...

That ozone out of static electricity. Have you ever thought about the term static electricity? Just now, the sense you've asked me. Right. Sure. It's static, as in it's not flowing. That doesn't mean it's not moving, but it's not.

flowing electricity. It's static electricity. You know, electricity we think of as a moving thing. So we call it static electricity uh but it's really electricity in general is just a movement of like electrons through a medium whether it's air or skin or water or your mom you know whatever it is hi roxanne um now everybody's thinking about electrons flowing through my mom well your mom is at least

So static electricity is not a current of electricity. It's just on the surface of the material you're talking about. Yeah. Which is really cool. I went down a huge rabbit hole about static electricity for this. And I don't have time to talk about all of it.

It's really neat. And when you rub stuff on stuff, it doesn't make it like all uniformly electrical. Like if you were going to measure it, it would have little patches where it's really cool. Anyway, static electricity forms between something that's an insulator. What does an insulator do? It doesn't allow current to flow. It doesn't allow electrons to move. Yep. Like, kind of blocks them or holds them or whatever. And a conductor, which gives up electrons, allows them...

So it forms between those two things. And there are several different forms of static electricity. There's contact induced, pressure induced, heat induced, and charge induced. They all have different fun names. Induced is electrostatic. induction basically a neutral charged thing comes near a charged thing so they try and balance and you get the static electricity in the spot in between there's heat induced which is called pyroelectric effect this one is pretty cool also good band name

Really good band name. The pyroelectric effect has to do with, of course, heat, atoms rubbing together and electrons moving around. There's the pressure induced one, which is piezoelectric. But I also have always pronounced it. piezo or piezo you know I don't know anyway

Whatever it is, it's the squeezy one. And then there's a contact induced charge separation. And that's the one we're talking about, which is the tribe electric effect. Slide things by each other and an electron. John's jump. Now, when you think of this, what do you think of? Because I had something that I immediately thought of when you're like, oh, static electricity, not the sweatshirt. But obviously, yes, of course. But.

Weirdly, I think of thunderstorms. Thunderstorms is a great example. I didn't think of that until later. But like, yeah, the reason lightning happens is, you know, all these things are moving around in the clouds and they're rubbing against each other. And you get a charged...

separation right you get like positive ions in one part and negative ions in another and because you have this this charge separation you get a voltage an electrical potential right that's that's where my mind goes first yeah i feel like you had something very specific in mind when you asked i was thinking of A science demo where you rub a balloon on your head. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Classic. Or. The Van de Graaff generator. The Van de Graaff generator.

Exactly. A Van de Graaff generator. Do you want to explain it? Do you want me to explain it? I love asking you to explain it because it's like a quiz and you always nail it. And it makes me so happy that you always nail it. Thanks, bud. But all I can think of with a Van de Graaff generator, I should say.

electricity i feel like is a big blind spot for me whenever i have to research anything i'm like this is just magic as far as i can tell it kind of is yeah like i i don't understand it well that's not to say it can't be understood but it's just like a real area i struggle with So Vandegraaff Generators, as far as I understand it right, it's like a big sweater rubbing like Rube Goldberg machine. There's a cat inside and it's just flipping it around.

You like crank something, and it runs like a belt up to a big orb, and it collects a lot of charge on the orb, and then it makes little sparks to us. This only gets better and better because you're like waving your arms around. Thanks for setting me up to say that I always nail it on the one that I just biffed on massively. No, you did it. You did it. You got a lot of it. It was excellent. Okay.

I just want to, can I have a sidebar real quick though? Cause there's this thing, let's, we call it gripe time. Let's call it gripe time. Okay. Gripe time. Some things grind my gears. And one of those things that grinds my gears is when people specifically in the YouTube.

tiktok and other social media world say the word science experiment when what they really mean is science demonstration they're not experimenting they don't have a hypothesis they're testing know what it is they looked it up on wikipedia and now they're just performing it it's a demo they're doing a science demo and it bothers me yeah

And it might seem silly, but the slippage of language is important. So if we pretend these are all experiments, then you can call anything an experiment. I've never worn sunscreen. Let's do an experiment. It's like it's not an experiment. We know what the sunscreen will do. It will... Block UV radiation from hitting your skin. Anyway, end gripe time. Gripe time!

So, Philippe gave me this ridiculous method to make static electricity, but if he had just asked, like, hey, how much ozone, we probably would have ended up at Van de Graaff generator. Which, just to give you... A little bit of reprieve and tell you that you were right. Yes, it's a pole with a big metal ball on the top. You've seen it at any science museum you've ever been at. It was invented by Robert Jemsen Van de Graaff and he wanted a thing that could.

create lots of electrons for particle physics experiments. And so it's the ball on the top is made of steel or aluminum and inside of the pole are two rollers. The bottom one is motorized and covered in a rubber insulator. The top one is made of nylon. And then there's a belt in the middle, usually made of surgical tubing. So like latex rubber, the belt is pulled past metal brushes on each end. And so it starts building up electrons in.

the top there's a charge separation between the top roller and the bottom roller and it's translated into the big metal ball that is a very simple oversimplified example but it's essentially A great way to take advantage of that triboelectric series or triboelectric effect.

So Vanagraphs are really cool. They're super huge. They can be really big and they can make sparks that go through huge air gaps. They have one, I think at Griffith in LA has a really big one and it's really awesome. My alma mater, Western Michigan.

university i realized i didn't know this when i went there has had one since the 60s and it's this giant kind of tubular one because there are different types it doesn't have to be a ball and a pole the most important thing is you're creating that like belt of charge separation maybe I should go do one at Kalamazoo that'd be cool anyway go do a video about it so you can't just like do an experiment I'll do an experiment The disgust in your place. So you can't just put Phil in a room.

With a Van de Graaff generator? No, I got to take off a sweatshirt over and over again. So how does a sweater make electricity then? So you rub that balloon on your head, for example, right? Your hair stands up. The electrons have moved from my head to the balloon. They're on the surface of this latex insulator now, and put simply, the valence electrons of my hair move to the latex, giving both a charge.

What the charge is actually doesn't matter. Like the electrons can move in all sorts of different ways. The important thing to remember is there's a separation. The reason the hair separates from other hair is it has a charge, whether that's positive or negative depends on, you know.

how things have worked typically in the balloon situation. From what I've read, it's the head is positive. The balloon is negative, but anyway, it's not actually about friction. Although I thought it was, it's about adhesion, which I didn't know. When two non-conducting materials meet, they form a bond. And that adhesion bond is what happens with the triboelectric property. Essentially, it's pulled apart, and in pulling it apart... electrons jump from one material to the other.

So as I'm separating the balloon from my hair over and over and over again, it's not the friction that's imparting energy. It's the pulling of the balloon away from the hairs that it was chemically bonding to really quickly. Physical pulling of the electrons off of the hair is causing the balloon to be negatively charged, which is super neat. Cool, I didn't know that. Yeah, I didn't either. So I've got this list. This is called triboelectric series. Okay.

Yeah, so start at the top. It has human hands, usually too moist, though. Very positive. That's just about you specifically. Hands too moist. Too moist. Thanks for telling me I'm claiming. Very positive. Too moist. Glass, human hair, nylon, wool, fur, lead, quartz, mica, cat fur, silk, aluminum, paper, cotton, steel, neutral, wood, neutral, amber, resins, hard rubber, rubber balloons, similar to latex.

Nickel, copper, brass, silver, gold, platinum, polyester, styrene, styrofoam, saran wrap, polyurethane, polyethylene, like scotch tape, polypropylene, vinyl, parentheses PVC, silicon, Teflon, very negative. So you get the idea here. I hope. Right. A human hand or let's say more specifically for this example, human hair is number three on this list. A rubber balloon similar to latex is number 20 on this list. Human hair is pretty positive.

A rubber balloon is near neutral, but on the negative side of this series. And so a triboelectric series, what you would say is things that are further apart on this list, they'll be more likely to swap electrons. So... This is a pretty interesting list, and I found lots of different ones. This is one of those examples of things where, like, scientists have done experiments. They have tested hypotheses and figured out which ones of these things will give up electrons to other ones.

and put them in kind of this series. Looking at this series makes a lot of things in my life make sense. Like when I'm trying to get the saran wrap out and it just keeps clinging to me. Yeah, human hands are at the very positive end and saran wrap or like plastic wrap is, yeah, even though. You're moist. Way down. So I numbered them on my screen. So one, human hands. Neutral is like 15, 16. Saran wrap or plastic wrap is 26. So we're talking like, you know.

Another 10 places past neutral, which is pretty wild, actually. It also makes sense why when you're using things, sometimes they'll stick to you. You know, like not just saran wrap, but like anything made of vinyl.

or like scotch tape if it falls off of the tape it might just like stick to your body it's because of the triboelectric good to know super neat so anyway this adhesion happens to philippe's sweatshirt as well so as he's pulling his sweatshirt over his hair the sweatshirts interacting with the hair and pulling physically pulling electrons off of it similar to like shuffling on a carpet does the same thing for a similar reason and a lot of carpets are not

made of wools, but if they were, even still... Wool socks on, say, like a polyurethane, you know, synthetic carpet. Those are pretty far away in the triboelectric series from five to twenty seven. So like they're going to build up a lot of static charge. And essentially what has happened.

again is the base of the socks are rubbing electrons off of the carpet and then on the surface of that if you could see where they are it's charged in like a weird splotchy pattern it's not even because it just depends where those electrons have been pulled Super cool. So it may come as no surprise to you, Julian, but there are no studies for how much ozone is made from taking off a sweatshirt. What? I'm always surprised by what...

I surprisingly find, right? Yeah. We talk about this. Sometimes I go in going, there's no way. No way. And then there is a study. Yeah. I was really... that there would be one, and it turned out I was right. But there are a lot of studies on textiles, fabrics, because science really...

doesn't get done unless there's a reason to do it. And people do need to know how much static is made from sweaters or sweatshirts or different materials. DuPont did a bunch of studies about nylon and different, you know, synthetic fibers to see how much static. electricity they would make. But the one that I thought was the most relevant here was getting out of a car.

There are studies from 2008. As recently as then, the Journal of Physics Conference series said a paper called Charging of a Person Exiting a Car Seat in 2008, exploring the triboelectric charging of fabrics and materials. I was like, all right. All right. We got potential. Pun. So the voltage for some of these experiments that they found with just people standing up out of a car seat in a lab, 18 kilovolts.

Oh, that's more than I expected. That's a lot. That's a lot of volts. Yeah. And over... essentially picoseconds so almost essentially instant instantaneously so a regular seat with no seat cover you would end up with a charge separation of about 18 kilovolts that you can if say you're wearing synthetic pants the

Charge in the body from static electricity is actually usually measured in millijoules, which is interesting. And so they said, quote, as the person rises from the seat, the charge remaining on the clothing induces charge separation in the person's body. One half of the separated charge couples with the charge of opposite polarity on the clothing, whilst the other half of the separated charge couples to the nearest ground.

The capacitive coupling of this latter charge to Earth causes the potential of the person's body to increase. If the body's potential is 10 kilovolts and the capacitance between the person and the ground is 150 pf. I'll come back to that. Then the total amount of charge is 1.5 micro C and the total electric. Electrostatic energy is 7.5 millijoules. It's not very much. 7.5 millijoules. Little.

PF is picofaradays. Yeah, picofarads or whatever. And it's a measure of capacitance. It's not actually that important for what we're talking about. It's just like how much charge you can store. Yeah, exactly. I found a 1993 paper on human static discharge around electronics as well, which I thought would be relevant. It's about like people who build.

silicon chips they want to know if they're going to capacitance themselves and then discharge it into a chip they're building because you don't want to shock the cpu you just built and they said that the total energy in esd

an electrostatic discharge event, can be tens of millijoules, with time constraints measured in picoseconds and several kilowatts of power. Again, though, still kind of wimpy, but then, Julian, I found... a non-governmental organization called the Static Electricity Control that studies the health and safety of static electricity in France, the UK, New Zealand, and Australia, and is the industrial recommendation group. for those countries all about static electricity discharge oh wow right

We're onto something here. These people might be helpful. They sounded serious because they said static electricity is the prime culprit for at least two serious fires or explosions in the industry worldwide every day. Every day? Every day. Wow, this static electricity is no joke. Here we are just rubbing socks on the carpet. Rubbing a balloon on your hair. Two fires a day every day. You're the reason these factories are burning down.

So one experimenter estimated the capacitance of the human body as high as 400 picofarads and the charge of 50,000 volts. discharged during touching a charged car, creating a spark with an energy of 500 millijoules. And to quote the StarCraft space marines, yeah, that's the stuff.

What, if you want to, like, set your car on fire at the gas pump, basically? Yeah, that's what you would do. That's what they're worried about, I assume. Also, you must construct additional pilots. You must. Ready to work. Zog, zog. That's a different game. So...

We needed a number that we have to hit. So we know how much ozone we need. We know how much electricity the human now can make. And we're going to just go with, this is again, perfect storm. So we're going to make 500 millijoules trying to hit. 0.01 liters per liter of ozone. Right. So I guess the question is how much ozone can you make with a given amount of energy? Boom.

There are things called ozone generators. It is a wellness trend that I am not a fan of. Oh, gripe time. Gripe time. Gripe time. I have only recently learned that people have been putting ozone in their butts. Oh, no. I just want to say. Oh, no. What? Don't put anything in your butt. No. Stop it! I thought butt chugging was a whole different thing. Stop that! Wow. Why? What?

Possible benefit. I saw an ad for this. Some guy being like, what's my key to looking this good at 55? He did not look that good. And he was like, put no zone in my rectum. All the time. No, he didn't. He did. He did say that. And I was, frankly, I was dumbfounded. I would be as well. Where do people get these ideas? When I was five, I was like, you know what? We got this toothpaste. I bet nobody's used it.

as hair gel before, and I thought I was real clever, and that's the same logic of people sticking ozone up their butts. Like, no. You'd be surprised what people are willing to stick up their butts. It's incredible, the variety of things. that people for listen for pleasure that's fine just make sure it's a flared base but like for happy pride y'all no judgment but for wellness Stop it for wellness. Stop it. Anyway, that's my gripe time.

Ozone generators literally just use electrolysis that I mentioned at the top of the show and they turn air into ozone and they can do it at a pretty efficient rate. I found a source that said you could make a gram of ozone from air for every 18 watts of power consumed. However, if it were pure oxygen, then the power consumption drops to only 8 watts.

And I found this on an ozone generator manufacturing website. So I'm just, you know, I needed, I needed information and this is already magic. So let's just figure it out, you know, and just in case you're wondering the reason people say that they need an ozone.

generator it's because they say it's got antibacterial properties because like i don't know for some reason there's like less o2 and more o3 in the air for a very brief amount of time before it breaks down and lets a free radical and somehow that stops i don't know julian but they do it and i don't get it i'm supposed to have bacteria in my colon that's where i want it anyway you want it in a lot of places in your body but yeah so after that i think we've got everything we need

We've got... If you look at your triboelectric list, number three is human hair. It's positive. Wool, no bueno. Polyester, however... Number 24, so if our sweatshirt is synthetic, so Philippe, you know, skimped on the budget a little bit and got himself a synthetic sweatshirt, then human hair plus polyester, that's great. We've got a good... triboelectric series to work with. Now we need to be in a place where all of the ozone is...

So have you ever heard of kiosk number six? Our UK listeners know what I'm talking about. The red telephone booth from the UK. It was the number six release that was released in 1936 to 1968, designed by Giles Gilbert Scott in 1935. It's made of cast iron. It's got a.

The Teak door, its external dimensions are 8 feet by 3 feet or 245 centimeters by 91 centimeters. So we're going to assume an internal dimension of about 90% of that because I couldn't find... any actual internal dimensions but the red telephone box i thought fits a person and let's assume it's airtight okay sure 90 of that is 220 by 80 centimeters so Tall, wide, and it's a square, so also depth. That's about 1,400 liters of air. Okay. So we need to make enough ozone.

And we want 0.1% of that? 0.01. 0.01% of that. Right. Okay. Did you do that math in your head? I don't do math in my head anymore. Just tell me. Just tell me the answer. So 1,400 liters of air. 0.0001 means about 0.14 liters of ozone. Okay. Not that much. Not a lot. But still kind of a lot if we're doing eight watts per gram. It's not like it weighs a lot. Generated by sweater power. It is going to be a lot. So if we want to hit 10 parts per million of ozone.

In that environment, that size, 1400 liters, we need about 21.4 milligrams per cubic meter at standard temperature and pressure. I don't know why I got all physics in this one. So to fill the phone box, we'd need about .0301. but 0.03 grams of ozone. Like not actually that much in that very small environment. So the energy required to make that...

is about 867 joules. We divide it by 500 millijoules per discharge and we get 1736 times that you'd have to take your sweatshirt off. And have the perfect amount of static electricity that perfectly translated it to ozone. And then you continue to do it 1736 times. Wow.

This is the chicken slap cooking all over again. It really is. Lewis would be so proud. I timed myself taking off a sweatshirt a few times and putting it back on. It takes like a second and a half if you're doing it quickly. So we're assuming, again, there's so many assumings, but...

We're assuming we get a good static shock every time we take it off and every time we put it on in your polyester sweatshirt. That's 868 cycles of taking it off and on inside of a phone box, which makes you look like a crazy Superman.

Very confused Superman. Conflicted about whether he wants to save the day or not. Do I do it? No, don't do it. Do I do it? No, I don't do it. I don't really like this person that much. Do I do it? No, don't do it. Ah, but I'm Superman. Ah, but I'm going to be late for lunch. So Clark Kent found dad in a phone booth. Yeah. From indecision.

But if we assume we get more than one shock per cycle, like say we got six per cycle. So three during take on three during take off on average, maybe get two or four, whatever. It doesn't matter. 289 cycles, which is 15 minutes of constantly take. Taking your sweatshirt on and taking it off, putting it on, taking it off, putting it on for 15 minutes as fast as you can. This is a survivor game. I can't be. And again, you're just hanging out in a phone box, breathing the ozone.

waiting for your lungs to have an embolism right right assuming your lung function is still like good enough to keep you going Also, it's airtight. Like, are you going to suffocate in the time that it takes you to do this? On top of that, I didn't even think of that, calculating how much CO2 you're going to make. Not that, I mean, in a pure oxygen environment, it's also not good for you anyway, so.

So it's just like, oh gosh. Well, if you're in pure oxygen and you have a static discharge from your sweater, I think you're just going to immolate yourself first. Honestly, yeah. You're just going to set yourself on fire. So it's going to happen. And since it's a synthetic fabric, it'll just melt to you. Which then you won't be able to take it off and on. So maybe the answer is none. It will never... It's the Apollo 1 disaster. No way, yeah.

So the most efficient way to do this would be to just bring an ozone generator with you into the telephone box. And then you stick it in your rectum. Just plug it in. In your rectum. Oh, God. And you wait for the wellness industry to take its course. They have models that can make 120 grams an hour. So you could like hit your PPM in like a second.

sweet in a closed environment even with air you could do it pretty quick it would be crowded in the phone box with that generator in there but like not for very long you'd have your embolism and you'd be done So Philippe, how many sweatshirt would you have to remove to inhale a lethal dose of ozone created by static discharge? If you could wear 1,700 sweatshirts at once, you could just take each of them off.

But otherwise, you're probably going to have to take off 1,736 static shocks worth of sweatshirts. However many sweatshirts that is. Would it help if you're more her suit? If you're hairier? Maybe. I don't know. It helps if you're drier. Drier air produces more static electricity than moisture air. Drier skin, which I don't know if you've ever experienced, would...

cause more static shocks. Yeah, in the winter, right? Like, I've lived places where it's like, oh, winter's coming, the air's dry, because I'm just getting shocked constantly. Yeah, I was on, I think it... Yosemite or somewhere where like it was high up and really dry. And I like slid into bed and it was like a light show. I was like, wow. My dad got out his camcorder to try and record it.

If you were under the covers, you might have had a pulmonary edema. Probably not. So thanks, Philippe, for your question. It would not solve anything. And please don't put an ozone generator up your butt. Definitely does not solve anything. Just don't do it. Just stop it. Stop it. Stop it.

What will they try and sell us next? Anyway, thank you so much for listening to another absurd episode of That's Absurd. Please elaborate. The show was created, written, and produced by that guy, Trace Dominguez. And that guy over there, Julian. That's a reference to the last episode. It is.

Yeah, that aired, which there will be some between now and then, so it'll be confusing. Anyway, and also thanks to our wonderful, wonderfully talented and man who's never produced an electrostatic discharge in his whole life, Kyle. Unless he wanted to, in which case he just did it. Kyle Sisk has command over static electricity. It's true. It's a very, like, low-tier superpower, but one nonetheless. Static man. Just give people, like, a light shock. The bad guys are like, quit it!

No, you lock the bad guy in a very small area and you just use your power to generate a bunch of ozone. Or to make jewelry. Because you have the power of electrolysis. Anyway, our website and social is made awesome by our new associate producer, Sabrina Capello. Our music is thanks to Epidemic Sound. Thanks to listeners who submitted questions for this episode, Madeline and Felipe.

If you would like to submit a question, we've made it as easy as we can, I think. You can fill out the form down in our show notes. You can email us at hello at that's absurd show dot com. You can visit our website. That's absurd show dot com slash ask. Or you can do what Madeline did. Call us 302.

two tape show that's t-a-p-e-s-h-o and then we have like a nice recording of your question that we can play on the show and you can you can hear yourself back on the pod and then you can tell your friends like hey I was on a podcast, which when I tell people, they're not impressed, but maybe your friends will be. Thank you to our absurd administrators, Les, Adam, Austin, Jonathan, Evan, Dan, Sabrina, and The Brain. and an enormous

outsized thank you to our preposterous producer, Pinky. Thanks, Pinky. Pinky of the House Patreon, first of your name, the Ridiculous, Queen of the Absurd, the reruns, and the first episodes, Queen of Aronson, Khaleesi of the Great Dirty Sea Protector of the Realm Lady Regent of the Seven Kingdoms Breaker of Chain Letters and Mother of Dragons

What are we going to do if we ever get two preposterous producers? We'll have to think of another title. We'll have to mine for a new crazy title. But Pinky's supporting us at the frankly absurd level on our Patreon that we didn't think was possible. And yet here Pinky is. So thank you so, so much. You are a maniac, frankly. Yeah. Thank you, though. Leave us a review wherever you're listening right now to this show. Everybody who has left a review, I see you.

I appreciate you. The ones who have left reviews talking about how great Julian is. I really appreciate that because he had so many reviews going the opposite way. So that was nice to be able to read. So if you haven't reviewed us, please do if you have reviewed us why don't you go ahead and tell a friend about the show send them an episode that you really love because the only way to grow a podcast is either to work with other podcasts or for you the listener to tell other people about it

So just take a second and do that. It would be really, really awesome. I know some of you annoy your friends and family by telling them about us, so keep it up, even if they ask you to stop. If you haven't yet, you can watch some of our videos over on YouTube. You can see our faces if you really want to. Look for the link in the show notes along with everything else we're talking about. And, of course, a special thanks to those who are listening on Nebula. We see you.

And we get a little bit of support thanks to you listening to the show. Nebula listeners who listen via Nebula get an ad free version of the show. They also support us and other independent creators just by being members of Nebula. and watching videos that they may have watched elsewhere right there on Nebula. Every view that they give them doesn't go to a faceless corporation. It goes to a, well, a smaller corporation owned by creators. To join Nebula, visit nebula.tv.

Go.nebula.tv and join and you'll get a discount because you know us. Well, Trace, what do we say at the end of every episode? Don't put it in your butt.

Don't put it in... I mean, you can put it in your butt, like for fun or whatever, if that's your... But there's not a health benefit. Like we say at the end of every episode, the vast majority of things you put in your butt... will not improve your life. Some might. I was going to go with the manosphere as the worst layer of the atmosphere, but I like yours better. I think yours is more practical. Like we say at the end of every episode. Pterodactyl Tea Party rules!

Pterodactyl petite petardy. Petardy. Don't put ozone in your petardy. Oh, there you go. Don't put ozone in your pterodactyl petardy. Petardy. Did pterodactyls have petardies or they had like... Presumably. Cloacas. You know what? No idea.