Pod Insights The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week Fallout Shelter Fads, The Library of Cocaine, Mosquito Nepobaby About this episode Ben Bradford, host of the podcast Are We Doomed?, joins the show to talk about when buying fallout shelter goods was all the rage. Plus, Laura tells us how she's related to mosquito royalty, and Rachel explains why the Library of Congress is holding onto Freud's "friend's" cocaine.
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Transcript 11,277 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:03 Rachel Feltman? At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and tech stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Feltman. I'm Laura Bisus.
0:26 Speaker 01 And I'm Ben Bradford.
0:27 Rachel Feltman? Ben, welcome to the show.
0:29 Speaker 01 Thanks for having me.
0:30 Rachel Feltman? So would you tell our listeners a little bit about what you do and about your own show that they might want to check out?
0:36 Speaker 01 I'm the creator and host of the new cheerily titled podcast called Are We Doomed?
0:42 Rachel Feltman? Nice.
0:43 Speaker 01 Which is, yeah, it's a show about the end of the world, both sort of real, practical threats that we face, but also, you know, how much is in our imagination? Are we doomed? Or do we just feel doomed? What are the things we need to take seriously? What can we do about them?
1:00 Rachel Feltman? Nice. It's a great premise because, you know, we, one, simply can't ignore the signs that we may be doomed in certain ways.
1:09 Speaker 01 Sure.
1:10 Rachel Feltman? And good to, like, you know, keep your head about it and just talk about keeping these in perspective and maybe getting some solutions.
1:19 Speaker 01 Not to plug the show too early, but I will say, one of the things that actually has been sort of lovely and unexpected is that I think I actually feel more optimistic about our chances as I do it. And I don't think that's because the threats that we face are any less real, but just because literally when you look at any challenge and you start thinking about what are solutions to it, it gives you a feeling that you can take action in a new kind of way. So that has been sort of unexpectedly nice.
1:49 Rachel Feltman? That's awesome. Yeah, I feel like that that theme has come up a lot in, when I talk to people who, you know, research or write about catastrophe, that like, actually, when you, when you sort of look at how people react and sort of like, once you actually start to think about problems and solutions, it's, it feels much more optimistic than you might expect in talking about the master.
2:11 Speaker 01 You know what it's like?
2:12 Rachel Feltman? So, yeah.
2:12 Speaker 01 It's like, and you guys will understand this as, as people who write. It's like when you start writing a story and the page is blank and it feels impossible. And you're like, this thing is impossible. And then you actually start writing and it just feels less impossible as you start writing. And it's sort of the same thing, but with, you know, nuclear war.
2:32 Rachel Feltman? Yeah.
2:33 Speaker 02 Bit of a jump.
2:35 Rachel Feltman? Well, let's jump right into it. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a tease about some kind of fact or story that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, et cetera, and decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then, once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Laura, what's your tease?
2:59 Speaker 02 My great grandfather discovered 2% of all known mosquito species.
3:05 Rachel Feltman? Only 2%?
3:06 Speaker 02 Only 2%. I know, slacker, right? Right?
3:10 Rachel Feltman? That's exciting. I'd love to, can't wait to hear about how you're, you know, an entomology nepo baby.
3:18 Speaker 01 Definitely a real thing.
3:19 Rachel Feltman? Yeah. Ben, what's your tease?
3:21 Speaker 01 Fallout shelters. So big in the popular imagination. You can picture it as soon as I say it. Vault hatch. In reality, like, no one built them. Almost no one built them. The whole thing was a big bust. Think dot com bust of the 2000s, podcast bust of the early 2020s, unfortunately for us. Like, your whole entire conception of fallout shelters comes from this one few month period in 1961.
3:47 Rachel Feltman? Wow. I'm excited for this one. My tease is, is there actually cocaine at the Library of Congress?
3:56 Speaker 01 Ooh.
3:58 Rachel Feltman? More on that later.
4:00 Speaker 02 Fun image in my head of some librarians.
4:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly.
4:04 Rachel Feltman? Laura, why don't you kick us off with mosquitoes?
4:08 Speaker 02 Great. Well, so technically, this is not something I learned exactly this week.
4:15 Rachel Feltman? They never are.
4:16 Speaker 02 They never are. You know, I'm a stickler for accuracy. My now husband, Francis, gave me the inclination that he is some sort of mosquito prince on our first date. The topic of our biggest fears came up in the conversation, and I said that mine are global pandemics and the rise of mosquito borne illnesses, since I'm a mosquito magnet, you know, and a hopeless romantic, obviously.
4:42 Speaker 01 As soon as he said mosquito prince, you were in.
4:44 Speaker 02 I was in. I was like, oh, I'm done.
4:46 Speaker 01 That was it.
4:49 Speaker 02 Well, he very smoothly responded with, you know, a fun, did you know that there are mosquitoes named after my great grandfather? And I was like, you know, 22 and like, no, I did not. I didn't know mosquitoes were named after people. But yeah, in all seriousness, my husband's great grandfather, Francisco Edlegon Bisis, really was an accomplished entomologist in the Philippines. He lived there for most of his life, where he had a really prolific career studying mosquitoes and malaria. Thanks to the, I'm going to underscore this, incredible team at the Smithsonian, and a shout out to Ben and Ryan for arranging all of this. We took a trip down to DC to meet with their mosquito, mosquito collections curator,
5:31 Speaker 02 Dr. Yvonne Linton. She showed us actual specimens of the many species he discovered that are now named after him, a lot of his papers and the books that he wrote. And they're all stored at the Smithsonian's archives, because he worked, did a lot of work with the United States Army back in the early to mid 20th century. And also, while I don't condone trophy hunting, we did kind of stumble upon an elephant skull that Teddy Roosevelt had procured. This word, I guess I'll use.
6:01 Speaker 01 He did that, yeah.
6:01 Speaker 02 He did. Yeah, yeah. Like, I, we're strolling by, and I see the tag, and I see like, the big loopy handwriting, and I see TR. And I was like, is that Teddy Roosevelt? And she was like, oh, yeah.
6:11 Rachel Feltman? Oh, yeah. There would, there would be like, no animal specimens in American history, without him. Natural history museums without Teddy Roosevelt.
6:18 Speaker 02 Hundred percent. Yeah.
6:20 Speaker 01 Specifically the one who hunted himself.
6:23 Speaker 02 So basically, we went, it was kind of, this whole experience was sort of like an episode of finding your roots with, you know, all creatures, great and small, you know, between the mosquitoes and that elephant skull and a scientific paper trail rather than an immigration one. And, you know, so beyond that tangible excitement of seeing these tiny mosquitoes named after him and mounted on those little slides or flipping through books, we got to finally learn about what set Francisco apart as a scientist, which we hadn't really quite understand until this. He was born on a farm in Luzon in 1896 and enrolled in the arts and sciences department at the University of the Philippines in 1922. He did not enroll to study mosquitoes. He actually wanted
7:07 Speaker 02 to be a journalist first, which obviously made me kind of happy. Not quite sure where the turn exactly came, but while he was in college, an American engineer with the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation was looking for an, quote, "able-bodied man with ideas, imagination, and courage to be trained as a malaria technician." At this time, historically, the US Army had a growing military presence in Southeast Asia and saw that it was in their best interest to learn about these hungry insects that were sickening and killing soldiers and locals alike. And it turns out that Francisco was that able-bodied man with ideas, imagination, and courage. And he ended up becoming the first Filipino
7:52 Speaker 02 trained as a malaria tech and eventually was promoted to an entomologist supervisor after only four years. As an entomologist herself, Dr. Linton told us she was impressed with how Francisco was able to see the bigger picture of how mosquitoes fit into the ecosystem without a lot of the training that's available today, you know, with only like four years' worth of work. He had this real knack for understanding how all of these organisms, big and small, were related and fit together.
8:23 Speaker 02 Yeah, the Philippines, we have not been yet, but it's home to an incredible, you know, a lot of incredibly diverse, incredibly biodiverse ecosystems, you know, with hundreds of thousands of different plants and animal species. So when you're researching that, there's a lot of variables. And he had this really keen eye for pruning and kind of weeding out what some of the noise in that data to sort of understand the bigger picture.
8:48 Speaker 01 Sure.
8:48 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, it's something that, you know, my, my husband is incredibly detail oriented. So in that weird genetic way, I was like, all of this tracks. And I could see, you know, I could see him doing this exact same kind of very, very detailed work. And we got to where we really saw this was he wrote a textbook called Notes on Philippine Mosquitoes, still in print today. There are a couple of different editions. And he was able to differentiate between the species based on tiny differences in their hair and wing patterns. So
9:19 Speaker 01 In their hair?
9:20 Speaker 02 Hair, in the little hairs on their legs.
9:23 Speaker 01 Just like how they style it?
9:25 Speaker 02 Yes, yes, you know, mullet versus, yeah, yeah, mullet versus mohawk versus bangs.
9:30 Speaker 02 Literally splitting hairs, like that was just unbelievable. And he worked very closely with scientific illustrators to capture those subtle differences. And he basically compiled all of this into this book that's kind of considered a bible of Filipino mosquitoes. Originally, I thought he was the one that drew all of this, which also tracks with, you know, my husband's wonderful attention to detail, but he did work with illustrators on that. But he still had to be the person to say, hey, put that hair over here, not there. So he still kind of had to have that vision as well.
9:59 Speaker 01 It's like describing it to the police sketch artist.
10:01 Speaker 02 Could you, exactly, exactly.
10:03 Speaker 01 But a mosquito.
10:03 Speaker 02 But a mosquito, not, not a person.
10:06 Speaker 01 Right.
10:06 Speaker 02 And while like, it's funny, and while those minuscule, minuscule details must have been painstaking to see, it ends up being really important. Because understanding that the differences between mosquito species can help control deadly diseases, namely malaria. So if you can tell that one species is more prevalent than another, or not living in a particular area, it can save some precious time or resources on mosquito mitigation. That way you're not wasting time worrying about West Nile if West Nile isn't there when you should be focusing on Dengue or malaria or something else.
10:41 Speaker 01 You know, I just, just to interject, we did an episode related to mosquitoes on our show, really specifically to the question of like, should we take them out?
10:51 Speaker 02 I'm a mosquito nepo baby.
10:52 Speaker 01 Now I know, now I know. But, but when you talk about your grandfather, you know, being able to sort of like sift through the noise in the environment, one of the things that we heard that was really interesting from this not only biotechnologist, but also ethicist who works on this programs is the sort of the value of people from the area being involved in the work because of course they're going to know the environment better. And so you talk about your grandfather being the first technician trained and he's from this region.
11:21 Speaker 02 Yeah.
11:22 Speaker 01 And I just wonder to what extent, you know, that shows sort of the power of that.
11:26 Speaker 02 The power of that local knowledge that you really can't gain unless you are in the ground, which we'll talk a little bit about like kind of his process, but exactly like, and that's, that still holds true today. That was true in the twenties and thirties and that's true, you know, now as well.
11:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's fascinating.
11:41 Speaker 02 Yeah. He spent most of his time on Anopheles mosquitoes. They are the ones that carry malaria. It's the female Anopheles lady power who spread it at the, yeah, right? Girl power. At the time that he was doing this, there were an estimated 2 million cases of malaria per year. And while it hasn't been completely eradicated in the Philippines, annual causes, the annual cases are way down in like the 6,000 per year range, largely concentrated in specific areas. And of course we have the vaccines. I remember the morning that that news broke, I looked at my husband and I was like, well, he's definitely happy right now. This is, this is definitely a big deal. And you know, Francisco himself, very likely, much to your point, probably caught malaria at least once, probably multiple
12:25 Speaker 02 times throughout the course of his work, just based on the very nature of it.
12:29 Speaker 01 Sure.
12:30 Speaker 02 You know, like if you need, if you want to study mosquitoes, you need to be among them. And he would do things.
12:34 Speaker 01 High risk work.
12:35 Speaker 02 High risk, you know, and he would do, he would sit outside and note what time the malarial mosquitoes were actually starting to bite. This way, you know, you could actually tell people when to take proper precautions. So like if they're not biting at 6:00 PM, you don't need to tell people to, you know, hang out under a mosquito net on their bed. That doesn't make a lot of sense, but if they're biting at midnight, 2:00 AM, promoting mosquito nets. Actually much more realistic. And kind of with all of that, Dr. Linton said that he was one of the first people that made a massive impact on the number of malaria cases in the Philippines, largely due to that local knowledge, that hands-on, critical eye for detail, and also timing. Since he
13:18 Speaker 02 was right, he was already on the front lines, other scientists as well were also kind of starting to see the forests for the trees, no pun intended, you know, and that there were several of these mosquito species in the area that looked identical, but behaved completely differently. Hmm. And he was also a pioneer in studying the mosquito as a whole. So not just adult mosquitoes, but what mosquitoes at the larval stage were feeding on looked like, and importantly, their connection to water. Philippines, archipelago, lot of water, water everywhere, and mosquitoes lay their eggs in water. So kind of studying that connection between water and the mosquitoes
13:59 Speaker 02 was very important. Looking at, were they in freshwater, brackish water, salty, fast water, slow water, and then being able to trace that to which types of mosquitoes were laying eggs there. The, now, the malarial mosquitoes, they kind of break the mold here in a weird way. If you look at a mosquito, the Kulex mosquitoes that spread West Nile virus, which, and some types of encephalitis, they like lay their eggs in that muddy stagnant water that we mostly associate with mosquitoes. Malarial mosquitoes, little different. They use clean, they actually breed in clean water. So what are you, they are, they care, they
14:40 Speaker 02 care, exactly. So when he was studying those incredibly robust slash snobby malarial mosquitoes, he noticed that they were laying their eggs in rural areas, first of all, where the streams were actually moving really fast, which is another sort of a misnomer. Usually, it's sitting water, or it's stagnant. When he took a closer look, he noticed that the mosquitoes were actually laying their eggs on the reeds, on the sides of a fast-flowing stream. So not necessarily in the flow, but right on the side and in the reeds. Fortunately, this presented an easy way to actually get rid of the larvae, remove a lot of, remove the reeds, take them out. And he did this by starting programs with local schools, like local elementary and middle
15:24 Speaker 02 and high schools, where he showed, perfect, you know, get, get those kids involved, where he showed kids where these mosquitoes were laying their eggs and taught them how to take out the reeds to destroy the larvae. Which Dr. Linton said this was at the time, a very forward facing form of integrated pest management that just kind of wasn't happening. And highlights how important spreading this type of knowledge was to him because you know, it was probably like, I mean, he probably knew people who had either gotten very sick or died from malaria. So he definitely saw the value in passing it on. And she says that today in the Philippines, there are kids who are still ace mosquito
16:05 Speaker 02 identifiers. And she credited a lot of that to his status as a teaching scientist, even, you know, several generations removed. And importantly, you know, he did all of this without really powerful microscopes, DNA analysis, PubMed databases, things like that. So I'm going to wrap up with some back of the baseball card stats about Francisco that I've been compiling. I really want like scientist baseball cards. I think that that would be something, a very, I think there's a niche market for that, but I think it could do well. So, you know, sharks, I'm here. Yeah. I'm ready. In 1955, he was named among the country's 10 outstanding scientists by the Philippine government. He, they awarded him a gold medal and a diploma of honor for his contributions to the study of malaria and mosquitoes.
16:49 Speaker 02 He and his wife Crispina had eight children, 36 grandchildren, 79 great grandchildren, and at least 61 great, great grandchildren, and six great, great, great grandchildren.
17:04 Speaker 02 There is actually a family spreadsheet that tracks this. It might be a little bit outdated, but again, that attention to detail, that gene is strong. When I asked, when I asked Francis, I was like, what's the current cousin count? Do you know? He was like, oh, I have a spreadsheet, Laura. And I was like,
17:17 Speaker 01 Let me look that up.
17:18 Speaker 02 Of course, he literally, he actually, and I was very excited. I was like, oh, I'm on there. I'm in. Yes. And yes, he has a total, Francisco has a total of seven mosquito species named after him. And they were actually even running out of ways to incorporate the last name BISUS into the scientific names. And in total, he identified 71 out of 3,800 known mosquito species. So that's that roughly 2% of all known mosquito species that were developed, discovered by this one man, this one very ordinary man. And yeah, from an emotional standpoint, it was, you know, obviously really moving to learn about my husband's not so distant
17:58 Speaker 02 ancestor. And it was just that great reminder of how science is people. You know, we need people doing things like sitting out and seeing when mosquitoes start to bite in order to make discoveries. And I kind of started thinking, thinking like, oh, who is the Francisco BISUS of snake venom? Or which teams right now are doing some of that really detailed work to keep the, to keep NASA's Artemis team safe by looking at things that we might not even be thinking about right now. So it's just kind of that really nice reminder that like behind every paper, behind every launch, behind everything, there's, there are a ton of people that, you know, you might never know their names, but they're doing something. But last, I do just want to thank
18:40 Speaker 02 the Smithsonian team again. They were incredibly generous with their time. And, you know, it was just really, really cool to get to learn so much and now get to incorporate it into, you know, into some of my work.
18:52 Rachel Feltman? That's really cool.
18:53 Speaker 02 Yeah.
18:53 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's amazing.
18:54 Speaker 02 It was fun. It was cool.
18:57 Speaker 01 You know, if I just, one thing that I learned when we did mosquitoes.
19:03 Rachel Feltman? Yeah.
19:03 Speaker 01 Is just like, I mean, when you're talking about it, like your grandfather, you mentioned this a little bit, but I mean, he definitely saved lives. And like, who knows how many lives he saved? Because the mosquito is the greatest killer of people.
19:16 Rachel Feltman? Right.
19:16 Speaker 01 Of any animal in history. You guys talked about hippos a couple of episodes ago.
19:21 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, that's why they clarify large land animal.
19:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly. Because the mosquito is so much worse.
19:27 Rachel Feltman? Yeah. Because of the mosquito, yeah.
19:29 Speaker 02 Right. You don't need to fear sharks at the beach. You need to be afraid of, more afraid of mosquito. You don't need to be, but.
19:35 Speaker 01 Of the mosquito, yeah.
19:35 Speaker 02 Of the mosquito, you have more chance of a mosquito hurting you than a shark, so.
19:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, they're, they're, they're real jerks.
19:41 Speaker 02 They are, they are.
19:43 Rachel Feltman? All right, we're gonna take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts.
19:55 Rachel Feltman? Okay, we're back. And I also have a, a sort of, you know, bowels of a museum story. So I'm gonna jump in.
20:02 Speaker 02 The best kind.
20:03 Rachel Feltman? Yeah. With, is there actually cocaine in the Library of Congress? The people demand to know. So I was looking at some articles on the Library of Congress website, as you do, and one in particular that delves into some of the more surprising items in the library's collection, which is FYI, in no way limited to books or even to media, and includes more than 170 million items.
20:27 Speaker 02 Wow.
20:28 Rachel Feltman? So you can learn about some wild stuff in there. I'm gonna share some examples before we get into the cocaine of it all. So there's an extremely detailed 3D topographical map of the Grand Canyon, made entirely of chocolate.
20:41 Speaker 02 White chocolate, dark chocolate, milk chocolate.
20:43 Rachel Feltman? It looks like milk chocolate, honestly. Definitely not white chocolate.
20:46 Speaker 01 The worst kind.
20:47 Rachel Feltman? Yeah. That's why it's still there. Nobody wanted to eat it. The Library of Congress website says they don't know much about the map or the company that made it, the chocolate topographic company in 1991. I did some, you know, some real, you know, gumshoe detective work.
21:03 Speaker 01 Yes.
21:04 Rachel Feltman? And this Denver-based company changed its name at some point to the Art Coco Chocolate Company. And for at least a few years, you could order from them by phone. I found conflicting info on whether or not they still exist. Maybe they changed their name back again. Unclear, hit a dead end. If you, if you know.
21:23 Speaker 02 If you know, call, please.
21:25 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, please.
21:26 Speaker 01 Also, the kind of products that they do, do they just do topography? Or, you know, do they do faces? I would like some other information about like, what kinds of things we can order.
21:34 Rachel Feltman? Yeah. Well, apparently they were called the topographic company, the chocolate topographic company. So it does seem that their thing was maps, chocolate maps.
21:42 Speaker 01 Yeah.
21:42 Rachel Feltman? And you might be wondering like, how is it possible that the Library of Congress is just like, stuck with this chocolate map they know nothing about? And.
21:50 Speaker 02 And how is it not melting? Like, I know it's the climate control.
21:53 Speaker 01 What's the temperature control situation?
21:54 Rachel Feltman? Like, yeah. So, no, it's a good question. And the answer is that basically, items will come in as part of large parcels that are mostly made up of the library's actually like mandated preservation material, which is like the papers of politicians and impactful individuals. And then also just like everyday folks who managed to capture part of the narrative of the time and place. So, you know, they're, they're really just like collecting narratives, right? But they sort of accept, you know, a person's papers, quote unquote, which sometimes include a chocolate map of the Grand Canyon.
22:35 Rachel Feltman? And once they have items and they accept them, you know, they do take the preservation of those items pretty seriously. You know, I doubt people have lost sleep over the preservation of this chocolate map.
22:48 Speaker 02 I might tonight, I'm just saying.
22:50 Rachel Feltman? But they certainly like, climate control is, is easy for them. Like, they, they definitely already have spaces that are designed for things that need to be kept cool. So I'm sure there were plenty of spots where they could, they could slip in that chocolate map.
23:04 Speaker 01 Have you seen a picture of this?
23:06 Rachel Feltman? Yes, yeah.
23:08 Speaker 01 Can you describe it? Because, you know, I feel like the Grand Canyon is mostly known for like, what's not there, rather than what is there?
23:14 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, no, I'm pulling it up just so I can really do it, do it justice.
23:18 Speaker 01 Yeah.
23:19 Rachel Feltman? So.
23:19 Speaker 01 Try to use words like luscious and silky.
23:22 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so sort of imagine if somebody took like.
23:28 Rachel Feltman? Like a novelty five pound chocolate bar, 10 pound chocolate bar, big old block of chocolate. And then just proceeded to carve away at it to create an aerial view of the Grand Canyon. So it is really, this is a, this is a novelty item defined by its negative spaces. It is very detailed. I don't, I don't know why it exists. I don't know who made it. I mean, I know that this company made it, but what's their deal? What? I don't know. And it, isn't it beautiful that people will be wondering this for as long as our great nation is capable of, you know, maintaining a library of Congress? So, and yeah, there are some items that they've like really gone out of their way to figure
24:12 Rachel Feltman? out how to preserve and display. So they have the whiteboard where, where Carl Sagan and Andrea and sketched out the, the premise of the movie Contact. Um, and it's double sided, you know, it's one of those like you flip it over and there's stuff on both sides. And they needed to figure out a way to display it that wouldn't risk wiping away any of the dry erase marker on it. But they also wanted people to be able to see both sides. So somebody actually like designed and constructed a display case that was like solving the problem of displaying a double sided whiteboard. Perfect. It's just incredible.
24:51 Speaker 02 Science is people. Somebody had to do that.
24:53 Rachel Feltman? Yeah.
24:54 Speaker 02 Who was that person?
24:55 Rachel Feltman? Yeah. They've also got a really nasty looking like chunk of fruitcake. It was a wedding cake from back in 1863 when P T Barnum sold tickets to the nuptials of Charles Stratton, who was known professionally as General Tom Thumb. He was two foot 11 and his similarly statured bride, Lavinia Warren. That ended up in the Library of Congress, not because of P T Barnum, but because Lavinia apparently in 1905 sent a piece of the cake to a theater manager named Harrison Gray Fisk, along with a letter promoting her upcoming book. And the cake wound up in the personal papers of he and his wife, the actress Minnie Matternfisk.
25:39 Rachel Feltman? So again, it's just one of those things that it's like, these papers were donated and also this old piece of fruitcake from a sideshow wedding.
25:47 Speaker 02 Why not?
25:48 Speaker 01 Well, you know, nothing, nothing is more exemplifies a fruitcake than it's still existing 100 years later.
25:55 Rachel Feltman? Yeah. Well, and in the descriptions, it's just a piece of wedding cake. And looking at it, it really, it's got, it's got a very fruitcakey vibe. This is not like the topper of a, a modern wedding cake that got put away for the anniversary. Yeah. That being said, who knows what it looked like originally because it's been some time. So maybe that's just all that's left of it. So, you know, in this article about all these random items, we then get to this amazing line. All of those are real, but it is not true, no matter how delightful the rumor, that the library has a very small stash of Sigmund Freud's cocaine. We have a very small stash of Freud's friend's cocaine.
26:35 Speaker 02 He was holding it for our friends.
26:36 Rachel Feltman? Cheeky monkey.
26:37 Speaker 02 Wow, wow.
26:39 Rachel Feltman? So, yeah, what's the deal with this cocaine? Yeah, not his at all. What's the deal with this cocaine? So to set the scene, in 1885, The Lancet, the medical journal, said that, quote, "The medical press is full of cocaine just now." They were literally like cocaine is so hot right now. And according to an article about this in Aon, the journal actually had trouble dealing with the sheer volume of cocaine-related research being submitted, in part because all the researchers were also on cocaine, which I'll get to in a minute.
27:10 Speaker 01 You're like, this stuff is great.
27:11 Speaker 02 Yeah. Look at all the science we can do with it.
27:15 Rachel Feltman? So, yeah, in 1884, Freud, Sigmund Freud, the famous guy, was getting very into cocaine in several ways. Coca leaves, of course, have indigenous use dating back thousands of years, but the active ingredient cocaine was, was only isolated in 1855. And, you know, it was sort of like people were aware of it in the, you know, three decades preceding, but Freud and fellow doctors kind of just started to get super into it in, in the 1880s. And they were all experimenting with the potential benefits of cocaine. And they were like, this stuff is great. I'm really calm, not anxious about social interactions at all. I, I feel great. I feel alive.
27:59 Rachel Feltman? Freud sent a vial of it to his fiancee. And then he, he ended up writing this, this big essay, this monograph on All of the promise of cocaine in June of 1884. And he was like, what can't cocaine do and how?
28:15 Speaker 01 So the person on cocaine?
28:16 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, exactly. And he was not alone in this. Like you, you'll see researchers describing how awesome it is that they're getting so much done in their work on cocaine because they're on cocaine. It's, it's wild, really. Like in retrospect, it's hilarious, but at the time they were just like, this is going to revolutionize science.
28:37 Speaker 01 Sure, they didn't know, they didn't know. To be fair, yeah.
28:40 Rachel Feltman? Yeah.
28:42 Rachel Feltman? And I, I found this paper from 2011 by physicist and science historian Howard Markle, who, who wrote about this in JAMA. And Freud, who was 28 at the time, he wrote this monograph and called it Uber Coca, On Coca, which is kind of ironic because he was indeed on cocaine. He meant about cocaine, obviously. So this is from Markle's paper. Using himself as his experimental subject over several months, Freud consumed a great deal of cocaine as he recorded the drug's physiological effects and potential therapeutic uses. However, he skimmed over cocaine's most important clinical use as a local anesthetic. It was a hurried last paragraph, a postscript, really, where he noted that they had marac, they had marked anesthetizing effects.
29:28 Rachel Feltman? And, and that was his big mistake. That brings in his friend at the Vienna General Hospital, ophthalmologist Carl Kohler. So Freud had been talking up cocaine to a lot of people, including Carl. And he had gotten him to join his experiments, AKA doing cocaine. But it was ultimately a solo experiment that made Kohler and cocaine very famous. He noticed that it made his tongue numb, and that gave him the idea to use it as an anesthetic, particularly for eye surgery, which was an issue that he and other people had really been trying to crack because eyes move reflexively in response to very little stimuli. So you really need to like.
30:11 Rachel Feltman? Settle those puppies down before you operate on them. And so he decided he was, he like slathered some on a frog's eye. Great success. Then he tested it on himself because I guess that's
30:22 Speaker 01 That's the next step.
30:23 Speaker 02 Next logical step.
30:25 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, exactly.
30:25 Speaker 02 Frog's eye, your eye.
30:27 Speaker 01 That's it.
30:28 Rachel Feltman? And he published that work in 1884. And this was the first local anesthetic, which of course was a huge deal. Now, obviously it's really good that we have better local anesthetics than cocaine now. There are many issues that arise when you inject yourself with cocaine. If you need me to really elaborate on that, listeners, send me an email. But you shouldn't do it is, is the real TLDR. But yeah, there was this guy, Dr. William Hallstead, who tested it as an anesthetic for other parts of the body. And again, just injected himself with it to test that. And he got like pretty addicted. And this was a pretty common story among researchers at the time. But when Kohler published this, for all of cocaine's flaws, this was a huge advancement.
31:11 Rachel Feltman? It was the only alternative to like really brute force knocking someone out with, with ether or chloroform. And so you got to keep a person conscious. You didn't like risk giving them too much of the sedative. You know, you could numb up the eye, keep the eye still. So unsurprisingly, this really took the surgical world by storm and the, the especially eye surgery. And Kohler became very famous. Freud was not thrilled about this. He wrote to his fiance.
31:44 Speaker 02 Tricks.
31:45 Rachel Feltman? "The cocaine business has indeed brought me much honor, but the lion's share to others." Yeah, he was very salty about it. But again, like, you know, he had, he had had the opportunity to explore this use of cocaine and had not, you've been too busy exploring cocaine. So.
32:01 Speaker 01 I feel like it worked out for him though, don't you?
32:03 Rachel Feltman? In the, in the long run. He found, he found his path.
32:06 Speaker 01 We don't really associate him with like cocaine so much.
32:09 Rachel Feltman? No.
32:09 Speaker 01 More with like the father of psychology.
32:12 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, yeah. Much of which is stuff he came up with while on cocaine. So.
32:17 Speaker 02 So it's like a subtext. It's like a, it's like a, it's like when you, when you. Yeah, it's that little footnote and, you know, but we, you know, he couldn't have become that without said cocaine. So, yeah. It worked out.
32:28 Speaker 01 Yeah.
32:28 Rachel Feltman? Yeah. And I should say that Freud eventually kind of soured on cocaine because he had seen it as this very promising treatment for morphine addiction, as many people did. Now, we hear that and go like, yikes, you know? Yeah. But at the time, they really did not consider cocaine addictive. Based on what? I know not. I think just the fact that you were able to stay awake and be productive. They were like, when we say people are addicted, we mean they're on opium and they don't accomplish anything. I don't know. It just feels like this very, this very hypercapitalist of drug use. But anyway, yeah, they considered cocaine totally fine and they thought it was
33:12 Rachel Feltman? a great way to get off of morphine. And there were people who really suffered because of that, you know, and there were people who went on to struggle with cocaine addictions. And that was something that Freud seems to have had a lot of feelings about later. But back to Kohler, while all this was going on and, you know, his star was really rising, he put a tiny bit of extra cocaine from his groundbreaking surgical experiments into an envelope and he tucked it away for posterity. And then more than a century later, his daughter donated a collection of his papers and library staff were like, oh, look at that. I think this is the famous cocaine guy's cocaine. And the FBI checked it to make sure it was inert,
33:55 Rachel Feltman? wasn't gonna kill anybody just by sitting there. And then they put it back in the vault and now there is a little bit of cocaine in the Library of Congress. And that's, that's pretty fun. Now, as for Kohler, you know, unfortunately, he really should have been a phenom in his field because of this, but he faced a lot of antisemitism. And not long after he published this work, one of his colleagues at the hospital called him a slur and they got in a fight. He punched the guy in the face, fair. And then they were both medical lieutenants in the Army Reserve. So the- Guy that he punched challenged him to a duel. They did that five days later and Kohler emerged unharmed.
34:39 Rachel Feltman? His opponent survived, but had two deep wounds.
34:43 Speaker 02 Oh.
34:43 Rachel Feltman? And.
34:44 Speaker 01 So Kohler won. He won the duel.
34:46 Speaker 02 He won the duel.
34:46 Rachel Feltman? He did win the duel, but unfortunately, because his opponent had been wounded, there was, there were criminal charges brought against both of them. I guess this was that awkward transition time where people still did duels, but then
35:00 Speaker 01 They're like, don't do that anymore.
35:01 Rachel Feltman? Laws. Stop dueling. You're supposed to just like throw away your shot or something. And he was like, I know what I, I punched him. I'm ready to hit him some more. So he, he basically had to resign. He lived in the Netherlands for a bit and immigrated to New York. But it worked out. He ended up being, I think, like the head of ophthalmology at Mount Sinai Hospital or something like he, he had a very successful career. And Sigmund Freud apparently nicknamed him Coca-Cola, which is great. That's a delight.
35:36 Speaker 02 Perfect.
35:37 Speaker 01 Excellent.
35:37 Rachel Feltman? I saw some sources saying that was a reference to the soda and some saying, no, absolutely not. It's just a coincidence. I think we simply can't know. I don't think Sigmund Freud was going to write down, I call him Coca-Cola like the new soda that is, has just been invented in 1886.
35:54 Speaker 02 Right, right.
35:55 Rachel Feltman? Um, but brief note on Coca-Cola, because yes, it did contain cocaine. And I know that that is something that people love, love to talk about. So just to wrap us up, in the 1860s, French chemist Angelo Mariani started making cocoa wine, which is exactly what it sounds like. It is wine with ground up cocoa leaves. He, his brand was called Vin Mariani, super popular. A couple of popes liked it. Thomas Edison said like, this makes me work real good. And yeah, the ethanol actually extracts the cocaine from the leaves. So it contained six or seven milligrams of cocaine per fluid ounce typically.
36:32 Speaker 02 That's not nothing.
36:33 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, Ulysses S. Grant also credited Coca-Cola with helping him like get through writing his memoirs when he had throat cancer. I think wine and cocaine could probably
36:44 Speaker 02 Solve a lot.
36:45 Rachel Feltman? Probably help a lot of people get through a lot of things. But you know, your mileage may vary. It was marketed for all sorts of ailments and then enter an American physician, Civil War Vet, and morphine addict named John Stith Pemberton. He was looking for something to help him get off morphine. And like I said, cocaine in the 1880s was considered very promising in that regard. So he started making his own Coca-Cola. One crucial difference is that he added the cola nut for caffeine because when you're drinking several milligrams of cocaine, what you really need is some caffeine in there to perk you up.
37:23 Speaker 02 Right.
37:24 Rachel Feltman? Yeah. Then in 1886, prohibition legislation started passing, so he made a non-alcoholic version. So coca for the leaves, cola for the nuts, and then carbonation because that was kind of another health craze at the time. It was marketed as Coca-Cola, the Temperance Drink, which is so funny to me.
37:41 Speaker 01 Amazing.
37:42 Rachel Feltman? It's like we took, we took the wine out of the cocaine drink, so now it's.
37:45 Speaker 01 Now it's fine.
37:46 Rachel Feltman? Yeah.
37:47 Speaker 02 Hold on, let me take, let me take a sip of this right now.
37:49 Speaker 01 I was wondering if this podcast is sponsored by Coca-Cola.
37:53 Rachel Feltman? I wish, you know, call us Coca-Cola. But yeah, also I should note there, there was a, a Spanish beverage called Coca-Cola that came out the year before Coca-Cola was released. And the town it comes from in Spain is still pretty salty about that. But yeah, Pemberton, when he died in, in 1888, he was still addicted to morphine and his son, who, who kept marketing his father's formula, actually died an opium addict. So really, just to hammer home.
38:29 Rachel Feltman? Cocaine was so popular and people were like, this is great for everything. And behind the scenes, a lot of these researchers and entrepreneurs were having a really bad time being on drugs. And cocaine actually stayed as a key ingredient in Coca-Cola until 1903, which feels so recent. And then for a while, they did some stuff to try to keep the flavor of coca leaves in there, even though there wasn't cocaine in it. But they don't even do that anymore. I am very curious about how the flavor profile was different.
39:08 Speaker 02 Different.
39:09 Rachel Feltman? Yeah. And there aren't cola nuts in cola anymore either. We get the caffeine from other sources. Do I actually want to go drink cocaine wine? No, I think that sounds very bad for your body and your mind, but I'm curious. Particularly if it's 150 years old. Yeah, I'm curious. That's true. But yeah, that's why there is in fact, a little bit of cocaine in the Library of Congress. And honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if there's some more. Now that I know all the kinds of stuff that's in the nooks and crannies of the Library of Congress, I'm like, it would kind of be surprising if there's only that one little packet of cocaine.
39:44 Speaker 02 Right, right. Just the one. And how prevalent it was in and some probably other academic disciplines as well.
39:52 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, yeah. But no, I mean, I think that for me, the takeaway is that there's so much goofy stuff in people's personal paper collections. And thank goodness that somebody is grabbing all of it and preserving it because, you know, it would have been a shame if that chocolate map of the Grand Canyon had gotten thrown away.
40:15 Speaker 02 One of the unifying facts of your weirdest thing today and mine is that my husband is a librarian, a digital librarian, a news librarian. But he is also the type of person who will make sure that some weird clips from NBC News that they get preserved and that they remain in the archives so that we can go back and look at them. It all connects. It all connects.
40:42 Rachel Feltman? Yeah. We're going to take one more quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact.
40:55 Rachel Feltman? Okay, we're back. And Ben, tell me about fallout shelters.
40:59 Speaker 01 All right.
41:00 Rachel Feltman? Are you in one right now?
41:02 Speaker 01 I look like I'm in one. I am in a recording closet, which is just slowly accumulating heat because it's already a hot day in Los Angeles. And the whole thing about trying to give you guys good sound quality is not having the air conditioner on, not having any fans on.
41:16 Rachel Feltman? Taking one for the team.
41:18 Speaker 01 I'm really doing it for you. Every time, every time I'm in here, one, I have to explain when I'm doing other interviews, you all know because you're doing audio. But I have to explain, like, I haven't been taken hostage. It's okay.
41:30 Speaker 01 So, yeah, thankful that this is an audio, an audio podcast. But, okay. It's the early 1960s. Nuclear fears are growing. Russia started to have bombs over the last decade that are on the scale nearing the US's, a number nearing or exceeding the US's. The Cold War is in full force. And people are thinking about, what are we going to do? And, you know, I think that today we live with nuclear war in such a way that in some ways, it's always in the back of our mind, but sort of that paradigm is in the back of our mind, too. Whereas the paradigm of the time is you're coming off of World War II still, right? And what happened in World War II during, you know, the bombing campaigns, when, for
42:12 Speaker 01 instance, you know, Germany is bombing England and bombing London, right? They're digging bomb shelters. They're going underground. And so there's sort of a hard to answer question of, well, how do we save ourselves from these more powerful bombs? It's hard to come up with an answer. So the US government is making sort of secret plans, a lot of them very grim. They're making their kind of private projections of how many people die. But publicly, there's not really an answer for this. The US is spending the equivalent of what would be about like four bucks a person today on what's called civil defense. And a lot of that is duck and cover, which, you know, sounds so inadequate for a nuclear bomb. But it's been explained to me that if you go back to the size of the bombs that, for
42:57 Speaker 01 instance, the US had dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That, you know, at this point with nuclear bombs today and with the ones that started to get built later in the 1960s and 70s and so forth, the fallout from them, the radioactive material that sweeps across, right, is the huge sort of third part, in addition to the heat and the blast, that you have to escape. But those bombs were small enough that the fallout wasn't as big of a deal. So you were still kind of looking for ducking and covering. If the bomb dropped on you, you were gonna, you know, be incinerated. But if you were sort of further outside the blast in a certain area where the shockwave, then yeah, you'd want to be duck and cover to avoid the glass and avoid, you know, things falling on you
43:39 Speaker 01 and whatever. So it wasn't like that was, you know, just totally outlandish. By the time they're running those drills in maybe the 1960s, it's maybe a little bit more outlandish. But that's where that comes from, which I thought was sort of interesting. But the US government is trying to figure out, what do we do in this new age of huge nuclear weapons? John F. Kennedy is president, he's a big Cold Warrior. Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York, convinces him that he's got to do something. But of course, they don't want to spend a lot of money on this. They want to build like highways. And it is very expensive to go and dig fallout shelters. And one of the great lines in our episode that focuses on this comes from Alex Wallerstein, who's sort of this great
44:21 Speaker 01 nuclear historian who sort of knows everything. And Alex says, what do we do in this country when we have a public health problem or a public issue, but we don't want to spend money? Which is, we say it's your responsibility. So it's your responsibility to protect your family from nuclear war.
44:38 Speaker 02 No experience with that.
44:39 Speaker 01 Right, sure. When have we ever had that? So this is what happens, right? So JFK famously goes on TV. He does ask for money, and we'll talk about what that money gets us set aside for, for some civil defense stuff. But the main message is protect your family from nuclear war. And it kicks off this whole industry and craze around building fallout shelters. So Life Magazine puts on its cover, "You can protect yourself from nuclear attack. 97 out of 100 people can be saved," which was wildly optimistic. All these businesses rush in, hundreds of businesses. They're advertising, "Save your family from deadly nuclear fallout."
45:21 Speaker 01 I mean, that's like just me doing a bad imitation, not that bad, honestly, of one of the ads that we've got.
45:26 Speaker 02 I know what you were going for. Yep.
45:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, and that's like sort of what it sounds like, I mean, you can hear it. Like, that's like what it sounds like. So it's this total gold rush, right? There's tons of coverage. And this is where our popular conception of like, you know, when you all think of the fallout shelter, what do you think of?
45:42 Speaker 02 I honestly, because I lived in Manhattan for so long, I think of the signs right outside.
45:47 Speaker 01 Okay.
45:47 Speaker 02 Because there was always...
45:48 Speaker 01 We're going to come back to those.
45:50 Speaker 02 Okay, because like, you know, there was one right across from our apartment. And like even now, in the back of my mind, it was like, you know, I could probably get in there if I needed to. If something were to go down.
45:59 Speaker 01 I'm so excited to tell you what happens if you go there. So yeah, these are these placards that have the sort of the radioactive symbol sign. They say fallout shelter.
46:07 Speaker 02 Yeah.
46:07 Speaker 01 And they're everywhere in New York. Rachel, do you have any image when I say fallout shelter?
46:11 Rachel Feltman? Honestly, mostly the video game and show Fallout.
46:15 Speaker 01 Okay, yeah.
46:16 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, and that's sort of like mid-century Americana, like, you know, hyper-capitalist, "Save your family." "Put this in your backyard."
46:28 Speaker 02 There was a good image of one in, I think the series was called Mrs. America on Hulu, where with Phyllis Schlafly.
46:34 Speaker 01 The Phyllis Schlafly one, yeah.
46:35 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, like they showed her putting like another gas mask and another cannon one, which made sense because she did study nuclear policy. So you can see why, among other things, that was one of her issues.
46:46 Speaker 01 And as a big Ayn Rand fan, she was, you know, very much into the conception of this is your job.
46:51 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah.
46:53 Speaker 01 Yeah, so totally. So that fallout shelter, like the Schlafly style, we're thinking about like going down the ladder in your backyard and, you know, the green metal shelves with canned food on them, et cetera, right? This is where the conception comes from. And also, this sort of rush kind of spawns the prepper culture. This is sort of where you can trace its roots to. So if you think about that, people like today who are doing kind of the more radical, self-reliance, preparation for the end of the world thing. This is where we start to see that really coalesce. Hundreds of businesses. Emerge, a lot of them evolve from other businesses. You know, a hardware store becomes the, we're going to build your fallout shelter business. This is the big trend. But what happens?
47:36 Speaker 02 Capitalism.
47:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, yeah, but it doesn't work, right? It failed, failed capital, right? It's, yeah, the market decides.
47:43 Speaker 02 No, we don't need.
47:44 Speaker 01 We don't need it. Yeah, people are like, wow, that's pretty expensive. I don't really want to do that. So there is an estimate that 200,000 homes have shelters, which is not none, right? That's not none. And that can be anything from your, your basement with some canned food. It could be a storm shelter, a storm shelter for tornadoes. But it's like, you know, less than half of 1% of homes have anything. And so this is all just like in a few months span for, in 1961, that, that this whole industry is just emerging and hot. And within a few years, it has collapsed to the point where 600 businesses have gone bankrupt or out of business. Yeah. And so it's a total crash.
48:28 Speaker 01 Instead, what you have happened, and that's where that popular conception of like the, sort of the family backyard shelter, you know, you're one from like the road that they have to emerge from because they're out of food or, you know, whatever. Instead, what does the US do? So John Kennedy does request and is granted some money. He wants about $200 million, which is kind of close to like $2.5 billion today. Again, like not nothing.
48:50 Speaker 01 He doesn't get all of it, but he gets a lot of it. And what they're going to do is more makeshift public shelters, right? So they're going to go to existing sites that have some form of protection from radiation. They're already underground, they're within a building, and there are walls outside of that building, things that are going to stop the radiation from getting through. And we can talk a little bit about like what makes a fallout shelter effective. But the way it was explained to me that you can hear in our episode is just walls, dense materials, you know, whether that's lead, which is like really good because it's super dense, or, you know, bricks, water, things that, just layers of things for the radiation, the radioactive fallout, and then the radiation pinging off of it to hit instead of hitting you, so you're not the wall.
49:34 Speaker 01 And so they go, and, and the US Army Corps of Engineers goes through and surveys just tons of buildings in tons of cities and marks them out. Now, all this is criticized. It is expensive. There's questions of how effective it is. There's also this counterintuitive problem, which is, what if it works? And this is still a problem today, right? Which is that if you create something that is essentially going to shelter your population from nuclear war, whether that's a defense program that can shoot down missiles effectively, whether that's, you know, something that where your citizens could all hide and then
50:16 Speaker 01 reemerge, although I think that that's still like less effective and not optimal, the worries become in this sort of system of deterrence, oh, you can win a nuclear war. So we need to fire before you can succeed in implementing this solution where you'll be able to win. And we see those fears today with things like implementing AI, for instance, where, oh, if you're able to respond more quickly. And then countries, of course, saying, well, if one, if one country implements AI, maybe we have to implement AI, not to push the big red button. We have other episodes that are sort of focused on this interesting aspect, but, but more just in this sort of the analysis and, and other sort of processes within command and control. That is a tangent, and I'm sorry. Okay.
50:59 Speaker 01 But, so anyway, this makeshift shelter thing, it, it does happen. And the US sorts out thousands of shelters. I think in New York, it's like tens of thousands, although I don't have the, the number in front of me. They're everywhere. They are, they're everywhere. They're everywhere. And so they go through and they go to these existing sites and they reinforce them. They'll add things like air, air filtration so that you can put, put more people in there and they'll be able to breathe. They stock them with food, you know, cans of foods, wafers, chemical toilets, which we talk about a little bit, and is maybe the most disgusting thing I've discussed on our show, other than mosquitoes. And so they do all of this. And over the course of about a decade, there's sort of this major effort. And it still probably doesn't house that much of your population. And you don't need to house everybody, right?
51:44 Speaker 01 Because what you need is essentially what these are designed for is if the nuclear bomb falls on you, you're still dead because no amount of bomb shelter is going to protect you from a nuclear bomb falling on you. If you're far enough away that like you're on the Far edges of the heat and the blast, maybe you can get through that. But mostly what you're doing is trying to avoid the nuclear fallout. One thing that I thought was really interesting that I didn't know, particularly because of the way that our media sort of portrays fallout shelters, is how long you're down there? And I'm wondering if you all have a conception, maybe you know this as science people, about how long the idea is that you're in a fallout shelter, hiding from the radiation.
52:25 Rachel Feltman? I, so what I think the case is, I could be super mistaken about this, but I think that like, you know, the misconception is that you're gonna be down there for a long time. And really, it's like, like 72 hours that the majority of the fallout dissipates? Is that right? I may have panicked Googled that one.
52:46 Speaker 01 No, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's absolutely right. And I think that is like sort of the difference between certainly like my conception of it, particularly as a generalist, not someone who's, I mean, now I'm doing a lot of science journalism, it turns out, but was not necessarily my background.
53:01 Speaker 01 And like I was more of a political reporter, a business reporter, with some energy and environment mixed in in various public radio careers. But yes, that's right. So 72 hours, the longest that most of these places were designed for was a week, with the idea being that maybe two weeks at the most. If you were trying to be really safe, you didn't have a guide or counter. And the reason for that is because of how quickly radiation, you know, the half-life of it spirals down to levels where you may not be safe, where it might increase your cancer risk, but you can go outside and not just like instantly fall over and die. So you get out and then you, and then you walk. Yeah, exactly. It's like the key, the key aspect to being able to get out and then walk is to not die immediately. So that, that was what happened. That was the, the conception of shelters.
53:46 Speaker 01 That was the intention of shelters, the attempt to get people to build it themselves. And then the ultimate result of, for most people, you weren't gonna have anything. But for more people than home shelters, you were gonna have makeshift shelters. But then you've got to maintain these things. So the shelter industry crashes. The threat of nuclear war kind of just hangs in the air. We get into Vietnam. We have an economic downturn. And I think that we just sort of live with this. And so by the early 1970s, less than 10 years later, inspectors in Los Angeles, where I am, for instance, go through these shelters. And what do they find? They find the food is spoiled, the medicine that was stored there, what hasn't been stolen is expired. And it's just this like big cleanup job.
54:31 Speaker 01 And so like, Laura, if you were in New York and you were following the signs to the fallout shelter,
54:38 Speaker 02 I'd find some rancid cans.
54:41 Speaker 01 You would be extraordinarily disappointed.
54:43 Speaker 02 Yep, yep.
54:45 Speaker 01 And in fact, one of the things that's happening now in New York is they're trying to take down the signs. But it's not even entirely clear which agency, which city department or state department is responsible for doing this. Yeah, which also then like leaves us with this question of, well, what is the plan today? You know, where do we go if there's nuclear war?
55:07 Speaker 02 It's back to being a you problem.
55:09 Speaker 01 It's back to being a you problem. And in fact, like if you find sort of the City of Los Angeles guidance on it, it's essentially like, take cover. It's like, go find some walls. And we talk in our episode a little bit about like what those might be. And, and, but it's this kind of like earthquake preparedness where it's like, have a go bag and, and sort of find a spot to hunker down, which is probably not going to be a great solution. And it is true that in nuclear war, there is probably not a great solution, other than don't have it, which is one of the things we land on. But one of the other things that we land on, and this also surprised me, is that I think that I have taken for granted that like, okay, if that happens, I'm in Los Angeles, so I'll just be melted and it won't be my problem anymore. And one of the things that we find is like, maybe.
55:53 Speaker 01 But even the sort of most deadly projections of nuclear war are that, you know, even in the, the sort of the, the biggest, most massive plans of destruction that we know about from the Cold War, which are bigger than sort of the, the more strategic plans today, and more strategic being, you know, put in air quotes. But Are that 40% of people in the US would have been killed in the blasts and those first days of war from the war directly. And that is a lot of people. But that also means that most people are not. Most people are not having that flash of light. And that could be true in cities as well, for various reasons that we sort of get into. And so that means that you're left with, in the event that this did happen, the sort of like grim reality
56:37 Speaker 01 of this, is that there's no good solution. And sort of the most unfortunate thing would be surviving it in some ways.
56:45 Speaker 02 On Amy Poehler's podcast, Kate McKinnon said she wants to survive four days of an apocalypse. Like, that's her goal. And after hearing that, I was like, I love that. Because you get kind of like the, you know, gold star for being prepared and being able to do this. But then you don't have to deal with like, the completely terrible aftermath.
57:05 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, you're like, loss of infrastructure? No, thanks.
57:08 Speaker 02 No, thank you. Yeah. But she was like, you know, for four, I'd like to make, I'd like it to make it to day four. So after she said that, I was like, I think that's my personal goal.
57:15 Speaker 01 New plan. New plan. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, it's interesting, because like, that is, in some ways, our darkest episode. We have a lot of ones where I think we land in a different place, where it's like, okay, I can just kind of see the light. But that in and of itself, sort of becomes, like, that grim reality and understanding it, to me, is actually like, yeah, like, let's spread the word on that one. Because it really does sort of emphasize, in a, in a real way, like, all the reasons to not do this.
57:46 Rachel Feltman? Yeah.
57:47 Speaker 02 All of the reasons.
57:48 Rachel Feltman? I would simply love if, if, if this chain of events had not been set off back in the day.
57:56 Speaker 01 It'd be ideal, yeah.
57:57 Speaker 02 Right, right.
57:58 Rachel Feltman? But yeah, it's really interesting about getting the signs taken down, because when I looked up local guidelines, which I did, because I recently had a kid, and I was just like, like, I still, it's just that now, I really can't justify.
58:15 Rachel Feltman? Being like a cool girl about the possibility of nuclear war. You know, I like need to, I need to sort of know what I would do because I have a child. And again, looking up guidance, the sort of mean thing is they're like, please do not try to go to the quote unquote fallout shelter that you have seen around the corner. Don't go outside to a second location. If you're inside, that's so good, buddy, be inside. And I think, you know, there is.
58:45 Speaker 01 I think that's wrong. I think that's wrong. I think you go to the Library of Congress and you find the chocolate Grand Canyon.
58:51 Speaker 02 And you're set, you're set. And the fruitcake, I mean.
58:54 Rachel Feltman? Honestly, probably one of the better places you could be if you, if you had to, to hug her down for a few days. So, and then, you know, it's just like the laws are suspended. So you get to eat the chocolate Grand Canyon for sure.
59:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, 100%.
59:08 Speaker 02 As long as you save like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, you know, anything that was a national treasure, as long as you save that, you're fine. The cake and the chocolate, go for it, go for it.
59:17 Speaker 01 In a lawless world.
59:19 Speaker 02 Yeah.
59:19 Rachel Feltman? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's very interesting because like it really is painted in pop culture as, as having been this huge cultural thing, getting fallout shelters. But then when you think about it, like, how often do you meet someone whose backyard has a fallout shelter?
59:37 Speaker 02 I've never. We might have a makeshift one. My house was built in 1948 and when we were first looking at it and I saw that it's like this cupboard under the stairs, kind of Harry Potter style, but there is a lot of concrete and there is a lot of, so I jokingly have said that that's, you know, um, you know, that that's ours. So I do wonder, I'd have to again, you know, have to go look at, look back at those blueprints. But I do wonder if that was, you know, if that was whether, if that was the intention to like, maybe at some point turn that into something kind of, you know.
1:00:09 Speaker 01 Or it might've been a bomb shelter.
1:00:11 Speaker 02 Right, right.
1:00:12 Speaker 01 You know, I mean, coming out of the 1940s, that was a very common thing was to, yeah.
1:00:17 Speaker 02 I always say that that's where like, if a tornado hits, that's where we're going. So.
1:00:21 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:00:21 Speaker 02 I did also once stumble on storm shelter, tornado storm shelter Tik Tok. Like my algorithm was just feeding me and there are some really souped up shelters out in Oklahoma. Like my, it was, I was like, I do not live there, but I kind of want that now. Look at that. They're really, really cool.
1:00:38 Speaker 01 People have ideas.
1:00:39 Speaker 02 They do. Ingenuity, we love it.
1:00:42 Rachel Feltman? Well, Ben, thanks so much for coming on. Would you remind our listeners what your show is called so they can go find it?
1:00:47 Speaker 01 I would love to. Yeah. Thank you for having me. The name of the show is Are We Doomed? We are available on all podcast apps. And we also have animated versions on YouTube at youtube.com slash at AreWeDoomedPod.
1:01:02 Rachel Feltman? Oh, that's so fun.
1:01:03 Speaker 01 AreWeDoomedPod on YouTube.
1:01:05 Rachel Feltman? Animation and existential dread just goes together. I love it.
1:01:08 Speaker 01 And the likeness of me, the likeness of me on the YouTube animation is a dead ringer. It's crazy.
1:01:15 Rachel Feltman? That's awesome.
1:01:17 Rachel Feltman? The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Feltman, along with Jess Bodie, who also serves as our audio engineer and editor extraordinaire. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. Our logo is by Katie Belloff. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at weirdest underscore thing. Thanks for listening, weirdos.
1:01:49 Speaker 03 When it comes to life insurance, annuities, and long-term care solutions, how do you know you've found the right partner? When everything works in harmony? Like innovative products, long-term value, and financial strength? Check out Securian.com to find the partner that hits all the right notes. Insurance issued by Minnesota Life Insurance Company and Securian Life Insurance Company. For rating agency information and how our ratings compare, visit Securian.com/ratings.
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