The History of Refrigeration

Keeping things cold with electricity changed the world as we know it. In more ways than you might expect. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 0:49Josh Clark?

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• 1:02Speaker 02

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 1:12Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, there's Chuck and Jerry Chilly Willy Roland is here doing the recording, wearing a little red beanie, looking all cute. And this is Stuff You Should Know.

• 1:27Speaker 03

  You can see Jerry?

• 1:28Josh Clark?

  In my mind's eye.

• 1:32Speaker 03

  Like, I don't see Jerry. She has a setting on her, on her setup where it's like show camera only to Josh. And not Chuck.

• 1:43Josh Clark?

  And she's wearing a little red beanie and looks like a mini penguin.

• 1:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, but she has, you can't smell her. She has a button to allow me to smell her. Even though she's in LA and you know what it smells like?

• 1:54Josh Clark?

  Miso.

• 1:56Speaker 03

  Yep, but she may have gotten that miso from the fridge.

• 2:01Josh Clark?

  Oh, okay. All right. I see what you're doing. Nice work, Chuck. That was a good old fashioned

• 2:05Speaker 03

  Real pro.

• 2:05Josh Clark?

  Stuff you should know segue. And in full stuff you should know fashion, I stepped all over it, so it didn't actually work that well.

• 2:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right.

• 2:14Josh Clark?

  Yes, we are talking about refrigeration, which is why you brought that up. And again, nice work. We've, this, this is one of those, I guess, topics that has popped up myriad ways in myriad episodes. So I mean, literally 30,000 ways in 30,000 episodes. And this is one of those stuff you should know things where we're just gonna bring it all together and finally talk about the main topic.

• 2:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, a big thanks to Livia for her help with this. And this was a me idea. Because I think after our history of dentistry, I just sort of got turned on by the idea of the history of like, certain just commonplace practices and things these days. And I maybe got something out of the fridge one day and was like, oh, man, refrigerators, they really changed the game.

• 3:04Josh Clark?

  Did you say that to yourself out loud, or were you just thinking this?

• 3:08Speaker 03

  I think I did. And Emily said, what the heck are you talking about? And of course they did. But I was kind of curious, like, I bet it's changed the game in more ways than I think. And that was sort of Livia's charge. And here we go with that, because I think it did change in more ways than I thought it might have.

• 3:22Josh Clark?

  Well, I was gonna ask that. I had a follow up question, and then you just answered it.

• 3:26Speaker 03

  Yes, it was satisfying, the result was for me.

• 3:29Josh Clark?

  So the, I think initially you were thinking like refrigerators, like home refrigeration.

• 3:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure.

• 3:36Josh Clark?

  Maybe like warehouse refrigeration, fairly recent refrigeration. But Livia, like you said, who helped us with this, went, no, no, and wagged her finger and said, this stuff goes way back beyond this chalk. And you said, how did you get in my kitchen?

• 3:49Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah, so we're gonna start early, way, way before mechanical refrigeration. There was still refrigeration, which just means keeping something cold.

• 3:59Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 3:59Speaker 03

  A refrigerator is a mechanical version of that. But in olden times, one might even say ancient times, people were still trying to keep things cold. Like, since we figured out That cold things lasted longer. People have been trying to keep things cold in various ways.

• 4:14Josh Clark?

  Yeah, cold keeps the flies away.

• 4:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 4:18Josh Clark?

  Flies don't like cold. So one of the things that people have long loved to do is cool down their drinks, right?

• 4:26Speaker 03

  Hmm hmm.

• 4:27Josh Clark?

  It's just something you take for granted these days, but that's one of the first uses people put cold storage or refrigeration to, which was to store ice so that they could chop it off with the ancient ice pick, probably made out of a bone or tusk or something like that, and put it in their drinks. And as we'll see, like that, that, that's just long been a desire of people. But whenever someone has access to ice in places you normally can't get ice, it's one of the first things they do to it. And it's also almost always a sign of wealth to start off for sure.

• 5:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I find it interesting that, and you know, I've traveled my fair share around Europe and I was, I was shocked early on in my twenties when a lot of the drinks came without ice.

• 5:14Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 5:15Speaker 03

  And they said, you know, that's sort of the European way because in Italy and ancient Greece and ancient Rome, the, the people that had the dough, they were putting ice in those drinks. And that's because iced drinks are better.

• 5:30Josh Clark?

  Yeah, across the board.

• 5:32Speaker 03

  To me, they are. I know everyone has their own things. Some people have sensitivities, teeth wise and things like that. So I get that. But I've always been a super icy drink guy. I love them cold, cold, cold.

• 5:44Josh Clark?

  And even if you're like a, um, like into cocktails, like you might not want ice in your drink, but I'll bet you used ice to chill that drink.

• 5:54Speaker 03

  Hey, unless you just like a straight up warm room temperature neat whiskey, which is your prerogative, of course.

• 6:01Josh Clark?

  Of course.

• 6:03Speaker 03

  You need to be cooling those drinks down really well. Like a cool drink isn't great. You gotta have it cold.

• 6:07Josh Clark?

  I remember there's one of the lamest mixology trends that somebody tried to start. And there was, it was around long enough for there to be some press on it and it just went away inevitably. It was room temperature cocktails.

• 6:21Speaker 03

  Ah.

• 6:22Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Like, why would you do that? You might as well make sure that every single one of them has to have celery bitters in it too.

• 6:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I know we're gonna get people that say like, I don't like things that cold. So even if they don't have teeth sensitivity, so again.

• 6:35Josh Clark?

  You have my teeth.

• 6:36Speaker 03

  People like what they like, but I'm an ice, since I was a kid, a tall glass of the iciest ice water is the most refreshing thing I can put in my mouth.

• 6:45Josh Clark?

  Huh, I just realized I drink room temperature water. I have a glass of it right here. So I guess I can't just stand with you 100% there Chuck, I'm sorry.

• 6:54Speaker 03

  Well, actually, the studio is the only place where I don't drink iced water because it makes noise. So I have a, you know, out of the refrigerator cooled, so it's still pretty cold.

• 7:04Josh Clark?

  Sure. Supposedly, your body metabolizes room temperature water much more easily, but supposedly you also burn more calories warming water up in your body. So.

• 7:15Speaker 03

  Alright.

• 7:16Josh Clark?

  You're gonna be torn.

• 7:18Speaker 03

  Well, I believe you because you said it.

• 7:19Josh Clark?

  One other thing about ice and drinks, I think the best martinis are the ones that have, you get them so cold that they have like a little shard of like Arctic ice on the top.

• 7:32Speaker 03

  I love that, but supposedly that's not the way, but I love that.

• 7:36Josh Clark?

  I love it too. It's so good.

• 7:39Speaker 03

  Oh, and we're getting so sidetracked over these drinks. We're not even through like the first paragraph here, but the martini, the ultimate martini is when they do that and then they bring you the tiny, you know, little half pitcher.

• 7:53Josh Clark?

  Alright.

• 7:54Speaker 03

  Sitting in a little tiny bowl of ice.

• 7:55Josh Clark?

  Yes, I love that too. And then also when they leave $5,000 in cash with you as well, for no reason other than ordering the $5,000 martini.

• 8:06Speaker 03

  Alright, so people are cooling their drinks with ice in ancient times and places. Around the 7th century, of course, the Chinese are always discovering the biggest and best ways to do things way back in the day. They found out that.

• 8:20Josh Clark?

  You hedged yourself right then.

• 8:22Speaker 03

  And I was like, oh, be careful. Salt peter, which is used in making gunpowder, was found to absorb heat when dissolved in water. So they would.

• 8:31Josh Clark?

  Did not know that.

• 8:32Speaker 03

  Maybe one of the first artificial cooling methods was to make a little salt peter bath and you would just sit a jar of whatever you wanted to keep cool in that cooler water.

• 8:41Josh Clark?

  Pretty cool. Get it?

• 8:43Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 8:43Josh Clark?

  That's gonna happen many times and I'll never do it on purpose. So I just apologize in advance.

• 8:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:51Josh Clark?

  One of the other things that people figured out pretty quickly is that when you have a liquid evaporating, usually water, as it evaporates, turns from liquid to gas, that phase change is what they call it. The eggheads call it a phase change. It requires energy and typically it gets that energy to change phase from heat. My God, the heat.

• 9:16Josh Clark?

  And it usually just pulls it from the surrounding air, which means that when a liquid turns into a gas, the air around it is cooler because it pulls that heat right out of the air to use it for the phase change. And if you have some way of moving that cooler water from around whatever vessel of, or sorry, the cooler air from around the vessel of water that's evaporating, you have yourself a primitive air conditioning system that's sometimes called a swamp cooler, I saw.

• 9:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've heard that before. This is something that has been done in India for centuries and centuries. And, you know, it's not refrigerator cold, but if you're looking to keep something cool and something a little bit fresher, it's not a bad way to do it, for sure.

• 10:02Josh Clark?

  No, for sure. And it has to be, this is the downside, it has to be a dry, hot place.

• 10:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:10Josh Clark?

  If it's muggy out, then it's not gonna have much of an effect. But I also saw-

• 10:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, like a swamp, ironically.

• 10:16Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I thought that was weird, too. I also saw one of the other really basic uses for it is to dampen a towel and hang it in front of a breezy window. And as that water evaporates in the towel, as it dries off, is what the laypeople call it, the breeze pushes that cooler air into your house. And I realized that I was having trouble like envisioning this stuff or why anybody would go to the trouble. And I was like, oh, yeah, before the kind of AC and refrigeration that we're used to, you had to go to all sorts of trouble. It's just so easy to take for granted these days. But to before this, and in other places where they don't have AC,

• 10:57Josh Clark?

  people would hang damp towels in front of a breezy window to get cooler. That's how desperate they were to cool down.

• 11:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, I imagine knocking something down a few degrees makes a big difference, you know, in the pre-AC days, you know?

• 11:10Josh Clark?

  For sure.

• 11:12Speaker 03

  Bearing things in the ground is also a good way to keep things cool. You know, like three to five feet down, you're going to find pretty consistent temperatures, depending on where you are. If you're in the north, it can be 45, 50 degrees down there. More like 70 in the south, and you know, that's Fahrenheit. And of course, anyone who's ever spent any time camping or hiking knows, as I did when I was a kid, my dad would build a little like a cordoned off area with stacked rocks in a very cold mountain river to put like jugs of milk and stuff like that in when we were camping as a family.

• 11:47Josh Clark?

  Yeah, there's things called spring houses or spring boxes, depending on how big the structure is, but typically if you have a stream or a spring running through your homestead, which from what I've read recently is like, like point number one that you want to make sure your homestead has is a source of fresh water. One of the cool things you could do with that is to build an enclosure around it. But first, within the enclosure, what you want to build is like, kind of like a widened area for the stream to flow into. And then it kind of fills up and then it exits the other side of this widened area. So you narrow the channel of the spring or the stream. Line it with rocks, line this box with rocks, basically.

• 12:30Josh Clark?

  And it stays about half full year round of this nice, cool mountain spring or mountain stream water. And you just keep your butter in there and crocks and stuff. So it's just like doing it in the stream, but you're basically making it a little easier to store your things in there. You could put more stuff in it than you would if you just threw it in the stream like a total hayseed. Like even, even the mountainist of mountain people are like, you don't, you didn't go to the trouble of building a spring house for somebody who just throws it into the stream themselves.

• 13:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, so far, I'm keeping track now, you have name checked eggheads, laypeople, and hayseeds.

• 13:11Josh Clark?

  And mountain folk.

• 13:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, and mountain folk.

• 13:14Josh Clark?

  That's what we do here.

• 13:17Speaker 03

  So in the 17th century in Europe, they had official ice houses. And they were, you know, you'd bring down ice from where you could get ice, like literal just ice from the wild, like in Scandinavia. And they were using it to preserve food, obviously. Also for, like, the medical community would use it for different things. And also chilling those drinks still. But, you know, you could use ice to treat burns and things like that, to bring down a fever. You know, making things cooler was a big benefit to a doctor.

• 13:49Josh Clark?

  Yeah, also remembering our Feta Cold Starve a Fever short stuff. We talked about how there was like, doctors viewed heat and cold as a duality of health. So yeah, if somebody was sick with one of the hot sicknesses, you would probably give them a cold drink and that was considered as good as medicine is today.

• 14:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, or of course, any, you know, sprains and, you know, muscle pulls, things like that, heat and ice, it can be used in various ways.

• 14:17Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 14:18Speaker 03

  The rice method, you know?

• 14:19Josh Clark?

  Sure. So one other thing I want to mention real quick is we're talking about people, like technologies that are like thousands of years old. There was something called a yak chal that Persians created that, to listeners, may or may not sound familiar, depending on when we release the short stuff on it.

• 14:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's either just out or coming out soon, it's getting its own short stuff because it was just kind of too much there. It was pretty cool.

• 14:47Josh Clark?

  Yeah, but it was like an ancient Persian ice making machine that dates back at least to 400 BCE, which is really impressive. But yeah, we'll get way more in depth on those in whatever short stuff we do. But the point is that people have been doing this for a really long time and they figured out some really ingenious technologies that harness natural processes to cool. And as we kind of progress through the technology, you'll see that we're basically doing the same thing, just a little more whiz bang, much more efficiently. It delivers much cooler air or water, whatever we're cooling. But it's still basically the same premise as what we were doing thousands of years ago to keep things cool.

• 15:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally. I think it's super cool. If you want to talk about like, real ice, and there's this really extensive, in-depth, long New Yorker thing, which, you know, most New Yorker things are, about Frederick Tudor, the Ice King, who's around in the 19th century, and he was the guy that was like, hey, we got all this ice up in New England, like, our lakes are literally frozen, and why don't we try and make some money by shipping this ice out? He had, you know, he tried to get investors, and they were like, I don't know, it seems like that stuff is gonna melt.

• 16:03Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 16:04Speaker 03

  If you put it on a ship and try and send it to Cuba. And he said, oh, watch me. And he put some on a ship, and sent some toward Cuba, and it melted. And he was like, oh, man, they were totally right. But he kept at it, and kept at it, and, you know, they used to keep, use things like straw to help keep the ice a little more insulated, and he said, sawdust actually works a whole lot better. And he and other people got in on the game, and that was like, American ice being shipped all over the world in the 19th century, which is, and making it there, which is kinda hard to believe.

• 16:40Josh Clark?

  Yes, and I have been racking my brain, what episode we first introduced the Ice King in. I cannot for the life of me remember what it was.

• 16:50Speaker 03

  Big loose?

• 16:51Josh Clark?

  I don't, no, I don't think so. I really don't remember what it was, but he popped up again later in our episode on Thoreau, because one of the places where he was cutting ice from was Walden Lake, and Thoreau noted the Ice King cutting ice in, or Walden Pond, sorry, Mayners. That, while he was writing his book, Walden, I think he appears in Walden.

• 17:17Speaker 03

  Two things, you just name checked Mayners, that's another one.

• 17:19Josh Clark?

  And Henry David Thoreau, the original hippie.

• 17:23Speaker 03

  That's true, but the one thing I did want to mention, and that's a nice little segue, was just to plug a little Instagram post I made recently. I was cleaning out my closet and I found a bunch of old schoolwork from elementary school. And while this part was from high school, I did a satire, an extra credit satire on Thoreau about someone who went to live deliberately in the woods. And the big joke at the end is they made it like 30 minutes or something. It wasn't the best comedy work, you know, for a ninth grader, it was okay.

• 17:56Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 17:56Speaker 03

  But people should go check it out, because I did a bunch of screenshots of various projects, a lot of space travel stuff and book reports, but one big one was on ancient Egypt. And I literally, in the thing, was like, "Hi, my name is Chuck Bryant, and I'm going to be your guide through ancient Egypt." And at the end, it was like, "I hope you enjoyed your tour, and once again, signing off, I've been your guide." And people were like, "Oh, my God, you were doing Stuff You Should Know as a fifth grader."

• 18:24Josh Clark?

  That's awesome, man.

• 18:25Speaker 03

  It's really pretty cute, but you can go to Chuck the Podcaster Instagram to check that stuff out. People got a real kick out of it.

• 18:31Josh Clark?

  For sure. I'll go check it out, too.

• 18:33Speaker 03

  You would like it.

• 18:34Josh Clark?

  And it's not like I avoid your Instagram, I just don't go on Instagram much, okay?

• 18:38Speaker 03

  I know that, buddy. I know you're telling everyone else that, but I know that's not your jam.

• 18:41Josh Clark?

  So I talked about how the technology has really just kind of improved on ancient technology. The uses for this stuff, too, have really kind of been relatively the same. We haven't had a lot of stuff that we've wanted ice for, aside from cooling our drinks, which is really, honestly, Olivia turned up a mention of the king of Tekoa, or Tekoa, I saw different spellings, in what's now Syria. And he used it to ice his drinks almost 4,000 years ago. So, I mean, people have been doing that for a really long time. Another one is to store perishable food, like you said, keeps the flies away, right?

• 19:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:22Josh Clark?

  And in doing these things, as we've gotten better and better at it, it started to have like really monumental, massive, sweeping changes on humanity. And here in America, one of the first changes it had, we will talk about right after this.

• 19:57Speaker 03

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• 20:11Josh Clark?

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• 20:39Josh Clark?

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• 21:46Speaker 04

  Lately, I've been learning some stuff about insomnia or aluminia. Um, how about the one on borderline disorder? Better yet, birth order. Heard that one before, but it was so nice. I learned it twice. Everybody listen up. Oh, it's Charles and Joshua. It's stuff, it's stuff, it's stuff. It's just now.

• 22:20Josh Clark?

  So Chuck, I was talking about how refrigeration had massive sweeping changes as we got better at it. And in America, one of the first things it did was it allowed people to expand their diet some. Because unless you were in like a southern state or something like that, you did not have access to a lot of different kinds of food year round. Like during like spring and summer, maybe even into fall a little bit. You would have things like, like dairy and poultry and meat. And then as winter. Special veggies. Yes. And as winter started to set in, you had pickled cabbage, pickled, um, neighbor who died that winter. Like pickled everything.

• 23:05Josh Clark?

  Canning didn't even come around. I didn't know this until the 19th century. I thought it was really, really old. So like you really did not. So actually you didn't have pickled anything now that I think about it. You had like salted stuff, cured stuff. And a lot of it was grains too, right? Stuff you could store fairly easily. And then when we started learning how to preserve food with refrigeration and got better and better at it, like people, their diets just changed radically. Like apparently in the northern states, by the time spring came, you were so malnourished from a lack of niacin, vitamin B3 that you normally get from like poultry and fish and meat, that they had a name for it, spring sickness. Today we call it pellagra, but it's a type of like severe malnutrition

• 23:50Josh Clark?

  that people would just annually get because they had that limited access to different foods. And then once we started being able to store and then more importantly, ship, items by refrigerating it, then things really changed. That spring sickness went away. And I'm also the first person in history to say the word refrigerating.

• 24:15Speaker 03

  Also, before people write in, they were definitely pickling things before they were canning. So you could still pickle things.

• 24:22Josh Clark?

  Okay, cool. So yes, you could pickle your neighbor then.

• 24:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, they had jars and stuff like that.

• 24:27Josh Clark?

  Well, what's the deal then? I mean, they just hadn't figured out how to use heat baths and that kind of thing?

• 24:33Speaker 03

  What, for canning?

• 24:34Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 24:35Speaker 03

  I don't know, maybe how to seal something properly would be my guess, but although, I don't know, maybe like wax sealing? Maybe canning should be an episode.

• 24:46Josh Clark?

  All right.

• 24:46Speaker 03

  And we can figure that out.

• 24:47Josh Clark?

  Yeah, let's figure it out.

• 24:49Speaker 03

  And can regale everyone with more tales of being drugged to the cannery as a child.

• 24:53Josh Clark?

  That's right, I forgot about that.

• 24:55Speaker 03

  Which is actually true. It makes me sound 100 years old, but that's actually true. So yeah, when artificial cold came on the scene, that really, really, really changed the game. There was a physician and chemist from the University of Glasgow in the 18th century, 1748, named William Cullen, who it looks like did the first experiment on artificial cooling and kind of demonstrating how that was possible. And he, like you said, it was just sort of a version of what they had done in ancient times with those water in the clay jars and exploiting that phase change from liquid to gas using the thermal energy. But he used instead of water, diethyl, diethyl, diethyl ether?

• 25:41Speaker 03

  And he would pump it out of a container and it would come to a boil. And that heat would pull all the heat from the surrounding area, just like it did back in old days. It was just sort of different, a different medium, and that would cool things down.

• 25:57Josh Clark?

  Yeah. This, Chuck, was one of those episodes where I went near mad trying to understand like the physics of the whole thing or even like the mechanical engineering aspects of this stuff. And it's gotta be because my dad was a mechanical engineer by profession.

• 26:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:13Josh Clark?

  So like I've got that little bug that I can't ignore. And I looked all over for how William Cullen's thing worked. And apparently no one knows because the same like four or five sentences are basically copy and pasted everywhere on the internet.

• 26:30Speaker 03

  Oh, that's frustrating.

• 26:31Josh Clark?

  So we do know that in the, before even 1750, he was the first person to demonstrate artificial refrigeration. It didn't go anywhere, but he showed that this was entirely possible and that it was pretty clever to use something like an artificial refrigerant rather than just say water. Although water is an excellent refrigerant in a lot of different applications.

• 26:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. A guy, an American this time named Jacob Perkins came along about 50-ish years later in 1834, and he's credited basically for developing the first working, what we would call, refrigerator. And his machine, and you know, again, it's just not too different from how they do it today. They just do it a lot better.

• 27:12Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 27:13Speaker 03

  But he used a vapor compression cycle. Again, it's all about the thermal loss of that phase change, but in this case, they're just exploiting it, you know, because if you move the pressure back and forth between the two, it keeps a constant cool.

• 27:30Josh Clark?

  Right. Yeah. So, so it's just nuts. If you see like a diagram and how it's explained and how a vapor compression refrigerator works, which is almost certainly the kind of refrigerator you have in your home, there's really just like four components to it. And they're really doing some basic stuff to this, but it's more a question of like, why? Like, why would you put something into low pressure and heat it up for the next step to be to like depressurize it and cool it down? And then you turn it into liquid up here. It's just, it doesn't make sense. It's almost just nuts. Like, somebody just went crazy with a diagram, but apparently that's how it works. And it's all, I think it's, like you said, it's just taking advantage of the different properties of lower pressure

• 28:14Josh Clark?

  liquid or higher pressure gas. Like, they can cool and heat. And they're, I guess it puts off so much coolness or so much heat that it can be used to refrigerate. And then it passes through this other thing, like, I think a condenser, and that gives off the waste heat. That's what's under your fridge. And then like the evaporator cools everything down. And I finally got it, Chuck.

• 28:39Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 28:39Josh Clark?

  So I've been looking at it wrong the whole way. The refrigerator doesn't pump cold into your fridge. Right? The, the actual mechanical refrigerant process. What it does is it sucks heat out of your refrigerator. And once I finally understood that, I was like, I, I got it finally. I got it because this cooler refrigerant goes through a coil. And I thought like it was emitting cold and that that's how it cooled down. Now it's drawing any heat from there, kind of tricking the heat into joining the coil and leaving the fridge box cooler, which is what that refrigerant wanted all the time. It thinks that, that heat was a sucker for falling for it, but that's exactly what it

• 29:24Josh Clark?

  does every time. And now the inside refrigerator is way colder.

• 29:29Speaker 03

  Amazing.

• 29:30Josh Clark?

  I think it's kind of amazing too, because it's the opposite of what I always thought was going on.

• 29:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's super cool.

• 29:37Josh Clark?

  I love that.

• 29:37Speaker 03

  They've used various liquids over the years. Ammonia is one they used for a while, methyl chloride for a while. All of these things were toxic though, so until they figured out a safer way, which you know, they would soon enough, people would actually die in the 1920s. There were cases where methyl chloride leaks happened, actually killed people. And then they said, you know what, maybe we should come up with a synthetic substance that does basically the same thing. So they came up with dichlorofluoromethane, AKA Freon. And until the 1990s, Freon was the go-to. And then we said, hey, that's not so great either because of our environment and the ozone layer. And so let's develop even newer, safer chemicals to keep things cool.

• 30:22Josh Clark?

  Yeah, which hydrofluorocarbons are good for the ozone layer, but they're actually horrible as greenhouse gases. There's a rating of just how much of an effect like a chemical has on warming the atmosphere. And they use carbon dioxide, CO2, as a one. That's like the baseline because we know how much it warms the atmosphere over a hundred years. So it has a global warming potential or GWP of one, carbon dioxide does. Hydrofluorocarbons have a global warming potential of 14,800.

• 30:59Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 31:00Josh Clark?

  That's a lot more than CO2, if you really stop and think about it. And these are the refrigerants we're still using. These are the alternatives that we developed and started using in the 90s. So it's like we go from the frying pan into the fire whenever we try to do something environmental, it feels like.

• 31:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's probably true. To me, this is where this episode gets super interesting. And this is kind of what I was really after when it came to the assignment, which is when things started moving around, cooling systems started getting better and better. People were developing this stuff. And at the same time, railroads were growing and growing and expanding and expanding. And all of a sudden, people in the Midwest, farmers could, you know, they were like, hey, I want to be able to ship my stuff and sell it to the East Coast. So the whole food scene was changing because of this. In the 1850s, they started, and this to me is just like super ingenious. They started keeping railroad cars cool by using ice.

• 32:02Speaker 03

  So they would, they were called reefers, R-E-E-F-E-R. A reefer was a refrigerated rail car. And they had these big hatches in the roof. They would load just these huge, huge blocks of ice. And then fans that were driven by, you know, powered by the turning of the axle on the train, or on the train car, rather. And that just, you know, it just blew on them like a breeze past a cool towel in your window. And all of a sudden, you had refrigerated train cars. They were lined in like flax and sawdust, like we mentioned, sometimes dirt, sometimes cow hair. And even though people were a little bit at first like, I don't know about this. The meat packing industry really got on board because they said, we've been shipping live cows

• 32:47Speaker 03

  across country for people to take care of when they get there, when we can butcher everything in one place and ship out this, what they called dead meat. It's disgusting, but that's what they called it.

• 32:58Josh Clark?

  Right. That's what sixth grade bullies call you too, when they tell you to meet them in the playground at three.

• 33:05Speaker 03

  Did meat.

• 33:06Josh Clark?

  But that changed, that changed absolutely everything. This is when meat became like a staple of the American diet. We talked a little bit about Chicago being the epicenter of this and that. What did Americans eat before the FDA came along or something like that?

• 33:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's right.

• 33:21Josh Clark?

  But all of a sudden, meat was much easier, much cheaper to ship, and they could ship it further and further. So they started supplying the cities with, with meat and people started to be able to afford it. And that just, that was another huge change, not just for humans, but for cows too, because apparently the cow population in the United States more than doubled in 30 years after we figured out how to refrigerate meat or ship refrigerated meat.

• 33:50Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, that's incredible.

• 33:53Josh Clark?

  That's a lot of dead cows.

• 33:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a lot of dead cows. It completely changed Chicago as a city and it completely changed the way we were eating as a nation all of a sudden. We had refrigerated cars also shipping produce. It wasn't just about the cows and the beef, even though it was a big part of it.

• 34:11Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 34:12Speaker 03

  But all of a sudden, you could be like, hey, I'm growing this fruit in Florida. And have you, have you ever had not just an orange in your stocking for Christmas, you ever had a big bag of oranges sitting around your house? Well, we're happy to provide that for you. And US Fruit, I think was one of the first companies to get involved in like sending their good stuff all over the place. And, you know, as a result, obviously, the prices really, really dropped. There was a article in the New York Sun in 1894 that talked about the price of pears went from 40 cents to two for a nickel in just a couple of decades, thanks to refrigerated cars.

• 34:48Josh Clark?

  It's even more impressive when you adjust for inflation. So a single pear was $11 in the 1870s, and they were two for $1.80 in the 1890s, thanks to refrigeration. Did you ever get an orange in the bottom of your Christmas stocking? Because I never understood why until I started researching this.

• 35:10Speaker 03

  No.

• 35:11Josh Clark?

  You never did? Oh, we always did. And I was always like, why is there an orange in the bottom of this stocking, making it seem like there's way more stuff in here than there actually is?

• 35:21Speaker 03

  I feel like I would remember that our stockings were a couple of little fun things, like a little top or some silly putty, but usually just like socks and stuff like that.

• 35:29Josh Clark?

  Sure. I'm guessing that the reason I did and you didn't is because I was raised in the north, the Midwest.

• 35:35Speaker 03

  Maybe.

• 35:35Josh Clark?

  I'll bet that's why. And so it was like a, like a Midwestern tradition because we didn't have access to oranges and you could eat an orange year round, basically, you lucky duck.

• 35:47Speaker 03

  Trains eventually, shipping wise, gave way to trucks and they said, hey, now we got these trucks that we can refrigerate as well. And so we're not, you know, things were built around industries, entire industries, separate industries were built near rail yards because rail shipping was the only, only game, you know, for a long time. So, and I think it was in the, in that, what did we eat episode when we talked about Chicago? Like the whole meatpacking area was around the rail yards because they could, you know, they wanted to have it super close. So now all of a sudden you could say, hey, stuff is, you know, it's really much cheaper to raise cattle or grow vegetables way out in the boonies. You get cheaper labor, cheaper land. So now we can do that and just throw it on a refrigerated truck to get it across country.

• 36:32Josh Clark?

  Yep. So Chuck, little by little, as these like innovations in shipping stuff, meat, produce, things that just could not make it from, you know, California to, oh, I don't know, let's say Denver.

• 36:48Josh Clark?

  Without rotting or something. As we got better and better at this, something called the cold chain started to emerge and evolve. And that was basically how we moved perishable items from one part of the country to another, thanks to this refrigerated stuff. And it was super primitive and separate. I think the, I don't know if you said it or not, but the very first private rail cars were these meatpackers refrigerated cars. They just did this on their own as like a great business move. But these things became so invaluable and people became so hooked on having stuff available year round that they normally wouldn't, that it just became an institution, like a part of any growing, developing

• 37:30Josh Clark?

  country's infrastructure. There was something called the cold chain.

• 37:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. There was an engineer early on who, who did not realize his dream, but he was sort of the first visionary in the mid 19th century. His name was Charles, what, Tellier?

• 37:47Speaker 03

  Ooh, nailed it. He was the guy that's kind of envisioned this and said, hey, the cold chain is a thing that we could make a reality and then we can sort of reorganize rationally on how we grow food and how we ship food. And it was his idea. He apparently died in extreme poverty because he never realized the dream to its fullest, but he tried. He actually got a British steamer ship and outfitted it with a refrigerator, even named it Le Frig... Frigorique?

• 38:23Josh Clark?

  Yeah, like, like, like fantastic, basically, but fantastic refrigerator is basically what it means.

• 38:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, that sounds like a

• 38:33Josh Clark?

  Like magnifique, but refrigerator.

• 38:35Speaker 03

  Fantastic refrigerator concern. And this was in 1877 and he was bringing beef across the ocean from Uruguay to Paris. And when they got there, he was like, everyone's gonna love this. And the French were like, huh, you think I'm eating meat that's been dead for a month?

• 38:54Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 38:54Speaker 03

  You're crazy and we're gonna pass a bunch of laws that ban this kind of thing for the next 20 years.

• 38:59Josh Clark?

  Until you're screeched, I'm not crazy. Shut up. Take it back.

• 39:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 39:05Josh Clark?

  So like you said, he died penniless, as you like to say, but his, his legacy lived on. Eventually people said like, okay, we can get used to this, but it took some, it took some selling for sure. One of the other major things that helped establish the cold chain was not just shipping, but it had to like sit for a little while when it got to where it's going. Like, it's not like the train stopped at every, every house for anyone who wanted eggs. Like it went to one central destination and it unloaded its contents. And so as a result, cold storage had to develop. You remember Rocky? He helped

• 39:46Josh Clark?

  train by punching huge sides of beef. That would, that was part of the cold chain. He worked in at least, I guess that's where he worked was a cold storage place?

• 39:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, like a meat pecker storage facility, I think. By the way, second Rocky reference in here, that was another very subtle one. We'll see if listeners can pick that out.

• 40:08Josh Clark?

  It already happened?

• 40:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, a little Easter egg.

• 40:10Josh Clark?

  I didn't pick it out. I want to know.

• 40:14Speaker 03

  All right, I'm gonna tell you off air. Ready? I'll tell you right now.

• 40:23Josh Clark?

  Oh.

• 40:27Josh Clark?

  Thank you for telling me.

• 40:29Speaker 03

  It sounded like you were acting just then. And you kind of were, but I really did just tell Josh.

• 40:35Speaker 03

  But yes, let's leave that as an Easter egg. Anyway, yeah, cold warehouses started becoming a thing. Again, that sawdust insulation provided a lot of the, you know,

• 40:46Speaker 03

  insulation, I guess. These were in the 1860s and, you know, it wasn't like your refrigerator cold, but they were storing like fruit and produce. So it basically is like, hey, you don't get too warm and spoil is what they were trying to, you know, accomplish there.

• 41:01Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it didn't have to be frozen necessarily.

• 41:04Speaker 03

  No, no, no. But by 1904, this was a legitimate thing. There were more than 600 huge storage, you know, cold storage facilities. I think 102 million cubic feet. And, you know, mainly based around cities, but they were holding everything from, you know, produce to namely eggs, because people wanted their eggs year round. And back then, before they started breeding chickens to lay eggs year round, they were basically laying in the spring and people wanted those eggs in the winter.

• 41:32Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and they really did breed them, Chuck, through selective breeding programs. There's something called the Red Jungle Fowl, which is a type of chicken, wild chicken, lays about 10 to 15 eggs per year. And like you said, normally in the spring, maybe in the early summer. That's just not enough if you want eggs year round. So the breeds that we developed, like the Leghorns, which is the top egg layer, the Champ, they lay about 350 eggs per year, year round.

• 42:01Speaker 03

  That's a lot.

• 42:01Josh Clark?

  But before that, yeah, you could just hang on to eggs. I almost said you could just sit on eggs for a while, thanks to cold storage.

• 42:09Speaker 03

  That's right. But, you know, we said the French were kind of grossed out by this. It wasn't just the French. A lot of people had a hard time kind of coming around to this idea of eating things that had been around for a while. And false rumors spread that, you know, that stuff could make you sick. It could cause cancer. So in 1911, as a PR rebuttal, I guess, the Poultry Butter and Egg Association had a cold storage banquet at the Hotel Sherman in Chicago, where they served an entire meal of foods that had been preserved through refrigeration to a lot of folks, including the mayor and the health commissioner, as sort of like, hey, here's where we are now. You don't need to be grossed out. And people said, okay, I may not be grossed out, but I'm also like, I have to

• 42:54Speaker 03

  get used to the idea of not buying the eggs from the farmer down the street, or getting my milk from down the street, or the produce from the farmer down the street. And so it took a while for people to come around to just getting food away from a source they really sort of knew personally and trusted.

• 43:09Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And that was one of the roles of the FDA and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was to basically say, okay, we get why you don't trust some of these people because some of them are actual total skulls, some of the people selling food. Apparently, one technique was to, if you had a bunch of meat that was about to spoil, you just froze it and shipped it. And the person wouldn't be able to tell until they thawed the meat out and tried to sell it. And you just ripped them off. That was a big one. Or if you had a cold storage facility, if you're storing something for months, you need to keep it cold for months. There can't be like, a week where everything breaks down and you just hang on to that stuff and sell it anyway after things get back online. And this was

• 43:50Josh Clark?

  the kind of thing that like, people in the US were having to worry about. So thanks to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, and then later on, actual laws that gave it teeth, that kind of helped set the stage for people to finally relax and be like, okay, I can deal with frozen food. Because it was like the GMOs of its day. Like, people were just like, it'll give you cancer if you eat frozen food. Like, it was, like, people did not trust food that had been frozen.

• 44:19Speaker 03

  That's right. We should take our second break here at minute 42. And we're going to come back, finally, with home refrigeration, right after this.

• 44:45Speaker 03

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• 45:00Josh Clark?

  Well, with Base44, describe that in your own words. You don't need to know coding or programming. Then you just keep editing and refining it until it works exactly the way you want. Your build comes headache-free with built-in login, data storage, backend, and hosting. So what's the app you wish existed?

• 45:17Speaker 03

  Try it free and upgrade when you're ready. Go to base44.com to get started.

• 45:28Josh Clark?

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• 45:45Speaker 03

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• 46:01Josh Clark?

  Yeah, plus, everything at Quince is priced 50% to 80% less than similar brands. They work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen so you can give luxury, quality pieces without the luxury price tag.

• 46:13Speaker 03

  So give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com, where you can get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK as well. And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, let them know it was stuff you should know. It's the best way to support the show.

• 46:34Speaker 04

  Lately, I've been learning some stuff about insomnia or aluminia. Um, how about the one on borderline disorder? Better yet, birth order. Heard that one before, but it was so nice. I learned it twice. Everybody, listen up.

• 46:58Speaker 04

  Oh, it's Charles and Joshua. It's stuff, it's stuff, it's stuff. Just know.

• 47:08Speaker 03

  All right, so iceboxes had been a thing since, you know, at least the 19th century. They started to become more and more common. And this is, you know, a big wooden sort of cabinet in your kitchen. Usually wood, and it was lined with something like a tin lining or zinc, maybe. And the ice man would come around, deliver a big block of ice to your house. And that's how things were kept cool, in the icebox. And if you are a Gen Xer or older, your grandparents may have even said the word "icebox." My grandmother certainly did. Because she lived to be 100 and was around when they called them ice, when they were iceboxes.

• 47:46Josh Clark?

  Right, not just call them. Yeah, there's also that whole excellent subgenre of desserts that are icebox, like icebox cakes.

• 47:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, lemon icebox pie. But finally, in 1914, we get our first mechanical refrigerator in the house. The domestic electric refrigerator, or the D.O.M.E.L.R.E. fridge, made its debut. And this was still not a fully integrated refrigerator. It was a device that you got to put in your icebox to keep things cool and to keep that ice from melting.

• 48:20Josh Clark?

  Yeah. So, yeah, it didn't take off. They weren't super reliable. They were pretty expensive. But not too long later, a decade or so later, in 1927, GE introduced its refrigerator. It's nicknamed the "monitor top" because there's a big round turret on top of the refrigerator that gives it a very distinctive look. It looks like a robot fashioned by like a 6th grader.

• 48:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:45Josh Clark?

  But "monitor" refers to the Civil War ironclad USS Monitor. And that's just, that was the nickname. I was looking all over for what General Electric called it, and they seemed to have just called it "refrigerator."

• 48:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is kind of cool looking. If you want to look up a photo, I mean, it looks as described.

• 49:05Speaker 03

  Leftovers, and this was something I was really curious about, that had been a thing. It was 1878, I think, when that term was coined. But leftovers back then meant like, you gotta eat this stuff the next day because people didn't want their food to go bad. People didn't waste stuff like they do now and just throw stuff away if they didn't eat it. So dinner went into the breakfast, or the lunch, or it went into a big pot the next day that was on the stove. And you just had these big sort of stews of leftover things. Now that you had the mechanical electric refrigerator, all of a sudden you could preserve stuff and you could serve. You didn't have to transform something. You could like, warm up and serve the same meal that you ate a few days ago.

• 49:50Speaker 03

  And that was a pretty radical thing at the time.

• 49:53Josh Clark?

  Oh yeah, for sure. Again, though, people were kind of like, I don't know about this.

• 50:00Josh Clark?

  I was about to say fortunately, but related to that, scarcity during World War II and World War I, but also the Great Depression, basically said, hey, everybody, you can't just like be throwing food away. Like, we need to be very thrifty with food. And that really kind of gave leftovers a big boost. Also because the government came in and created propaganda campaigns to kind of persuade people to start eating leftovers more. Because again, thanks to your new handy GE refrigerator, you can do that kind of thing.

• 50:31Speaker 03

  That's right. It's pretty great. You know, the cold chain is what really changed the game early on. But it also changed like, not just availability, but like literally creating new kinds of foods, like inventing new foods. Iceberg lettuce is so named because it could hold up to being shipped on ice.

• 50:51Josh Clark?

  And it has the same taste as an iceberg.

• 50:55Speaker 03

  Hey, man, I'll go to bat for iceberg lettuce.

• 50:57Josh Clark?

  Really? Really?

• 50:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's unfairly labeled as junk.

• 51:04Speaker 03

  And like iceberg in with some arugula and a little romaine. And some leafy greens, throw in a little iceberg because it's so crunchy.

• 51:12Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 51:13Speaker 03

  And you don't get that kind of texture from, I mean, maybe a little bit, but it's the crunchiest lettuce to me. So I think it gets a very snobby sort of, people look down on it for, for bad reasons.

• 51:24Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 51:25Speaker 03

  Is my, is my take, but I like a little iceberg.

• 51:27Josh Clark?

  Tell them what John Waters called iceberg lettuce. I thought that was great.

• 51:32Speaker 03

  The polyester of lettuce.

• 51:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I was also raised a, you know, lower middle class kid who grew up eating iceberg lettuce.

• 51:41Josh Clark?

  Okay, I was too.

• 51:43Speaker 03

  It has a fond place in my heart for that reason.

• 51:45Josh Clark?

  I understand. I, I hated salads, so maybe that's why I hate iceberg lettuce. Cause that's all, that's all we got was iceberg as well and like French dressing or something like that or ranch. And that was it. And you ate it and you liked it and you shut up about it.

• 52:01Speaker 03

  I would party on an old school eighties iceberg salad so hard.

• 52:04Josh Clark?

  For real, like even when you were a kid, you would eat that?

• 52:07Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, I mean, that's the only kind of, you know, I mean, it's probably not even a vegetable, but I considered it a vegetable. I didn't like a lot of vegetables, but I would eat a salad.

• 52:17Josh Clark?

  So that's funny. I, I hated salad so much, I would refuse to be served anything except for some iceberg lettuce and some carrots. And I wouldn't even eat that. No salad dressing, nothing. Like whenever everyone else was finished, if I was still eating my salad, I had to stay at the table and finish it. And so at that time, I would just start slowly putting it bite by bite, under the credenza behind me. But then I was short sighted enough. I didn't go back and clean it out. So every few months, like the credenza would get moved and there'd be a pile of like desiccated iceberg lettuce and carrots.

• 52:49Speaker 03

  The other thing I like to use iceberg for now is like if you're making something in a lettuce cup, iceberg works really well.

• 52:55Josh Clark?

  Okay. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

• 52:57Speaker 03

  Like chicken larb or, you know, something like that.

• 52:59Josh Clark?

  Totally. I'll agree with you on that.

• 53:01Speaker 03

  So frozen foods, obviously, wasn't a thing for a long, long time, but finally in the 1950s, they said, hey, you know what? We can cool things, we can freeze things, we can freeze meals, and we can freeze orange juice. And I know we've already talked about TV dinners and concentrated, frozen concentrate orange juice, but those were two really big game changers, only

• 53:24Speaker 03

  made possible for advances in refrigeration and freezing and shipping.

• 53:28Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and while we're on it, I believe in our, like, food origins episode, I don't remember what it was, but we talked about the TV dinner, and we totally credited Jerry Thomas, the salesman for Swanson, as coming up with the idea. And since then, it's become much clearer that Jerry Thomas might have had almost nothing to do with this, and that the real hero was a 21-year-old bacteriologist named Betty Cronin, who was the one who not only, she might not have come up with the idea, I think she said one of the Swanson sons did, but she was the one who figured out how to make it work, and to make these meals that are different foods entirely, that all cook

• 54:11Josh Clark?

  at the same time and come out the way that they're supposed to. That was all her.

• 54:16Speaker 03

  That's right. Betty Cronin, unsurprisingly, not forgotten, but doesn't get nearly the accolades she should have gotten.

• 54:24Josh Clark?

  No. She does now, though.

• 54:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, way to correct the record, friend.

• 54:29Speaker 03

  So yeah, TV dinners. I mean, I would go listen to that episode, it was pretty great, but it definitely, you know, came along as TV was coming along, and it was a big deal. And even though, I mean, there are still TV dinners sort of like that, but if you go in the frozen food, I mean, I don't get any of this stuff, but if you go to the frozen food section, I mean, you can get almost any kind of meal frozen these days.

• 54:51Josh Clark?

  Yeah, even iceberg lettuce.

• 54:56Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah, that's not what that means anymore.

• 55:00Speaker 03

  Oh, no, I'm not gonna let someone ruin hawking up a loogie for everybody. That's one of life's great pleasures.

• 55:09Josh Clark?

  Sure. There's one other thing I wanted to mention. So the cold chain is now so diverse, and there's so many different versions of it all working together. It's now called the cold web. And Livia gives a great example of what we can do now. We can catch a fish in Norway, send it off to China for processing, and then send it from China to the United States for eating, all within a half an hour.

• 55:34Speaker 03

  That's amazing.

• 55:37Josh Clark?

  Well, maybe longer than that, but still, it is still amazing. You got anything else?

• 55:41Speaker 03

  We should do an episode on gullibility.

• 55:44Josh Clark?

  Nice idea. You got anything else?

• 55:47Speaker 03

  I got nothing else.

• 55:48Josh Clark?

  I got 10, 12 more minutes worth of material. Do you mind just sitting there?

• 55:52Speaker 03

  No, let's do it.

• 55:53Josh Clark?

  Since Chuck said, let's do it, I think it's time for listener mail.

• 55:59Speaker 03

  Uh, this is about the pink house. Hey, guys, I can't believe there is finally a subject I can share some information about. Every year, I'd visit my cousins who live about 20 minutes away from Plum Island, and heading to the beach was a yearly activity. As we all grew, and we had our own families, the yearly gathering at Plum Island got bigger and better, and passing the pink house has always been to tell that you're just a few minutes away from the beach. I grew up hearing the same story you guys shared about it being a spite house, and believed it to be true as it truly sits alone on the salt marsh. It's pretty weird looking. Just last month, though, being a new homeowner on the island, I was sent a town newsletter in which a tribute to the pink house gave a different history. I've attached the article for you to read. While it wasn't quite built with

• 56:43Speaker 03

  spite, there seems to have been some spite in the story. Our family loves the show and even flew to Boston to take our two adult girls who live in Boston to see you live. Thanks to you, we are walking local experts on the biosphere too. And that is from Amy Sandy, who is wonderful.

• 57:02Josh Clark?

  Yeah, thanks a lot, Amy. Number one, thank you for coming to see our show. And number two, congratulations on your new house.

• 57:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure.

• 57:11Josh Clark?

  And number three, thank you for sending us a delightful email. And if you want to be like Amy, you can send us an email too, to [email protected].

• 57:23Speaker 02

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, MyHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 57:39Josh Clark?

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• 58:24Josh Clark?

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• 58:36Speaker 03

  You put a lot of love into the things you send during the holidays. It's baked with love, carefully packed with love, or shipped with love right from home. Because what you're sending isn't just what's inside the box, it's the time, thought, and care you put into it. And this holiday season, the United States Postal Service is delivering your love to more addresses in America than anyone else. Send it with love. Send it with USPS, the United States Postal Service. Learn more at USPS.com/holiday.

• 59:03Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.