Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Baby Bottles

Episode Date: January 19, 2026

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why baby bottles are secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5Visit http://sifpod.store/ to get shirts and posters celebrating the show.

Baby bottles known for being food. Vimos for being for babies. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why baby bottles are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Hey there, Ciphalopods. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting that people think it is.

My name is Alec Chamed. I'm not alone. I'm joined by McCos, Katie Golden. Katie. Yes. This, this episode is. episode has major news. We have a topic.

We'll get to it. Big news. But no joke of major news. Yeah. I was saying, do I even do the intro because the news is big. I like that your compromise was just going really fast. That's true. Yeah, I didn't plan that too.

I was literally like, I don't know what I'm going to do. Yeah. I was checking my, like, I was checking all my devices to see. Like, did I accidentally like turn the speed up Alex button? Yeah. So it's basically two pieces of news. And Katie, do you want to go first with your news? Sure. I'm having an air. Yeah. So I'm having a kid coming pretty soon now. You know, approximately a month away. We'll have to see. It's not up to. to me. It's up to

up to the little creature. Yeah, but you know, we've been plant my husband and I have been planning this a long time and so we're very happy about it and excited and trying to learn everything.

I'm so glad we can talk about it now too. Yeah. I was like, am I going to spill the beans? Yeah, every time we talk about anything like that could even be tangentially related to pregnancy or babies. I'm just like, I want to talk about this, but, you know, yeah, you know, just wanted to let you guys know that that's what's happening. If I sounded pregnant over the past eight months, that's why.

Because in fact, I was and still am. Someone wearing amazing giant headphones is like, I knew it. Right. They can hear the baby kind of like kicking. Yeah, he is very, very active. So I wouldn't be surprised if you heard some like sort of karate moves through the microphone. Yeah. Oh, that's so exciting.

And then fun other piece of news is completely unrelated. Right. Right. Is that like pretty much coincidentally, me and my wife are expecting. like a baby too. So I'm glad I can also talk about that. Alex thinks it's a coincidence, but Brendan and I actually did sort of a moon ritual so that we Right, right.

All them at our networked in a way that no men can understand. Right, exactly. It has to do with crystals and the moon and zodiac signs. and aromatherapy, you know, Pinterest, things. Like, it's a very complicated ritual, but, yeah. Of course, me and Katie, your buddies, like, you mentioned privately that you guys were maybe trying, and that was like, and I was like, hmm, interesting news. Yeah.

Because we've also been thinking about a long time. And we're due weeks after Katie, but not a long time after Katie. Yeah. So it's pretty cool. Yeah. We really, it's, you know, this is so that. when the Schmidt child and the golden child are adults, like they can just... I should have called them Meyer too, yeah.

Yeah, they can just like smoothly take over the podcast empire and there won't be any other options for them. Somebody in my life especially was like, be sure to clarify to listeners that you and Katie are not a couple because they might not know. Yeah. It's separate babies from separate couples and separate places, but the timing is funny. Yeah, yeah. The timing is, like I said, Brenda and I did do sort of a ritual involving some teeth and pig's blood so that we would have babies around the same time. That's why she removed my teeth. Yeah.

Okay. Okay. Yeah, you know. I've been gumming things for many months now. Yes. Anyway, yeah. So we're both overjoyed to share this about each of our news. And the other, I guess, programming note is, of course, SIF continues.

It's the main thing I do professionally at a true joy. And there also will be some like parental leave weeks, but the podcast continues for both of us. So it's very exciting. I will probably take a good amount of leave, but I will return. Yeah. You can't keep me away. You can try. But I don't want to.

Yeah. And I have decided I want to like model dads taking at least a little bit of leave. Yeah. But it won't be forever either. And so you'll discover it as it comes. And the timing is sort of up to creatures right now. So we'll see. Right.

Right. They have their own, they have their own sort of agenda, the baby agenda. Big baby. It's a boss baby, of course. We're terrified, Brett and I, my husband, Brett and I are terrified that we're going to have a boss baby. Like, it's our number one fear is that the baby's going to come out and it's going to be a boss baby and it's going to have a little suit on already and talking Alex Baldwin's voice. Not Alec, Alec Baldwin. As a member of the Alex community, I was just about to snap about that.

Sorry, sorry. I impugned the Alex community. Alec Baldwin. Yeah. But yeah. So we're fingers crossed. It's not a boss baby. Otherwise,

uh, we're very excited. Yeah. It's been such joy in both households for a long time. So yeah, and you folks, I'm thrilled to say. I also,

yeah, we haven't done like a social media post or anything either. So, so this is first news for a lot of people, I think, too. Yeah. Also, I'm just, yeah. I'm like not even on social media anymore.

So, you know, yeah, it's, I think, mental necessity. But yeah, you know, I'm very happy to be able to share it with the listeners. We watched a video on social media that said a pregnant woman should remove all of her husband's teeth. And I figured it's good medical advice. So that's why we did that. There's so much good pregnancy advice online. Sorry, I couldn't get through that with a straight face. Yeah.

It's really good to, the best thing to do is Googling symptoms or Googling whether something is safe to eat. Because the answer is to both of those questions is that you're currently dying. And also if you eat literally anything, you'll, you'll explode. So that's weirdly a good segue into this episode topic because so we were like, we put our heads together and said, what's a good? episode topic for the episode where we both tell people we're going to have a baby. And one fun idea was baby bottles. We're a show that does history and science and lore about why things are the title secretly incredibly fascinating. So I'm thrilled to explore baby bottles today. And the easy programming note, as always, is that we're not doctors. And on top of that, it seems like

there's no perfect baby bottle or like brand to recommend or anything in the modern day. They're just regulated by governments. And so we have amazing stories about bottles and no real. for you is the programming node. Right. We're very, we're very not doctors. Like, I can't emphasize enough how not doctoring, how little doctoring that we do. Also, having a baby out of the way has really reminded me I'm not a doctor. Right. Yeah. They're keeping situations where I learn a lot. Yeah. I mean, the one baby bottle thing, I think I've learned recently just because, like, I, I took a class and they're telling us, like, what to buy, what not to buy. And this is the opinion of a single obstetrician who said, like, don't worry about like buying a bunch of baby bottles yet,

because you want to, if you're going to try to breastfeed, you might not need it for a while. And that's literally all I know about baby bottles. That's it. Yeah, we got similar-ish advice from somebody. They said just have a box of a bunch of different kinds of baby bottles because you'll find out what they'll take when they're here. Basically, anything that I don't need to know immediately after birth, it's like I can't, I can't learn about. because there's so many other things that I'm learning about. So baby bottles, I'm excited.

I have learned nothing about them. This has been really a primarily history episode on this prep. So I really loved finding out where all this came from. It's truly SIF. And on every episode, we lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week that's in a segment called Something in the Way, SIF stats. Do do do do do do do do do.

Attrax me like no other number Bown B'am, bow. Something in the waste If Count Stats I do wanna hear stats now Do do do do I do want to hear stats now Kiti on guitar everybody

Yeah I bet you couldn't even tell I made those sounds With my mouth flaps That name was submitted by Kurt on email Thank you Kurt We have a new name for this segment every week, please make a mycelian wagging bat as possible. Submit yours through Discord or to siftpot at gmail.com.

And Katie, the first number is after approximately 32 weeks of pregnancy. After approximately 32 weeks. I'm there, so tell me. Yeah, I think that's between where you are and Brenda is as we tape. After 32 weeks, it's a child development estimate for when a fetus has begun to learn the reflex of, of sucking. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, this kid already sucks, so I don't know what to do.

And it's accurate. That's literally true. Yeah. Yeah, he's doing all sorts of movements in there that I can feel. So, like, I'm not surprised. Like, because there's, like, a lot of stuff going on in there. Hickups moving around, punching me, like, square in the kidney. So, like, the fact that they're starting to learn the latching, suckling.

reflex does not surprise me. Yeah, and they learn it late in pregnancy, you know, it's third trimester, but also usually before birth. Apparently, it's fully developed around 36 weeks. Of course, these are all estimates, too, and kids vary. And some kids are born before 36 weeks, and then they have a slightly immature sucking reflex. They need to kind of finish learning it on the outside. But according to Stanford Medicine Children's Health, that's pretty consistent across babies. They start learning to basically when their finger touches the roof of their mouth suck on that reflexively around 32 weeks. Yeah. So every baby bottle is designed based on this idea

about babies essentially that they're going to do that move. Because babies are like born pre-programmed with some stuff. Otherwise they would not survive. So like obviously there's the like autonomic stuff like breathing, heart beating, blinking, the stuff that you don't really, we don't really think about that just happens in the background. But yeah, they've got a lot of other instincts, like the suckling instinct and like other things. Like, I don't suggest you do this. But if you dunk a baby underwater, they'll, like, shut their eyes and, like, close their mouths. Please don't do that.

Baby stunts. Baby stunts. The audience hungers for stunts. We got to do it. Diving. Diving baby. But, I mean, human babies are really underdeveloped compared to a lot of mammal babies

in terms of what they are born knowing how to do. Because they're kind of like they're born quite prematurely. A lot of the development happens outside of the womb because our heads and our brains have to be so big because we're such freaking smarty pants know it all mammals. that like, but we also like to walk up right. Yeah. So the heads and the hip issue is a bit of a sticky situation.

So Mother Nature and all her wisdom made it so that the baby, like our human babies are quite helpless compared to basically the majority of all other babies. I guess a good comparison would be kangaroo. I mean, yeah, there are some animals whose babies come out pretty underdend. developed like kangaroo babies can barely do anything. The echidna is on that monotream episode we did. They're underdeveloped too. They like stay in a patch for a while. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. So, you know, they got to have some programming otherwise. Otherwise they're, what are you going to do? Yeah. Yeah. Late in the game, they develop a lot of skills. And according to the Cleveland Clinic, that sucking reflex also develops alongside what's called the rooting reflex.

The rooting reflex is when the corner of a baby's mouth is touched. They'll usually open their mouth and move their head toward that. And so those two reflexes working in tandem make babies good at seeking nipples. Right. And also taking a baby bottle. So like you can drive your baby crazy just like poking their mouth like back and forth and they get confused. They don't know where they're supposed to go. That's good to know.

Yeah. Yeah. Pranks. We got stunts, we got pranks. Pranking newborns. You got pranked. And yeah, and those two reflexes are also things that babies build on as they develop more skills. Because another number here is around two to four months of age after they're born, around two to four months of age.

That's approximately when babies begin to transition to making an active choice to suck rather than it just being a reflex. The reflex is kind of a platform they build on. they will begin to make more of a choice. And apparently some parents find themselves surprised or even concerned because as their baby starts choosing to suck or not suck, then their behavior around breasts or bottles might shift. Even in a way where the parent maybe thinks the baby's going backwards developmentally. But what's really happening is just they're being more conscious in the action of sucking. What would make someone feel like they're going backwards, just that they're like wanting to suck on their hands or things? things more and that makes it seem like they're being more of a baby.

It's either that they're breastfeeding less easily or battle feeding less easily. I see. Just now that it's a choice, they're like thinking almost, I don't want to call it thinking too hard, but like because they're stopping and thinking. Yeah, overthinking. It's okay. It's okay to accuse babies of overthinking things, I think. Yeah.

Listeners need to know that we're having babies and we're going to bully them every way we can. Okay. That's the plan. We're making jokes, but we mean no harm to our offspring. Yeah, we'll do a good job and stuff. But yeah, I've also heard that actually like putting things in their mouth, like their hands, helps teach them that it's, because they will have a really sensitive gag reflex early on when they're really little. So if anything is solid is like getting into their mouths and it hits like sort of the roof of their mouth, they'll like have a gag reflex. And that's good because that protects them.

But then as they get older, they have to kind of unlearn that gag reflex because they do have to eat solids at a certain point. They do. Yeah. Yeah. The approximate number there because all child development is a range and varies. But around six months of age, most babies will begin eating some solid foods. Yeah. So they have to have that sucking ability.

to live on liquid, you know, it's pretty important. I guess they could like sip on it instead, but they prefer to just suck it down. Yeah, but like when they suck on their hand, their hand can safely like kind of touch parts of their palate, their soft palate that would normally make them gag. And that's okay because it's their hand. They're not going to choke on their hand. But it like helps teach them sort of that desensitizes their mouth a little bit so that by the time they start eating solids, they're not always going to gag on them.

them. Yeah, and they are learning so much as they go. Like, they are less skilled as maybe the baby of a wild animal that is to hit the ground running. But then they learn fast with the big brain that was sort of irritating in the birth process. Yeah. And the next numbers here, these are invention dates for elements of a modern baby bottle. We'll be in and out of modern bottles throughout the show. But maybe the most interesting number to me is the year 1845. Okay. You know, 15 years before the Civil War in the U.S. And that was when a New Yorker named Elijah Pratt patented the first rubber nipple. Wow.

And it was not for the end of a bottle. It was for basically nipple shield for a woman who's breastfeeding. Oh, that's crazy. To ease the wear and tear of nursing. Oh, wow. That's really interesting. So it's like, so it was for breastfeeding. but when babies start to develop teeth and also even before then, like, it's apparently can be pretty hard.

It's a, you know, it's a sensitive area of the body. So you know how like your lips on your face can be quite sensitive to irritation? Yeah. Same thing there. And then especially once you start involving teeth, that can cause, you know, discomfort. Yeah, yeah. And this idea of shielding the nipple some way was very old and just rubber technology. getting better. So Pratt patented a version of that that just goes over a woman's nipple to ease that.

And apparently this revolutionized baby bottles, but after a while. Because the next idea was put it on the end of a bottle of liquid for a baby. And then also this first version was still pretty gross rubber. It was apparently a black rubber that had a strong odor, a strong flavor of rubber. Oh. And if you washed it in hot water more than a few times, it fell apart. That's not ideal. So rubber was not very good yet.

Also, that doesn't, like, babies can be sensitive to taste, so that could have affected whether they wanted to even suckle on that, right? Yes. Yeah. So we'll link the patent. The design makes sense, but the material was cruddy. And one key source this week is M. Michelle Jarrett, who's a sister professor of history at the University of Missouri.

She says that before these were good, parents would improvise half measures like putting a piece of cloth over that rubber nipple or just having a baby bottle with no rubber nipple and then like cloth or other permeable stuff over the end. And it took really until after the start of the 1900s for baby bottles to start to have rubber nipples on the end consistently. Yeah, that makes sense. Another source is the University of Nebraska. Their medical center has a collection of historic infant feeding devices and like digital resources and pictures. So you can see what we had before at that link and we'll talk about things we had before too. Yeah, I'm very like Alex sent me some pictures and I'm very excited about some of them. Yeah, and one of them, the next number is 1841.

So four years before that first rubber nipple. In 1841, another American named C.M. Windship. I don't know what CM stands for, but CM Windship patented a glass bottle for nursing and we'll link the Smithsonian for a picture. It's basically a glass model of a woman's breast

with an additional opening to pour the liquid into and then a very, very small, simply hole in it but it's modeled sort of like a little nipple shape and that's what the baby would drink out of. I mean, it's definitely something that seems like it might be challenging because it textually

It's just glass. There's no softness or give to it. Yeah. Yeah. Americans said our glass blowing is getting better. What if we make glass containers for the liquid we're feeding to babies? And they said surely nature is perfect. Surely a woman's breast is the exact shape this all should be.

And that's not necessarily a bad idea. To this day, there's modern brands that make baby bottles with a very rounded shape, not the sort of cylinder that I think of as the emoji or the picture or whatever. So it could be a good idea. Yeah, it seems like it could work. Did it work at all? Like, was it okay? It was perfectly okay.

And in a later takeaway, we'll talk about the 1800s' huge problems for baby bottles. Uh-oh. It was about as good as all the other 1800s stuff. Right. But it was a really influential design that led to a lot of glass bottles. And basically except for a chunk of the 1900s, glass has been a dominant material for baby bottles. The other big one out there is plastic. And then some people do kind of a hybrid where it's a glass liner and a plastic exterior.

Those are kind of the ways to get baby bottles today. Right. But plastic basically took off in the mid-1900s and then people have gotten concerned about it. Because of the micro and the nanoplastics and the BPA. and M.A. MBAs and NBAs. If you give your baby MBAs, they become a boss baby. Yeah. We do not want a boss baby. I can't emphasize enough how much we don't want a boss baby. Yeah, and I'm going to link like half a dozen things about BPAs and also microplastics, because again, we're not doctors or scientists.

And this is still being studied. It seems like in general BPAs are not necessarily good for us. And because babies have smaller bodies, that's the first area people have worried about. Yeah. BPA stands for Bisfenol A. It's a kind of plastic that was developed in the 1950s. And we also all consume microplastics. People are trying to study that with babies. But one number with all this is 2009, because in 2009, the city government of Chicago banned the sale of any baby bottles or infant cups in the city that contain BPAs.

They set up huge fines for stores that carry that. And when they did it, they specifically did it with a mindset of the federal government is failing to do this. Chicago alderman Manny Flores said, quote, the FDA has dropped the ball. Whether that pressure or something else took effect, the federal government caught up. The U.S. FDA did a similar ban in 2012. Everybody from the state government of California to the Commission of the European Union did similar bans in between Chicago and the US. Everything seems to be BPA-free at this point that I've noticed. I mean, I could be wrong. Like, there could be some covert, some black market BPA water bottles. But yeah, I mean, it seems pretty

much like now, like everyone knows that you, you don't want to have BPAs. Yeah. And like US regulators, even before this weird administration, we're basically saying a little bit of BPA is okay and like canned goods. And I think on the soda cans episode, we touched on it. But the first frontier of basically society worrying about this was baby stuff. They said, get rid of it there and keep thinking about it for other stuff. Yeah, that makes sense. Whether it makes sense or not, it has led to a new resurgence of glass bottles, which was also dominant for a lot of the 1800s too. Right. And glass is safe. We'll talk later about other 1800s problems, but the main risk of a glass bottle is that it breaks and then can cut somebody.

Right. But it seems to be safe for feeding people. Beyond BPAs, I'm going to link NPR's coverage of a study from 2020 where they said babies might get microplastics from plastic bottles and everybody's getting microplastics from everything and we're still figuring out what that does. It is a good bad way. We're like figuring it out. I know health stuff is concerning and it's just like particularly predominant in baby

bottles as I researched them. Right. It's where everybody's kind of gas. to really, really think about it. Because we have babies. Yeah, because they're so, yeah, they're fragile and squishy. And the last number this week, it goes way back, at least 6,000 years ago. At least 6,000 years ago, that's the 4,000s BC.

That's how long ago people in Europe fed animal milk to their babies using specialized clay drinking vessels. So this is really interesting to me because, like, in general, My understanding is that animal milk is not good for babies. But before we had formula, you had to feed the baby something if you couldn't produce milk. Exactly. Yeah, if either the adult women in the community were not able to provide them milk or if the baby was refusing to take milk, animal milk was the other option at all. Right.

That was it. I thought like certain type of animal milk. And again, don't follow this advice. It's not medical advice. is historical. And babies, babies do a lot better now with modern medicine. But like I think like there was like the biggest takeaway from the episode is that

babies are in a better spot than they've ever been in. Yes. But I thought like that goat milk was a bit better than say like cow milk in terms of compatibility and digestibility. But then like sometimes they would mix it with something that had sugar in it or so or you know, like they would mix it up with some stuff to kind of try to like make it more, either more palatable or more nutritious. We didn't have like formula back then that was like actually researched and to mimic the

nutrients and breast milk. So we just kind of had to do what we had if there wasn't like, you know, another nursing mom who could spare any milk. That's right. Yeah. And apparently also some people in some communities suckled their baby. directly from an animal like a goat. Oh, wow, really.

If that was an option that made more sense than other options. I know this isn't how it worked, but I'm just imagining someone with like a baby in their lap and then like holding a goat in one hand and like just like holding the goat up to the baby. Oh. Oh. Like the goat's a rag doll. Like it just accepts being used to look at a tool. Bleeding every so often.

Bleet. Yeah. Yeah. And then also they could milk these animals into. the container of a clay drinking vessel and archaeologists find these all over Stone Age communities in places where there was a lot of raising livestock for dairy. This was just less common in a place like the Americas because they had less large dairy animals. Neolithic end of the Stone Age villages. People made small round clay items sort of like a bowl with a little spouter opening on the sides.

So also theoretically a baby could pour the milk into their own mouth with their hands. Wow. Like a bottle, you know, or a sippy cup. I'm looking at, is this the one with the, like, the little things that have the little feet? Yes. And also, I love, I'm so excited to link pictures of these because they were often decorated with, you know, four little feet or like a hat and a neck. It looked like a little animal toy, too. I love these so much.

These little guys. Which is adorable. Basically, like a sort of round cup with like a narrow, narrower neck and opening. and then it's got two little, like, feet, just like little boot feet. And then, like, a head that kind of looks like maybe a goat, maybe a bowl or something. They kind of look like fat kangaroos, but I'm sure these are not meant to be fat kangaroos. Yeah, it's truly Stone Age, joy and whimsy and craft, and all of it gets us into takeaway number one. The earliest version of baby bottles supported a population explosion.

that helped create civilizations. Whoa. These items, you can also build a civilization without it, and especially in places with less dairy livestock, they just fed their children other ways. But apparently in Asia, Africa, and Europe, there were lots of communities where this, like, sort of sippy cup early baby bottle made of clay helped expand families, which expanded cities, nations. It was part of a population explosion that moved us from the Stone Age to.

the Bronze Age. Every civilization, I think, came up with some version of milk substitute in case you couldn't, like, obviously there were like wet nurses and stuff and sharing milk when someone supply wouldn't come in. Everywhere on Earth, there was like some version of, if it was an animal milk, it could have been like a ground up stuff, ground into a paste and like proto formula, right? Right, yeah, like you had water to it and like, yeah, yeah. Right, exactly. I guess if you, I mean, it's kind of morbid, but like if you can't feed enough, like if you have babies and then some of them can't feed or don't take to breastfeeding or a woman's supply doesn't come in and you have not as good of an alternative, it does limit the population because you'd have like high infant mortality.

So is that, is that why this like helped with a population explosion? Yes, it's that and also just having more ways to get more food to more people. Right. And also like physically freeing out mothers. Right, yeah. Mothers or wet nurses, if they're directly breastfeeding without pumping it and serving it later, it ties up your hands in your chest. And if a mother could give their child this proto baby bottle that looks like a little animal sippy cup, that might give them a few more minutes of free hands or chest. for either another baby or just doing something else.

Right. And also, it seems like that would kind of encourage, like, more community care. Like, if you have, they can be taking care of the baby while the mother is doing, like, farming. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, like either separate tasks or our family now has enough hands to have more kids, you know? Right. Apparently based on just finding more human remains of more children. Archaeologists are sure that toward the end of the Stone Age, human populations went up in places that were doing agriculture and dairy livestock.

The key source here is a study from 2019 in the journal Nature was led by archaeologist Julie Dunn of the University of Bristol. Other key sources of feature for Smithsonian magazine by Brian Handwork. They say that it's surprisingly easy to find traces of milk in ancient clay from several thousand years ago. I would not have thought that's possible. But they have done a lot of digs where they've found fatty residues from milk in pots from as far back as 9,000 years ago. Also, there was a study where European archaeologists analyzed plaque on the teeth of human remains and found traces of milk proteins that had to be from livestock. And then in 2019, this team at Bristol, they were able to find residual milk on a microscopic level inside of these small clay vessels. And also the vessels were buried in the graves of ancient children.

I see. Okay. So that's kind of the connection because adults were probably also drinking milk, but these were specifically affiliated with children. Yeah. And this was a site in what's now Germany. Apparently the key thing is that the clay vessels were not glazed. So they had a lot of tiny little open nooks and crannies and pores. And the milk fats were a perfect size to just lodge into those little nooks and crannies and still be detectable. 4,000 years later in this case. Yeah. Based on those finds, they were able to figure out that animal milk was either a supplement for a mother's breast milk or the best substitute they had if a baby couldn't nurse or just they were simply feeding more babies with less humans. Whatever the exact way they used it, it was crucial for expanding and supporting the

population of a community. And suddenly you could have more people because. You can milk an animal into these vessels and also the baby can partly hold it for themselves. And that's surprisingly revolutionary, even though it's a little thing. That makes sense to me. I mean, when you have an alternative to pure breastfeeding, you're going to save a lot of lives of children and also in general, just a more fuel coming into the human population. Yeah, completely. Yeah, and apparently the other big innovation was turning milk into cheeses or yogurts for adults, because that can last longer in cheese's case and also if someone's lactose intolerant, they can take some of that a little better sometimes.

Apparently a lot of Neolithic people were lactose intolerant because this was kind of new drinking milk. Especially like aged cheese, I think is like, because like I can, I'm, I have no idea if I'm still lactose intolerant actually. I might be a little bit, but like aged cheese is a lot easier because it has less lactose in it. Yeah, so like for adults, that was maybe the biggest advantage of raising dairy livestock. And then for having children, it was that they could feed themselves some animal milk. The other other thing is, I'm thrilled the link, a different Smithsonian Magazine feature by writer Catherine Harmon Courage. It's about the history of breast pumping. Breast pumping is much older than I expected.

Apparently, we've on earth ceramic cone-shaped objects in ancient Greece. Whoa. From the 400s BC, where it's like, it's a ceramic cone, a lady fills the cone with water, places it over their breast, and then there's a spout to open and close. And you have like a gentle vacuum for drying out a little bit of milk. That's wild. So breast pumping is way older than I thought, but also the stone age. They didn't have it yet. And so that's also why this animal milk solution was so important.

Because breastfeeding mostly had to be kind of happening live, you know, like in the moment. I don't want to be gross, but like couldn't you just kind of like, I don't know, squeeze it out? We think people might have like tried to express some of it into something. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. But it was probably just difficult. Yeah. Yeah, probably just didn't work very well.

If that was easy, women would just do that today. But it's not that easy. Right. Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, it sounds really bad. Even today the tech is not great, but yeah. Yeah, it doesn't sound good. So, yeah, so these like clay vessels are surprisingly important in all of human history.

It's also important to note that they weren't particularly sanitary. According to Durham University bioarchologist Rebecca Galens, the fact that we can study these thousands of year old lipid proteins inside of the pores in the clay vessel points to that they weren't sterilized very well. Right. It would not be there anymore if they cleaned it good. I mean, that's the purpose of glazing partially. Yeah. In addition to it being decorative is that you can hold liquids in it without it leaching into the porous clay and then bacteria getting caught there. So like I took some, I learned how to do pottery.

Cool. If you want it to be food safe, it's really, really important for basically the, and wherever the water or liquid is like going to be contained for that to be very, thoroughly coated in food safe glaze because what can happen is if the liquids get absorbed into the cured clay, then it can cause bacterial growth. So you're for like say a drinking vessel generally, you're supposed to like glaze the inside really thoroughly, glaze the outside. And then on the very bottom, you can leave it a little bit unglazed. But like like an unglazed foot on the bottom is fine, but like everything else should should be glazed. Yeah, and they were fully in the stone age. They couldn't figure any of this out. So they like kept doing these vessels because it was

still a net positive. And also there's a suspicion that maybe they buried the vessel because they had some sense that it was not a good vessel and had something to do with the child passing away. Oh, really? That's interesting. It wasn't. Yeah, that's like why do they think? Because like I also would think that bearing something with a with a child might be like the child really liked this or you know like right so it's like how do we know it was that they thought the vessel might be to blame it's purely a theory yeah i see okay we just wonder if that's another reason but the reason you describe also make sense yeah yeah yeah so and they apparently find these all over the place and we're now you know as of like 2019 doing even better analyses of them but they were in

important tools, and again, they were important art objects and probably toys. Yeah. Like, it's also an animal toy for your child if they use it that way, and they probably did. Yeah. Yeah. Man, I want to make one now. I want to make my own weird little guy. Right.

If you made, like, a safe one that's glazed, it's probably good. Yeah. It's essentially an open sippy cup. Yeah. For a child, like an older, I would say probably less safe than a sippy cup because they can break it. But yeah, for an older child, maybe one of these little weird little foot. foot guys. That's safely glazed.

And people who've researched this, they're also very fun because the other kind of picture we can link is kids who were given, like, modern safe replicas of the Stone Age sippy cups to try. And when you see the kids with them, it just looks like they're having a sippy cup. It's extraordinarily cute. You can tell Stone Age kids must have liked it too. It's great. This picture is really cute. Also, I feel like they kind of like dress this kid to make them. look a little more Stone Age.

Like he's wearing sort of very simple smock. I don't think they had striped pants in the Stone Age probably. I'll bet if you're a researcher, like you can't get away with dressing them like Bam, bam from the Flintstones, but you also like nudge the parent toward, what about no logos? Like you're trying to old it up a little bit, you know? Right. Maybe no like maybe no Paw Patrol onesies.

Yeah, yeah. With neutral colors. It's a delicate balance. Yeah. That's cute. He's into it. I see these extraordinarily ancient clay things and I can totally imagine a baby liking it. Like not just settling for using it.

It's great. Yeah. Like we're kind of the same as people in the Stone Age in that way. And, you know, also parents liking it. Everyone likes fun little things. It's the best. And off of that, I think very joyful takeaway and also a ton of numbers about the whole history of this topic. We're going to take a quick break.

And then come back with a couple more takeaways about baby bottles. Folks, as always, our show is brought to you by members of maximum fun. Almost all of our revenue comes from direct support from listeners who think it is worthwhile for this podcast to exist. And so please consider becoming a member and thank you so much if you do that. On top of that, we found some extra support this week from a product that makes sense. That product is ExpressVPN. ExpressVPN improves your security on your devices. If you go online without it, it's like using the same password for absolutely everything.

If you connect to an unencrypted network in a cafe, a hotel, an airport, etc., your personal data is not secure. ExpressVPN creates a secure encrypted tunnel between your device and the internet, and it works on all devices, phones, laptops, tablets, and more that lets you stay secure on the go. I have been on the go quite a bit recently in doctor's offices for reasons that will make sense if you heard the beginning of the episode. And those tend to be a Wi-Fi network that's just kind of open. Like you do one checkbox to say that you won't violate the terms of the hospital system or whatever. So I really like having an extra layer of security. In particular, when I'm in a situation where I am very distracted from my internet security,

I'm dealing with important things. And it's worth giving yourself that if you can. Secure your online data today by visiting expressvPN.com slash sales. S-F. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-V-S-V-N.com slash SIF to find out how you can get up to four extra months, expressv-P-N dot com slash sif. We're back and we're back with more baby bottle takeaways. And, of course, our big news if you missed the beginning of the show. We're both having babies. We're having different babies.

Different babies. Brenda and Alex are having a little Schmidt. Brett and I are having a little golden McColley. Yeah, I haven't thought through what I'll describe about their name publicly. Because I like John Hodgman's thing of secret fake names for his children, but I might just say their name. We're figuring it out. We don't have a name yet. So anyway.

Yeah. Publicly, I'm going to call my baby like, I don't know, dextrose. You know, just like something, I don't know, because that seems to be the thing that big. A food ingredient? Is that dexterous? But if Elon is naming his kids' ex and like, you know, like I feel like it's got a, I got to do a. And 2026 is the future. Right. So they're a baby from the future.

Yeah. Right. Exactly. Their name will be spaceship or laser gun or. Yeah. You know. Dextro space ball. Right.

Back slightly earlier in history than the future. We have another takeaway here of takeaway number two. Baby bottles of the 1800. might have been riskier than baby bottles in the Stone Age. Whoa. The 1800s was a weird peak of ideas that might be good on their own, but they added up to baby bottles being huge vectors of disease and pathogens. That's surprising.

To an unprecedented extent. That's surprising, right? Because you'd think maybe glass and rubber would be more sterile than porous ceramics. Yeah, and I hope I was clear before, too, like glass is safe as a baby bottle material. The only real risk is it shatters. And, you know, that is the risk that is obvious to everyone. And then the baby has a weapon now. Like breaks the baby bottle.

Comes at you. Your baby mugs you, of course. Right. All your fruit snacks straight into a sack. And then they're out of there. No, but the way they laid out rubber for them and also just the way they shaped the bottle. to make it hard to clean. There were a bunch of poor choices

accidentally turned into a disease hot house of just all sorts of germs. Which is amazing. And then within a couple decades, completely fixed it. Once we got well into the 1900s, baby bottles were quite safe. And you should use one if you want to.

That was just like, because it was easier to clean them. Easier and we like understood that we should clean them properly. Yeah, exactly. Right, right. And then also, like, at least in highly developed countries, sanitation and infrastructure got better, too.

Right. I'll link an article from JSTOR Daily about basically the developing worlds. It can still be kind of unsafe to use a baby bottle if everything's not very clean. Right. And also I would imagine an understanding that like milk, whether it's animal or human, needs to be fresh or refrigerated. It shouldn't just sit out a lot. That too.

Yeah, yeah. Germ theory and medicine was a mess in the 1800s. Right. Recently. Yeah. Well, you know. We talked about these Stone Age equivalent of baby bottles. Between there and the 1800s, they didn't get a lot more advanced. I'm going to link to the London Museum, which is a digital museum about that city. And they describe a bunch of different construction work in London where to this day people turn up Roman Empire versions of the Stone Age Sippy Cup baby bottle.

It was called a Tatina. It was basically a small clay vessel for animal milk. The Romans would also put water in it or put very watered down wine in it, which is never about it. But from like the Stone Age to the ancient world to well into AD times, this was all kind of the same move. And then in the late 1700s, people really start getting into, hey, not metal or clay. let's do like glass for holding liquid for a baby, which on its own is a good idea.

Glass has just been an amazing material. Yeah. Totally inert when you have it sort of like in a solid form. Yeah. It doesn't leach anything. Like metals and stuff can leach stuff into your water and pretty, pretty incredible material. Yeah. And like durable and expensive to make, but not impossible.

And, you know, and so if folks have also heard the long ago Siff about ketchup. It's oddly relevant here because we talk about the Heinz ketchup company achieving a lot of early success by putting their products in glass containers. The public said, like, I can see the contents. I trust my eyes. It must be safe. Right. And then that sort of mentality took off before Heinz in the baby feeding world. People said, like, if we make the container of the food for the baby out of glass, then we see what they're feeding them. That helps us keep them safer. And on its own, that's true. Right. But then I'll link. a few galleries, especially from the Yale School of Medicine and also from East Carolina University,

they have old glass baby bottles that are almost like shaped like a long boat or like another very narrow thing, like narrower than the modern kind of baby bottle. And so that was just relatively hard to clean. People either wouldn't get into it or didn't understand enough germ theory to bother. And so the baby would get sick from some kind of like bacterial infection. Exactly, yeah. Or pathogen. And then also it's 1800s hospitals and doctors, so they're not that good at solving that kind of thing,

and there was a lot of infant mortality. Doctors are just like, have you tried, like, being more stern with your child, giving them a swat on the butt to make them stop being sick? And then another thing that's a good idea on its own was the invention of baby formula. People start developing versions of that in the mid-1800s. The early ones were usually some kind of mix of flour and the, animal milk and other chemicals to hold it together. It wasn't all that healthy, but it was a start. And that simply increased demand for bottles. So between glass bottles and baby formula and also

new breast pumping technology, in the mid-1800 is just lots more people buy baby bottles of this type. And since they have flaws, that increases problems. It also seems like the pumping itself, like if the pump is not sanitary, that could also introduce bacteria. Exactly. Just like the more parts, basically, are involved than the less than 1800s person cleaned it well. Right. And like, modern parents will be like, oh, I have to clean so much stuff because, like, yes,

you do. Yeah. And then they were like, I am from the 1800s. I don't really clean anything. Sorry. And now they try to sell you like bottle sanitizers and if you don't. If you don't have a dishwasher, right? Or you do and you just want a separate thing.

Like you can get like a bottle sanitizer. Yeah, I've been learning about those devices. Like it's cool that so much is out there. And because it's only getting safer and safer and safer and safer. Like, like you should be thrilled to not live in the time we're talking about, you, the Lister. You can get a wipe warmer where you put the baby wipes and the wipe warmer. So then whenever you wipe the baby, it's like a like it. warms their tushy.

I'm going to use that for me as soon as we get it. Like, come on. Yeah. It sounds amazing. I feel like, yeah, the baby's not going to get one, but I'm going to get one. Yeah, they're on their own. I want the comfy situation. Yeah.

Yeah. And the last bit of this wild 1800s story is the single most notorious design idea in baby bottle history. It's from the late 1800s, relatively recently. And the incredibly grim nickname for this in hindsight is murder bottles. Oh boy. Because they cause so much child death. Yeah.

This was a Victorian era idea where baby bottle makers said, hey, we're not that good at making like a rubber nipple for the end of the bottle yet. What we are good at making is thin rubber straws, thin little rubber hoses. Oh, that's a lot of surface area. Yeah. And so nobody could clean that. Like even today it would be hard to clean a tiny thin rubber hose with the stuff I've got. Yeah, like a nozzle. Yeah.

I've had enough experience with aquarium care to know that like any tubing is like impossible to clean. Yeah. Like I don't blame people for being bad at cleaning it. But we'll have pictures linked of like there were, there's all sorts of pictures of little Victorian babies holding. You know, you have like a glass bottle all the way in your lap and a straw all the way up to your mouth. because, like, of course, that's how you'd use it. Right. And according to pediatrician and Yale medical historian Howard Fink,

doctors rapidly put two and two together. They said, like, lots of babies are dying now. It must be the latest in bottle technology. Yeah. Was this when they understood bacteria and germ theory? Yes, and also, yeah, this was like the 1890s. People were rolling this out, 1880s and 90s. So also people were understanding germs better, too.

Yeah. So it was also they could just. like figure it out to some extent. Right. Like how are people cleaning these thin rubber nozzles that are long and you can't fit any anything in there? Yeah. And like and also babies very easily sucked onto them.

So unfortunately it remains a popular design on the market. Like apparently doctors in the U.S. were trying to get the government to ban this as early as the 1890s. But it was widely sold into the 1910s. It was in the Sears and Roebuck catalog until 1915. But the nickname is appropriate. It just massively increased child mortality. Yeah.

And then as soon as we stopped doing that, bottles were safe. You know what I mean? Like then basically just people got their act together and bottles have been safe ever since. Also, a murderous baby could use it as like a Garrett, like, you know, sneak up behind you with the hose and get you. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's not, totally not dangerous to give a baby a big, long little hose, like that, yeah. Right, yeah.

But also they could be in a spy movie, like a spy baby, boss baby of a spy baby. Right, assassin baby. What would you rather have a boss baby or a assassin baby? Yeah. I mean, I love James Bond movies, so. Yeah. Bond baby. It's a new idea of DreamWorks.

Assassin baby. It's about a baby born with Daniel Craig's voice. and his assassin baby. That's fun. And, you know, that's my idea. You have a totally different last takeaway of the main show because it's not even about humans. Forget humans. Oh, wow.

Takeaway number three. A few cephalopod species have been observed using bottles as homes for their babies. Cephalopods, eh? Yeah. This made me so excited about everything. It's babies and syphalopods and everything. It's great. I'm so glad you're coming around on cephalopods, Alex.

Like, of all the sea creatures that you are scared of, I'm proud of you because these are, cephalopods are very, very cool and good. Yeah, it also helps that it's not squids. I'm the most scaredest big squids, but probably the least scared of octopus. Big squids. Yeah, like a giant squid is utterly terrifying Kthulhu stuff to me. I can think of, I got to scare Alex sometimes because I can think of some very spooky, spooky cephalopods to make him scared. Cuddlefish are cute.

Yeah, the two stories here are very small octopuses and cuttlefish. Yeah, makes sense. And I like that it just flips the meaning of the words baby bottle. It's bottles that they're putting their babies in. It's great. Yes. And the octopus story is from a feature for Atlas Obscariya by writer Benji Jones. the Cuddlefish story is from, it's 2013 and it's the Tumblr blog of the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Whoa. Wonderful Tumblr use. Love it. Tumblr. That's some 2013 stuff, man. That's great. Hey, they're kind of still around, right? They are completely around, yeah.

I don't use it, but apparently it's pretty cozy these days because it's not like everything else, you know. Right. But, yeah, the octopus story is from 2025. This is marine biologists in Florida. Dr. Hannah Cook works for the county government of Monroe County, which is the southern end of Florida, including the Florida Keys. And she does work supporting and protecting coral reefs. On one dive in April 2025, she noticed a beer bottle just on the ocean floor.

So she was like, I will collect the trash. Yeah. And then when she approached it, she saw a whole bunch of eyes looking back at her from inside the bottle. That's my favorite beer. A thousand eyes in a bottle. A thousand eyes, IPA. Eyes PA. Yeah.

The species is octopus Jubini, also called the Atlantic Pygmy Octopus. Aw, cute. The adults are rarely larger than five inches long. Hey, that's so cute. And so not just a bunch of babies, but also an octopus mom. We're all in this little beer bottle. Aw. Aww.

That's so cute. Just hanging out. And with most octopus species, a mom will lay eggs and then defend the eggs for the entire rest of your life and then just pass away. That's what, like, I see the mom. Like, she's kind of like, she's like the whole thing. Like, she's kind of curled around in the whole thing and her little suckers are on the side and then there's all the babies. Yeah. Yeah, it's like the picture I'll link.

Well, and it's in the article too, but it's like labeled. Yeah, they like pick out the eyes and tentacles and stuff. It just looks like a big clutch of everything. Yeah, I didn't even notice the mom because she's just kind of like the background, the substrate that the babies are on. Yeah. But yeah, you're mentioning, which is true that, like most octopus species, like they're simopal paris, which means they only have offspring once and then they die,

unfortunately. Yeah, yeah, their bodies have evolved. to just kind of stop continuing to live once that task is complete. Right. So, yeah. There's also a thing where I guess this mom decided, hey, this bottle, it just has one entrance made of a solid glass material. And I can very easily store and defend all of my eggs in the space. Right.

Because I would imagine naturally that they look for crevices to squeeze into. And the octopuses are very squishy. They can fit into really tight spots, which helps them both with hunting and also. protecting themselves, which they millions of years ago chose as a strategy over having a shell because cephalopods used to have big shells. And now they don't in general. Yeah. Other than Nautaloids, Nautiluses. Now they've gone for squishiness and then basically finding a shell, which could be literally a shell or beer bottle or a little cranny in a reef.

And apparently Hannah Cook's find then... That made some news. And then other scientists piped up and said, we've also had a bunch of observations of octopuses inside of discarded human items like bottles, too. It's just going on, especially in the Florida area. Right. And University of Miami environmental scientist Jennifer Jacques-K says that octopuses are highly opportunistic and creative. And so, you know, the high output of United States trash is now a go-to container for some octopus baby clutches. So we should be littering more beer bottles into the ocean is what you're saying.

Like, no, and they really use it well. It's great. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the totally other bottle story is on the U.S. West Coast, Cuddlefish at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Apparently staff aquarist Brett Grass, maybe Grass say it's GRAS-S-E. he handles cuttlefish husbandry at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, breeding cuttlefish. Wow. Because apparently they have a lot of them and then they'll lay hundreds of eggs at a time. So it's just a lot of species survival plan arranging the genetics properly kind of thing.

A lot of tiny little cuttlefish pacifiers to hand out. So cute. I just imagined a cuttlefish with a pacifier. I'm really happy. Yeah. And so in 2013, apparently. he had so many cuttlefish he needed to build more space for the eggs on the babies and especially in an aquarium setting you want to have a bubler for that yeah if folks know aquarium stuff

bubblers basically help provide and spread oxygen and also prevent fungal growth and couplefish eggs are sensitive to all that in nature in the ocean uh octopuses and i believe cuttlefish might do this as well but especially octopuses will like wave their tentacles over their eggs to oxygenate them. So if you don't have a, if you have a bunch of eggs and you don't have the, the mom there to waver tentacles, you got to oxygenate them another way. Yeah, there you go. And then Brett Grass apparently got the equivalent of extremely expensive quotes from contractors

for how to build more space and more bubblers and stuff. on the Monterey Bay Aquarium Tumblr, they joke that he instead found a solution that cost $2.50 because he got two-liter soda bottles and then rig that up with plastic tubing and silicone glue to create rows of soda bottles full of cuddled fish eggs and then babies when they hatch, happily bouncing and bubbling around inside. That's so cute. Also, I imagine if you ever were really sleep deprived at work, you're just like looking for something to drink, you might be like, oh, this is an interesting boba type drink that I'm drinking. What is this like playing fanta?

Anyway, I don't know. Whatever. Crystal Pepsi? Okay. Chunky. The last last thing here, there was one extra, either happy surprise or extra idea for this Monterey Bay system, which is that not only did the bus. or provide oxygen and prevent fungus, it also freed up the cuttlefish mom's tentacles and

time. Apparently, they found that the moms could focus on just laying more eggs instead of, like, handling and caring for their eggs all of the time 24-7. So they made even more eggs. So it reminds me of the Stone Age baby bottles. Yeah. It's truly wild that this kind of parallel happened with cuttlefish in a moderate aquarium. There was another study that found that for like octopuses.

I don't know. I think this study was done on octopuses, so I don't know how it would apply to cuttlefish. But like they edited some genes so that they would no longer produce some kind of hormone. And they found that they no longer died after laying eggs. But they did not take care of the eggs like at all. So they had zero maternal instinct.

So the eggs didn't make it. But I could imagine you could create like a system of octopus sort of like we have a robot that takes care of the eggs and then the mother gets to just continue being an octopus forever or something. I don't really. I just really like octopuses and I want to see what happens when you give them a longer lifespan because I think they might take over the world. Yeah, yeah. Build civilization. And honestly, I bet they'd do a bang up job of it. So.

Yeah, all of us are Wallace and all of them would be Grommet, just silently doing sensible things. Right. Yeah. Octopus Gromit sounds great. The Grompetopus, yeah. Grompterpus. I think we end on Gromptipus. Great.

That's it. Yeah. Yeah. Folks, that's the main episode for this week. And I'm so excited for all of you to know both of our wonderful news. We're each very excited. And it's a new frontier in the show, which I'm so excited, keeps on going. And also will have this extra richness as we each grow our families.

So wonderful to kind of announce it this way with a related topic. And thanks for being here and I'm sure being kind about it. And hey, welcome to the outro of the Baby Balls episode. It's got fun features for you. such as help remembering this episode, with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, the earliest version of baby bottles supported a population explosion that helped build civilizations. Takeaway number two, baby bottles of the 1800s might have been more dangerous than baby bottles in the Stone Age. Takeway number three, a few cephalopod species have been observed using bottles as homes for their babies.

which I love is sort of a new, different meaning of the word baby bottles. And those stories were octopuses in the Atlantic and cuttlefish at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. On top of those takeaways of very large numbers section this week about all sorts of elements of child development, all sorts of invention dates and elements of the creation of the modern baby bottle, also the recent trend and laws against BPAs and also concerns about plastics that have helped revive the glass baby bottle. And of course, the Stone Age, Clay, Animal Sippy Cup version of what became the baby bottle. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now

if you support this show at maximum fun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists. So members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is two different ways. The United States is the weirdest country in the history of baby bottles. For the entire existence of the political entity of the United States, Americans have been super psychologically and scientifically weird about this. Visit sifpod.f.fod.fund for that bonus show,

for a library of more than 23 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows and a catalog of all sorts of Max Fun bonus shows. It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximum fun.org. Key sources this week include all of the very best sources we can draw on, because again, we're not doctors or child development specialists or materials scientists with the glass and plastic element.

But we draw on a lot of health resources from Stanford Medicine Children's Health, from the Cleveland Clinic, from the Mayo Clinic, also a lot of interviews with very pediatricians. And then there's a ton of amazing digital resources from museums and universities about the history of baby bottles. Special thanks there to the University of Nebraska Medical Center, to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, to the London Museum, to the Yale School of Medicine, East Carolina University, and the George Marshall Medical Museum in the UK. On top of that, the most relevant scientific study this week was done in 2019, published in the Journal Nature, led by Julie Dunn of the University of Bristol, and then handy sources of digital

writing include Smithsonian Magazine, Atlas Obscira, and the Tumblr of the Monterey Bay Aquarium. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hoking, the traditional land of the Muncie-Lenape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skategoq people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people in life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord.

We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode, because each week I'm finding is something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 70. That is about the topic of spoons. And fun fact there, the entire bonus show is about an item that is nicknamed the McDonald's Cocaine Spoon. You will find out why in the bonus.

So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast Creatures. your feature about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is unbroken, unshaven by the Budo's band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Sousa for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks. Go to our members. Thank you to all our listeners. It's truly a joy to share this kind of life milestone with you folks on top of the joy of making a podcast every week. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network

of artists-owned shows. Supported directly by you.