Stuff You Should Know - Are we all Martians?

Episode Date: September 18, 2012

There's a very good question that no one has yet satisfactorily answered: Where did life on Earth come from? Some look to the Red Planet as the source of life here, which, if correct, would make us al...l Martians. Is there anything to this out there claim? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Flooring contractors agree. When looking for the best to care for hardwood floors, use Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner, the residue-free, fast-drying solution especially designed for hardwood floors, delivering the safe and effective clean you trust. Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner is available at most retailers where floor cleaning products are sold and on Amazon. Also available for your other hard surface floors like stone, tile, laminate, vinyl, and LVT. For cleaning tips and exclusive offers, visit Bona.com slash Bona Clean. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff, stuff that'll piss you off. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging?
Starting point is 00:00:42 They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jackmove or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and I'm with Charles Bryant, and we're doing Stuff You Should Know today. Oh, yeah?
Starting point is 00:01:26 Yeah. Not the other one. Stuff You Should Not Know. Nothing You Should Know. Yeah, we're out there inspiring podcasts. Yeah, we heard about that today, right? Someone started podcasts in the Illinois Valley. Nice. I don't know where that is. I don't think it's Illinois though. But they wrote about it in the paper, right? Yeah, they got it right up in the paper. Pretty cool. Yeah. Okay, before we get started, buddy, we need to announce our upcoming New York trip. Yeah. And trivia night. Yeah, we talked to Mayor Bloomberg, and he said that Friday, October 12th, 2012, is Stuff You Should Know Day in the five boroughs of New York City. That's right. And we will be presented a, not a key to the city, but a key card to our
Starting point is 00:02:12 hotel, at least. It's a set of lock picks to the city. That's right. And so we're coming for Comic-Con. Yeah. If you have a Comic-Con pass, you can come see his podcast live, and we're going to have details on what room and what time and everything. Yeah, plus it's cheap, even if you don't have a pass, like they passes are not expensive. Okay. Yeah, even in this economy, it's value. It's still good. So we're going to be podcasting live during the day on Friday, and you can check out Facebook and Twitter for info on exactly where and when. And then that night, yeah, another Stuff You Should Know trivia night, which was a huge success, huge success in New York last year. So it started two years ago, right? Yeah, two years ago. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:02:54 About this time, too, I think it was October, wasn't it? Yeah. So it's a whole day, a whole day of your life in New York City packed with Stuff You Should Know featuring Chuck and myself. So this is going to be great. And I know it's just me, but I like saying myself. And we're going to have details for sure on that. We're locking down the venue, hopefully as we speak, and locking down our All-Star Celebrity trivia team as we speak. Yes. If you're out there and you're an All-Star Celebrity, you want to play with us? I think it's a great call out, Chuck. Head us up. Yeah, we're still assembling our team. Yeah, a couple of the stalwarts are going to be out of town, which is disappointing. So
Starting point is 00:03:33 we're looking for comers, as it were. Yes, as it were. And we're also looking for comers to challenge us and duke it out on the trivia floor. It's going to be fun. For free. That's right. And there will be adult libations involved if you're into that. Root beer, probably. If you're into that. Sure. And that's about it. Anything else? I think it's high time we started the episode. Okay. Thank you for bearing with us, I guess, everyone. Yes. Let's see, Chuck. I'm a little under the weather today. I know. I'm fighting. I just learned that. I'm not going to get sick. I'm just like, man, that one day where it's like you're right before you're about to get better, the worst day, but you're just not going to get
Starting point is 00:04:15 sick. You know what I'm saying? So I don't have like five days of sickness ahead of me. I've got bagel days of sickness ahead of me. You're saying this like positive thoughts is at the deal. Okay. Yeah. I found that my mind-body connection is really, really strong, especially in the horrible way where I'm like, I'm not going to get sick. I wonder if I'm getting sick, though. Am I getting sick? Then all of a sudden I'm sick. Right. It's like, I just talked myself into getting sick. But it sounds like you just talked yourself into getting well. So I'm trying it out. It's mental gymnastics. Sometimes it works. Yeah. But I guess let me just go ahead and start and get this one over with. Okay. I like this one. Yeah, not bad. You
Starting point is 00:04:54 realize this is half of an article I sent you before that you, you're like, no, let's not do this one. Really? Yeah. The origin of life on earth. But didn't we do that? No. We never did that. No. Well, there was a reason. Well, maybe we can do the other half. We'll do this as like part of a two-part suite about where life on earth came from. Mars. Maybe. There's another way, and this is my intro. There's another possible way. And it's something called abiogenesis. All right. And abiogenesis basically says that all the proteins needed to form RNA somehow were present in the early earth in the primordial soup. Yeah. Yeah. And somehow they came together in a structure that was RNA. And RNA is a pretty specific weird little thing in that it can not
Starting point is 00:05:45 only replicate itself, it can make new stuff too. Wow. So it can build DNA, but it can also replicate itself. That sounds like something out of a Ridley Scott movie. Very much so. Yeah. And they think that RNA somehow came together and over the course of millions of years and all these different trials and errors finally started to form DNA, which kickstarted life. The origin of life was just a bunch of proteins that came together. There are a lot of reasons people poo poo this. Sure. A lot of people, a lot of creationists say, hey, you know, Occam's razor, which you scientists love so much. Yeah. Do you think that's it or that somebody created us? Right. So the abiogenesis hypothesis, maybe theory by now, has kind of had some holes in it, but it's really interesting. And
Starting point is 00:06:33 we'll talk in depth about that in another one. Okay. This one is about the big rival to abiogenesis and it's called panspermia, which is a pretty neat name. What does that mean? Seeds everywhere? Yeah. Seeds everywhere. Yeah. They're just all over the place. Yeah. Panspermia. And it's from a guy in 1906, Swede, whose name is pretty awesome. Svante Arhenius. Yeah. Who wrote a book called Worlds in the Making? And he coined the term panspermia, but it was about 50 or so years, maybe 30 or so years before him, that the idea of panspermia was first put forth by Lord Kelvin. Yeah. The famous Lord Kelvin, British physicist. Mega famous. Mega famous. I mean, not many people get a temperature scale named after him. No, there's not just the Brian's
Starting point is 00:07:28 tail. Tommy Celsius. And Billy Fahrenheit. Yeah. Man. And Lord Kelvin. What a triumph that is. So his idea was that seed bearing meteorites, which is kind of where we are here with this, did we come from Mars? Potentially that these meteorites that had life buried within them, or at the very least, you know, sitting on the surface. It had life there. Found its way to Earth, and that's where it all started. All right. And it's pretty cool to think that way back then, they were thinking of this stuff. Back in the 1870s. Yeah, man. Yeah. You know. Well, I mean, there's not super far off. The space elevator came from a Russian guy in 1880. That's true. People were thinking back then. Yeah. They'd had a lot of time to subjugate other cultures.
Starting point is 00:08:19 May have been thinking even more, you know, because they didn't know as much. Right. All they did was sit around and think. Well, if the Olympics taught me anything, the opening ceremonies, it's that they had a lot more time to toil and think, and everything just got better after the sod was removed when the Industrial Revolution came about. You think that got better? I think it got worse. Oh, I see. It seemed to me that it was the saving grace of civilization was when the Industrial Revolution hit. Oh, okay. I thought you meant the opening ceremonies because it got much worse after the Industrial Revolution. All of a sudden, people were texting each other on screen. It was weird. It was like these little romance stories
Starting point is 00:09:00 playing out on the field. Yeah. It got so odd. Yeah, it did. Yeah. But fortunately, the Olympics had John Hodgman to defend it. He was the sole person to defend it on Twitter. Oh, I see. Boy, good thing Twitter wasn't around during the Atlanta Olympics. Yeah. I don't remember that one, but you knew it was like, you don't remember the Atlanta Olympics. It was so embarrassing. It was like, it was like little Richard driving around in a truck or something like that. We had stainless steel pickup trucks driving around. We had like line dancing and like Georgia Peaches. It was just like, oh man. But the point was it was big. It may have been gaudy, but it was big, right? No one could outdo Beijing.
Starting point is 00:09:39 But they were saying they weren't even trying to do outdo Beijing. They were trying to do something different, but still it missed. Thumbs down. Yeah. Okay. So anyway, getting back to it, back to the Victorian era and their science thought. Wow, we got so far off. It's ridiculous. Right. But the point was the concept of panspermia is that the earth prior to the arrival of life was like a virgin Petri dish. Yeah. And then there was some cosmic cough and like a little bit of cosmic spittle infected this Petri dish and all of a sudden life took off. That's gross. Panspermia. You said a more narrow definition back then, but now it's been broadened out to the point
Starting point is 00:10:29 where pretty much most scientists believe that you can exchange life among bodies in our solar system. Like it can happen. Yeah. Well, it's been proven to happen. It was broader, right? Back in the day, it was broader. And then now it's broader. Back then it was more specific. It was broad, narrow, and then it went back to the original broad version now. Science has started to kind of back up what was originally considered a flight of fancy. So what Lord Kelvin thought was that asteroids brought life to earth. Yes. And probably from Mars, maybe elsewhere in the galaxy or elsewhere in the universe. Sure. But the point was they arrived via rock. Well, after a few years of consideration, most people were like,
Starting point is 00:11:13 that's not possible. Like an asteroid would basically pulverize everything on it. Yeah. There's heat involved. There's no way. Sure. And so the Swede comes along. Sovante Arrhenius. And he says, no, these are just basically like little little microbes traveling between the planets. Yeah, it's like you don't even need the meteorite as the vessel. Right. This stuff is just going by what starlight. Yeah. It's kind of a simple way to put it. Electromagnetic energy. Yeah. And no other articles had starlight. Yeah. It's a little more fanciful. Or ether, I think they used to call it too. Oh, really? Yeah. So this is all great. And then we find out in 1975 when we launched the Viking probes, which to Mars, which I think we goofed on this before,
Starting point is 00:11:58 right? The Viking name or something. Yeah, I think it sounds familiar. Viking one, touchdown at Chrysa Planitia, Viking two on Utopia Planitia. And interestingly, they took some some atmospheric readings and they found that the same stuff in the atmosphere of Mars was also contained inside these meteorites from the 1980s. Pretty cool. Right. Well, they figured out the signature of the atmosphere of Mars, and then they compared it. And it was the same. Right. And then they went back and said, well, wait a minute, let's find out what other rocks have this specific unique signature that we can locate on Mars and say these are Mars meteorites. And they, I think they had like 50,000 of them. 53,000. Yeah, the ones they already had, they like
Starting point is 00:12:50 looked back into them. And 104 of them came from Mars. That was kind of low, I thought. Yeah. I was a little disappointed. But the point is, is these things show that rocks can travel from Mars to Earth and survive intact. That was the big part of it. That's right. So you have a little bit of Lord Kelvin's original idea starting to come back into reality. Yeah, you know, just good for him. He has a scale and everything, but they dug him up and shook his hand and put him back. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2,200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah, and they can
Starting point is 00:13:36 do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs. Of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm a prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. Cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. This is what it sounds like inside the box car. I'm journalist, Anel Morton, in my podcast, City of the Rails. I plunge into the dark world of
Starting point is 00:14:30 America's railroads, searching for my daughter Ruby, who ran off to hop trains. I'm just like stuck on this train. God knows where I'm gonna end up. And I jump. Following my daughter, I found a secret city of unforgettable characters living outside society off the grid and on the edge. I was in love with the lifestyle and the freedom this community. No one understands who we truly are. The rails made me question everything I knew about motherhood, history, and the thing we call the American dream. It's the last vestige of American freedom. Everything about it is extreme. You're either going to die or you can have this incredible rebirth and really understand who you are. Come with me to find out what waits for us in the City of the Rails. Listen to City of the Rails on the
Starting point is 00:15:21 iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts or cityoftherails.com. Shall we move on to ALH 84001? This is one of my favorite meteorites. This one, you remember, this one caused a huge stir. Like Clinton came out and was like, there's life on Mars. They found evidence. They found three different traces of what they considered, I guess, microbial fossils from Mars. And two of them were discounted. But another one was like a chain of magnetite that was arranged in such a way that it couldn't possibly have been created by anything but an organism. I think the results are still out on that one. The other two are like, no, no, it's definitely inorganic. But this one, the jury's still out on whether
Starting point is 00:16:14 it's possible it was created by some sort of organic life that basically excreted magnetite chains. So the cool thing about this is they studied years later, they've come up with all these different issues of why this might not be able to happen. One of them is the intense heat that would be generated. Could the meteorite survive it? Could life on the meteorite or buried within it survive it? Yeah. And they studied at Caltech. Yes, Caltech. They studied ALH 84001. I wonder what they call it? Probably the Allen Hills meteorite. Yeah, probably so. Because that's where it was found. And that's what the ALH stands for. So they studied this and they figured out that inside this thing, it actually never got hotter
Starting point is 00:17:04 than 104 degrees. And they did this through magic called magnetic signature. They cut off a slice of it and found its magnetic signature couldn't heat beyond that. So that means it never disappeared. Yeah, it never got hotter than 104 degrees. So that kind of put that one to bed. Yeah. So there's plenty of microbes that can survive temperatures of 103 or 140 degrees. In fact, I bet a lot of them love that kind of temperature. Love it. Yeah. They're called retirees. That's right. And then so that backs up Kelvin a little bit. The fact that there's rocks that we can say definitely came from Mars back him up. Yes. And then also getting back to the rocks coming from Mars, the possibility, the probability of one infecting the planet. I guess you could
Starting point is 00:17:56 say the early planet also came to be supported through further research. Some guys from NASA, was it NASA? Yeah, they calculated that as many as 50 billion Martian rocks pummeled Earth in the first 500 years of the Earth's life. 50 billion about 20,000 hit Earth. No, 20,000 a decade. Oh, no, within a decade. Right. Yeah. But over the first 500 million years while the Earth is cooling in the prior, just prior to the existence of life on Earth, 50 billion Mars rocks hit Earth. Right. Okay. So they're saying the rocks can survive. There were plenty of them. And we know that at least one traveled and did not heat up over 140 degrees. And the NASA dudes also said that basically our inner solar system
Starting point is 00:18:56 all has sort of a similar suitable environment. So exchange of life in the inner solar system only is very much likely. Yeah. Yeah. If you take care of it. If you look at Mars, the chance that Mars can send a rock to Earth is way higher than it's pretty high. Right. Yeah. But if you if you go outside of our solar system, the chances start to plummet exponentially downward. Yeah. To where if you go outside of our solar system elsewhere in our galaxy. Yeah. Even in the Milky Way, the odds are like one in a billion that even a single rock could have hit Earth in its first 500 million years. Yeah. Just doesn't happen. But apparently the interplanetary exchange between Mars and Earth is a lot more frequent than you'd think. Oh, yeah. We're also talking about how
Starting point is 00:19:54 that 104 degree internal temperature bacteria can survive that. Sure. Maybe even thrive. Yeah. Yeah. There are some bacteria, too, that have been studied that have been able to survive basically trips on satellites exposed to solar radiation, much as they would be like on a meteorite, and they've been found to survive pretty pretty well as well. That is very true. A lady named, no, I'm sorry. Well, yeah, a microbiologist named Lynn Rothschild and her partner, Rocco Mencinelli. I believe that's how you pronounce that. Mencinelli. They put some halophiles, which are salt loving, which you'd find in the Dead Sea. Yeah. And they can like these buggers or survivors. Yeah. They basically just scab over their cells. Yeah. And survive
Starting point is 00:20:47 like that. And they found that after two weeks on a satellite, 10 to 75% of these bacteria had survived. Not bad. That's not bad. So we know that bacteria can survive in space. We know that it could possibly hitch a ride on a rock and we know that plenty of rocks come from Mars. True. Jumping back a little, one of the initial things they thought would be that, you know, if these asteroids or if these things are colliding in space, it would just disintegrate into dust, basically. Yeah. They found out that is not necessarily true either. They found trace gases within meteorites that originated on Mars in the 1980s and basically figured out that if one of these impacts happens, maybe it's disintegrated in the middle, but on the outer
Starting point is 00:21:37 edges, there could be like larger chunks that just get shot away. Right. So that's basically where these things are coming from. Okay, but some other people said, all right, well those ones that get shot away, they get to escape Earth's gravity or Mars' gravity. Yeah. They would have to suddenly in a less than a second be accelerated from zero to 11,500 miles per hour. A thousandth of a second. If you did that in a thousandth of a second. Yeah. If you did that to a human, the human would become liquefied. Of course. Okay, but that doesn't necessarily hold true with bacteria. And we know this because certain microbiologists have packed bacteria into bullets and fired them and then studied the bacteria and found that they were alive still. They survived
Starting point is 00:22:25 that trajectory. Yeah, which wouldn't be that fast though. It wouldn't be 11,500 miles an hour. I guess it's as fast as they could get it though, right? I guess. Okay. Well, at least it was a good effort. Oh, the Gerda Hornick, microbiologist in Germany, she also sent organisms into orbit for six years, not too bad in the 1980s, bacillus subtilis. And this is pretty wacky because not only did it survive, but when this thing started like depriving itself or getting deprived of nutrients, it formed like a shell, like a spore shell on top to basically protect everything underneath it. That's the one I thought with nothing. That's the one I thought was scabbing over. Oh, okay. That was that one. Yeah. So, you know, in the cold, dark, no water, no nothing,
Starting point is 00:23:18 about 30% of these things survived. Right. That's survival. Okay. So then we have one last factor, chup time. Yes. So, it's not like this is a 10 hour or two week trip. Like this can take a really long time for a rock to escape Mars' gravity and then basically make its way to Earth. Like millions of years. That kind of time. Can a bacteria survive that length of time? Sure. Why not? Well, in 1995, some really smart people at Cal Poly isolated a living spore from the gut of a bee preserved in amber, kind of like right out of Jurassic Park. How long ago had that bee been preserved in amber? 25 to 40 million years. And the bacteria is still alive? Yes. And that is not even the most amazing one. The most amazing one? No. No, no. Russell Rieland of West Chester University
Starting point is 00:24:13 in Pennsylvania extracted bacteria from a 250 million year old salt crystal, living bacteria. Yeah, trapped inside liquid in that salt crystal. So, I think all the questions have been answered as like, it's not probable, but it's feasible at least that these things could have taken place. So, it is possible that we are in our origin, Martians. That's right. It still raises a question, Chuck. What's that? Where did that life begin? Ah, geez. The war on drugs impacts everyone. Whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy, number one, is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2200 pounds of marijuana.
Starting point is 00:25:02 Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs, of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm a prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty, exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. Cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jackmove or being robbed. They call civil asset. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is what it sounds like inside the box car.
Starting point is 00:25:52 I'm journalist, Inel Morton, in my podcast, City of the Rails. I plunge into the dark world of America's railroads, searching for my daughter Ruby, who ran off to hop trains. I'm just like stuck on this train. God knows where I'm going to end up. And I jump. Following my daughter, I found a secret city of unforgettable characters, living outside society, off the grid and on the edge. I was in love with the lifestyle and the freedom. This community, no one understands who we truly are. The rails made me question everything I knew about motherhood, history, and the thing we call the American dream. It's the last vestige of American freedom. Everything about it is extreme. You're either going to die or you could have this incredible
Starting point is 00:26:40 rebirth and really understand who you are. Come with me to find out what waits for us in the city of the rails. Listen to City of the Rails on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, or cityoftherails.com. That's it. Dial it back even further, huh? That's all I got. You got anything else right now? That's all I got. So I would recommend going to howstuffworks.com and typing in are we all Martians and we'll bring up this article on the site. You can also type in origin life earth in the search bar and it'll bring up my article on panspermia and abiogenesis. That's right. Actually, there was one more thing we should have pointed out. What? We said that it can take 40, 50, 15 million years for these meteorites to reach
Starting point is 00:27:31 earth, but we didn't point out that that's not always the case. Sometimes these things find their way to earth in just a few years. Or day. It doesn't always take 50 million years. Nice. Okay. Chuck, Josh. Before we go any further, we need to tell everybody to go do some reading. Too sweet. Agreed. Our horror fiction contest. That's right. As everyone knows, every Halloween for the past couple of years, we read a horror story and Jerry jazzes it all up with sound design. She does good work. And this year, Josh had a pretty awesome idea that sort of bit us on the behind by calling for fan submissions. And we got a lot of them. We got 104 of them. Yep. And they had to be between 3,000 and 4,000 words. So we read between 300 and 400,000 words of these
Starting point is 00:28:20 submissions and we went through and we picked out our favorite 16 and it was tough. There's some really good stuff in there. Agreed. But we came up with the sweet 16 and now it's up to you guys out there to pick which one we read for the Halloween episode. Yes. We've entered the 16 into this fancy little bracket game, a widget on the House of Works website. It has this grossly inappropriate country music that we can't disable. There were extensive emails about whether or not we can disable. We couldn't like put horror sounds or anything. No, I wanted to. So bad. So it's like this really scary bracket game with like the it's crazy. That's weird. Anyway, there's brackets up there. First, you need to go to type this
Starting point is 00:29:05 into your favorite search engine. Blogs, House of Works, sweet 16 here. And it'll bring up this blog post that has a link to all 16 articles or entries. Yeah, we're also linking to this on our Facebook and Twitter. So you can do that too. Yeah. And then you read the 16 and then there's a link on that same blog post that has the bracket game. You can jump off to that and vote for your favorites. And then round one ends this Friday. Round two starts I think that day. Okay. And then it keeps going and going until we come up with a winner. Four weeks. Okay. And we will read that on the air. It'll be awesome. And I think we already have next year's picked out as well. We do because we had what we thought was the best one that was disqualified for certain reasons. And so we're
Starting point is 00:29:56 just going to clean it up and read it next year. Yeah. It's not a winner. No. In no way is it a winner. In fact, it lost. It lost disqualified right out of the gate, but we still liked it. Yeah. And the other 16 are really great. So it's like any of them are going to be really good. Yeah. I'm not disappointed in the least. Me neither. I'm very excited as a matter of fact. Okay. So go to blogs, how stuff works, and then sweet 16 horror fiction, something like that. And it'll bring up that post that says like read the sweet 16 horror fiction entries here. I think there's an explanation. Really? Yeah. All right. That was lengthy. Yep. And then you call this another trucker emails us. We've heard from a few truckers, long haul truckers. Yep. And I imagine
Starting point is 00:30:42 podcasts are pretty great. If you're sitting there with hemorrhoids, driving across canvas. All right. Just listen to the white color crime podcast guys. Couldn't help but think of my own experience. My last job was working the counter at a general auto repair shop. There were two of us at the counter. Both handled the phones, inventory parts, cash drawer, just about everything except turning wrenches. As we didn't have charge accounts with all of our parts suppliers, we paid cash for some of the parts right out of the till parts had to be entered into the inventory as a cash transaction. And the system would spit out a piece of paper showing the transaction. And it would get filed away a couple of weeks after the other guy quit. I was now handling all
Starting point is 00:31:26 the transactions and started noticing some things. Every quarter, we would audit the invoices. And some of the invoice numbers were repeated, as well as very unusual things like a distinct Ford part number on an invoice from the local Dodge dealer. Some of them were photocopied invoices and we didn't have the original. So we uncovered basically that this guy was taking legitimate parts invoices, making color photocopies. Using a razor blade, he would cut out things like the invoice numbers, parts and prices and alter another legitimate invoice by taping those numbers over the originals and photocopying. So this dude is just like basically manipulating these documents. Sounds like it. Very easily. Since I left the company a year ago, they have continued looking
Starting point is 00:32:15 through the files. I'm covering more and more forged invoices. I don't know the exact figure, but this guy stole a staggering amount of money from the business and he's gotten away with it up until now. Does it just end there? Yeah. Weird. I mean, yeah, this person doesn't work there anymore. So Justin doesn't work there. I don't know if they're pursuing this anymore. That's, I guess, this white collar crime. Sure it is. It's not, you know, it's not like the stocks and bonds and things, but sure. It's white collar crime. Altering documents? I feel like it's on the blue collar side of white collar crime. Sure. In a parts store? Yeah. An auto parts store? Yeah. Maybe that's what's tripping me up. If you are on the road a lot and we keep you company,
Starting point is 00:32:54 we want to hear your thoughts. You can tweet to us. Wait until you're parked. S-Y-S-K podcast. You can also join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. And you can email us at stuffpodcast at discovery.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being
Starting point is 00:33:48 robbed. They call civil acid for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Here's today's fortnight weather report. iHeartland has been hit by a major blizzard. The snow has turned iHeartland and fortnight into a winter wonderland with new festive games, including a winter themed escape room, a holiday obstacle course, ice skating, hidden holiday gifts and more. Look out for upcoming special events from your favorite artists and podcasters all month, along with scavenger hunts and new how fan are you challenges. So embrace the holidays at iHeartland in fortnight. Head to iHeartRadio.com slash iHeartland today.

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