Stuff You Should Know - Can you vacation in Antarctica?

Episode Date: January 10, 2012

The answer is yes, but there's a lot more to traveling to the southernmost continent. Learn why emperor penguins don't make eye contact with humans, which country has the best research station and why the chances of your ship sinking are alarmingly high. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Flooring contractors agree. When looking for the best to care for hardwood floors, use Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner. The residue-free, fast drying solution is specially 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? 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 work. 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, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. This with me is a man named Charles W. Chuck Bryant. He's a little under the weather right now. Yes. You sick? Yes, and that should come through in this show. If you get me sick. I'm not going to get you sick. I got my own little mic cover. Yeah. With

my name on it. I'm going to take it, probably burn it. Actually, I'm not going to burn it because it's pricey. Didn't the company get it for you though? Yeah, but I don't want to waste the company money. That's good thinking. Yeah, I'm a little ill, so I'll apologies people, but we like to soldier on here at SYSK. We meet our deadlines. Remember when we often talk about when you were sick for eight months? It was a long time, yeah. I'm hoping this is no more than a few shows. Maybe even just these two. That's what I'm hoping. Because we're recording two today. Yeah. But I feel bad for you because both of them are kind of chilly. Yes. Especially this one. Wintery topics. Yeah. Well, it's almost always winter in Antarctica, even when it's summer. Tis the season. Chuck. Yes. Have you

ever heard of a guy named Captain Robert Scott? Bobby Scott? Yeah, Bob Scott. Oh, Cappy? I think he went by Rob instead of Bobby. He was one of the first two people or led one of the first two expeditions to make it to the South Pole in Antarctica. And he was beaten by just four weeks by a Norwegian rival. I think he's going to say he's beaten by a polar bear or something like that. No, well, he did die. Oh, really? A five-man team made it to the South Pole and started making their way back and just hit some real freak weather. And the guy, the team meteorologist, was in that five-man team and just felt awful that he'd missed this prediction. Yeah. And they were just buffeted by, I think, negative 40, negative 90, just ridiculously cold temperatures. So freak weather,

or as they call it in Antarctica, weather. Or Tuesday. Yeah, Tuesday. So these guys died, but they were found, and among them were found some of the finds, some of the things. This is a scientific expedition, obviously. Some of the notes they made, some of the weather notes, the trio of penguin eggs, emperor penguin eggs. Nice. So this was kind of the crown jewel of the stuff that they accumulated during the scientific expedition. And here's why. Apparently, back in this era, this is 1911, I think, people thought that emperor penguins, because they couldn't fly, were the most primitive birds on the planet that they hadn't evolved. And people were real keen on proving or disproving Darwin's new theory about evolution

through natural selection. So they figured, if you go find the eggs of this very primitive bird, you're going to find the link to dinosaurs and birds. The reason why is because the Edwardians also believed that an animal went through all the stages of evolution during its gestation. Okay. So they figured, hey, silly, take some emperor penguin eggs, crack them open, you're going to find a dinosaur. Right. It didn't work out like that. But they found the very cute emperor penguin. They did, dead inside, of course, frozen to death. And now that I've seen the march of the penguins, I realize just how mean the expedition kind of was. I didn't see that. Oh, man. I know. You don't mess with an emperor penguin egg. They go through a lot to keep those things

safe and warm and hatched. And you just don't steal three of them. Agreed. Captain Robert Scott did. And you can't today either, I imagine. You can't, but you can pay someone to take you as close as you like. And if you're a jerk, you could conceivably do it. Sneak one out in your old purse. Yeah. Let's talk about vacationing and arctica. Did you know you can do that? Well, I do now. Yeah, me too. Here, let's talk about the body of land itself, because it's pretty remarkable. It's South Pole, like you said. Yeah. 99.5% of the landmass is ice. And I think the other 0.5 is a small putting green. I'm not mistaken. It's a nice zoysia growing there. During the winter, the ice gets bigger, obviously, making it the fifth largest continent,

5.1 million square miles of largely ice. And that's a lot of ice. It is. Even though it's shrinking, which we'll talk about a little bit. Yeah. But naturally, during the seasons, it expands and contracts slightly. Sure. Yeah. As ice is one to do. Yeah. When it's warm, which is November to February, it's going to be below freezing almost all the time. And in the winter, it can drop to 90 degrees below Fahrenheit. And I got a world record here of 128 below zero in 1983 at the Vostok Station. Wow. Very dry, which is awesome, because it's like pristine powdery snow, blustery winds. Actually, that's not the good part. Well, the winds are almost constant, and they get up to like 200 miles an hour. You ever seen the thing?

Yeah. And by the way, 200 miles an hour is 321 kilometers per hour for everybody else. Sure. And you know what? 90 degrees below Fahrenheit is minus 68 Celsius. Yeah. Like to convert for our friends in other weird places. Yeah, chew on that, Canada. Not a lot of people live there. In fact, the only people that live there are people that have set up research stations there. Yeah. And I guess some of them are manned year round, which is pretty crazy. Sure. That's awesome. Yeah. So I say if you go to a research station during the time from what, February to November, you're going to find maybe 50 people there. And then when it's bustling, from November to February. Summertime. Summertime is going to be maybe 150 people there. But

all of these are temporary residents. No one lives on Antarctica. Well, temporary in a living sense, but they're permanent structures. Right. They're not living in tents. The residents are temporary. Yes. Not their structures. But there have been people who were born on Antarctica. Yeah. That was a cool fact of the show, I thought. Yeah. Have you heard of Emilio Marcos de Palma? I have indeed. You have? He's Antarctica. He is. He's the first Antarctica ever. He was born in January, 1978. And it was a bit of a ploy, actually. His father worked at a research station in Antarctica. And the Argentinian government found out that this guy's wife was pregnant and hustled her down to Antarctica to give birth there in an attempt

to lay claim to sovereignty of Antarctica. Yeah. And that's because no one is generally born there. There's a lot of nations over the years that have tried to claim it as their own, including Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, Great Britain, New Zealand and Norway. Right. I'm surprised the U.S. isn't on there. Don't we know that there's land out there that we don't have our name on? Chile did the same, pulled the same stun as Argentina. I think six years after Emilio Marcos de Palma was born and a kid named Juan Pablo Camacho was the second Antarctic in ever born there. That's right. But you can have as many babies as you want there. You're not going to establish sovereignty because there's a treaty from 1959 called the

Antarctic Treaty, appropriately, and nothing. Basically, it says the Antarctic doesn't belong to anybody. It's like the oceans. It belongs to everyone and no one. No one can lay claim there. And because it doesn't belong to anybody and because it belongs to everybody, it's protected from war and it's a nuclear free zone. It wouldn't wage war in any way. No, I know. Here you're going to fight. Yeah, exactly. Like 10 other people? Yeah. Or in the case of the thing, you would be fighting some horrific shapeshifting beast. Right. And by the way, we should probably point out, I think it's still commonly overlooked. Antarctic is the only place where you can find penguins,

right? Except for using aquariums. They're not in the Arctic. Okay, I didn't know that. Yeah. Penguins and Arctic. Gotcha. And also, if you know, I know you love HP Lovecraft here or there. Sure. If you are into Antarctic and you want to be scared out of your wits by an emperor, Penguin, read at the Mountains of Madness by Lovecraft. Yeah, I want to read that one. Dude, that's probably his best one. Really? And it's set entirely in Antarctica. I think they're making a movie. I think they had before. Peter Jackson's looking into it, I think. That would be good. Yeah. He's probably the only person who could pull it off. Oh, yeah? But he'll probably fail like everybody else. What about Eugene Levy? You don't think he could do it?

He could, but it'd be too charming, you know? Like it wouldn't exist in the canon. Or a Christopher Guest movie. I just saw Spinal Tap for the first time the other day. First time ever? Ever. Shut up. You move like, what do you mean you haven't seen Spinal Tap? So we watched it, right? I loved it. I had no idea what I was missing. I tweeted to Michael McKeon and said, are you aware that you're in Spinal Tap? And he tweeted back. Shut up. Wait, what? Really? That's what he said. Yeah, I favorited it. So we're on, was that personally or that was S-Y-S-K? S-Y-S-K. So we're on his radar in a small way. Apparently. Wow. At the very least, he thought it was a funny tweet. That's pretty funny. Yeah. And I can't believe he never saw that.

Never. I literally watched that movie over 50 times in college. Like I can recite it almost by heart. I can totally see that. Yeah. I can see that. I mean, I loved, you know, Best in Show a lot. So I knew I'd like Spinal Tap. Yeah. Well, that was the, that was the original. I know. Wow. Yeah. It was strange seeing Harry Shearer because I just associate him with The Simpsons almost entirely. Oh yeah? Yeah. He was great in that too. I can talk about this stuff all day. Let's get back to Antarctica. Yeah. Or we should do a Christopher Guest Spinal Tap podcast. So if you want a vacation there, which you can do, you got to get there. And in this case, getting there, I don't know if it's half the fun, but it's half the challenge. Because you're not

going to find any I-20s zooming into Antarctica or any Delta airline flights landing there. Right. Most of the action when you're traveling to Antarctica takes place on the Antarctic Peninsula. Yeah. Which is a sweep of land that juts out toward Southern South America. I imagine almost all of Antarctica is still very much not trod upon. Right. You know. Yeah. It was just explored like at the beginning of the last century basically. Yeah. People are like, why don't I want to go down there? I took this off. Right. Exactly. So like you were saying, like it's not easy to get to and you're going to get to the point that's easiest to get to from Southern South America. So most likely you're going to take a ship, a cruise ship probably,

from Argentina or Chile and show up. Which seems weird that they're that close. It's very close, isn't it? Isn't it weird? Yeah. Like you think of like hot temperatures. You do. But then you're like, oh wait, that's Bolivia I'm thinking of. Chile's actually right by Antarctica. The first commercial cruise liners because you're going to get there by ship is how you're going to get there. And cruise ship is one of the most popular ways to do that these days. The first one came in 69. And that was the Lindblad Explorer. Oh really? Yeah. Just to give you an idea of the increase in tourism over the years. In the early 90s, only about 9,000 people per year. And just a couple of years ago in 2008, 2007 to 2008, 46,000.

Which doesn't sound like a lot of people, but it's a lot for an arctic. Right. Especially when you consider the proportion that we're wearing Mickey Mouse ears at the time they were cruising around the glaciers. Drinking Chilean wine. There is a tourist association, the IAATO International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators formed in the early 90s. And their mission basically is to keep everything safe and keep everything above board and ethical on an environmental scale. Yeah. Because they don't want it to be ruined. Antarctica is supposedly pristine. It is. We found out it isn't though. That same Scott expedition. Yeah. Also, I don't know how I don't want to think how, but it came by some Emperor Penguin skins. And they're still to this day used

to as a control sample when you're comparing tainted Emperor Penguin skins today. Right. And they found out that DDTs actually made its way down there to Antarctica. So it's not really pristine. Geez. That's pretty pristine. Right. Well, now that you have all these ships and people running all over the place. Exactly. It's like the Everest deal. Exactly. November to March is, like we said, this quote unquote summertime. So that's when tourists are most likely going to be there. A little bit smaller than ice sheet, which means boats are going to be able to get around easier because you got to be able to navigate through the ice sheets. And not a whole lot of boats have the kind of hole that it can withstand bumping into icebergs. No, this was very alarming

to me. It was to me, too. There's there are people who are going on cruises on cruise ships. Yeah. And these cruise ships can't withstand an iceberg that the Linblad Explorer. Yeah, the first one. Yes. That was also the first one. That was also the one that sank in 2007. It was the same exact ship. Really ironic. Yeah. They changed the name to the MS Explorer. But it was the same exact ship. The first one, the first cruise ship to go to Antarctica was also, I believe, the first one to sink in 2007. That's a nostalgia tour. It was actually outfitted to withstand an iceberg. And it still sunk. So then you consider that there's plenty of cruise lines down there that aren't in any way equipped to take an iceberg. Apparently, they're very worried that this is a disaster

waiting to happen. Well, let's go ahead and go there then. Since 2007, there have been four ships that have run aground, which is not a good place to run aground. No. Plus, it's not good for Antarctica because it's like, hey, have you met our refined fuel yet? Yeah, that's true. True. But if you do run aground and you're in a cruise ship incident, you're going to be stuck there for a little while because it's not like any other place where they can just send out a SAR team and all of a sudden, you're getting rescued six hours later. So in 2007, with the MS Explorer, these passengers were in lifeboats. It says for hours. I wonder how long. I don't know. I can imagine a while. And they got picked up by another cruise ship,

right? So it wasn't even a SAR team that came to rescue them. No, it was a Norwegian cruise lines, I think, that came and got them. So they're like, thank you. And that same year, actually, Ann Curry from, what is she, from the Today Show? She's from a show. She was doing a piece called End of the Earth, and she went down to Antarctica. And she and her crew ended up getting stuck there for days. And they just hung around the research station, which we'll get to in a second because of freak weather, though, right? Not like an accident. No, but the freak weather is apparently fairly common. So you just call it, again, weather down there or Tuesday weather. But apparently, if you book an Antarctic vacation, the tour operator says, don't make any big plan

on two weeks of either side of your trip. Because there's no telling really when you're going to go down there. We're shooting for this window, but it might not be that window. That might put me off, not from a schedule standpoint, but just from beer, you know? And then I have a story for you. Let's hear it. So this is all in summer. Like you might get stuck there during the summer. If you're in winter, there's no way for you to get out. You're absolutely stuck there. Nobody's coming in and you're not coming out. You have to hunker down for the winter. Yeah, they shut it all down, right? I'll travel. Yes. And there, I think beginning in 1959, the Russians built the Novo Lazarevskaya. That's my Russian. Nice. Their Antarctic base, the Russian Antarctic

base was built. And two years later, there was a surgeon there named Leonid Rogozov. And he was stuck there for the winter. I'm self. No, he was with some other people, but he was the only physician. Right. And he just happened to figure out that he had a cute pancreatitis. Oh, man. And that he was about to die. And that he had two choices. He could either allow himself to die, or he could perform an appendectomy on himself. I'm sorry. He had appendicitis. Okay. What did he do? He performed an appendectomy on himself. Wow. When you're doing this, you can't knock yourself out. So he had no anesthesia whatsoever. Oh my God. And he stayed awake the whole time. He would work for four or five minutes as he was carving. There's a famous picture of him like carving

himself and he's just stained with blood. And he'd work for four or five minutes, rest for about 20, 30 seconds, try to keep from passing out. And he finally did it. He successfully performed surgery on himself and lived to 2000, I think, is when he died. He lived another 2000 minutes. But I mean, could you be better than that? He's pretty bad. He's up there with Onoda. Yeah. And who was the white, the white death? Seam, Ohio. Yeah. Yeah. I'd like to see those guys sit down and have a tough off. Yeah. Like an arm wrestling competition. Yeah. So anyway, you're stuck there in the winter for sure, but you can frequently get stuck there in the summer, too. Which, hey, you know, it's only like 15 below in the summer. You're golden.

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. 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 robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the War on Drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Who do we become when we travel? I have never flown without wearing a suit until I refuse to do it. Who are we allowed to be? Those blue American passports as powerful as they are,

it doesn't work the same for everyone. And where is everybody going? I do love to sit near the ocean and drink. Join me, Brendan Francis Nunum, for Not Lost Chap, a new season of the travel podcast that The New York Times, The Economist and The Atlantic named best of the year. In each episode of the new season, I'll share an audio postcard from where I've been, talk to a travel writer about their work, and invite a famous frequent flyer to come by and answer your travel questions. If I'm sitting in the seat and the person beside me is acting irate, I'm going to call a flight attendant before I stick my size 13 foot up their tiny ass. Ah, the joys of air travel. Listen to Not Lost on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Uh, sightseeing cruises, probably what the most popular thing to do, like the Alaskan cruise, they'll run you through the Kodak Gap, which, did you look at the pictures of this place? No, it was pretty. Oh my gosh, the La Mer Channel is the official name between the Booth Island Mountains and the Arctic Peninsula, but they call it that, obviously, because they should call it the digital Impeg Gap now, I guess. But it's extremely photogenic. It's where you see those ice blue cave, ice caves that you can go through when you're boat and stuff like that. Nice. I guess not caves, but tunnels. Cool. Pretty amazing. And hope you don't strike either side. Exactly. So they're going to take you on these cruises,

they're going to get you close. Some of these tours will take you actually on to land from a smaller boat or a helicopter for a little while, but you're not going to be spending a whole lot of time on land if you're doing one of the cruise ships. Right. There are some expeditions you can undertake, like there's some that you can cross country ski to the South Pole, and you camp along the way. It's like a two-week tour, I think. I'll bet it's pretty cool too, but I think you have to be kind of strong of mind, probably. Yeah, anybody. You'll go nuts, I would imagine. Well, it depends. I mean, I'm sure there are conditions to where it's like quote-unquote warm and just lovely and blue, but there's also going to be the whiteouts where you

can't see your hand in front of your face, and the wind is blowing your headgear off, and yeah, that's no good. Well, plus also, I think plenty of it's barren. It's just the same view, like 360 degrees, which has to drive you a little nutty too. It's lovely though. You can also, if you're insane, already run a marathon in Antarctica. I'm going to tell my friend James about this. He's a trail runner and does like these trail marathons and these crazy things, and I think he's doing one in Ireland soon, so he likes to travel. I'm going to turn him on to this. All he needs is about 16 grand, and he can join in the Adventure Network International full or half marathon. I would imagine it's 15-5 for the half marathon, and then 16 grand

for the full marathon. But you're running in the interior of Antarctica at about minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit, and you're going to have to deal with the temperature, the wind, changes in elevation, and for penguins trying to trip you because they got money on somebody else. And let's be honest, running a marathon. Let's not forget that part. That's challenging in July. It keeps me at home right there. I want to know what they run in though, shoe-wise. Yeah, I wonder too. You know, I wonder if it's, I mean, obviously they're not wearing snowshoes or anything like that or spikes. I guess there's areas where just heavy tread would work. I would think so. There's got to be. Or else, what are you going to do? You can't run a marathon

in snowshoes. No, it's ridiculous. So once you're there, you want to pass a little time. You want to see some things that are awesome besides the Kodak Gap. You can go check out the mountain there, and you can even climb it. And it's really not, I didn't get a height on that, did you? No, but it's a four-mile climb. Which isn't that much. No. I mean, it's not, it's nothing to sneeze at, but it's no Everest. But I imagine there's probably a lot of ice to it, ice climbing, and as well as just rock climbing. Mount Vincent is what we're talking about. Vincent. What did I say? Vincent. Vincent. Yeah. Not Vincent. Right. Okay. It's the son of Vincent. Got you. Sorry about that. You can go get your picture made in a bikini

in front of the little South Pole marker at the Amundsen Scott South Pole Station. It's a very famous American research center at the South Pole, and they have a little candy cane pole with a little silver ball on top of it. And I've seen a lot of pictures of ladies in bikinis taking their picture there. So the Americans never said this is our land, but they're the ones who built the research station like virtually on top of the South Pole. Yeah. And Amundsen Scott, that's named after the two guys who made it to the South Pole, including Robert Scott. And Raul Amundsen. Yeah. When was this, the early 1900s? It was 1911 and 1912, which makes it seem like Amundsen beat the tar out of Scott, but it was really four weeks of September and January. Oh, really? Yeah. And

when you go, you're going to find that there are very friendly people at this facility, that there are tours already set up. It's kind of a routine thing to like go to, you know, the American South Pole Station because, I mean, if you like the outdoors, you're going to love Antarctica, but there's not that much to do really. No, there really isn't. You check out the pit. There's a lot of wildlife. Well, yes. And apparently one of the cool things about Emperor Penguins, and Penguins in general, is they are not at all afraid of humans. That's because we've never killed them with reckless abandon. I know. Or at least as far as they know. Right. And apparently they'll just ignore us and hang out with us and pose for pictures. Yeah, they'll do close-ups. But

it's just about any naturalist or biologist will tell you, just hanging around an animal and watching it like some slack-jawed goon is going to produce stress in the animal most likely. Because the animal, even though it's not scared of you as a predator, it doesn't know what you're going to do or what you're doing or what you want. And you just probably should keep that in mind. Yeah. When you're observing penguins, don't chase the penguins. And when I said, when I said a lot of wildlife, let me clear that up. It's not like Yosemite National Park wildlife. But it is a very hospitable place for certain kinds of animals, especially animals that live in the water, because there's just tons of protein. You've got whales, you've

got penguins, you've got polar bears. Man, you have to see Marta the Penguins. I don't know. You know, it was one of those movies that just got by me. It is. I think I won an Oscar. Yeah, sure. Morgan Freeman? Yeah, our buddy. Yeah. But yeah, it's a really great movie. Have you ever been to the Aquarium's penguin exhibit? Yes. You know, you can stick your head up. You can crawl into the tunnel. Right. And you stick your head up into a clear plexi hole for your head, basically. And the penguins are right there, right in front of your face. Like, what are you doing? Yeah, you're stressing me out, observing me. So Chuck, the water is generally, or the sea is good for the wildlife around it because they've adapted to it. Yeah. If you're

one of those polar bear guys, though, you can considerably jump in during the winter. You should do so at your own risk. Oh, the humans that do that stuff? Yeah. Because the water gets down to about 32 degrees Fahrenheit. There are, I should say up to 32 degrees Fahrenheit. And you're going to freeze because it's zero Celsius. Yeah. It's very, very dangerous. And if you do that and you hurt yourself, you're going to find yourself on a long, arduous journey back to Chile or Argentina at your own expense. Yeah. I mean, there's a little bit of medical help at these stations and maybe a passing cruise ship will have the good doctor from the love boat on board. But you're not going to be able to get serious medical attention and you're, you could be in

trouble unless you get either too sweet or you're going to be performing self-surgery. Right. Exactly. BDD style. So how much is it going to run you? Uh, I don't know. Do you know? I don't know. I've heard you can expect to spend upwards of 10 grand. I mean, the marathon was 16 grand. I mean, getting there is going to be pricey period. Sure. But like a really probably, probably like full on great state room kind of cruise down there, including airfare to South America. It's going to run you 10 grand or probably less. I'm sure you can get deals for less, but you need to have a little bit of cash to make it down to Antarctica. It's not a poor man's vacation. No. That's what you're saying. Yes. Environmental safety concerns,

Josh. We talked about obviously, would you say was there now DDT? Yeah. They found traces of it. No, they found it in penguins. Geez. In April 2009, there was a joint session of the Ant Arctic Treaty Panel and the Arctic Council. And they met in Baltimore, Maryland, which I'm sure that's nice in April, but for some reason I thought they would say like, let's go to Phoenix in July and hold our meeting and thaw. But, uh, they had, you know, a lot on the agenda, including global warming talks, shipping routes, stuff like that. But they did talk about tourism and not coincidentally, or coincidentally, around that same time, a 25 mile ice shelf broke off, shattered into the sea, which kind of was like symbolic of, hey, we really need to talk about

tourism. 25 miles. That's huge. And the, um, the, I guess the tourism and the loss of ice has this sort of self-reinforcing thing going on because you lose ice, you actually get more tourism. Yeah. Which is ostensibly responsible for even further climate change in the area. And so you lose more ice and you get even more tourism. The reason why is because you lose 25 mile piece of ice, cruise ships go, oh, we can go in here now. Right. We have a passage. Exactly. Jerks. So they're, they're coming up with, um, I guess an idea of how they can, um, they want to ban the construction of any kind of hotels or anything like that. Any permanent, not even nice accommodations. No, not even, which are pretty although that would probably

know that would be permanent down there. I'm sure you can say it would be, it wouldn't be permanent, but yeah, it would be an article. Right. Um, you want, they need, they want to do a number, a limitation to the number of ships that can come in every year. Yeah. Um, restrictions on how close ships can come to shore. Yeah. Like, are you going to drop people off here at the shoreline? Yeah. Just to see those little penguins. But here's the problem. They can't just say like, okay, we're going to have 50 ships a year or 20 or whatever. Uh, if you touch the penguins, you'll be executed by the international criminal court at the Hague. Yeah. Um, they can't say these things because

no one has any sovereign right to issue any kind of decree over Antarctica. So what can they do to establish guidelines and recommend that signatory countries and travel agencies follow them and suggest, highly suggest that. But right now there's only 47 signatory countries on the Antarctic treaty. Yeah. I wonder who's on there. I was going to look that up, but I didn't get a chance. Uh, and the reason why they don't ban people outright, not only can they not, but one of the most important parts of the treaty is that it does allow freedom of access. They're like, you know what, you can come here if you're able to. Yeah, they can't stop anybody from coming there. Yeah. And I feel like, I feel like they want to allow it just to a degree.

Sure. I might be wrong there, but. Well, I'm sure that the tour operators associations like, I don't know, we want to tread lightly here. Exactly. Um, and then speaking of getting stuck in Antarctica, one last thing you know about this. Um, a couple of years ago, the, a case of 11 bottles of Scotch, McKinley Scotch, which isn't made any longer and was originally produced in 1896 or 97 and was part of the, um, Ernest Shackleton Nimrod expedition of 1907, was left beneath his hut and forgotten for like a hundred years and they found it in 2006. When did we talk about this? We talked about it on the webcast. Oh, the good old webcast. And they got it out of there. Remember you and I were like, what's going to happen to this because

like that treaty, like your Antarctica is there for scientific expedition. You're supposedly not supposed to touch anything that has any sort of historical or scientific significance. It's not supposed to come out. Right. So they're like, you can't really remove this. Guess we'll have to drink it down there. Well, it turns out that, um, Canterbury Museum in, uh, Christchurch, New New Zealand now has this Scotch and it's exhibit. I can't remember. Did they sample it? Someone did, didn't they? No one will probably ever taste the Scotch. Instead, they've allowed some Scotch makers to, um, to take samples and see if they can recreate it because no one has their original recipe anymore. I bet someone's taken a nip. That's what I'm thinking too. Somebody. Surely some

rich guy was like, get me that Scotch. Here's as much money as you need. Yeah. And it didn't go into the hands of some rich Scotch lover. It went to a relatively unknown museum in New Zealand, which is pretty cool. I bet the night guard. I bet there's some Kiwi security guard that's taking the tiniest of nips. Right. And then fill it back up with like tea. Yes. They'll never know. It's like the mini bar. 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, uh, 2,200 pounds of marijuana. 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 the prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Step out of piss y'all. 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 asset. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Who do we become when we travel? I have never flown without wearing a suit in time. I refuse to do it. Who are we allowed to be? Those blue American passports as powerful as

they are. It doesn't work the same for everyone. And where is everybody going? I do love to sit near the ocean and drink. Join me, Brendan Francis Nunnam for Not Lost Chat, a new season of the travel podcast that the New York Times, the Economist and the Atlantic named best of the year. In each episode of the new season, I'll share an audio postcard from where I've been, talked to a travel writer about their work and invited a famous frequent flyer to come by and answer your travel questions. If I'm sitting in the seat and the person beside me is acting irate, I'm going to call a flight attendant before I stick my size 13 foot up their tiny ass. Ah, the joys of air travel. Listen to Not Lost on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever

you get your podcasts. So you got anything else? I don't. So that concludes our episode on alcoholism among night watchmen. And if you want to learn more about that or Antarctica, you want to type in A-N-T-A-R-C-T-I-C-A in the handy search bar at howstuffworks.com, which means it's time for a listener mail. Josh, I'm going to call this exchange, email exchange, because I'm actually going to read my response to sort of an upset Canadian. This is about daylight saving, which, by the way, we misspoke. Go ahead and say that we're getting beat up by the people south of the equator when we said that they spring back and fall forward. Yeah. That it's not so. They spring forward and fall back. It's just at opposite times as us. You know what I'm saying? No. They spring

forward, they fall back, but their spring is opposite of our spring. You haven't seen the Facebook and emails? They've been killing us. They're spring. Okay. I got you. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, I do. It was very, very north hemisphere centric. And so I need to explain myself here because I got an email from Marie from Canada, and she was all mad at me. Just finished listening to the podcast on daylight saving time. You mentioned that in the civilized world, time makes no difference, and only the rising and setting of the sun is really important. I wanted to offer you a different perspective on that. I live in White Horse Yukon, Canada, and the sun is currently rising at 953, sets at 351, and that's a whole five hours and 57 minutes of light in the dead of winter.

I assure you that we are a fully functioning part of the civilized world here, and setting the time is very important to us. We do observe daylight saving time in the Yukon, and in the summer month, when we get our on average 18 hours of daylight, having the clocks change makes a huge difference in my daily life. After the long dark, it's a relief that the clocks now allow for a little more vitamin D. I think you, I just found your comments callous. Perhaps you should rely less on these skeptic pages as it seems to put you in a sour mood. Makes me skeptical. Yeah. Please remember that you have a very wide range of listeners, and we are not savages out in the wastelands. We are intelligent people who enjoy learning, and see you and your colleagues as valuable and

often entertaining source of information. She's talking to you, right? Because it sounds like one of your quotes. It was one of mine. Okay. So I wrote Marie back, and I was like, Marie, you either misunderstood or I didn't get it across clearly. I wasn't saying that at all. What I'm saying is the civilized world is the, the only reason clocks matter to me is because man invented clocks and time quote unquote to get on schedule in a commerce way. So businesses could be open and you could reference schedules and work schedules and, and shopping and things like that. If man had never invented a clock, it wouldn't change anything about the rising and setting of the sun.

We would just operate on the rising and the setting of the sun. It's like I'm watching you set us up for a future listening mail. Yeah. So it very much matters obviously in the civilized world because that's the only place at time matters. I imagine in third world countries where they don't have clocks, they just operate with the rising and the setting of the sun like we did before we invented clocks. All right, give me a shovel. Does that make sense? Sure. I certainly wasn't trying to say that people in Canada were uncivilized. I think the people of Canada attention, Chuck Bryant means you no harm. He's a very nice guy. None. I can be the Canadian anthem. And he is never out to hurt anybody's feelings.

Even when he does, it's accidental. Please accept his apologies. So I either misspoke or was misunderstood or something got garbled up, but sorry, Marie. So you have it. Thank you to all of our friends in Canada for listening. Man, I gotta tell you, they take off easily, especially if you call their Thanksgiving fake Thanksgiving. They're sensitive people. They do not like that. But it's because Americans are arrogant and they're like, you know what? Yeah. But they don't necessarily pick up on when we're poking fun at our own arrogance. Yeah. Which is surprising because they gave us Dan Aykroyd. Yeah. Yeah. Whittierman alive. So if you have a great story about Dan Aykroyd, we want to hear

about it. Okay. Heck yeah. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can go on to Facebook and let us know about it at facebook.com slash stuff you should know. And you can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The HowstuffWorks iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes. 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 robbed. They call civil answer. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. In 1967, Joseph Stalin's only daughter flees Russia for her new home, America. Hello everybody. I am very happy to be here. That story alone is worthy of a podcast, but Svetlana Svetlana is about what comes next. And it's the craziest story I've ever heard. It has KGB agents, a Frank Lloyd Wright commune, weird sex stuff, three Olgas, two Svetlanas and one neurotic gay playwright. That's me. Listen to Svetlana Svetlana, January 30th on the iHeart radio app,

Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast.