Stuff You Should Know - Does Pyromania Actually Exist?

Episode Date: April 26, 2018

A fascination with fire is part of every kid’s childhood, but it’s meant to be passing. For some people, fire becomes the central focus of life, and the urge to set a fire becomes an irresistible impulse. We think. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryan,

and there's Jerry over there. And this is Stuff You Should Know on our 10th anniversary. How about that? Happy anniversary, Chuck. Happy anniversary, Josh. Happy anniversary, Jerry. Happy anniversary, Jerry.

Nice. Jerry Mouth, happy anniversary. Yeah. 10 years, Jerry said 10 long years. She did, didn't she? She did, the longest, I think is what she said. Do you realize if we go another 10? We'll have been doing it for 20 years.

That I'll be like approaching 60 years old. That sounds weird. It's starting to seem normal to me. Being old, speeding toward our ultimate demise. I'm trying not to think about it like that. I'm thinking more of like- Circling the drain. Of having mellowed an age like herring and a can.

Right. Or a pickle, like a good pickle. It takes a minute, you know what I'm saying? To get just right. Sure. We're at prime pickle age right now. Speaking of pickle. Oh yeah, you are pickled?

Yeah. You're feeling okay? We talked earlier. Emily and I celebrated our 10th anniversary of the show last night. A little too much. Congratulations. I'm a little foggy today.

Yeah. Can't wait to do this Facebook Live. This should be interesting. Well, yeah, we're gonna do a Facebook Live. By the time this comes out, you guys will have all missed it by a couple weeks, so TS. Yeah, and in true stuff, you should know fashion. We probably should have recorded something to be released

today on our anniversary. We did. But we're releasing it a couple of weeks after. We released the Unabomber today, which I think was a good episode. Sure. So it was a fine 10-year anniversary. Yeah.

Okay. Either way, 10 years. 10 years. It happened. So Chuck, I know it'll clear away the cloudiness, the fogginess, some smoke. A Bloody Mary? Oh, okay.

Smoke, Chuck, from a fire. Yes. And I have to say, I admit to getting pumped up for this one by listening to Def Leppard. I was hoping you'd mentioned Def Leppard. I just did. Take it away. If you weren't, I was going to.

Yeah, the album's named Pyramania. The song is Rock of Ages. Right, but he does say, what is it? No serenade, no fibergade? Just Pyramania. Come on. Yeah. What do you want?

What do you need? I want rock and roll? That's right. Man. And then after that, I was like, oh, what else came from this air? So I ended up on like Steve Perry and Journey and some other stuff, but I'm pumping nonetheless.

Did you ever, did you go for a little... Yes. Lighty phase? A little bit. Yeah, I think, what do little boys do? This article by Craig Freud and Rich, PhD, as far as I know, the only PhD to ever write at How Stuff Works, he very wisely pointed out

that a fascination of fire is basically universal among kids. Yeah. It's a good way to get introduced to things you shouldn't do is doing them early on at a young age before you can actually go to the store and buy gasoline and start a real fire. You know, just kind of messing around with a little lighter fluid and a lighter,

hairspray and a lighter. That's another one. Don't do any of this, by the way, kids. But I'm just saying, messing around with fire in small, basically harmless ways, it's a pretty natural part of your development. Yeah, I mean, I think I remember very specifically one time when I was playing in the woods,

we grew up on a couple of acres in the woods. The clean woods that your neighbor cleaned up and died in? No, no, no, that was my friend. Oh, those are different woods. Yeah. Okay. I remember very specifically when I was a kid, I was probably like 10.

We need the Wayne's World like, doodoo, doodoo, doodoo, doodoo. I think I built a thing, I don't even know what it's called, but you take like a coffee can and you dig into the side of a hill and you stick the coffee can in there and then put a little stovepipe in it.

What's a stovepipe? You know, like a chimney. Right, what do you mean, like made from what? I can't remember what I used. It might have been PVC or something. Okay, all right. And then, I don't know if you're supposed to cook in it. It was some sort of like legit camping thing.

Okay. But I started a fire in it and it got kind of big and was just smoking a lot. And I remember hearing a siren and freaked out because I thought it was coming for me, which it of course was not. No, so you didn't burn down the woods, right? No, I didn't burn down the woods at all.

And looking back, it was probably a very small fire because it was in a coffee can. Yeah. Or not, you know, one of the big coffee cans. Yeah, yeah. But still, I remember thinking, I did something bad and they've gotten me. Right, but then you ran away and you're like,

oh, I got away scot-free. I should try something bigger next time. No, but I did run away and think like, oh boy, that was a close one. Did you learn your lesson? Yeah, I don't remember. I mean, you know, I've told the story about lighting, coat hanger and rings on fire

for the evil-can-evil jumps and things like that. Right. But that's all, you know, pretty run-of-the-mill stuff, I think. Sure, right, so agreed. It's fairly run-of-the-mill. Imaginative, but still fairly run-of-the-mill, right? What about you?

I feel like I remember a fire of some sort, but the fact that I blocked it out makes me think it may have been a big fire. But you didn't try to like burn down a house being built or anything. No, no. No, and I was never, like I was, you know, kind of fascinated with fire and everything, but never.

You didn't dabble in arson. I just, I feel like one time one almost got away from us. And of course it was the woods. Yeah, I mean, that can happen. But I think our fascination with fire, my fascination with fire, quickly translated into using lighters to light cigarettes in the woods again.

Yeah, mine did not. So, but there's a fascination with fire that people go through. Sure. According to our buddy, Sigmund Freud, if you go through a weirdo-psychosexual development which is to say, not exactly like what Freud thought you should go through,

you could conceivably come out the other side hanging on to that fascination with fire to where it is an outlet for your stress, your impulsivity, it can become a central focus of your life, like what you think about as fire. And if you check these boxes and some other ones, you could conceivably be considered

a person with pyromania, which we have reached the pinnacle of political correctness now because I refuse to say pyromania. It's a person with pyromania. It's entirely possible there is not a single person alive on planet earth who is a true person with pyromania,

but we're still gonna say person with pyromania just in case. Yeah, I mean, it's after reading through this stuff and doing the research, it's a little squirrely to pin down. Yeah, it's had. For sure, because, well, for a lot of reasons, but the DSM-4?

We're on five now. Five. They do have some criteria that goes as follows and with each one, it really whittles down, like just regular, hey, I'm drunk and I'm starting a fire. Right. I wanna collect on this insurance. Yeah, so here we go.

Number one, they must have set fires deliberately and purposefully more than once. Yeah. So that's a lot of people. That's pretty baseline. Yeah. I don't think they're talking about fireplace fires. Or are they?

We'll get into that. Okay. Must be tense or exhibit outward emotional behaviors before setting fires. That's excitement, facial expressions, changes in voice. That's kind of funny. You must have your tongue sticking out of the corner of your mouth while you're lighting the fire.

Must be interested in, curious about, fascinated with and or attracted to fires. But there's a big one that we have to add here. Attracted to fire should not have anything to do with sexuality. That is apparently an entirely different disorder that is even rarer called pyrophilia and that's a sexual arousal disorder from fire.

Interesting, yeah. People are so interesting. So we need to do a paraffilia episode, at least a necrophilia episode once. Yeah. There's like a lot of, surprisingly, there's a decent amount of research on that. Yeah.

Number four, experience pleasure, tension, relief or gratification after setting the fire or watching the fire. But not sexual gratification. No. God help you. Right. You're a person with pyrophilia in that case. So like if you start a fire in the woods

and you get an erection, then you're a pyrophiliac. Right. Okay. If it goes boing, then you're a pyrophiliac. Other psychological disorders cannot account better for the behavior. So in other words, if you have a manic episode and you start a fire, it's due to the manic episode

and not pyromania. Yeah, which now we're getting to the point where you start to wonder like, is there such a thing as true pyrophilia? Well, especially with this last one, no other motivations for setting the fire, like collecting insurance, like burning down a political rival's office.

Yeah, you can't shout like anarchy. Right, or being just angry at somebody or burning a body that doesn't count. Right. Improving your living circumstance. So I found something about that one. There was back in the medieval times, not the one where you can go to today,

but like the real one. Not the restaurant. Right. There was like this kind of thing that like if you hired or basically kidnapped a medieval servant girl, there was a good chance that she was going to burn your house and your children down so she could go back home.

Oh. So that would be an example of that. Interesting. Yeah. Responding to delusions or hallucinations and then finally impaired judgment. And that's what I was talking about, being intoxicated or if you have dementia

or something like that. Right, and even Chuck, from what I understand, even if you are doing this, if you're starting fires just to start fires for fun, that would technically not qualify as a pyromania. You would basically just be an arsonist. Like there's actually, so there's an umbrella term, fire setting, which is a behavior.

Arson is a crime. Pyromania is a psychological diagnosis. Right. Okay. And they're all kind of wrapped up together, which is why it makes getting things like, how common is it? It's really tough to kind of pinpoint that.

Right, so Freud and Rich says, if you are a diagnostician and you're presented with the person who sets a lot of fires and they're like, they don't drink. They don't even purchase insurance because they consider it a form of gambling. They don't have an erection? No erection to be found.

They, like once you whittle all this stuff away, you'd be like, oh my God, this person's making my career right now. I found a genuine person with pyromania. Yeah. Very rare. Yeah, and through the years it's been really, it's kind of gone on a rollercoaster ride

as far as the definition of pyromania it said during the 150-year span of legal and medical literature. Sometimes people were frequently diagnosed. Sometimes they weren't at all. And it doesn't seem to be any change in behaviors, rather changes in shifts in psychiatry and what we think is diagnosable.

Right, and what, how much personal accountability we ascribe to mental illness, right? Right. So like with, there's just this constant evolution and it's actually just kind of a circle. It's not really evolving. It's when you think about pyromania, the question is, is it the result of an uncontrollable impulse

or is it the result of an impulse that wasn't properly controlled? So is the person culpable or not? And over this one study that you mentioned, over like 150 years, they saw it just bounce back and forth and back and forth and it corresponded to the attitudes of society and psychology

of whether or not a person was responsibility for their own actions. And in court also, if you were holding court today, if you said, well, I plead not guilty to that arson by reason of insanity because I have pyromania, that you would just have automatically shot yourself in the foot right there in the middle of courtroom because part of the criteria of pyromania is

that you're not responding to a delusion or any kind of severe mental illness. So by definition, you would be lucid and know what you were doing is wrong or else you wouldn't be a person with pyromania. Yeah, I didn't know this is complicated. It's very complicated. Should we take a break?

I think we should. All right, we're gonna untangle this a bit more and come back and speak to how common this stuff is. Here we go. Here we go. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses

and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references

to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll wanna be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts

or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself,

what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS

because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast

or wherever you listen to podcasts. So, Chuck. Yes. How common is it? Well, like we said, it's kind of tough to say because it's all wrapped up statistically in arson statistics. Yeah.

And we've already determined that's not necessarily the same thing. Right. And so, consider this. If you are an investigator, a psychiatrist or a psychologist who's trying to figure out how many people with pyromania there are, you have to go find people who are in jail for arson.

Yeah. So by definition, your population sample is skewed one way. Right. What about people who may have pyromania but have said, well, I'm not going to jail. I can just start fires in my fireplace like you were asking. Oh, well. They would still qualify as a person with pyromania.

They're just not a criminal arsonist because arson is a criminal act. They're just smart enough to not do this. Yeah. And there was, now that I look back, there was no distinction that you start a fire like on someone else's property that becomes dangerous. Right.

You literally could start a fire in your own fireplace and make an excited face and feel relieved afterward, not get an erection. Better not. And I mean, that'd be a great way to, I mean, all things being equal, that's not a bad. Not bad at all. Kind of control your own urge.

Especially considering that pyromania is a, it's an impulse control disorder. So it's in the same class as like pathological gambling, addictions. Sure. If you're starting fires in your fireplace and that's it, you could be a lot worse off. Oh, yeah, for sure.

There was one study though, a psychiatrist named Nina Lindberg in Finland reviewed 20 years of medical records and psychiatric evaluations of 600 arsonist, all men. And it's definitely skewed more heavily toward men. Yeah. Isn't that right overall? Supposedly. So Freud thought it was an expression of misdeveloped or,

yeah, misdeveloped male psychosexual urges. All right. But they found that most of these arsonists, you know, again, they started chipping away. Most of them had mental disorders, personality disorders. 68% of the arsonists were drunk, which is really interesting, I think. It is.

So that whole thing about not being drunk and not being considered to have pyromania, some people reported their sense of like the arousal was excited by drinking. So how does that work? And they also were choking themselves out with a belt. They were going for the full Monty. The trifecta.

Then they separated the group into two things, criminal arsonist and pure arsonists. These are people, like you said, that had not committed a crime of arson. Well, but it's interesting. I thought they started out as arsonists now. Oh, no other criminal activities. OK, yeah.

All right, that makes sense. And then finally, they applied the old DSM at the time for criteria. And only 12 of these 600 dudes met that criteria, although it says that nine of them admitted to being drunk. So how did they fit that criteria? That's what I'm saying. She's so confusing.

Even if you look at the history of the DSM, the DSM-1, it starts out as being listed as an obsessive compulsive disorder, doesn't make any appearance at all in the second edition. And then by the third, fourth, and fifth, it's considered an impulse control disorder. So just from 1980 to the current time, there have been all these different bouncing back

and forth about what it is. And they still have no idea. Well, but anyway, you slice it, it looks like. It's a very small number of people. If, like you said, even if it's a thing at all. Right. So there's another study by these two researchers, Grant and Kim.

They sound like a folk duo, too. Grant and Kim. Yeah. They got their hands on, I think, 21 or 27, 21 subjects who had been clinically diagnosed with pyromaniac, OK? And strangely, 11 were male, 10 were female, which is kind of surprising, since this is supposedly skewed 20 more male.

11 male, 10 female. And they found some really interesting stuff. They said that most of them, the onset began in adolescence or early adulthood. And supposedly, that's like the risky time for a lot of impulse control disorders, that they basically all reported feeling arousal or excitement, not necessarily arousal.

Like you think like sexual arousal, no. Again, no erections. Right. It's just got to be like you're just wound up. And the only way to get unwound, and you know it, is to start that fire. And then when you start that fire, you feel a tremendous sense of relief.

You may feel excited. And then from what I understand, and this really goes with kleptomania. You remember Kleptomania, our episode about that? It was like you could not not steal. The only way to turn the switch off in your brain was to steal. In this case, the only way to turn the switch off

in your brain is to start a fire. But you immediately regret it. I think 90% of them reported immediately having severe distress after starting a fire. So you know it's wrong. And this is probably the saddest thing about the whole thing. One third, which is so seven out of 21,

that's still a significant number, reported considering suicide as a means of controlling their fire starting. Like they felt that bad about this, that they wanted to just kill themselves so they wouldn't start fires anymore. So there is a real cost to it, in addition to the fact that this is a really dangerous impulse control disorder.

I mean, gambling's bad enough. But what do you do with gambling? You're ruining your life, you're ruining your family's life. Maybe your parents, it has a finite amount of reach. With fire setting, it's like you could kill any number of people. Yeah, I find it interesting too that there are kleptomania like these impulse control disorders.

We talked about being a little kid and stealing something. I think a lot of kids go through playing around with fire, playing around with stealing things. I guess gambling's sort of the only one that's really nut. I don't know a lot of 10-year-olds that are playing three-card money. I got in trouble for gambling in elementary school. Well, of course you did.

But we were playing with Skittles or whatever. And even at the time, I'm like, come on. We're playing for Skittles here. This is ridiculous. It's interesting. This is an outrage. Give me my cards back. But I do remember feeling bad when I stole something once

when I was a kid. And I think that's the point of doing all that. Yeah, but I don't. Yeah, maybe so. But I don't remember feeling bad about the fire. I just remember feeling like, when I heard that siren, like, crap, I'm in trouble. Right, so what you're learning by testing boundaries

and following your impulses is, oh, doing this makes me feel really bad. Or, oh, doing this scares me to death because I can get in big trouble for it. And you get that emotional limbic system learning mechanism. Smackdown. Right, smackdown, exactly. And that's how you really, truly learn.

Your parents can tell you all day long. But unless you're like Al Gore, you're not going to listen to it. You're not going to listen to your parents like that. You've got to go test it out yourself. Right, or you're a budding sociopath and you don't feel bad. Right, you're like, I want to do this.

And that limbic system doesn't smack you down. It says, maybe you should, you don't like that kid down the street. Maybe you should set fire to his house. Right. Or steal his stuff. Right. Or mistreat that animal.

You shouldn't do that. You shouldn't do any of this stuff. Oh, well, that's true, but especially the animal thing. Yeah, but that's like one of the early signs of, you know, sociopathy. That is psychopathic. Psychopathy. Psychopathy.

That is debated. What you're talking about is the McDonald triad. Yeah, I mean, I don't think it always does, but a lot of times when you look back at the history of serial killers and things, they started with weird animal things. But I think the problem is that's like so sexy and so made the news, the idea that if a kid is a bed wetter,

starts fires and mistreats animals. That was two out of three. Right, you're close. That you can basically say, well, there's a serial, that kid's going to grow up to be a serial killer, which is not the case. I think it's, is that reductive or deductive? Where really it's, if you look at serial killers,

they tend to have the, they check those three boxes. But just because you check those three boxes, doesn't mean you're going to be a serial killer. No, but let's say this, if you're a parent and your kid is doing all three of those things, you know, just keep a little eye on them. Keep an eye on them, right? Just give them a chipmunk and see what they do.

Test them out. Give them a chipmunk and a match. And just lock them in a room and see what happens. We should probably take a break after that one. Yes, we'll be back right after this. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses

and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references

to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right.

So let's say it turns out that you may be part of the 1% and not in a good way, where you're super rich. Yeah, did we say that? That like they think 1%, 1 to 4% of arson's is Pyromania. Yeah, I mean, 1 to 4% of the population. No, not even. So but let's say you are one of those rare people. How would you treat this impulse control disorder?

So one thing I saw was, as with any impulse control disorder, but particularly because this is such a dangerous, threatening impulse control disorder, you basically need to keep in touch with a psychiatric caregiver your whole life, that there's remission, there's relapse, and that even if you get your Pyromania under control, it can pop up in other ways like gambling or addiction to alcohol and drugs or whatever.

So you really need to have some sort of psychiatric presence in your life. It's just part of your life. Sorry, that's just that. But you can be treated. Sure. There is treatment for it. It can be kept under control.

Yeah, behavioral therapy, of course. They've had some success with SSRIs, selective serotonin, reuptake inhibitors that we've talked about a gazillion times on the show. And with anti-convulsants, too, right? Yeah, this was super interesting to me. This was in 2006. There was a letter to the editor of the Journal

of Clinical Psychiatry. And there was a dude, a psychiatrist named John Grant, who said he had a case of a patient who said this person fits the criteria of a person with Pyromania. And I examined this guy's brain with what's called spectimaging. I've actually never heard of that. No, it's like wonder machine plus.

Or is it minus? Maybe. It could be light, L-I-T-E. Yeah, maybe. It's like, I have this machine in here that I made. It's just like a colander with some tinfoil over it. Yeah, that is weird. After 10 years in, I've never heard of a spect machine.

10 years to the day. S-P-E-C-T. I think I just made it up. So he found a region in the left interior, I'm sorry, inferior frontal portion that had low blood flow. He put this guy through a few weeks of behavioral therapy and this anti-convulsant drug for 12 months. This guy lost the urges or had a really big decrease

in the urge to set fires. Brought the guy back in, put him in his tinfoil colander machine, and there was no problem in that frontal portion of the left inferior lobe. Right, cleared it right up. Blood flow is fine. Which makes sense, because the left inferior gyrus, I believe, is one of the regions associated

with impulse control. So all of the- It's amazing. It makes sense. Could it be biological? Sure. I mean, there's a whole school of thought out there that all psychiatric conditions, all are biological.

We just don't know how to catch them or point them out. And we also don't know how most of the drugs that we use to treat them actually work. We just are like, well, it works, kind of. Right. Really interesting. So I've got another one for you. I'm surprised this is the only kind of good example of that,

though. But it's so hard to find somebody who's- True, Pyromania. The thing that gets me is why if it's comorbid with some other kind of disorder, why is it not Pyromania? I think that's what's confounding everything, is psychiatry and psychology have said, it's its own thing. I don't know if it is necessarily its own thing.

But one thing that has- one study found, and I couldn't find who conducted the study, but there was a study that found, basically, if you've ever seen a volunteer firefighter, you've seen a person of Pyromania. Yeah, they say that there's a strong association with, hey, I'd like to go- and I've heard that with arsonists, too.

Yeah. That they, a lot of times, are volunteer, or, you know, regular firefighters. There was a very famous fire captain named John Leonard Orr, who in the 80s in California- Sparky. Basically, he was a serial arsonist who killed four people. Oh, man.

And it's not like it was by accident. He would go start small fires out in, like, the hills. Don't they have hills in California? Sure. Where they have wildfires. He would go start small ones so that he could go start big fires, and the fire department would be distracted out in the hills fighting the small ones

when the big one went up. He would set off fires in stores that had people in it while they were open. So he wasn't doing the thing where, like, I want to start a fire because things are slow, and I really want to fight this fire. Right. Like, he was trying to hurt people.

From what I understand, yes. And he was a fire captain and an arson investigator for years. Man. So that is a thing. And some people, if you aren't a firefighter or just too lazy to be a firefighter, but you still have Pyromania, you might still go to fires when you see, like,

a fire truck go by. You have that scanner in your house. You will go to the fire and watch. And I would guess if you're a firefighter, you probably see the same person here or there and are like, what's up with you, man? That's a movie. But supposedly, like, you can find people with Pyromania

on fire staff, which, as long as they're not starting the fires, God bless them. Yeah, that's true. That's probably a pretty healthy way to get your kicks. It's to watch fires? To go to fight fires. Oh, oh, oh, yeah. But people with Pyromania also will pull fire alarms

just to see the fire trucks. It's not just a fascination with fire. Yes, the whole thing. Things associated with fire, too. So interesting. Lighters, firefighting equipment, firefighters. And sometimes, they will, as the urge is building, they will start accumulating combustibles,

like little pieces of fuel, like paper. And oh, this will burn really well. Oh, this lighter looks awesome. I can't wait to start the fire with this. And just keep it around. And then finally, they can't hold it back anymore. And then, wow. But not burn.

Oh, right. No erections. That should be the title of the show. I think it might be. Pyromania colon, no erections, exclamation point, doing exclamation point. Wow. Do we just name it live?

With onomatopoeia. What else? Do we have anything else in here? No, that's the thing about this. There's not a lot to it. I'm actually impressed that we got 30 minutes out of it because it's so uncertain what Pyromania is. Yeah, actually, here's the one statistical percentage.

It said, estimated in 1.13% of the population. OK. That even seems high. They don't know. They have no idea. I've got one for you. All right. Arson's in the US.

Supposedly, there's over 62,000 arson's every year in the US because a billion dollars in losses every year. Wow. And about 80% of arson's result in no arrests. 80%? 80%. And I also saw that in Australia, apparently, they like to light their fires too,

there's a fire that's lit every hour of every day in Australia. Yeah, what is going on down there? I don't know. This is hot. Are we going to find out in September? We're going to find out. Maybe we should do one on arson at some point because arson investigation is something I know nothing about

and it's fascinating to me. Well, a lot of it's totally made up. Arson investigation? Yeah. What do you mean? It's junk science. What, like, hey, it originated here? Yes, but I'm working on my intuition here

and I learned it from this guy who was working on his intuition but we still put people to death based on this junk science evidence. We totally need to do one on that. I wonder if what they say is, look for the thing that looks the most melty and that's where it started. That's where it started. There's your problem. Interesting.

Yeah, we'll do one on that. I've been wanting to for a while. Yeah. OK. All right. OK. Deal. OK.

Jerry? OK. Jerry didn't care. If you want to know more about pyromania, you can type that word in the search bar at howstuffworks.com and it will bring up a pretty great article by Freud and Rich, the doctor. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail.

No listener mail today on this one because we just want to take a moment to say thank you. Moment of silence. OK. All right. To say legitimate, sincere thank you for 10 years of podcasting. None of us thought this would take on the life that it's had. I feel safe to say.

I agree with you, man. And I looked at the old podcast rankings today and we're right there at number six. What? Yeah. Just hanging tough, man. It's not too bad for a 10-year-old brand. Hanging tough.

Like the new kids? Was it the new kids? Yeah. Whoa, Josh and Chuck and Jerry. So we've said it a lot. There would be no us without you guys and that is as true as true gets. So we still count on you to spread the word,

to proselytize, and to tell your friends to listen. Maybe put a sandwich board on and ring a bell up and down the sidewalk. Couldn't hurt. Yeah, thank you, everybody, for getting us to this point today. Like you were saying, Chuck, we definitely would not be here without you guys.

So thank you for listening all these times. Amen. Amen. I got nothing else. Well, if you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us. I'm at JoshMClark and at SYSK podcast on Twitter. Chuck's at Movie Crush on Twitter, too, by the way.

Chuck's also all over Facebook at facebook.com slash CharlesWChuck Bryant and slash Stuff You Should Know. You can send us all an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, StuffYouShouldKnow.com. We're more on this and thousands of other topics. Visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher

and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place,

because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.