Stuff You Should Know - Exoskeletons: How's it coming?

Episode Date: October 25, 2012

Since the 1960s, the Pentagon has called for a suit that can make a soldier jump higher, run faster longer and generally be a badder dude. It's only now that the materials needed are coming of age. Listen in to learn the state of exoskeleton technology. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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like what we would call a jack move or being 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 podcast. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HouseStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, the continuously endlessly ill Josh Clark. Reminiscent of 2010-ish? Nine? What's crazy is, dude, I take such good care of myself, though. I drink so much juice, like fresh juice. You mean I juice almost every day? Well, that doesn't mean you're impenetrable to sickness and viruses. No, I don't smoke cigarettes at all. That doesn't mean you can't get a virus. No, it should. It should. I am like a fortress here, man. I exercise a lot. I spray

lice all in my face three times a day. That's probably what did it. It's irksome. I know. I feel bad for you. Anyway, that's me. Chuck's fine. This is Charles W. Chuck Bryant seated across from me. He's totally fine. It is a little. And something I noticed about Chuck today was a little stirring. Chuck is the spinning image for Tony Stark. Please. You look exactly like Tony Stark. Like Robert Downey Jr.? Yes. No. You do. You've got the hair. I look like a eight Robert Downey. You've got the hair. You have the facial hair. You've got the glowing chest. Yeah. You have the whole thing going on. All right. For the uninitiated, Tony Stark is Iron Man. He's a billionaire industrialist. Turned super hero. Iron Man. Philanthropist. Yeah. And that was

clearly just said to introduce our topic. That is not true. I patted you on the shoulder and reminded you that you looked like Tony Stark before we were ever recording. All right. But we are talking about exoskeletons, which is the Iron Man suit for all practical purposes is an exoskeleton. Yeah. Because one thing I learned reading this article is that an exoskeleton is also known as a wearable robot. Yeah. Which falls under the category of human augmentation. Yeah. And one of the Japanese versions of the how one that we're going to talk about. Yeah. I saw some video today that they had one that was in the color of the Iron Man suit. Is that right? Yeah. Of course, they're going to do that at some point. Sure. But did you see the one on the page zero of this

article? Yeah. It's awesome. It's pretty cool. It's like an army exoskeleton. And next to it says future soldier. And there's a little there's nice track lighting above it for some reason. Playmore with claymore. Geez. That was grim. Well, okay. Yeah. Sorry. But still grim. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I saw some exoskeleton videos too that were pretty awesome. It's pretty amazing where we're at right now. Yeah. Because this isn't this is not new. But it turns out the U.S. military the Pentagon has been like give us an exoskeleton. We want one bad. Yeah. Like the 60s. Sure. And pretty much nonstop people have been trying to do this. And we're finally getting to the point now where they're becoming viable. So it's awesome. It is awesome. So let's talk

about the history of this. Like we're saying an exoskeleton is a wearable robot. Yeah. It's also human augmentation. But you can't confuse it for armor because armor is not really augmenting anything. It's protecting. Sure. Although an exoskeleton would customarily be provide some sort of protection like armor. There's a distinction between the two. Yeah. Although these that they're making now don't have any armorment that I can see. No. It's coming though. Yeah. I'm sure. Yeah. Other than protecting its own systems. Right. Yeah. But yeah. I guess if your arm happens to be behind that. Yeah. It's protecting it as well. It's a win-win. So like I was saying let's this has been around for a little while this idea or the Pentagon's quest for this. Yeah. But

but Kevin Bonser and Patrick Keiger point out that this idea goes back to like the 19th century. Have you heard of the steam man on the prairies steam man of the prayer. Yeah. Yeah. Have you seen that. Yeah. I looked it up. It looks like a robot WC field. It does. It looks like it might have been the inspiration or actually that was pre WC field. Yeah. But yeah. It's a big it was a book. It was a little dime dime store novel in 1868 by Edward Sylvester Ellis and it was a big giant WC fields robot that pulled I guess the the creator of said robot in a little cart Johnny Brainerd like a rickshaw of sorts. Yeah. Hold by a robot of sorts. Yeah. So really you could liken him to a robot more than a wearable robot. He was basically a robot that pulled the cart.

But for 1868 for someone to be dreaming this stuff up pretty remarkable. I say that the 19th century was a had a deep pool of fantastic imagination. Agreed. From like the mid 19th century to like the 30s. That's where it all happened. I mean that's where it all began at least. Yeah. And then the 70s happened and like that was cool. Like we went back to it a little bit. But the 19th century to the 30s. It was right there man. If they could have thought of up something like the Internet they would have. And also you can look up the steam man of the prairies. There's images of them all over the Internet. And if you're interested in that kind of thing the entire books on Project Gutenberg. Oh cool. Yeah. I have to check that out.

So I'm doing great work. Steve Gutenberg these days. Yeah. He's killing it. What a project. I mean who would have thought that like post police academy he would dedicate himself to something like that noble. I think some people might think we're serious. So after that let's flash forward a bit to 1961. This is actually a couple of years before Iron Man. It's kind of remarkable even in 63 that Iron Man as a comic made its appearance. Well I wonder if like this was inspired Iron Man. It probably did. Probably so. Those Marvel guys they had their finger in the pulse of stuff. The Pentagon had a couple of proposals for the wearable robots and the AP even reported on the quote servo soldier. Yeah. The Tom servo soldier. Right. And it was a human tank

equipped with power steering and power brakes run faster and lift heavy objects immune to germ warfare poison gas and even a nuclear blast. Right. Because that's the whole point. They're thinking big. It's basically like we need to come up with some sort of outfit that a person can wear that will help them be bigger faster stronger jump higher. Yeah. Punch harder. Yeah. What's astounding Chuck is within just a couple of years a Cornell scientist named Neil Meisen had something that he called the man amplifier that looks remarkably similar to the stuff of today. Have you seen it. Yeah. It's sort of reminded me of the you saw aliens right. Yeah. Remember the little forklift thing. It sort of looked like that on top but the base of it

instead of legs had like a tank caterpillar tracks like a tank. I didn't see that part. Yeah. The ones I saw looked just like that exoskeleton from aliens. That might have been the Superman suit. I think it was the same thing. Now that well the man amplifier that I saw from popular science was like a machine is on tracks. Tank track. That's pretty cool. But even so it had the big big grabby robot arms. Right. Yeah. Crush kill destroyer missiles. Yeah. So this guy Neil Meisen had a this the idea the concept down pretty quickly in pretty short order. Right. Yeah. He wasn't the only one this kind of set off this Pentagon call for exoskeletons set off like a fervor. G.E. came up with something called the the ped up pedipulator. Yeah. Pedipulator. Did

you see that one. Yeah. It looked like a modular like you could hook some together. Yeah. It looked like a sort of like the cab that you ride in look like a big one of the big bulldozer cabs. Right. And then it had but it had four legs and it actually walked. Did it have four legs. Yeah. I saw. So the one I saw again looked like an ad at right from Empire. And then two legs. Yeah. Interesting. But they were strung together. There is like four of them. I don't know I had it four legs. No I had two. No I had four. You're thinking of the tauntaun. No the tauntaun is like the beast. No the ad at was the big four legged. Oh OK. I'm thinking of the smaller version that's on two legs. OK. In the same scene. Just the ad. Right. I'm sure there's Star Wars fans out there

going it's called the mean. And we're going to hear from them. Yeah. I don't remember what that's called. But you could you could combine these things and form basically like a human exoskeleton centipede. Yeah. But none of these to me look like exoskeletons. They look like machines that you sit in and ride. I got it. OK. Then I saw something that said this is Neil Myzen wearing his man amplifier and it looks exactly like the stuff that they test out today. Wow. Yeah. Well good for him. Good for Neil. I get the impression that he was ahead of his time. So most of these things unfortunately of course he was ahead of his time and did it like in somewhat of a dead end. Why. There's some really good reasons why. Well yeah I mean the reasons you would

probably guess which is it's way too expensive. Computers aren't fast enough especially in 1965. Everything's too heavy. The batteries we can't design batteries that will last long enough. It's a big deal. It's like sort of the quest with all technology is like you got to make it affordable and light enough to operate. And you know yeah I guess affordable will be cost effective right. All these things and then technology is just a limited technology. So material science basically wasn't where it needed to be and is only just now starting to get there. One of the other big problems one of the other big hurdles with making a decent exoskeleton is the actuator which are the the little muscles that move the electromechanical muscles that move

in place of the human muscles. That's right. But we're starting to get there. I mean computing power is getting smaller and more more portable. Yeah. And incredibly powerful. That was the word I was looking for. And wait until we get into quantum computing man. It's going to take off like a rocket. I'm sure. We are battery life is getting more portable smaller more durable. Yeah. And apparently actuator science is really starting to come around. Well that's good. So that means that we have all the stuff in place and apparently DARPA the defense advanced research projects agency a.k.a. the secret area 51 people. Yeah. I think Morgan Freeman heads up that division. Is that right. I think so. OK. So what's his name. Somebody Fox the Fox.

I don't even remember in the Batman movies. Yeah I can't remember. OK. He's read to me. Yeah. Always. But not Red Fox. No. So the DARPA was apparently well aware that this these material science and computing power was starting to come around and they put out another call for exoskeletons and this one's starting to pay off. Well a call in the form of seventy five million dollars worth of funding. Right. Meaning hey we can actually put a little dough towards this. And they said that they started a division called the exoskeletons for human performance augmentation. Sure. Which doesn't spell anything cool. No. I think they kind of dropped the ball there. I agree. And they wanted something that would accomplish five things. They had a directive.

They wanted something that would allow just a regular soldier to carry like hundreds of pounds of gear without much exertion. Right. And this is one of the big applications. It's not to fly around and shoot people like Iron Man. Like a lot of it's kind of boring. It's like like lifting supplies. Right. All day long. Doing the work of three soldiers basically. Loading missiles. Yeah. Really heavy stuff that you might need a machine to do. You can now get a man machine. The second thing they wanted to be able to handle heavy weapons that would require two people. And I can do it with one. They wanted to be able to carry soldiers off the field which is a huge deal. And one of the reasons my brother-in-law who's a Marine

says that they don't allow women in combat is because a lot of you know you need someone who can throw a soldier over their back and trudge through the desert for a day if you need to. That's a common obstacle that's thrown up against female firefighters as well. Oh yeah. Yeah. I get that. I'm all for equality but you got to take care of the people. You know what I'm saying? You're in dangerous water. No man. I mean I'm all for it. If there's a woman who can throw me on her back and carry me three miles through the desert I'm all for it. Yeah. But just don't leave me dying out there. Right. They wanted it to be impenetrable and penetrable to gunfire which is pretty key too. There's the armor thing. The armor thing. And then finally I think this

was the little kid in all of them. They wanted it to be able to jump really high. Yeah. Really, really high. Just like and make it jump really high and say cool stuff. And there's actually there's something called the Springtail Exoskeleton Flying Vehicle. Have you seen that one? Yeah. I don't know about hovering motionlessly thousands of feet in the air. I don't think they're at that point yet. Yeah. And this didn't even this was not even exoskeleton. No. It was more like a flying. It was like a GI Joe machine. And it's not a jet pack either which was in this article. No. What it is is it's a couple of turbines. Kind of like two fans. Yeah. Off to the side. Yeah. In a with a ladder in between. But so you're standing under like under a ladder which

is just bad luck to begin with. Yeah. And then connected to the ladder are two turbines on each side and you just hang on and you take off which again I don't think it's a combat exoskeleton but it would be very cool if your exoskeleton could fit inside. Yes. So you run 500 miles carrying 500 pounds. Yeah. For 24 straight hours. And then you get in this thing and fly off. Yeah. That would be cool. I think that's that's where we're trying to head here. It's like a little personal helicopter at this point though. Yeah. Because I mean if the company can crack the this code they can make all manner of cool little things. Right. Yeah. And make them all compatible like and then tell the army like collect all eight. But you have to buy the half email. Yeah.

Okay. And the half email cost you. 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 twenty two hundred 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 a prime example. 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. Before. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Hi everybody I'm Tyler Florence and I'm Wells Adams. We're the host of the new podcast two dudes in the kitchen. You might be asking yourself why do these guys have a podcast because we love food. You and I have known each other for a while. We got a chance to click together on television on Food Network back in the day and I gotta tell you there's no two better guys are more equipped to take you guys on a journey through the kitchen. It's all about great recipes. It's all about connecting with fantastic techniques and having a great time

while you're doing it. This is a podcast for you for you to call into give us your feedback and we're here to answer your questions kind of get those kitchen burners fired up. I got a lot of questions just because I'm not nearly as good of a chef as you are. So I'm going to be asking you a lot of questions and you guys out there can ask them as well. It's going to be a lot of fun. We're going to learn a lot and you know what most importantly we're going to eat good. We're going to eat good man. Eat good in the neighborhood man. We're here for you. Listen to two dudes in a kitchen on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. We should talk about Sarkos which would later morph into Raytheon. They're one of the leaders

in the exoskeleton racket. Got him. Steve Jacobson is the was the robot maker at Sarkos. I don't know. Is he still at Raytheon? Do you know? I don't know. Okay. Well he's what started it there though and he basically divides the system where sensors would detect these little minute contractions in your own muscles. Like if you go to like grab something your muscles going to contract a little bit. Yeah. And then there were a series of valves which regulate the flow of this high pressure juice to these joints those joints powered cylinders attached to cables that were sort of like tendons. He sort of made a very basic mechanical version of how our own muscles and tendons operate. Well like an extension of an augmentation of it where basically these

sensors go oh I know what you're about to do. Let me. Right. And you will pull your arm off if you try to pick this up. But me the exoskeleton knows what you're trying to do. And then after I'm sure training for a few days in this thing it just becomes second nature. Yeah. Did you see the Iron Man guy the dude from the movie? No I didn't see the video. I was looking for it. The guy was Clark Gregg. He was like the agent. Okay. From the Avengers and the Iron Man movies. Okay. And he tried this thing on and like punched wood blocks and lifted these big weights and did push-ups and it was pretty remarkable. That's pretty cool. Yeah. It's amazing. Yeah. And they call this the XOS. This is the first prototype. And the XOS. Well that's actually

the XOS too now. Well that was yeah the XOS was the first prototype. But this is kind of like the the leading edge like I think the Pentagon and DARPA are putting a lot of funding behind Raytheon's XOS. Yeah. They predict by 2015 they could have a tethered module going. What does that mean? That means it's tethered. Do you know what tethered means? That means it's attached to something like a cable. Right. Oh so like it's attached to a power source or something like that? Something like that. Okay. And then by 2018 they're hoping for a non-tethered version. Yeah. Because I mean it's like hey bad guys come over here. Yeah exactly. I can't get to you. Well the tethered one would be fine for dudes like loading trucks and things

like that on base. Sure. Yeah. Sure. But not in what they call the theater of war. You know. By the way. Winston Churchill. Yeah I think so. I think we forgot to mention that flying vehicle thing. That thing actually goes over 100 miles an hour now. Yeah. And the XOS runs at least 10 miles an hour. And I remember reading that first and being like whatever. Yeah. And then I think oh yeah I can't run 10 miles an hour at all. So yeah this thing running 10 miles an hour and the point here is it's endurance because as long as its battery is charged. How fast can we run? I mean you could run that fast. You could get up there but for like 10 seconds and then your heart pops. I'm talking myself. Right. There's I mean 10 miles an hour is. Because you walk

four miles an hour. Typically. If you walk pretty fast. Yeah. No. Not typically. No. No. That's getting into speed walking. Well that's all I do. You do not walk four miles an hour. Like we walk maybe two two point five. Really? Yeah. Well whenever I did hiking we always based it on a four mile an hour pace. That's four miles an hour. Yeah. That's really fast. I guess I was a champion hiker then. I guess you were. I should have got that up. You're like I used to do it on my hands. So like we said Sarko turned into Raytheon and then there's other competing firms. Well Sarko was bought by Raytheon. What did I say? They turned into it. I mean there's a distinction. Then Berkeley Bionics is another company. Yeah. They're

civilian peacetime. They're basically helping out the people who can't walk under their own power any longer. What they're getting really good at is energy consumption. Solving solving that problem. They had something called the human load carrier which ran for about 20 hours without a recharge which is a big deal. Dude that's huge. Yeah. It's a big leap forward. Did you see there's another one Argo medical technologies has something called the rewalk. Yeah these are pretty cool. And it's like 150 grand which sounds like a lot but at the same time if you're paralyzed this thing lets you walk. Yeah it's basically just mechanical legs attached to your regular legs with a little backpack on for the power. Yeah. And it's based on the segue as far as like you lean forward and

it walks forward you lean back and it stops. Which is good because if as long as you are as long as you're not paralyzed as long as you have mobility from the waist up I would think you'd be able to use it because you lean above your waist that you're sparring. Yeah. Yeah and a lot actually we should point out a lot of these exoskeletons that even the army and the military you're working on are some of them are just waist down. Yeah. Some of them are made for you know punching and lifting and potentially flying and shooting but they have a lot of waist down work too which they said helps you like lift things anyway because you're supposed to lift with your legs. Right. Yeah. It just transfers the load to the ground. Exactly. And yeah we're

also these don't look like pants you know like no just exoskeleton pants. Remember fleas pants made of teddy bears? No. You don't remember this? No. Oh you should look it up it's pretty awesome. The bass player? Yeah from Red Hot Chili Piper's yeah. They're just kind of like braces with maybe a foot. Yeah. That you just step into like you can step into these things. Yeah it looks like sort of like a high-tech leg brace that's a good way to put it. Yeah except it walks for you. But pretty soon it's going to look like an awesome suit of armor that you can like run and jump and just hover and just do all sorts of cool stuff. Like Tony Stark. Like really reading this I was like oh my gosh I can't believe this stuff is really good. Yeah and then you see

the videos and you think wow I bet it's clunky and then you see the video of a guy that's never walked. Yeah. Get up out of a chair and walk and you think man I bet he didn't think it's clunky. Exactly because he's not trying to kill anybody he's just trying to walk. Exactly. Now we just need to get the price down for the average person who can't walk. Yeah um well how much were those $115 grand? $150 for the re-walk device. Still not too bad. No that's what I'm saying especially if your insurance will chip in. Yeah so there's a company in Japan called Cyberdyne and that sounds like a name that James Cameron would make up but it's real and they have made a real breakthrough in a couple of ways. One that they don't their howl machine, HAL. I wonder if Kubrick was live.

I'm sure he's tired of people naming everything howl. Yeah. It's like enough already. Did you know someone impersonated him? Oh yeah they made a movie about it. Yeah did you see the movie? It wasn't great but John Malkovich always great except in that movie. So they made advances in a couple of ways. One is that they don't require the muscle contractions anymore. They pick up on your brain sensors. Your electrical messages being sent from your brain. That's an enormous breakthrough. Huge breakthrough. Yeah because think about it you don't have to have any mobility whatsoever. Like you could be Stephen Hawking and like run around and like pick up stuff and people and throw them. If you can think it you can do it. Yeah that should be

their motto. Yeah and the other breakthrough is I'm sure you saw the howl. It's like really streamlined at this point. It's not clunky. Well this is the Japanese for like robotic design. Yeah I mean it's pretty sleek. Yeah they know what they're doing. Yeah very much. And now we can flash forward all the way to 2010. You know it'd be really cool if they made it an exoskeleton but they made it like look like an android so you put on like this kind of rubbery face too and like it had facial expressions and things like that. I think that would be better than this like really cool suit to go into battle. Yeah just terrorize anybody who saw like this like weird plasticy human like thing coming at you with like a 50 caliber machine gun holding it like it's nothing.

My guess is the way the war is going down today people are already pretty frightened by these soldiers coming in. Yeah I guess they can see in the dark and have laser sightings. Sure I think you're probably frightened anyway. Even old timey war was probably very frightening. Agreed. Maybe we should not make it more frightening now that I think about it. Okay maybe we should make them look like little lambs that kill. That explode on content. All right so we're in 2010. DARPA has made some serious headway. Now their suit weighs about 55 pounds which is like. I think this is the exos. Is it the exos too. Yeah and can carry 200 pounds and with no fatigue going on like you said 10 miles an hour it can run and that's pretty

impressive I think. It's good enough especially if the thing can run. Yeah because this thing's running for you. You're moving but you're just barely moving and you're not going to get fatigued at running 10 miles an hour. No. And I can imagine like you can cover some ground in 10 miles an hour. Think about this. You could cover 10 miles in one single hour. That's straight. That's true. That's a lot. That's very true. Eventually they're going to hook GPS systems up to this. It says one of the uses for soldiers would be to obtain info about approaching terrain. So I guess they could send them out ahead or whatever. My friend have you seen Predator? Yeah the first one. Don't think that that's not going to be inserted into this this whole

array of technology. Which part? The thermal. Oh yeah thermal imaging. Yeah so you're just running along 10 miles an hour and you have been for 20 straight hours and you're running through say the desert and you see everything thermally. You're fine. You're going to be just fine. Yeah that's a good point. Especially if you can jump really high. Really really high. And then they're also working on some computerized fabric that they would wear that would like to monitor all your systems. So I guess the point there is it would be light. Like I'm sure they can monitor your systems now but it'd probably be too bulky. Yeah. So you want they're going you're going to wear the computer as you wear the robot.

Yeah. Pretty amazing. Yeah and what I mean we're talking like we're not very far off from this 10 15 years maybe. Yeah and it's not all soldiers like we said they're using it. A lot of the the research is for people with spinal injuries and stuff like that. Yeah so pacifist can get on board too. Exactly. Rich pacifist. Also I want to say like I came across a really cool website called cyberneticszoo.com and if you're into like old timey popular science drawings and stuff like this. It's cool stuff. It's covered up in it. So I would recommend checking that out. You got anything else on exoskeletons. I want one. That's what I got. Just give it a few years man. I'm going to get you one that looks

like W.C. Fields. Okay. And actually the man on the prairie. It looked like a cross between W.C. Fields. If W.C. Fields mated with the Jetsons robot made this is what this thing would look like. Roxy. Rosie. Rosie. I think so. I think Rosie. 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 jackmove or being robbed. They call civil acid.

Before. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Hi everybody. I'm Tyler Florence and I'm Wells Adams. We're the hosts of the new podcast two dudes in the kitchen. You might be asking yourself why do these guys have a podcast because we love food. You and I have known each other for a while. We got a chance to click together on television on Food Network back in the day and I gotta tell you there's no two better guys are more equipped to take you guys on a journey through the kitchen. It's all about great recipes. It's all about connecting with fantastic techniques and having a great time while you're doing it. This is a podcast for you for you to call into give us your feedback

and we're here to answer your questions kind of get those kitchen burners fired up. I got a lot of questions just because I'm not nearly as good of a chef as you are. So I'm going to be asking you a lot of questions and you guys out there can ask them as well. It's going to be a lot of fun. We're going to learn a lot and you know what most importantly we're going to eat good. We're going to eat good man. Eat good in the neighborhood man. We're here for you. Listen to two dudes in a kitchen on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay. If you want to learn more about exoskeleton you can type it into the search bar at howstuffworks.com and it'll bring up this awesome article to check it out. I said search bar

this is your mail time. This one's kind of a downer but I feel like we should read it because it's you know you need to get the stuff out there. I'm going to call it abusive grandparents. Oh man I saw this one. Yeah we sort of made some jokes in our time travel cast about the grandfather paradox and like are there abusive grandparents because they're also sweet and there are of course there are. It's very sad. I think we knew that. Yeah. Hey guys today I was listening to the podcast and you brought up abusive grandparents. You both sounded like it was a tough concept to swallow and I agree it is. That being said I'm writing you to say that yes sadly there are abusive grandparents. I was raised from the age of five by my maternal grandmother who was physically,

mentally and emotionally abusive most of my life. She was abusive to every child who ever came through her house, her children, me, her nieces and nephews. She herself was heavily abused as a child by her mother and father that went on to be married twice to abusive husbands. Unfortunately she wasn't strong enough to break the cycle and in fact she encouraged my own mother her daughter to hit me. She kicked me out often and at the age of 12 I was sent to live with my deadbeat father and his wife for a summer. At 14 she kicked me out to go live with my mother and her husband. I lived there for a few years then back to my grandmother because her home was close from my school. Two weeks before my 18th birthday she instructed my mother to beat me because I

stayed home from school to go to the doctor for tonsillitis. I ran away that day and never went back. I moved in with my now husband and his parents where I lived through the rest of my high school senior year in college. It has been 10 plus years and I have no contact with that grandmother. I've been in therapy for about four of those years and so I just want to say yes there are abusive grandparents. In fact I knew of another girl my age who was also being raised by an abusive grandmother and that is Amanda in North Carolina and I wrote her and she said that she has a nine month old girl and she is going to be the first one in the family to break the cycle of abuse. Good for her. That's how it happens. Yeah so sad all the way around the grandmother

that was abused and then had to be some husbands and took that out on her grandkids and nephews and daughters and it's just the cycle of abuse is horrific and it's up to you to break it. Well thank you very much Amanda in North Carolina. Yeah we appreciate the candor that's awesome. Agreed. And congratulations to breaking the cycle. Agreed. Well let's see if you have a story that you want to share with us when we were flip with something we shouldn't have been. We'd like to hear about it. You can tweet to us at SYSK podcast. You can send us a facebook.com slash stuff you should know message post on our wall there. That was a clumsy way to quit it. You can also send us a regular old email at stuffpodcastatdiscovery.com.

For more on this and thousands of other topics visit howstuffworks.com. 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. 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. The Zen teacher Suzuki Roshi says each of you is perfect the way you are and you could use a little improvement. The one you feed podcast is here to support you wherever you find yourself at

the beginning of this new year. This month in particular we're covering topics such as how to incorporate healthier eating and exercise reducing stress and finding more calm and even learning about different approaches to sobriety. So here's one small step that you can take that will have a big impact this new year. Listen to the one you feed on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.