Stuff You Should Know - How Alchemy Worked

Episode Date: July 17, 2025

Alchemy evokes sorcerers working by candlelight combining potions to create magical items, real Dungeons & Dragons stuff. But alchemy gets a bad rap. Alchemists had lofty goals like curing poverty and their work laid the foundation for science to come.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Yeah, I mean alchemy, I think a very appropriate topic, taking something mundane and turning it into something fantastic. Oh, yeah, I guess we are kind of alchemists in that sense. Or were you talking about a different podcast? No, no, no. I was talking about what I aim

to accomplish today. Hey man, not only do you aim it, you, or aim for it, you hit it right on the head. Yeah, alchemy baby, let's do it. Clumsy attempt at a compliment. Yeah, well yeah, when we're talking about alchemy or alchemists, for me at least,

and I would assume most people, kind of conjures images of like some magician wearing like a robe with stars and moons on it, maybe even a pointy hat to match. Sure. He's lit by candlelight, he's in a strange little laboratory, he's doing all sorts of weird stuff

to basically create some sort of magical potion or do something like that, right? If you know a little more about it, maybe you think of charlatans who trick people into investing in their alchemical schemes of turning lead into gold. But it turns out that there's a lot more to it than I ever realized.

And the people involved were, they were a lot more interesting and a lot less dumb and fraudulent than history has kind of cast the mass. Yeah, I always thought of alchemy as, just from what I knew as a youngster, which was just turning something like a boring metal into gold like you were talking about. But it is, I think, interesting that modern science

now looks back and says, hey, you know what? I mean, sure, there was a lot of bunk and BS involved, but some of the foundations of modern chemistry were there, even though that wasn't their intention really. Yeah, and you can also make a pretty strong case that the alchemists were the ones who laid the groundwork for the scientific method.

Yeah, in some ways, sure. What's cool about it too is that, you know, the Europeans, the medieval European, you know, monks and sages and scholars are the ones you typically think of, at least in the West, when you think of alchemy. But it's a, I don't wanna say worldwide, but it really kind of ties together traditions

from a bunch of different parts of the world into a mad pursuit for immortality and glory. Yeah. Totes. So we should say that you can kind of trace the Western tradition of alchemy, the Europeans as you think of it, all the way back to Egypt. Egypt was like the starting point for the Western tradition, but Egypt even

seemed to get it from other places, specifically even back before Egypt. It seems like China and India were possibly in on the pursuit for immortality, which seems to be the thing that initially gave alchemy like its birth. Yeah, and they may have called it like, you know, the art or something like that, or maybe, you know, some other they may have called it like, you know, the art or something like that, or maybe, you know, some other word that they had that meant, you know, some sort of transformation might be taking place.

The word alchemy itself was first used in Arabic, and then eventually French and English in medieval times. But yeah, I think it's interesting that it followed that route, and it's also not surprising that, you know, China was one of the first to get involved in something like this, because I feel like any time we're talking about ancient practices, China always seems to be sort of leading the way in one way or the other. Indeed.

One of the reasons China was so heavy into it was because the early alchemical like pursuits or purposes were to create an elixir for immortality. The reason they cared so much about that was because the country had a huge Daoist population and Daoism is very much interested in achieving immortality one way or another. And so China and its alchemists put together mercury, arsenic, sulfur, and said, here, drink this, a lot of times. And surely a lot of people died

from drinking those things, right? I mean, you can't drink a concoction of mercury and still just wipe your mouth with the back of your hand and walk off like, time to get to work, you know? Yeah, I'm sure there were some people that suffered under alchemy experiments over time. But they also, you know, on the other side, and this is sort of the plus side and minus side

of some of these experiments, they also, whether or not purposefully or not, gave us things we still use today, like potassium nitrate, so they sort of accidentally discovered gunpowder, and ammonium chloride, which is used today as nitrogen and fertilizer, like for farms and stuff like that. Mm-hmm. So, yeah, there were, that is kind of a tradition in alchemy of, you know, they were trying

to do something else, but they still found useful stuff that we still, you know, make or use today. And China's whole jam with alchemy kind of started to dry up as Buddhism spread throughout the country, because Buddhism was much more focused on rebirths and mellowing out about the whole immortality thing. And so the pursuit of, you know, immortality through special elixir just kind of became a moot point.

Or a moo point, sorry. Yeah, I mean, I guess the Buddhists were like, yeah, maybe it's really not possible to live forever. Maybe we should set our goals a little more reasonably. Right. Let's just pretend like we don't care about living forever. As far as India goes, they were also not seeking immortality, and they were also kind of like post-Buddhist China, like, let's try and promote health,

let's try and cure some disease. Maybe we can try and transfer something into gold, but you'll see that kind of popping up. That's why I think a lot of people, the first thing they think of is turning something into gold because that was the pursuit of a lot of alchemists because gold was so revered, either as the best metal, go ahead and make your white snake joke.

I wasn't going to, I was just thinking of gold wearing a t-shirt that says the best metal. Yeah, with like the devil's hands, the devil horns fingers. Sure. And also thinking like, perhaps like drinking something that maybe liquid gold, but it's really not liquid gold, it just turned the color gold,

could make you healthier or maybe live forever. Yeah, and in India, they were trying to make gold not to get rich, but because like you were saying, they were trying to balance health, restore health. Like it was just associated with healthy living, essentially gold was. So then we reached the Mediterranean. That was another ancient place.

And by the time Alexander the Great invaded Egypt in 322 BCE, they found pretty quickly that the Egyptians had already been developing their own tradition of alchemy for a while, and the Greeks said, hey, I like your style, let's mix together our philosophy and our understanding of physics and astrology with your alchemy, and let's produce something really great that medieval monks are really gonna go nuts for. Yeah, and I think this is like, I know we're gonna say this quite a bit, and let's produce something really great that medieval monks are really gonna go nuts for.

Yeah, and I think this is like, I know we're gonna say this quite a bit, but I think they were, these early scientists were taking a stab at something, you know? Like, sure there were charlatans and stuff like that, but this was so early on in the game, like science was brand new, and they were like, hey, let's try this thing and see if it works out.

Maybe didn't always follow modern best practices, but you can't expect them to either. So like, I don't know, I feel like over time on this podcast period, we've kind of tried to shine a little bit of light on some of this stuff. It's like, hey, they were doing their best back then, trying to get involved in science at least. Right, at least they were doing something you lazy sass.

Yeah exactly. I mean this is when the first books on it came out. There was one called the translation is natural and mystical things by an Egyptian named Bolos of Mende. This is around 200 BCE. A lot of this was again about making, you know, viable metals like gold and silver. But again, it was the first kind of preserved writing that we have on this. Yeah, right. No, for sure. And he was also somebody who wrote pretty straightforward about alchemy and the recipes and the processes, which would come to be very rare as alchemy developed. It became much more secretive. Yeah.

But this Greco-Egyptian creation, this melding of different traditions to create this specific kind of alchemy, it's called Hellenistic alchemy, that laid the foundation for Western alchemy to come. One of the other big things that came out of it or another indicator of how important it was is there was this kind of legendary figure that developed among the medieval alchemists, the monks. His name was Hermes Trismegistos, which is a great name.

Not a good hotel check-in name, but it's a great name regardless. Could you spell it again, sir? Like how many times are you gonna hear that? Right, and you would say it just like that too, like real uncertain and unsteady, like Hermes, Tris, Submes, Stoes, I think. So it was a combination, a straight up combination

of Thoth, or Toth, I think Thoth, the Egyptian god who invented writing, the one with the ibis bird head. Yeah. And Hermes, the Greek messenger of the gods, like this was a complete syncretization of those two, and later medieval monks would ascribe like alchemical text to having been written by Hermes T. Yeah, Hermes T. That's a better check-in name by far. Really?

Is that T-E-A,S-E-R or T-E-E? I think it means like Hermes third the best. I think is what Trismegistos translates to. All right, that's pretty good. And this is one of those episodes too, Chuck, where when we say words, we might accidentally cause somebody to go poof and something either appears or disappears. So everybody be prepared for something to vanish.

Yeah, I agree. And no one knew that, you know, like when you look back on stuff like this, it's kind of hard to parse out like who was first, who was influencing who. It's just sort of spread around the world. There is a theory that India's belief system was basically just sort of brought over as a, maybe not as a book,

but you know, brought over wholesale from proto-Aryans in Central Asia, and they were in the area between 4 and 5,000 years ago. So it's, you know, I don't know if there's a lot to be gained from sort of debating who was coming up with what first, you know? Right. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it doesn't really matter. It's those historians, they're kind of fixated

on that kind of thing. But, you know, it is interesting to wonder, like, where culture came from, because so much of it influences so much else. It's not just in alchemy, but in all things, basically. But you mentioned Bolos of Mende, and he actually came after the guy who the Western tradition of alchemy is kind of like based on.

Like this guy was the guy. He's like, here's how it's done. This is the ground rules for alchemy. Okay, everybody? His name was Zosimos of Panopolis. And Zosimos of Panopolis wrote something like 28 books on alchemy. And for a while they were like, we've only got a couple of letters of this guy, but we knew he was brilliant. Apparently they've been finding his stuff all over the Arabic world in libraries

that they didn't realize they had it before, but a lot of his writings have recently been rediscovered. Yeah, and his stuff, he's another one of those that was pretty detailed in his writing, and to have stuff like this preserved is pretty amazing. He was, because he was an alchemist, obviously transforming metals, or trying to transform metals. But like I said, he was pretty specific.

He would have write-ups on exactly what tools he was using, on what methods he was using. A lot of this stuff was obviously repurposed from the kitchen, like kind of cooking stuff or maybe craft work, not the band. But, you know, crafting and like... Like a bedazzler. Yeah, like a bedazzler. Or perfume making.

And he credited a lot of this stuff with a Jewish woman named Maria. And he was like, you know, I've taken a lot of her methods and a lot of her methods also transferred over to early methods of cooking, like, you know, French and Italian cooking methods. Yeah, like a water bath, a bain-marie or a bain-yau-marie is, you know, like, you know when you melt chocolate chips in a pan that's inside a pan that has water in it? Yeah, so you don't scorch it, right?

Exactly. You can thank the Jewish woman named Maria, who has lost a history aside from Zosimos of Panopolis' writings, but she apparently taught him. Yeah, and he said, hey, you can use a lot of this stuff to not make gold from lead. Yeah, I mean, he definitely came up with some processes that he figured out himself.

And like you said, these people were taking a stab at it. They were like, what happens if I do this? And what happens if I try that same thing with a different metal or a different powder or something like that? So they were experimenting. They were starting the beginnings of experimentation that would lead to what we understand as a science.

Zosimos was doing this. Like he was one of the first to do this. I also saw a definition, I'm not sure if I sent it to you or not, but he had an explanation or a definition of what alchemy is. He said it was the study of the composition of waters, movement, growth, embodying and disembodying, drawing the spirit from bodies and bonding the spirits within bodies. And what he was saying, like, if you stop and think about it, it's actually pretty comprehensible.

He's saying alchemy is the study of, you know, all the things we've observed about the world around us, trying to figure out how that stuff works. Like, how does a soul come into a body and become attached to it? How does it leave it after death? What's the deal with water? That kind of stuff.

So like it was just them seeking to apply essentially a proto-scientific understanding of the world as they understood it. Yeah, like what happens if I distill this thing down to its base form or create, you know, you're gonna hear a lot of talk about vapors. Like, you know, boil something or heat something to create a vapor, and then smash it together with this thing. And now I've just learned, you know, I'm trying to make gold maybe,

but I've all of a sudden discovered that it changes properties of both materials if I combine these two things. And while they may not have understood what the heck that meant, chemistry later on would say, oh, actually what they were doing was this. Right, exactly. Yeah. So this whole jam that was laid down by Zosimos and Boulos and the early Egyptians

who eventually kind of combined their stuff with the Greek understanding of the world, which is really important, because Aristotle's thoughts about, you know, what made matter up, like earth, wind, fire, and air, the four elements, that was the understanding of the world that they were working from.

They were trying to figure things out within that context. So, Aristotle had a huge contribution to alchemy early on, which as science would later kind of decide was just a huge wrong turn at the outset, especially considering that Democritus, who was around around the same time as Aristotle, remember him, he was the one who's like, everything's made up of atoms.

I just am not gonna use the word atoms yet. Right, exactly. Good place for a break, yeah? I think so. All right, we'll take a break and we'll talk a little bit about the move into Europe right after this. OpenAI is a financial abomination, a thing that should not be. An aberration. A symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley. And I'm going to tell you why on my show Better

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podcasts. Okay, Chuck, so things were just kind of hanging around from, you know, 300s BCE, where the Egyptians and the Greeks had kind of come together and created that version of alchemy. And eventually, the Arab world started to rise, and it started to go over here and go over there. And wherever it went, it kind of took this and that from each culture that it found interesting. And one of the things that they did, they showed up in Egypt and they said, hey, I like this alchemy stuff you guys have been doing for the last few hundred years. Teach that to us. And that actually helped lay the groundwork for the incredible amount of learning that took place around this time in the Arab world.

Yeah, and logging stuff, describing stuff that would later on, again matter starts out basically, you know, with the basics, which are heat, coldness, dryness, moisture, and combining these in different, moist air to create a vapor. And they would, you know, mix these things together, and they would combine it with mercury or sulfur or something like that. And trying to make gold, once again. Right. I think it's called chrysopoia? Yeah, that's the technical term, I think, for trying to make gold. Yeah, exactly. And there are a couple of big names.

There are a few big names, but two that still made it all the way through history. Raziz, who's known as the greatest physician of the Muslim world at the time. He was an alchemist, a contemporary, I believe, of his, named Jabeer. He was well known as an early scientist. Some people call him the father of chemistry.

And these guys were they were contributing by saying like, hey, don't just throw a handful of powder at something like, you know, do a thumbnail and use the same amount every time, just just little contributions like that. What was a huge contribution, was that they took a lot of these ancient texts, translated them into Arabic, and then those were eventually translated into Latin, which is when things started to spread like wildfire throughout Europe in like the 12th century. Yeah, I promised talk of Europe, and I just forgot we had to stop by Arabia first. But this is beginning in about the 12th century when it moved into Europe. And this was a time when Europe was shifting

to a university, sort of a more academic way of looking at things and away from the monasteries who were, I guess, some of the more early science-minded people. And Christian scholars at the time in Europe, they started to become a little more open to say like, hey, maybe we should, you know, look to other texts, ancient texts even, look from other cultures to try and see if we can learn something from them.

And so they started experimenting with mineral acids, boric acid, sulfuric acid, stuff like that, and trying to develop elixirs. And this is where you'll hear more about things like, you know, immortality, like the elixir of life, philosopher's stone, which we'll get into and stuff like that. Yeah, and we should say, now that I think of it, I'll bet a lot of this transfer of knowledge came from the Crusades. Europe just showed up and was like, give us everything,

including all of your books on alchemy. Yeah. That would be my guess. But yeah, around this time, so I read that the European alchemists following this tradition believed that in the ancient world, they had already found what was called the Philosopher's Stone, which just sounds so cool.

Make a really cool title for a Harry Potter book or a Willie the Wizard book or something, you know? Are you making that joke? Philosopher's Stone. No, I think it's just kind of like, it just fits naturally, you know? Well, that was the original title of the Harry Potter book. Sorcerer's Stone, okay. That's why I asked if you were joking.

Not the Sorcerer's Stone, it's the Philosopher's Stone, wasn't it? No, they changed it to the Sorcerer's Stone from the Philosopher's Stone, wasn't it? No, they changed it to the Sorcerer's Stone from the Philosopher's Stone. What a ripoff. Okay, well, we're talking about the Philosopher's Stone, and that was a term for this substance that supposedly was all over the place, but we just didn't recognize the magical properties of it.

That you could turn immediately anything into like gold or whatever the perfect version of that thing was. Because that was the thing. Gold to the alchemists was the perfect version of a metal. And all other metals, whether it's lead, tin, silver, whatever, we're seeing them in the process of moving naturally into gold. That's how they understood it. What they were trying to do is figure out

how those processes worked so they could speed it up. Right? Yeah. And do it, but like that's where they got the idea of taking lead and turning it into gold. That's what they were trying to do, was move lead into its more perfect natural state, which was gold. And the way that they thought you could do that

was with the Philosopher's Stone, which would make that happen automatically. Yeah, and the way that they thought you could do that was with the philosopher's stone, which would make that happen automatically. Yeah, and you mentioned earlier that they would operate a little more in secrecy later on, and this is kind of where we are now, is they would operate, maybe they would have their apprentices and stuff like that, but it was kind of shrouded in secrecy a lot of times. They would use like codes and symbols and metaphor and stuff when they were like recording their experiments. And there were a handful of European alchemists that, you

know, we should probably go over a little bit. The first of which is Albertus Magnus or Albert the Great. He was a German philosopher in the 13th century and he was a friar, a Dominican friar. And he studied the work of these Arab alchemists, because like we said, it kind of came over from there. And the ancient Greek philosophers, which, you know, as we mentioned, kind of melded those two worlds of philosophy and science, or this kind of science. Right, right.

So there was another guy, I mean, there's a bunch that we could talk about, John D., Arthur D, Roger Bacon, they were all alchemists who contributed to our understanding of the world. One I hadn't heard of was Jean de Roque-telad, telad, Jean de Roque-telad. I think I got it that second time. That sounds good to me, but German is my non-specialty. He was trying to figure out chrysopoia, which is again transforming things into gold.

The thing is, and this is a really good example or way to point this out, he was a Franciscan monk. He didn't care anything about getting rich. As a matter of fact, he had taken avow of poverty. So many times the alchemists are like, all they wanna do is like just make gold and be rich. They were just greedy magicians essentially. No, that's not the case. They wanted to create gold to end poverty. They wanted to find the elixir of life to end disease. Like they had really big, big goals

that they were trying to reach. And he was a good example of that. He wanted to give the Catholic Church the ability to make gold so that they could fund themselves better essentially. Yeah, I took a vow of poverty in my 20s. I think you did too. Oh yeah, yeah, it was forced on me.

So one of the things that he did too, which is pretty interesting I think, is he got talked about sort of distilling things down to their purest form. He did that with booze and he distilled it down to aqua, how would you pronounce that, vita? Aquavite. Aquavite. He called it the fifth essence of wine or the quinta essentia.

And this goes back to Aristotle again, this idea that, you know, it's something different than those four classical elements that we're talking about. And I forgot how he pronounced his name, but let's just call him Dr. R. Said that, hey, when I create this distilled wine down to its purest form of alcohol, and I put meat in that stuff, the meat just kind of stays like it is. It stops this decay. And he didn't think he had tapped into a new way to preserve meat.

He thought like, hey, maybe this stops things from aging and maybe this alcohol is a cure-all. Right, he went on to create the Mai Tai. Oh, nice. Another one, this guy's my favorite, Paracelsus. His real name was Philippus Theophrastus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim. But we'll call him Phil?

Hohenheim. Hohenheim? Yeah. Well, he went by Paracelsus. I think we talked about him in our poison episode, or there was some episode, because he was famous for saying the dose makes the poison. Like, you can take enough of anything,

and it's going to kill you, which is a, the dose makes the poison. Like you can take enough of anything and it's going to kill you, which is a really important understanding at the time. But he was one of the ones who led the way of secrecy because he believed that what the alchemists were doing was dealing in like the nature of the universe and that this information was way too potent to just have out there.

So he was one of the ones that led the charge in that. He also was known as questioning Galen's thousand-year-old idea of the four humors being the cause of disease. Paracelsus was like, no, I think that there's like external factors involved, like maybe even little tiny bugs or something like that that get in your throat and then into your stomach

and then just really screw things up down there. That's me paraphrasing him. That was Paracelsus. So he was a straight up genius for his time. I'm a big fan. Yeah, I'm sure they came right back at him and said, no, no, silly man, it's just black bile. That's the problem.

He's like, you sure? Like this other stuff could be making us sick. He's like, again with the bile. There was also Nicholas Flamel, I guess, or Flamel. I'm not sure how you would pronounce that. I think Flamel. Flamel, okay. He is the one who is credited to have discovered the Philosopher's Stone.

He was just a mere bookseller in the 14th and I guess 15th centuries. And he said, I got a book, I purchased a book, and it was in a language that was so hard to translate, it took me 21 years, but once I finally cracked that code, in that book was the information on how to produce the Philosopher's Stone. And this is what I don't understand. He got rich, but did he get rich off of selling this? Like, that's what I couldn't figure out. No, the later alchemists, like, starting around the 17th century, they created a legend about him saying that he had created the Philosopher's Stone, so now he could turn anything into gold, and that's how he got rich.

Yeah, but how did he get rich? I still don't get it. Oh, I see what you're saying. Because he wasn't turning stuff into gold. No, from what I saw, his wife was rich. Oh. That's the likeliest explanation. But this legend grew up around him because he really was well known.

He's recorded historically as being very rich. Kind of suddenly, they endowed like a ton of hospitals, a bunch of schools, churches. That are, some of them are still around today. They endowed like a ton of hospitals, a bunch of schools, churches, that are some of them are still around today. And he was known for putting alchemical messages kind of encoded in the buildings, like on plaques or in art toys or something like that.

Yeah, so he definitely was an alchemist. He definitely was rich, but it was this legend that grew up around him that he was one of the few who actually found the philosopher's stone. I almost said sorcerer's stone, man. See? Gets in there.

Another legend is that he perhaps maybe lived to be 114, but records say he was between 80 and 114, so that's a pretty big gap there, a wide range. 34 years. It is pretty wide, but even 80 back in the 1400s, early 1400s, is pretty respectable, I guess. No, agreed. So we talked a little bit about the Philosopher's Stone.

That was one thing that as far as we know, no one ever created, right? But all of the alchemists in Europe were after this, trying to figure this out. While at the same time also performing all these other experiments just in case they didn't figure out how to do the Philosopher's Stone, they were figuring out how to do it the hard way too. There was also another thing that they were famous for trying to create, which are called homunculi, which are essentially artificial people in miniature that they wanted to create so that they could study how life begins,

or like Zazimos had said, you know, how the spirit bonds to the body. Like that's the kind of thing they were trying to figure out by creating mini humans. And they had all sorts of, I think it's fair to call it, wacky ideas of how to create a homunculus. I think it's pretty fun. I mean, the word homunculus is fun in and of itself.

But yeah, there's something called the Book of the Cow. This is an Arabic book in the ninth century that apparently Plato had something to do with. And there was a recipe for a homunculus in there, which is one homunculi. And it involved inseminating a ewe, had something to do with, and there was a recipe for a homunculus in there, which is one homunculi. And it involved inseminating a ewe, which is, I guess, that's a female sheep, right?

With human sperm. Don't ask how, I'm not really sure how that happened, but I'm sure they had their... Not too many ways to do that back then. I'm sure they had their methods. And you would have a birth, and it would be some sort of shapeless form at that point, and then you need to treat it with specific stuff, materials, put it in a glass container,

and then it grows into a tiny person. Yeah. I don't think that this ever worked, but I guarantee some people tried it for sure. Oh, I bet. I mean, you have to have some excuse for when you're found with the sheep, right? Oh, yeah.

Oh my God. Oh, my God. Oh. Uh, that's gonna stay with me, like Sorcerer's Stone, Chuck. Every time I see the word you, E-W-E, it reminds me there's this Happy Days episode where Richie was writing in chalk on the sidewalk a message to some girl that he liked, well, in a place where he knew that she was gonna walk home from high school, right? I remember this.

And he drew I and then the heart and then the U, like a sheep, and the girl comes up on him while he's sitting there finishing it, and she's like, I love sheep? And he's like, it's a U, I love you. But the way that she said I love sheep just always, it stuck with me, like, the weird thing you said about inseminating sheep

and Sorcerer's Stone will always stick with me. And it probably taught you the lesson, like, never put yourself out there with a girl. That's right. Yeah. That was definitely the line you got from Richie Cunningham, for sure. I had forgotten completely about that. And as you started to tell that story,

I completely remembered it, just like flooded back to me. That's funny. There's one other one too, this is a Brady Bunch one that I always think of whenever I think of I Heart Sheep, when I see the word you. So we're like three or four inceptions from this original thing. There was a Brady Bunch where Greg and his friends

stole a rival school's mascot, which was a goat. Okay, I remember that. And it just so happened that a bunch of officials from the school came over for coffee to the Brady house while the goat was there, and they had to move it from room to room and hide it. And Greg finally gets discovered with the goat in a closet holding it in this really awkward position.

And the face he makes when they open the closet door. I can't imagine how many takes they did to get it just that perfect. But it's one of the great all-time shots of 70s television, if you ask me. Did the goat, was he wearing like a cape or something? Yeah. I remember that.

I'm going to send you that clip, because it's worth watching. All right. wearing like a cape or something. Yeah. I remember that. Yeah. I'm gonna send you that clip, cause it's worth watching. All right. So I guess we need to take our second break. Yes. And then we'll come back with more talk of 70s television right after this.

["Skyfall"] Open AI is a financial abomination. A thing that should not be. An aberration. A symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley. And I'm going to tell you why on my show Better Offline, the rudest show in the tech industry, where we're breaking down why OpenAI, along with other AI companies, are dead set on lying to your boss that they can take your job. I'm also going to be talking with the'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would Ebene, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free.

I'm Ebene and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that will challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. On Pretty Private, we'll explore the untold experiences of women of color who faced it all, childhood trauma, addiction, abuse, incarceration, grief, mental health struggles, and more, and found the strength to make it to the other side. My dad was shot and killed in his house. Yes, he was a drug dealer. Yes, he was a confidential informant,

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and in session 421 of Therapy for Black Girls, I sit down with Dr. Afiya Mbili-Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex language system, right? In terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, your spiritual belief.

But I think with social media, there's like a hyper fixation and observation of our hair. Right, that this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a reel, is how our hair is styled. We talk about the important role hair stylist play in our communities, the pressure to always look put together,

and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us. Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss Session 418 with Dr. Angela Neal-Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All right. So we have talked sort of hinted at the fact that alchemy is not looked back as it was for many years. And there's a more modern sort of view of it as like, hey they were doing the best they can at least that's what Chuck said and some of the foundations they laid for modern chemistry are actually

kind of valuable and that's kind of where we're at now a lot of like metallurgical processes were created that were legitimate maybe accidentally creating medicines or things that led to medicines happened, which is also valuable. Mm-hmm. What else? Oh, well, I mean, just the very fact that these guys were carrying out experiments.

Like, before then, philosophers just said, like Aristotle, like, this is what everything's made of, earth, wind, fire, water. Trust me. No one asked him, exactly, no one asked him, how do you know that or anything like that? And he really he really you know I'm not saying he was a fraud or anything but he didn't use any scientific experimentation. It was the alchemists who started that. They were the ones who started working in the

lab with specific measures of materials and then very importantly recording their results. So they were documenting what they were finding. These are all just the basic outlines of the scientific method today. Yeah. And I mean, the word chemistry actually comes from alchemy in about the 1780s, which is pretty interesting. And alchemy is also like the other definitions of alchemy. Doesn't it also mean like some sort of romantic chemistry that can happen? Yeah, you know, like romantic chemistry, right?

So a rom-com, what they have in their, romantic chemistry, that understanding and use of the term chemistry actually predates the use of the word chemistry as far as the scientific discipline goes by almost 200 years. Yeah, that's a good point. And there are also some pretty major players that we revere as our scientific forebears

that were involved in stuff like this who maybe tried to keep a little quiet, like Isaac Newton. And this is like well into the 18th century when Isaac Newton was doing his thing. And he was like, yeah, maybe we could make gold from other materials. And maybe I'm not gonna, you know,

I'm also into some occult and spiritual concepts, but I'm gonna kind of play that down and keep that all under the table for now and it will only be discovered later. Yeah, underneath his ruffle puffy pirate shirt, he had the best metal t-shirt on. Well, and people that were in charge of sort of keeping up with his story and his records,

they kind of buried that stuff over the years to protect his image, didn't they? Yeah. Newton was such a genius that he was pursuing two lines of inquiry into the nature of the universe. One, like the physics genius, the mathematician that we know and love is like the world's first true scientist. At the same time, he was pursuing alchemy as well. Like he was looking into the whole thing like... Hedging his bets? Yeah, essentially, he was trying to figure it out. He apparently believed, or his paper said, that he thought alchemy was this ancient wisdom

that God had directly given humans and that alchemists were figuring out, were learning. Like this was like divine, a divine delivery of like knowledge essentially. And like you said, his papers were kept private just to preserve his image for centuries. And then finally they started to get published and people started to understand him a little more. And I saw a really interesting quote at some point that one of his biographers said that Isaac Newton was not the first scientist, he was the last alchemist. Whoa.

Yeah, and I mean, it doesn't necessarily make sense to you if you, when you first hear it, but it's very much like how, say a bird evolved out of a dinosaur bird. The dinosaur bird was not a true bird. The first bird was the first true bird. And in that same way, the point they were making was Newton was the thing that the first real scientists evolved out of, but he was not that. He was part alchemist too.

Yeah, that's a good point. There were even some more modern world leaders that were like, you know, these guys are trying to make gold and I know it didn't work out, but maybe we could try because it'd be great if we had a lot of gold. Maximilian II and Rudolf II, and this was 16th and 17th century Holy Roman Empire stuff where they were like, hey, why don't we just sort of help financially support these alchemists?

Because you never know, maybe they can tap into this elixir of life or get us untold amounts of gold. Yeah, I also saw Henry VI not only gave some, I think, 15 or 16 alchemists official royal licenses to produce alchemical gold. He took what they used and minted it into coins. So supposedly there are coins. Which wasn't gold. No, it was a combination of mercury and copper sulfate with a little bit of water and it produces some alloy once you clean it up that looks a lot like gold,

but it's much lighter. There's coins out there still today to collect that were basically alchemy gold that Henry VI commissioned and that Britain's gold coins were made out of for a little while. Which ironically are probably worth a lot of money. I would guess so.

And that is ironic, isn't it? Yeah, a little bit, don't you think? Yeah. I would even say more than a little bit, don't you think? Yeah. I would even say more than a little bit. I'd say a lot of it. Okay. The Académie Royale des Sciences in France is founded in 1666, and that's when they said, all right, this philosopher's stone stuff is not going to be in our curriculum anymore.

We're not going to look at astrology. We're going to move into the modern era of the 17th century version of the modern era. And that's what they did. They kind of shut all that stuff down as like the official scientific, as far as official scientific pursuit academically goes. Yeah. And the whole thing kind of continued on.

The 19th century still had alchemists in it. The upshot of that whole thing was that they were fraud charlatans, and they were really the ones who gave alchemy a bad name to our modern ears. But also science, when it was really, when it really developed, it had a tendency to turn on its predecessors, the things that it evolved out of, like witches, herbalists, that kind of thing. Same thing with alchemists, like it was just so dumb and, and backwards. Science is the, the kind of thing. Same thing with alchemists. Like, it was just so dumb and backwards. Science is the truth.

It just basically disavowed alchemy, even though it directly evolved out of alchemy. Yeah. But now it is nice, kind of refreshing, that today science is ready to be like, yes, it's a little embarrassing, but this is our grandfather. Yeah.

Well, you know, I feel like grandfather is usually less embarrassing than father. I don't know, it depends on the era the grandfather's from because they can say some really inappropriate stuff at Thanksgiving, you know? Yeah, I strive to be, if I ever am a grandfather, just to be the sort of sweet, dottering old guy that everyone just thinks is fun and funny.

You definitely will be, man. No doubt about it. I think you're also, though, one of those grandfathers who's also a beloved dad, too, which is... Well, so far so good. It's hard to do. One more thing about Alchemy. I, when I was studying, listened to a bunch of Dungeon synths.

I know I've mentioned it before. Okay. But in particular, I was listening to albums by Witch Bolt. Okay. It's really good stuff, man. If you're into any kind of like instrumental synth music, I am. You could do a lot worse than listening to Witch Bolt.

All right. And then it also jogged my memory. When I mentioned Dungeon Synth a couple of years ago, we got an email from somebody named Alon Enchanter, who has a Dungeon Synth label called High Mage Productions. And you can go check them out on Bandcamp. But they sent us a couple of jingles that apparently were lost,

because I sent them to Jerry and she's like, I have never heard either of these. So we can look for some High Mage production jingles coming in the future. Thank you very much for that. You guys. Fantastic. I'm gonna check out Witch Bolt. What a great name.

It really is. And their album covers are amazing too. Oh, I bet. Okay, well that's it for Alchemy everybody. We did it, Chuck, and we're done. And that means it's time for Listener Mail. This is a correction on me. I can't believe I missed this.

I feel like a dummy. Hey guys, when you mentioned Heavy Metal Parking Lot on the Sunset Strip episode, the greatest Heavy Metal short documentary of all time, Chuck attributed it to Penelope Spheeris. She made Decline of the Western Civilization. So I goofed that up. I was totally thinking of Decline of Western Western Civilization. So I goofed that up. I was totally thinking of Decline of Western Civilization, another great documentary. But have you seen Heavy Metal Parking Lot then?

I have, I just misattributed the filmmaker. Apparently, Jeff Krulick and John Hayne made Heavy Metal Parking Lot. It's beyond satire and encapsulates a moment in time that was magical. They also made, and this I didn't know, they also made a documentary called Neil Diamond Parking Lot. No.

So, that's pretty fun. I'm going to have to check that one out. That is from, that's with best regards from Matthew T. from Cleveland, Ohio with a PS. I love you both very, very much. Thanks a lot, Matthew T. right back at you. And if you want to be like Matthew T. and correct Chuck, Chuck loves that kind of thing. You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom as an email and send it off to stuffpodcastatihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, myHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. [♪ music playing, chimes playing, drums playing, bass drumming, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing, drums playing women's sports with powerful interviews and insider analysis. Our shows have connected fans with the heart of women's sports. In just one year, the network has launched 15 shows and built a community united by passion podcasts that amplify the voices of women in sports. Thank you for supporting I Heart Women's Sports and our founding sponsors. Elf Beauty, Capital One and Novartis. Just open the free I Heart app and searchHeart Women's Sports to listen now. Just like great shoes, great books take you places.

Through unforgettable love stories and into conversations with characters you'll never forget. I think any good romance, it gives me this feeling of like butterflies. I'm Danielle Robay and this is Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club. The new podcast from Hello Sunshine and iHeart Podcasts where we dive into the stories that shape us on the page and off. Each week I'm joined by authors, celebs, book talk stars, and more for conversations

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Chappaquiddick is a story of a tragic death and how the Kennedy machine took control. Every week we go behind the headlines and beyond the drama of America's royal family. Listen to United States of Kennedy on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.