Stuff You Should Know - How Crime Scene Photography Works

Episode Date: February 17, 2011

Crime scene photography is a crucial aspect of forensic investigation, but it's by no means a new part of detective work. In this episode, Chuck and Josh explore the history and modern use of crime scene photography. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Flooring contractors agree. When looking for the best to care for hardwood floors, use Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner. The residue-free, fast drying solution is specially designed for hardwood floors, delivering the safe and effective clean you trust. Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner is available at most retailers where floor cleaning products are sold and on Amazon. Also available for your other hard surface floors like Stone, Tile, Laminate, Vinyl, and LVT. For cleaning tips and exclusive offers, visit Bona.com slash Bona Clean. The War on Drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call,

like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid work. Be sure to listen to The War on Drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Snap, snap, snap. That was my camera impression. You could, you get your little iPhone. You could do, you know, the little sound if you want it. I guess I could. Is that the sound of me? That's your iPhone

camera impression? That's my, it's my own personal rendition. Did I introduce this yet? I have not. I'm Josh Clark. You did. Oh, I did. You didn't say this is Stuff You Should Know. This is Stuff You Should Know, the podcast, right? That's right. I have you noticed I've started to differentiate between the podcast and the nothing else. Oh, yeah. Here, let's see what we got. There you go. Yeah. So, Chuck, had you been, you know, in the act of vandalism, murder, theft, or had you done it, gotten up and left some sort of scene behind? Yeah. That picture would have constituted crime scene photography. Yeah. That is not my intro. Okay. Did you notice in this article again, Alphonse Bertillon, Bertillon, right? Yeah. He was a 19th century French

photographer who was credited with creating the concept of crime scene photography for forensic police investigation. Yeah. He's also credited with creating something that any smoking gun fan will appreciate this guy for mug shots. Yeah, I like mug shots. Mug shots. He created mug shots, I should say, for the purpose that they're used today, cataloging a criminal. This guy, with this face, with these tattoos, has done this crime. Yeah. Right? Or has been questioned for this crime or whatever. It's a way of documenting what a person looks like, so there's no mistaken identity, that kind of thing. Yeah. And when Bertillon came up with this, it was kind of a lifesaver for people suspected of being criminals or for criminals, because in France at the time,

you may be branded with a hot iron. That's how they identified repeat offenders. Oh, really? Yeah. So, that was kind of a save. But Bertillon was also very much interested in eugenics. Which was the idea that you could create a fitter, better human race by basically sterilizing or killing people who didn't fit the idea of fitness, right? Yeah. Epileptics, criminals, that kind of thing. Sure. And part of eugenics was based on phrenology, where the shape of the skull, the shape of the face, characteristics. And Bertillon came up with 11 characteristics that you could measure. Drawn on ethnic lines, largely. Yeah, very much so. But using calipers and other instruments. And he came up with this uniform measurement set. That's the other reason he

started doing mug shots, right? And it actually worked for a while until in the early turn of the century, the last century. Yeah. Not this past one, the one before. Okay. Okay. Leavenworth Prison. A guy was using this Bertillon measurement. There was standard procedure by them. Yeah. To book somebody named William West. And this guy who was doing the measurements, that was his job. So, he knew everybody in the prison's measurements by heart pretty much. Right. He was like, I have measured your face before. And this William West was like, no, I promise you I've not been here before. And he's like, I don't know. Let me look. So, he looks it up and sees that, yes, he has indeed come up with the same exact measurements

for these 11 different distinct characteristics. Which Bertillon calculated to be one in about 4 million. The chances of two people having the same characteristics. And not only that, this Leavenworth forensics guy finds that they're attributed or cataloged with a guy by the name of William West. Here's the thing. The guy he was booking, processing, wasn't lying. The other William West was still in prison in Leavenworth with the same 11 characteristics. So, as of that guy's processing, there were two William Wests with identical facial characteristics in Leavenworth at the same time. So, was that the beginning of the end of mugshots being used in that way? Pretty much. Because from what I understand with the characteristics, it was sort of like, he was

using that as proof. Like, just look at the guy. Just look at him. Right. Look at the face. Well, not only that, by studying, by creating a catalog of people along these 11 characteristics. Like, how far apart your eyes were. Like, how protruding your eyebrow ridge is. That kind of thing. You would conceivably, and we're very much doing something along the same lines with DNA today. Right. We're conceivably saying, well, this person with this, you know, pronounced eyebrow ridge is, you know, very much predisposed to acts of murder and violence. Because as you've seen, all these other people that we've cataloged have this protruding eyebrow ridge. And that common characteristic shows that you're a murderer. Not a very good way to nab a criminal.

No, but it's the same point that we're at with these DNA databases that we've spoken about too, Chuck. That's right. Let's get back to crime scene photography, shall we? Yes. Bertillon was the first guy to really do that. And he, he was the first guy to, I mean, there's been forensic photography, they said, since pretty much the camera's been around. Yeah. But he was the first guy to say, you know what, let's do some different angles. And let's get some real close-ups. And let's survey the whole scene. And now we have sort of a picture of what the whole crime scene looks like. Right. And it was crime scene. Methodical. He was the first to really apply a method to it before. It kind of grew out of newspapers printing crime scene photos. Yeah. Like the guy in road

to perdition, dude law. Yeah, I enjoyed that. It was a good movie. But they would, they would go for the art or the shock value of it, not necessarily the evidentiary value of it. So, yeah. Yeah, it's very sensationalistic. Yeah. Crime scene photography is obviously very important because evidence is transitory. You clean up a crime scene, you remove the body, lift the fingerprints, you do all that stuff. So you need to get it while the egg is still in the pan, as they say. Who says that? I think you just say that. So before everyone else comes in and does their thing, the crime scene photographer, there's a lot of pressure on these men and women to go in first because they've got their CSI guys outside saying, all right, come on, let's get

this over with so we can start analyzing it. Right. But they got to be first because you don't want to disrupt the scene. Yeah. And you have to take your time and you have to do it right. And there's standard procedures that you have to come up with. Very much. But yeah, it's kind of a high pressure job. It's a very important job. You remember when we were talking about blood pattern analysis? Just a couple of days ago. It seems, yeah. It seems like just no time at all. But you were talking about how maybe some police departments have people pulling double duty with blood pattern analysis. Yeah. Not necessarily so with crime scene photography. This is not as much an art as a science, even though it's something that grew out of an art. This position is very

valuable so much so that the Manhattan District Attorney's Office has its own crime scene photography and videography department. Oh, really? And they dispatch them independently of the cops. Yeah. So they'll be two on the scene because they found that documenting a crime scene is so important to closing a case that they just they have their own peeps doing it. Their own peeps, their own homies. All right. So let's talk about the classifications of forensic photos. There's three of them. And at first it sounds like no duh, but it's a little more interesting than that. You've got your overview. You got your mid-range. You got your close-up. You think overview, you think, yeah, they just take the big wide shot. They take a lot more than that. They take pictures of the

outside of the buildings. Yeah. They take a picture of entrances and exits. Yeah. They take pictures of, let's say there's a crowd of folks standing around that police tape. Yeah. You know, in the movies they always return to the scene of the crime. Yeah. You can pick them out of that crowd. So they take pictures of the crowd. Not only that, if the police are canvassing the crowd and some people wander off or whatever, you can use that to go find those people who may be potential witnesses. Exactly. They will take pictures of, not just the room, but every angle of the room, the corners of the room, the different rooms in like, let's say a murder occurred in a bedroom, they're not just going to stick to the bedroom. They're going to take pictures of all the rooms

in the house because they may say, hey, look in that picture. The phone was off the hook in the other room. So let's go lift fingerprints off the phone handle or trace the last call that was made, something like that. This call is coming from upstairs. It's inside the house. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy, number one, is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2,200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah, they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs, of course, yes, they can do that in on the priming sample. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with

absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that will 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 it civil asset for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jordan Klepper, Daily Show contributor, Trump rally pass holder, and as of today, my most daring title yet, podcast host. This is Jordan Klepper Fingers the Conspiracy, an all new limited series podcast from the Daily Show. Now, normally when I hear Trump's supporters

bring up these, let's just call them what they are, 100% unverified banana gram conspiracy theories. We grab the sound bites, pack them in the segment for the Daily Show and move on to the next person. I feel like calls is such a native word. We are not a cult. If you go online, there's a whole list of pedophile symbols. Really? Yes. What's on your back? Q flag. Q and non. One of those crazy people. Now we're doing it differently. I'm finally diving into some of the most incredible conspiracy theories that have been pitched to me at Trump rallies. Like, did you know that Osama bin Laden is a guy named Tim? Yeah, we're doing a whole episode on that one. JFK Jr., coming back from the dead, that's an episode. The Deep State, that too. We're going way down the

rabbit hole. Listen to Jordan Klepper Fingers the Conspiracy on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So that's the overview. That's the overview, right? And that pretty much is like, okay, here's the boring part. And then they, oh my God. Now we're at the mid-range, right? Yeah, that's when you zoom in a bit on some of the gruesome aspects of the crime. I've told you before, I think I've mentioned it, that I've seen like some crime scene photography that's really like, oh, guy in the woods. No, thank you. You know, Kurt Cobain, people are always trying to find that photo. His, his, well, wouldn't crime scene, but his death scene. Yeah. Or was it? Yeah, that's right. Courtney, or who was that investigative journalist that tried to pin it

on her? I don't know. There's a documentary. Yeah, it was that guy, Nick Somerother. Nick Cage. Nick Cave. Nick Love. None of those people. Nick and Jessica. Yes, that's who it was. Okay. So the mid-range shots are pieces of evidence, like the murder weapon if it's there. But you're not, you know, you're going to do some different variations. You're going to zoom in on the murder weapon, obviously. Right. But you also want to show it in relation to where it is on the scene. Yeah. Like it was laying, you know, on the floor three feet from the body. Yes. And I can take it away now. Right. After the mid-range, we come to the close-up. And the close-up's going to be like maybe the

murder instrument, a tattoo on the victim's body, a scar, a serial number if somebody used like a DVD player to beat somebody else to death with it. You've got to catalog the murder weapon, that kind of thing. Yeah, good point. So this is what the close-up's useful for. And then when you're taking a close-up photo, you take one with like an instrument, like a ruler or something like that to provide scale. Yeah. And then you also take a duplicate photo, the same photo without the measuring device. So the defense can't be like, oh, well, that ruler was actually covering up, you know, incontrovertible evidence that my client was not guilty. Yeah. Covering up the name of the killer. Right. Yeah. So it's important to take two. You're right. They also

have to be really detailed with the photo log, has all the details. Nowadays with digital photography, you have, you know, you can have the sequence of photo number, the date and time, all that like already stamped on. But back in the day, they would, you know, use a log and a book to record all this. The filters that they use, like, hey, I used the daylight filter out here because I had to, but it's, you know, this can't be tainted. So you got to let people know that that was a filter use. You got to be honest. Got to be very honest. Yeah. Chuck, we also mentioned that you, there's a standard operating procedure that you have to come up with. One of the big aspects that lends credence to crime scene photography is that sensationalism has been pulled completely

out of it, has no place in it whatsoever. Yeah. And one of the ways that you ensure that your photographers aren't being sensational or can't even be accused of being sensational is by coming up with the standard operating procedure method that you are going to employ when taking photographs, right? Yeah. So you have to have things like maximum depth of field, which is the amount of a photograph that's crisp and clear and in focus, right? You can't be all arty and do one of those like portrait things where the background is blurry, right? Might look neat. If you're telling the cadaver to make love to the camera, you're on the wrong path with your crime scene photography. Yeah. The last thing you want is for your boss to say, boy, these are really sensational.

Yes. Because while you might say, well, thanks, that's not what you're looking for. No, I know. Not at all. You don't want art school calling you. So other technical specs that should make up this photo taking procedure, right? Or you want to make sure that the photos are sharp as possible and that none of the devices that you're using to measure are blocking anything. You don't want to get creative with how you take the photo. You don't want to cover up anything. Yeah. Leave anything out. No. You can't let anything be blurry. That's important. That kind of thing, right? Yeah. And that's just part of this larger standard operating procedure, correct? Yeah. And that's for the picture taken itself. Right. But the procedure also includes afterward.

You have to have a standard chain of custody, image security, because Dexter leaves a crime scene with the camera and what's he going to do with it? Right. Or if he hands it to... What's the one guy? Yeah. The funny comic relief. Yeah. Have you seen his truck? I was in one episode. I couldn't believe it. But he hands it to... I don't want to get any emails, Chuck. Well, look it up. He hands it to Makusa. Yeah, Makusa. And Makusa should sign something that says, I took custody of this flash drive from Dexter Morgan. And my name is Makusa. Exactly. And then he'll make some vague sexual joke. Yeah. And everyone will laugh at home. Right. You have to preserve that original digital image. So let's say you want to blow it up and

change the contrast a bit to highlight something. That's all great. That's all groovy. But you have to note that you've done that and you have to have the original in its original form and format as whatever if it's a JPEG. Yeah. You can't make it a GIF or a GIF. Certainly not an animated GIF. That's gruesome. That would be weird. There are a lot of times there's image security software to make sure everything stays like it should. You have to store it in a hard drive. You have to back up some of it. Right. Just got to be really, really detailed. It's not like your vacation photos. No. Anytime you do anything to manipulate that photo, you should log it. And again, you have to be just be completely honest. You shouldn't have any dog in the fight.

No, of course not. Your job is to document this scene and extract or prevent any emotion from coming into it as much as possible. Yeah. Exactly. Right. Let's talk about the kit, which isn't super exciting, but you're going to have your camera, maybe a couple. Yeah. If you're into that, you're going to have a variety of lenses that will work for different crime scenes. You're going to have some filters if you need them. You want your wide-angle lens. You want your mid-range. You want, if you want to zoom in on something and you don't want to get down on the floor, you might want to zoom lens. Yeah. Be a good idea. A light meter. Make sure everything looks great. So Chuck, what is the, I noticed the gray card. What's the gray card?

I saw it. It works with the light meter. Yeah. I think you use that to, to set your meter. Is that right? Like you use the, like that's your, like your meter understands this is the gray card. I think so. It's the zero value. I think so. I think it's sort of like white balancing a video camera. I got you. Okay. I'm like, oh, I had that wrong though. And generally you're going to use color unless they said things like latent fingerprints sometimes or show up better in black and white. Yes. But most times you're going to use color. Should we mention video since I said that word? Yeah. I think it's become a lot more prevalent since the advent of the video camera. And especially nowadays, you know, the SLRs that shoot great high-def video. I've seen it.

She can have all in one package here. I know. You don't have to have a couple of cameras. You have to tow it around. So is SLR a brand name? No. Okay. It's a single lens reflex, I believe. That's a guess. The war on drugs impacts everyone. Whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs, of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm the prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Step out of piss y'all.

The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jordan Klepper, Daily Show contributor, Trump Rally pass holder. And as of today, my most daring title yet, podcast host. This is Jordan Klepper Fingers the Conspiracy, an all new limited series podcast from the Daily Show. Now normally when I hear Trump supporters

bring up these, let's just call them what they are, 100% unverified banana gram conspiracy theories. We grab the sound bites, pack them in the segment for the Daily Show and move on to the next person. I feel like cult is such a negative word. We are not a cult. If you go online, there's a whole list of pedophile symbols. Now we're doing it differently. I'm finally diving into some of the most incredible conspiracy theories that have been pitched to me at Trump rallies. Like, did you know that Osama bin Laden is a guy named Tim? Yeah, we're doing a whole episode on that one. JFK Jr., coming back from the dead, that's an episode. The deep state, that too. We're going way down the rabbit hole. Listen to Jordan Klepper Fingers the Conspiracy on the iHeart radio app,

Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Josh, videotape. You know a lot about photography, don't you? Well, my dad's a big shutter bug. Nice. I grew up with it. Videotape is used a lot nowadays and that can do a lot of things that regular SLR photography cannot like show you. You can literally walk a jury through a crime scene and show relationships to the body or the weapons, like a picture is one thing. It's worth a thousand words. Sure, at least. But 24 frames per second. That's worth 2,240,000, I would say. Yes. So videos is used a lot of times and they say if there's video that they actually video before they take the still photographs and the CSI guys are out there going, oh, come on. You're going to draw a picture

too. Well, that's what they used to do originally. They would draw, oh, is that what that was? Yeah. They would sketch the crime scene. But of course, I mean, it doesn't get a lot more subjective than sketches. Yeah. So when photography came along, people seized on it pretty quick. When the video camera came along, people were like, oh, this is just as good. If not better, let's accompany the two. But you need both. They use infrared film sometimes. If it's dark and you need to get a blood stain, that's when you're super fancy, I think. Yes. What else? Oh, I tell you the thing I thought was cool was if you video blood spatter on a wall, let's say someone's brains were blown out over a wall, you could potentially photograph that, put a yardstick

in there as a frame of reference. And then years later or days later, you can make a slide. If it's a slide, then you can project that onto a wall, even onto that wall, actual size. So you can kind of recreate it as it was before it got all cleaned up, project it right there on the wall. That's really neat. Kind of like Princess Leia. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. When R2D2, is that what you're talking about? Yeah. Okay. When R2D2 was projecting her as a hologram. Exactly. Yeah. Although nothing like that. You want to talk about Weegee? Yeah, Weegee's one cool cat. What's his deal? Weegee is the, I guess, pseudonym of a guy named Arthur Felig. Yeah. And he was big from the 20s to, I think, the 50s. He was an independent photographer,

photojournalist. And he had a special knack for sniffing out crime scenes. So much so that someone once complimented him that he had the sense of a Weegee board to predict when a crime was going to occur. So he would be in the right place at the right time to really get all the photography he wanted out of it, right? How did he do that? Well, he lived in a shack behind the police station in Manhattan, and he had a police scanner. Right. Timsters probably. Yeah. He basically didn't have a life. So he just sat around listening to the police scanner and he would just head on over. He also had a pretty extensive network of informants, cops, robbers, barbeques, you know, prostitutes, whoever. I wonder if they based an LA confidential. Was it Danny DeVito? Was the,

was he the photographer? No, I think this guy was way more put together than Danny DeVito's character was. Yeah, he, although it would make sense because Weegee, which he adopted that name, but he spelled it phonetically W-E-E-G-E-E. Just call me Weegee. Right. He did travel the LA, and he created a spread called Naked City, and it became the movie, The Naked City, right? But he was just this famous crime scene photographer. One of the things that he became famous for was not just the crime scene. Any smoke could, you know, shoot a dead body, and that was something. But he would often turn and just start taking photos like close-ups of the crowd in their prairie and ecstasy, you know, like with these crazy, like some would be laughing and others

would be smiling and some would be crying. And it was just like, it would capture the range of emotion. And he has one very famous photograph called their first murder that was taken in Williamsburg, which is hipster central now in Brooklyn. And they, it's just this group of people of all ages. They all seem to be white, but they're all just in this weird pose, like almost writhing in ecstasy on the scene of a murder, like before the cops have even got there, like that crowd that crowds around. Oh yeah, look at them. Like Ray Bradbury wrote about them. Really? The crowd, they would be there on the scene when an accident occurred. Interesting. It's kind of like that. But anyway, Weegee had some pretty good stuff.

Well, and that kind of brings up a point that crime scene photographs have been viewed, and this is ones from back in the day. I don't think they view new ones as art, but in Hollywood, in LA, they dug up in 2001 a box, I say a box, it's probably more than one box. Yeah. A trove. A trove, a treasure trove, if you will, of old forensic photos. And some of them were some of the most infamous crimes and murders in the history. And Black Dahlia comes to mind. I don't know if that was in there, but yeah, I wonder if it was in there. I'm sure it was. Probably so. And some of these negatives were decomposing and deteriorating at this point. So they said, you know, we should preserve these because it's historical record. And some of these

are really great photographs. And so years later, they actually took it on tour in art galleries. What was it called? I think it was called, I know Weegee did that, didn't he? Yeah, Weegee had one in New York called, Weegee murders my business. I read a quote from him. There's a pretty cool book called Shots in the Dark based on a true TV documentary, I think. But it's a lot of crime scene photography, but it's an explanation about crime scene photography, too. There's a quote from Weegee where gangsters in the 40s and 50s, the big ones, they reveled in their notoriety. But it was the young punks who tried to like cover up and pretend they weren't, you know, criminals. And he would always say to him, like, you just wait until

you make it big, you punk, then I'll take your picture. So he's a tough guy. Really? Yeah. Is he still around? No, I think he's dead. He was working in the 20s through the 50s. Well, I mean, he knows how old he was. He's immortal. He could be like really old. So crime scene photography? I don't have anything else. I don't need it. Pretty straightforward. If you want to see Weegee's their first murder, it's pretty interesting. You should type in crime scene photography in the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com. This concludes our Dexter Loven series, Valentine Week series of crime and documentation. Indeed. And since I said search bar, that means Chuck, of course, it's time for Listener Mail. Yeah, we're doing a shout out and now I say we

never do them, but we're kind of doing them more. We never do shouts out. The only reason I'm doing this is because this this lady has been writing me since last summer, August, I think. You really make them wait. Her birthday shout out. No, she broke me in August for this dude's birthday, which is now. Oh, wow. So I thought, you know, persistence pays off. Yeah. Sarah. So her boyfriend, his name is Graham Baker, and he is turning 25, I believe, tomorrow. She says she's collecting birthday greetings, and he's such a super fan that she thought, I think he actually said, if I ever received anything from Josh and Chuck, I would probably lose my mind. So hopefully he's going crazy right now. And she said, here's some information about him

that you should read. He turns 25 on February 18th. He's doing his master's in religious studies at McMaster University in Canada, Ontario, Canada. Yeah. And it's going to complete his thesis this summer. He needs some encouragement, she says. So keep on plugging away there, Graham. He's originally from Edmonton, Josh, calls Calgary his home, and is in Hamilton until summer of 2011. That's a lot of information. She says I live in Calgary. Others more. Is this social security number in there? No. They both listened to Stuff Mom Never Told You and Stuff You Should Know on their road trips. Nice. He lived in Prague for four months to study abroad. Very cool. He really likes Star Trek. He's really funny. And his two favorite bands? Yes. Henry Clay People.

Nope. The Band. No, those are my two favorite bands. Jimmy Cliff. No. Wilco and the National. Todd Rungren. Todd Rungren. So, Graham, happy birthday, dude. And tell Sarah to quit emailing us. This has been going on for months. Yeah, I think you can reasonably block her now. Yeah, she's kind. But yeah, happy birthday, dude. And thanks for listening. Good luck with that, the religious studies. Happy birthday, Graham and Sarah. That was very kind of you. So if you have a birthday request, birthday shout out request, don't send it. You can send us something else, though. And if you do, go ahead and email us at stuffpodcastathowstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. To learn more about

the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The How Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes. Brought to you by the re-invented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff, stuff that'll piss you off. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil asset work. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Crash Course, a podcast about business,

political and social disruption and what we can learn from it. I'm Tim O'Brien. Every week on Crash Course, I'm going to bring listeners directly into the arenas where epic upheavals occur, and I'm going to explore the lessons we can learn when creativity and ambition collide with competition and power. Listen to Crash Course every Tuesday on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.