Stuff You Should Know - How Death Masks Work

Episode Date: January 16, 2013

One of the earliest civilizations we've detected, the Myceneans, kicked off the habit of creating a mask of a deceased person's face in deathly repose. What began as an ancient rite has only recently fallen out of practice around the world. Learn about this dignified but ghoulish custom with Josh and Chuck. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jackmove 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 podcasts. Brought to you by the 2012 Toyota Camry. 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. This is a very plaster-erific episode of Stuff You Should Know.

Did you ever work a plaster when you were a kid? Art class. That's a no. I did work. I had one of those little pottery wheels. Oh, yeah? Like the toyish version of it. Oh, cool. And there's something like clay, wet clay in your hands is really a neat feeling.

Hey, just tell Demi more of that. Yeah. You know? Yeah. That made for one sexy scene. Male nipples. What made an appearance in that scene? The Swayze shirtless?

Yeah. Okay. I believe so. Ah, he was always shirtless. Yeah, I think he was. He was shirtless for most of his career. Yeah. Have you ever seen that dirty dancing at the end of that movie

when they do the whole dance showdown thing? Oh, yeah, yeah. Somebody put Iron Man in over Patrick... No, over Jennifer Gray. So it's the whole scene, but it's Iron Man dancing with Patrick Swayze. And it's really neat and hilarious for someone. Oh, the song Iron Man is used instead of... Nope.

Iron Man, the cartoon superhero, the comic book hero, is dancing with Patrick Swayze at the, for some reason, at the end of this. I gotta see that now. You should. I don't even know what that looks like. You should check it out. I cannot visualize it. Well, visualize this, pal.

July 22nd, 1934. Chicago. See? It's hot. Real hot. 30-something people. 32 people, maybe 33, died from the heat that day. Really?

That's how hot it was in Chicago. We should say. Chuck and I, because of our work schedules, we are frequently sequestered away from everybody else while they do fun things like hilarious book exchanges is a good current example. Yeah, if you hear people laughing in the deep background, which is something you've never heard before on our show, that's because our department's having a party without us.

Yeah. It's really sad. Yeah. All right. So back to it. Back to July 22nd, 1934. There was a- People dying of heat.

Yeah. There was a movie, a Clark Gable movie, that a guy named John Dillinger wanted to go see. Oh, a famous gangster, John Dillinger? He was a famous bank robber. Yeah. He was an Indiana man. And over the course of a year, he robbed a ton of banks.

He apparently robbed a police station or two, killed at least one cop. And on his birthday, a couple months prior, I think in May, he'd been made public enemy number one by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. Yeah. On this night, July 22nd, 1934, he would be betrayed by a woman in red, a madam, as a matter of fact. Ooh, Anna Sage. Anna Sage, that's right.

And he went with his girlfriend and Anna Sage, who was his girlfriend's landlady, to see this movie. And after they came out, the FBI was waiting for him. He takes off running, pulls out his gun, really does, and they just kill him with a hail of bullets. One of them gets him in the back of the neck and it goes out his eye, and that did it for John Dillinger, aka public enemy number one.

And sold out by Anna Sage, as it turns out. Who was then deported back to Romania, I think. Oh, really? For her troubles, yeah. Thanks for the help. Yeah. Now, here's your one-way ticket on this disease-ridden ship. Exactly.

So he dies, but that's not the end of the story. He was basically put on public display. Either he was put on public display, or the public said, we're going to need to see this guy. Yeah, that was sort of a thing, though. Like, I remember when Jesse James was killed. Yeah. Same deal, though.

Like, these notorious criminals, sometimes when they were caught, it would be like a big thing. Like, back in the old day, they would put him out in the day. Like, back in the old day, they would put him out in the town, square, like, in the pine box. Right. Come by and look at him. This was, I mean, Chicago in the 30s was not that far removed

from that, you know, Wild West. Like, get your picture taken next to the body of Jesse James. Right. So that's kind of what they did with Dillinger. And at least two different groups, actually three, but only one was authorized, made casts of his face after he was dead. And we call those death masks.

What those guys were doing was carrying on a centuries old tradition, millennia old, really, if you want to get technical, of basically making a negative image of a dead person's face so you can make, I guess, masks from it later on. Yeah. Or, you know, a full statute head. Bust, if you will. Yeah, or bust, or full statue, if you really want to go all the way.

But, um, curiously, and I find this to be one of the facts of the show, they did make a positive of Dillinger's face, and J. Edgar Hoover had one in his office, as, I guess, sort of a trophy of sorts. He did. I thought that was pretty cool. I never knew that. Yeah, that would be cool to not only have a death mask of John

Dillinger, but the one that was in J. Edgar Hoover's office. Yeah. That's just specific. Yes, very. Um, so I said that this is a very old thing, and it goes back at least to the Egyptians, but they're the first ones who we know made some sort of funerary mask of the deceased.

They had a very good reason, and theirs was that if the soul, if you didn't make a mask of the deceased, the soul couldn't find the body any longer and wouldn't have a face in the afterlife. Yeah, because as you learned in our mummification cast, the face is wrapped up. Right. So there is no face any longer.

So there you have it. You got like a King Tut, and it's not like the regular death mask. It didn't look like them. Right. Very ornate. Right. Uh, yeah.

Or candy. I think King Tut's was actually like, that's his face. Oh, really? Yeah, that they went to that level of trouble. I mean, I knew they tried to make it look like him, but was it actually a mold of his face? I believe it was. Yeah, the Egyptians weren't the only ancient group

to do this either, Chuck. The Mycenaeans who were, whose civilization was discovered by Heinrich Schleemer. Yeah. He found some death masks, and they're really rough and weird looking, but they are, they took gold sheets that were pliable enough so that they laid over people's faces, and they made like a, again,

a funerary mask. Wow. Yeah. So if you didn't have, if you weren't super famous or a nobleman or have a lot of money, you could still get the old death mask. It was probably made of linen and painted gold or papyrus maybe, but you could still get your death mask.

Right. Even if you weren't King Tut. Sure. The Romans did a lot of this too, and the Romans actually had, I thought I knew everything about ancient Rome. Yeah. But it turns out that they made death masks, and they're at the funeral, a person who kind of looked like the deceased

would wear their death mask. Yeah. And then other people would wear that person's ancestors, their dead relatives' death masks. And basically you just have like a dead family reunion at the person's funeral. Then after the funeral, that recently deceased person's death mask was put together with all of his relatives

or her relatives. Just wait for the next person. Yeah, and then he would come out with everybody else to bring the new person into the circle, which is kind of neat. I didn't realize that they did that. It's very odd. But and I wonder if they would do impressions of them

like, oh, I'm Uncle Slavius. Look at me. I love wine. Come here and sit on my lap. Yeah. So you mentioned the ancient Romans. Caesar, Julius Caesar actually had a full wax cast of his entire body after his death.

Yeah. Stab wounds and everything. And Mark Antony was, I guess, dumb enough to go show it off to a crowd. And they rioted and burned down the Senate building. Yeah. So I don't know what reaction he was looking for, but that probably wasn't it.

And they're like, we love your records. Not that Mark Antony. So I guess with the Romans, too, with Egyptians, basically throughout history, if you weren't wealthy, you probably weren't going to have a death mask made of you. If you weren't wealthy or you weren't like the king. Yeah. And one reason is because a lot of times these were artists

before photography, artists and painters and sculptors, as soon as someone died of note, they would get their death mask made so they could then paint them and sculpt them and have a reference for what they look like. Yeah. And same thing. I mean, artists didn't paint nobodies. You know what I'm saying?

Exactly. So you didn't need to have a death mask made of you. And this is pretty much the way it was in Europe for most of history, except in Italy. Italy pretty early on said if you achieve something notable, probably make a death mask of you. So if you see early inventors and artists and those kind of poets, if you're in Italy, you'd probably have a death mask made.

If you're a notable personality. Right, like Da Vinci. Sure, he's probably got a death mask. But elsewhere, England, France, all that, it wasn't until late modern history that you started to see death masks of non-noble people coming out. And as a matter of fact, it was Madame Tussaud, the lady behind the wax museums who kind of brought death masks

to the masses during the French Revolution. She and her uncle, Philippe Curious. They were just masters of wax. And they worked a lot. Yeah. There was one of Louis the 16th's mistresses, underwent the guillotine. And she apparently had a terrible grimace on her face when she died.

I wish people could have seen the face you just made. You also curled up your hand for some reason. Yeah, don't think she did, too. Yeah. And so, Philippe Curious, he basically pinched her face back into, the decapitated head's face back into a nice position. And then rolled her in some wax that he laid out next to the grave. Wow.

Yeah, they were operating on this higher death mask level like no one ever has. But the Madame Tussaud wax museum that you enjoyed today grew out of a death mask operation. Interesting. And it seems like a very macabre thing to do. But it's different now. These days we like to remember our deceased ones as living and look at photographs of them doing things where they're alive and lively. Yeah. And go die over there where we don't have to see them think about it.

Exactly. Close casket funeral. But it wasn't the same back then. They would, royal and wealthy families would display these death masks of their relatives in, like, you know, the parlor room or the drawing room or here in the main hallway. And it was, you know, it was a point of pride. It wasn't like macabre, weird or gross. Then eventually it became pseudoscientific with the advent of phrenology.

I wish we had a good article on that. We don't. I haven't seen one. It's pretty interesting, like the early days of that stuff. Maybe we'll pull it together. It's like when people were just starting to figure out the brain and not really having any idea what they were doing. Yeah, really missing the mark. A lot of times, yeah.

Yeah. So phrenology basically was the idea that you could predict a person's personality, behavior, whether someone was a criminal or not, how intelligent they would grow up to be by, like, the shape of their face, the shape of their skull, the bumps on their skull. And so phrenologists, as this field grew in the 19th century, kind of increased the demand for death masks because they wanted to compare people side by side. Right. So you've gotten some pretty cool death masks of, say, like John or Joseph Merrick. Oh, really? Yeah.

Or he's, I think there's like full body casts of him. Wow. Or, you know, a criminal or a genius or whatever, and these phrenologists would keep them side by side and try to like compare and figure out, there's got to be a key there somewhere. Right. And they have themselves convinced, but they were all wrong. Was there something, there had to be something to some of that research, right? There was a lot of consensus among scientists.

They're all wrong. That's all it took. Let's disappoint. One cool thing is that later on in today's world, you can look back at some of these death masks and gain a little bit of insight, diagnostically speaking, on how someone might have died. Right. In this article, they mentioned Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott. They think now he died of a stroke because his death mask, he has the telltale signs of like the droopy face on one side.

Yeah. And Abraham Lincoln, they think might have had a wasting disease because he had life masks made, which is same thing except you're alive. Before he died, had a couple of them made, and they look at these now and say, you know what, Abraham Lincoln might have been dying. Of like tuberculosis or something, maybe, right? Is that what they just said, a wasting disease? Yeah, I think that's a wasting disease. Yeah, that makes sense. Consumption.

But then, of course, Booth took care of that in a more hasty manner. Yes. I don't want to give a spoiler away from the movie, but I'm pretty sure Lincoln gets shot. There is a, speaking of Booth, his brother Edwin had a, he was like one of the most famous actors, at least in the country, if not the world when he was working. Oh, really? And he had a death mask made, and it was collected by a man named Lawrence... Of Arabia? No.

His name was... Olivier? No. Lawrence Hutton. Oh. And Lawrence Hutton was a literary editor for Harper's Magazine, which is still around today. Very good. And he was in a junk store in New York one time and ran across a death mask and just was immediately smitten with the idea of collecting these things.

So he spent the rest of his life traveling the world, finding death masks, buying them, having them made of people in some cases. He had one of Edwin Booth. And he amassed this incredibly large collection, the world's largest individual collection of death masks. And when he died, he bequeathed it to Yale. No, Princeton, I'm sorry. Oh, nice. So Princeton has this museum of death masks now. Holy cow.

I'd love to see that. Well, lucky for you, buddy. They digitized it. Oh, really? Yep. They have this really nice website, the Lawrence Hutton Death Mask Museum website. And it's got all of them on there. It's really, really interesting.

Some are very, very old and like poorly done. There's one of Lincoln that it's just like, oh, wow, looking at Lincoln's face because he's so recognizable. Yeah. But to see the details. Yeah. Daniel Day-Lewis right there. All right. And you can't hear his weird voice.

Right. But you can almost, you can almost hear it just looking at it. But it's the details. That's the thing about death masks that are so, I think alluring to some people is it's not only the detail of like, you know, the age and the face and what life did to them. But it's also the detail of the absence of life. Yeah. Like it's a death mask, you know.

Like the hollow eyes. Or in the case of Dillinger, the bullet hole. Yeah. Apparently his death mask was so detailed. They did such a good job with it that you could see the abrasions on his face from where he hit the pavement when he fell down dead. Yeah. Looking at some of these up close, like the detail is remarkable.

It's pretty eerie. Yeah. So if you can't make it to Princeton, you can check out the Lawrence Hutton. Just type in Lawrence Hutton Princeton and it'll bring that up. It's a pretty cool little website you can spend some time on. Yeah. And if you do go to Princeton, they got a great little brew pub. You should go to see the death mask.

Go have some beer. What brew pub? Yeah. I mean, I can't remember. I mean, I assume it's still there. When I was living there in the mid-90s, I bet it's still there. But it was kind of new at the time. It was like, whoa, a brew pub.

Yeah. This is crazy. Yeah. It's crazy. 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. 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 answer for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. From Wall Street to Main Street and from Hollywood to Washington, the news is filled with decisions, turning points, deals and collisions.

I'm Tim O'Brien. The senior executive editor for Bloomberg Opinion. And I'm your host for Crash Course, a weekly podcast from Bloomberg and iHeart Radio. Every week on Crash Course, I'll 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. Each Tuesday, I'll talk to Bloomberg reporters around the world, as well as experts in big names in the news. Together, we'll explore business, political and social disruptions and what we can learn from them. I'm Tim O'Brien, host of Crash Course, a new weekly podcast from Bloomberg and iHeart Radio.

Listen to Crash Course every Tuesday on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so let's talk about how you do this, shall we? Yes. You need to do it really soon after the person dies because you don't want the bloat to set in. You can distort the face and they want, like, the death face. Not the two days after death face. Right, exactly. So they would apply grease to the face, especially on facial hair because it made it easier to take the bandages off

and they didn't want to, like, rip out your eyebrows. Yeah, because you still had a funeral to hold. Exactly. You didn't want to look like Sergeant Mauser from Police Academy. Do you remember? Yeah, he's got his eyebrows blown off. Have you ever seen anyone with no eyebrows? I saw Mauser. It's just weird because sometimes you can't pinpoint why they look so freaky.

I remember a guy in high school shaved his eyebrows, one of the, you know, one of the bad kids. Oh, yeah? Came in one day with this. That's how he was rebelling? I don't know, he was just one of those bad kids. Like, I didn't associate with him because I was a good boy. But he came in one day in my industrial arts class. He has eyebrows shaved and it freaked me out.

Really? Oh, yeah. Like, I definitely didn't have anything to do with him after that. It was really strange looking. He shaved his eyebrows. Yeah, I think it was probably a Pink Floyd thing. So then you apply the plaster bandages. It's interesting is the first layer is where you get all your detail.

That's really what the death mask is. And then all the other layers just reinforce that first layer. Right. So anybody who's ever hung drywall knows that if you don't get that thing smooth when you tape it, it just is broadcast throughout the whole wall. It's just ruined. Yeah. Just set the house, just burn the house down.

My guest bedroom. Yeah. Yeah, you know. That is a very bad job in there. Yeah. And it's funny when contractors have come by since then. They've gone in that room and I've been like, yeah, boy, I don't know who did this drywall job.

It sucks. All right, so the plaster sets back in the day. It took about an hour these days. It'll set in just a few minutes. And then you carefully remove the mold. You've got your negative and then it's up to you. You can do a wax positive. You can do bronze.

What else? However much you want to charge people. Yeah, I guess so. Marble. There's one in Napoleon that they made out of marble. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah, he's not very intimidating when you see his death mask.

Yeah, no. But I mean, they broke his spirit pretty good. Yeah. Sure. Exile to an island where it's just you and some other jerks. Yeah, it might have been nice. Yeah, I don't think he liked it. He was too bent on taking over the world.

To stick him on an island was like the greatest insult. Like this is what you control now. Yeah. Napoleon. This little tiny space. You said that these days plaster dries in a few minutes. And actually, there were death masks. I'm sure somebody somewhere is still making a death mask here or there.

But George Bernard Shaw had one made when he died in the 1950s. Oh, wow. So it's still something of a modern event. I'm totally going to get one made. Are you? Yeah, why not? Nikola Tesla had one made. Yeah, his is.

Have you ever seen his? His is interesting because I've only seen the one picture. That one. Yeah, as a younger man. So he got older is just, I don't know, you know, the ears are huge and his nose was really large. It doesn't look that large in this picture. And I guess I'd never seen it at profile. But yeah, he looks sort of like David Bowie.

No. It was a guy, the old, old guy who took all the drugs. Walter Matthew. No. Not burrows, but Timothy Leary sort of looked like a Timothy Leary before he died. Gotcha. So like just old. Remember Timothy Leary died on webcam, right?

Oh, really? Didn't he like live stream his death? Like even before anyone knew how to live stream, he figured it out somehow. I had no idea. I believe he did. That's sad. I'm sure it's up on the web. All right.

So we tell our awesome kind of fact of the podcast story. Sure, man. Of the unknown woman of the scene. AKA the Lincoln New Dayless Scene. 19th century Paris, Josh. Here's the story. An anonymous woman moved to Paris from the country, falls in love with a young man and gets her heart broke in two by this French jerk. She is distraught.

She casts herself into the river and the river scene. Is it scene? I believe so. And sin. Sin. And nobody claimed the body ever. And the mortician was taken by her beauty and the... He said, oh, this dead lady is so hot.

Well, maybe. But he was taken with her beauty and her calm, almost peaceful expression on her face. No one ever claimed her. He did a death mask and said, now she is known as the unknown woman of the scene or the sin. AKA the Lincoln New Dayless Scene. And a lot of people ended up having copies of this death mask in their house as, I guess, art or something. Yeah. This is kind of weird.

Yeah. But I mean, this is before collector's plates had come along. Maybe. True. And it was like spoons from St. Louis or this lady's death mask. So the author of this article pokes some holes in that story. The truth is that this death mask was in wide circulation, right? Yes.

And it probably wasn't from a woman who drowned because her features would have become bloated and distorted by the time she started to float to the surface. Yeah. And she also looks kind of peaceful. Yeah. So they think that it's probably a life mask posed for by a live model, but they never recorded who it was. That's right. But the mystery around it, I think, probably helped sell some of the death masks.

Sure. So they kept it going. And then that's the end of the story. I think here's where it gets really good. Me? Yeah. 1960. Peter Safar, an Austrian doctor, is developing this really radical new thing called trying

to save someone who's having a heart attack. Right. Rather than just be like, oh, well, yeah, which is something I could do. There is something you could do. It's called CPR and he championed it and got in touch with a Norwegian toy maker named Osman Lerdahl. That sounds so made up. It does.

And Armand Tensirian. And said, you know what? I need a way to teach this. I need some sort of like plastic dummy to teach people how to do this new thing called CPR. And the guy says, I got just the thing. This will use this face of this woman of the scene and throw it on a dummy bust. And that is who Recessa Annie was. Yep.

And as I was reading this the whole time I was like, no way. Is that Recessa Annie? Is that Recessa Annie? And it was on the following page was the sentence that became Recessa Annie. And I literally felt like, I don't know, it felt like exalted. Yeah. Man, I used to like put my mouth on that thing. On a 19th century death mask.

Yeah. Yeah. Every summer for lifeguarding. My mom used to teach CPR classes and she had a Recessa Annie and the kid too who had like that snappy little track suit. Like dark blue tracksuit. I don't remember the kid. Like the striped colors.

Yeah. You had these in your house? Yeah. It was a little off coding at first. That's kind of cool. But yeah. Eventually it was like, you know, it's neat. Yeah.

I can't believe I'm still a little blown away that that's who they ended up using. Yeah. Very neat. And when you looked and I looked up the death mask and then I looked up Recessa Annie and I was like, yeah, that's her. That's cool. Except she's got nostrils and a mouth hole. Right.

Which is very important. If you're going to practice CPR. Right. Or if you're going to make a life mask, you want to make sure that the person has a way to breathe. And that's usually through straws into the nostrils. Josh, if you live in Michigan, Midland County Historical Museum there, they have Jesse James and Butch Cassidy.

Sweet. You can go by and check that out. You know, if you go to the Makers Mark Distillery, their little tour, they have Frank James Gunn. One of the owner's grandfathers was the guy who Frank James surrendered to and he handed his pistol over. Oh, really? It's pretty neat. Have you ever been there?

Mm-hmm. Did you dip your own bottle? I know. Oh. They let you do that? They do. Yeah. I know.

Why didn't you do that, man? How can you go to the Makers Mark and not dip your own bottle? If you dip your own bottle, then it becomes a memento and it seems like a waste of bourbon. Oh. You wouldn't drink it? Sure. All right. Where else?

There's this very cool thing called the Black Museum. I look this up. In Scotland Yard. Oh, yeah. I want to go there. Well, you can't. I know. I want to meet a Scotland Yard detective who can get me in.

Well, you can't. You're not a Scotland Yard detective yourself. I will then go to Scotland Yard detective school so I can get into this thing. This thing has been around since 1874 and then moved and refurbished in the 1980s to New Scotland Yard. And it was originally called the Black Museum. Now it's called the Crime Museum. And dude, they have like letters from Jack the Ripper in there.

Wow. They have nooses that hung famous people. They have weapons from famous murder cases and a bunch of death masks, apparently. Why would you not let the public in? That's a travesty. I think any British police officer can go if they like make a reservation. Like you don't have to be a Scotland Yard dick, but yeah. Pretty cool.

Jack the Ripper letters. That's awesome. Yeah, there's got to be some movie plot based around the Black Museum that you could come up with. But just the name itself. Like everything comes alive. Maybe. At night.

Yeah. There you go. There's your movie. And poor Ben Stiller gets in trouble. And that's where it goes south. 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. Okay.

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 asset. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. From Wall Street to Main Street and from Hollywood to Washington, the news is filled with decisions, turning points, deals and collisions. I'm Tim O'Brien, the senior executive editor for Bloomberg Opinion.

And I'm your host for Crash Course, a weekly podcast from Bloomberg and iHeart Radio. Every week on Crash Course, I'll 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. Each Tuesday, I'll talk to Bloomberg reporters around the world, as well as experts in big names in the news. Together, we'll explore business, political and social disruptions and what we can learn

from them. I'm Tim O'Brien, host of Crash Course, a new weekly podcast from Bloomberg and iHeart Radio. Listen to Crash Course every Tuesday on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to learn more about death masks and you want to see some cool pictures of death masks, you can type the word death masks into the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for what? Well a couple of quick pieces of business and then listen to our mail.

So what's the first order of business check? Well we got a TV show coming out on Science Channel January 19th, which is right around the corner. 10 p.m., airing two episodes on the first night, premiere night, after Idiot Abroad's premiere, which is a very good lead-in for us, we're super excited about that. And what more do you need to know? Nothing. You need to know that you should be there and watch them.

Yeah, such a little DVR and give us some love. Make some noise at the Science Channel Facebook page, that will help us out. Yeah, and Twitter. Yeah, we appreciate it. What about Listener Man? Okay, Josh, I'm going to call this Martha. Martha's got a few corrections for us. On our, and we haven't done corrections in a while, but on our topic of peak oil, she's

in the business. She knows a lot about it. First of all, she affirms me, which I like. Chuck was right guys, dinosaurs in no way shape or form make up oil or gas deposits. Most of the source material comes from things like algae and phytoplankton that has died and sunk to the bottom of its lake, ocean or sea. Number two, the things you said about proved reserves being unreliable, it's partially true guys.

In some countries like the U.S. and Canada, U.K. and members of the Eurozone, proved reserves are actually audited by regulatory bodies. In the U.S., it's the SEC. This is because an investor would most likely consider the amount of proved reserves a company has access to, since that tends to be a good indicator of the health of the firm, whether or not it's a sound investment. If you misrepresent your reserves to the public, the SEC will come after you and the penalties can be severe.

In some countries, the proved reserves is very conservative, actually, heavily audited and is probably pretty reliable, but she did point out that other countries where they might not want to be as forthcoming, you can get some hinky numbers. I feel like we said that. I can't remember. Then number three, she takes us to task a little bit on fracking. She said, I know it's a contentious subject, and we just should do a podcast on this. It's in my ideas queue.

You guys refer to fracking as causing an environmental disaster every time someone does it. You may call me a shill, but even Lisa Jackson of the EPA, who is not a friend of the oil industry, has said that there are no proven cases of fracking resulting in underground freshwater contamination, and fracking has been conducted in the U.S. since the 1940s. It's far more likely that poor well-designed and bad cement jobs would be the culprit. However, there is a big study being conducted right now by the EPA, so all of this may change if they find something, but as of now, the science doesn't support the position of most anti-fracking groups, so I definitely want to do a podcast on this now.

I feel like she's challenged. I feel like she's using psychology on us right now. I love your show. I find it fascinating, but I'm weird like that. Keep up the great work. Can't wait to see your TV show in January, and that is from Martha. Martha, that was a perfect letter from an expert, somebody in the field, taking us to task, being nice about it, letting us tell everybody else that maybe we got it wrong.

Maybe we didn't. Yeah, you know. And then mentioning our TV show. Exactly. So, thank you for the perfect letter. Yes. If you want to send us a perfect tweet, you can tweet to us at SYSK Podcast. You can send us the perfect Facebook posting at facebook.com slash stuff you should know,

and you can send us a perfect email to stuffpodcastatdiscovery.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Brought to you by the 2012 Toyota Camry. 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 for it. Be sure to listen to The War on Drugs on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Langston Kermit. Sometimes I'm on TV. I'm David Bowie, and I'm probably on TV right now.

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