Stuff You Should Know - How Megalodon Worked

Episode Date: May 3, 2016

Between 2 to 20 million years ago, the biggest shark with perhaps the most devastating bite of any animal ever ruled the oceans with an iron jaw. Despite its fierceness, megalodon went extinct while other species that swam with it survive today. Why? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

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

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

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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry. This is Josh again. And this is Stuff You Should Know. Megalodon. Burglodon.

Saxophone. Jerry, where's yours? Nice, Jerry. Yep, she trained well. So, Chuck. Yep. Have you ever seen Megalodon? No.

No, you haven't. Neither have I. Neither has any human being, because they're extinct. That's right. But they are pretty awesome. And when they were alive, you would not have wanted to see one anyway. Well, maybe from shore.

Maybe. Until they learned to walk. Yeah. And you would have been like, oh, I regret coming to the shore today. Caracodon, Megalodon. No, I think, I don't know if that's it. Carcarodon.

How's that? Carcharodon. I'm going to say Carcarodon. Carcharodon. I like Carcharodon. All right. That's the official name. And it was a real thing.

It's not made up. It is not the invention of a cryptozoologist or a sci-fi writer. No, it was a real thing. It was a real thing. And giant, giant shark. I mean, so giant, I don't want to overuse the word mind-boggling.

So I'm just going to say incredibly remarkable. Should we go ahead and just say the size of a school bus? Yeah, I saw the size of a Greyhound bus. It's about the same size. Well, I guess, yeah. One smells a lot worse than the other. Which one? Am I right?

The Greyhound. The school bus just smells like fear and disappointment. The Greyhound bus smells like all that, plus days and days of body odor and farts and cigarette butts. Yeah. You ever taken a long bus trip? No. I took one from Arizona to Atlanta.

It's the worst. Yeah. Well, yeah, no one. I think I might have talked about this. It didn't dawn on me until like day two. I was like, wait a minute. Nobody is able to shower. We're all just getting stinkier.

We're all eating garbage food. Oh, wait a minute. And farting into our cloth seats. It was awful. How long did the trip take? It feels like it was like three days. Because you stop like every freaking two hours. Because you've got to account for however many people on there.

And it breaks down? Didn't break down. Oh, yeah? You just had to stop a lot for breaks. And we got stopped in Mississippi for a drug dog to come on. Oh, really? Did anybody get in trouble? No.

They just randomly stopped for the drug dog? Yep. And this German shipper jumped all over the seats. And they opened up the baggage underneath. And he ran all over the place. So I guess. Then he went home and took a shower. Yeah.

He was like, man, get me out of there. I guess smuggling drugs on a bus is actually, when I thought about it, I was like, what a great idea. Yeah, because it's apparently under the radar. Yeah. And everybody else's smell is overpowering the smell of the drugs. You'd think. There probably were tons of drugs on that bus.

And the dog was just like, ugh. I had 10 pounds of cocaine. And they didn't smell that. Just kidding. So like you really needed to say, just kidding. Well, you never know. Kids listen to this. Yeah, probably especially this one.

We want to say hello to all of the sixth grade classes that are listening to this right now. We'd also like to say a special hello to our new sponsor, Greyhound Bus Lines. Leave the driving to them. So Chuckers. Yes. We are talking about the Megalodon, the biggest shark

that ever lived. And it may have had, from what I can understand, it makes sense too, if you stop and think about it. It may have had the most devastating, as how I've seen it put, bite of any animal that ever lived in the history of Earth. Yeah, I would say that's accurate. It was bigger than T-Rex.

T-Rex is very ferocious. Had a very ferocious bite. Ergo, ipso, facto, it was probably more ferocious as bite-wise than T-Rex or anything else. Let's talk about it. All right. Before, like 400 years ago, people were dumb. And they thought they found these fossils of these humongous

six-inch teeth. Like a tooth itself is like larger than a hand, a human hand, like a large-ish human hand. So again, to put this in perspective, because everybody knows what great white teeth look like. About the size of a shot glass. It's a great white tooth? Yeah.

OK, so about two inches. These were six, so three times larger than a great white tooth. And T-Rex is right in the middle at something like. Oh, really? Yeah, T-Rex is at about four inches. So we're talking a megalodon tooth is 15 centimeters in length, where a great white shark is about five centimeters.

Yeah, and that's for a single tooth. Just one tooth. Very, very large. And I saw that they actually go up to seven inches. Oh, wow. As far as what they found. So 400 years ago, people found these fossils. And they said, oh my god, it's a petrified dinosaur tongue.

Dragon tongue. Oh. Even better. Well, I have dragon, snakes, and dinosaurs. OK. Down in my research. I saw dragons only. I believe in dragons 400 years ago.

Sure. And then in 1667, Danish anatomist named Nicholas Steno said, these aren't tongues. They're teeth. Don't be stupid, everybody. Yeah, these are gigantic teeth. And everybody was like, don't be ridiculous. They're dragon tongues.

I'm wearing one around my neck as we speak. And I use it in my potions along with Eye of Newt. Probably so. Yeah, apparently they did use it in medicine. Oh, I'm sure. You find something that big. It's got to have great powers when you grind it up and snort it. So they found these teeth over the years in these fossils.

Not only just the teeth, but something called centra, C-E-N-T-R-A. And that is the, it's not vertebrae, but it's a part of the spine that doesn't deteriorate. Right, because here's the problem. A shark skeleton is made up almost entirely of cartilage. So no matter how big it is, over time, that cartilage is going to break down and return to the dust on the bottom of the sea floor.

That's right. And you'll never know what was ever there. But luckily, those teeth in the centra are made of harder stuff. And the teeth actually become fossilized. And there's another one of my favorite episodes that just flies under the radar. Fossils? Fossils was great.

Man, that's an old one. So you remember the fossilization process is where the individual atoms of this stuff are basically replaced by stone. And the thing literally turns to stone. So anything organic in it is replaced by stone, and it becomes fossilized in that sense. So that's why something like a tooth could survive.

Amazing. It becomes stone. And apparently, the same thing goes with the centra. So taking megalodon teeth and megalodon centra, they started making calculations and measurements and figuring out like, oh my god, this thing was enormous. Yeah, and we've mentioned the t-rex and dinosaurs a couple of times.

They weren't, if you're picturing in your head, dinosaurs roaming the earth and the megalodon swimming in the ocean. Fighting one another. Yeah, they didn't overlap by about 45 million years. So it wasn't even close. And of course, humans, we haven't been around that long at all in the grand scheme.

No, homo sapiens, maybe 100,000 years or so. Yeah, so obviously, we were not there during the time of the megalodon either. Right. So our opening bit about standing on the beach watching them is it was jokes. It's stank of BS. Just humor.

So dinosaurs were around from 200 million years ago to 65 million years ago when the big asteroid hit. And then megalodon was from 20 million years ago to about 2 million to 1 and 1 half million years ago, it seems like. Yeah. So yeah, absolutely no overlap whatsoever. And I was just helping out a sixth grade class just now.

So you mentioned before the scientists were left with quite a task. It's not like finding 80% of like a dinosaur's bones and saying, well, we can put it together. They didn't have a lot to go on with just the center in the teeth, but they're much smarter than we are. So they were able to do so. Yes.

And one of the things that the centra actually shows too is growth rings, right? So just like a tree, sharks actually have a signature of growth, I guess you'd call it, like a tree ring on their centra on these kind of vertebrae-like structures. That's key. They get one every year, every season

when it changes from, I think, warm to cold. They get a little growth ring. And so if you're an ichthyologist or a paleontologist or a paleo-ichthyologist specifically, yeah, you could look at one of these things and be like, oh, well, this megalodon lived to 150 years old. That's right. Because these are 150 rings.

Yeah, and apparently, wide light rings means you grew faster as a megalodon. And narrow dark rings means you grew a little slower. So they can look at these growth rates in the age of death and just understand a little bit more about the great journey to extinction. Right. So you, too, will understand a little bit more

about the great journey to extinction right after these messages. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends,

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

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

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

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

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

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you know, stop, stop, you shouldn't know, you know.

So check, they found teeth. Yeah. And they found teeth, actually, all over the world. There's a lot, it's an amazing amount of stuff that they were able to glean from just finding some teeth and some centra here and there. And one of the things that they figured out from the teeth is that, wow, we found teeth all over the world.

In Europe, in India, in Japan, in North America, South America, Africa, Australia, basically, they've been found around every continent, except for Antarctica. And I would guess that if you could dig down through the ice sheets around Antarctica, you would probably find some megalodon teeth. Yeah, because it was very different a million years ago

down there, as far as I know. Yeah, you like living in South Carolina? Nice coastal beach scene there. Imagine the megalodon swimming around. Megalodon. That's exactly what happened. In 2009, some paleontologists from a university in Florida, I'll just say that.

That was very generous of you. They discovered some fossils. And these specifically were interesting, because they were all little baby megalodons. It was a nursery. Yeah. And they discovered the same thing off the coast of South Carolina, which,

if you know how big something is when it dies, and you know how big it is when it's born. Just add them together and divide by two. And you have a pretty good idea of what its life was like. And when they were little babies, they were just 20 feet long. Yeah. Isn't that cute?

They figured out, did you say that nursery was found in Panama by those researchers? Yeah, and then I think the other one was off South Carolina. Right. So they figured out from these teeth that the megalodon infant was as big as a normal size great white shark adult. Like a pretty big great white.

Yeah. That's like on the larger side. Yeah. That's amazing. 20 feet long are the babies. Yeah. That's like baby Huey, basically, but as a shark. So this means clearly this is the apex predator of its time.

And it can, well, it probably went everywhere because it could, because nothing threatened it. You could eat whatever it wanted to. And all things suggest that they ate a lot of whales, baleen whales. They found teeth marks on whale bones. They even found teeth stuck in whale fossils. Yeah, pretty exciting.

No, it happened there. They were in the middle of a meal. Yeah. When they got wiped out. Or they lost a tooth and it went down with the whale. Well, it said teeth, though. Like, maybe they just lost a bone. Maybe it was like me.

And it bit into a chicken bone and started dropping teeth. Was that what happened? The chicken bone? The second one broke off at a Falcons game. It didn't hurt. That's right. You told us about that. It was so weird.

I was like, well, my tooth's just broken half. OK, as long as it didn't hurt. And I went and sat back down to my seat and watched. And passed out from the pain that suddenly swarmed over you. No, there was no pain. The only pain was watching the Falcons this season. Yeah, seriously. So they weighed between 50 and 100 tons.

And they could eat up to 2,500 pounds of food a day. I love this. Isn't that amazing? I love the comparison the author made. I wasn't going to do it. OK, we won't. No, go ahead. The author said, that's 500 more pounds

than the average American eats in a year. Just such a dumb comparison. But it's also hilarious in every way. I think good comparisons are one where it really hits home. Like that doesn't. So the author should have been like, that's 50,000 Big Macs. Maybe. That would have satisfied me.

Yeah, times 50,000. That was terrible. Did we say Chuck, how big the mouth is based on these reconstructions? No, they put how you see the big giant shark mouth. Sometimes it's from a real shark. And sometimes they just put it together. In this case, they put it together.

Yeah, but the mouth will feature real megalodon teeth. But the bone jaws or cartilage jaws are obviously resin, right? But you'll frequently see somebody standing in one of these and they're just dwarfed by it. And this is pretty accurate. Apparently, it was reasonable for a megalodon to have a seven foot diameter, which is,

who knows how many meters, two at least, in diameter, the mouth. And so I saw this one, I think, shark facts or something, shark insider. Some site was basically like, actually, if megalodon were alive today, you wouldn't have to worry about it, because it would be like you eating a cheez-it and calling that a meal. They wouldn't even bother with you.

That's good. I would not gamble that and swim around it, because even if it just opened its mouth, you'd just go right in. Well, we like cheez-its. Exactly, and if there's a whole box of humans that megalodon would probably eat the whole thing. It is.

A box of humans is called a school bus. That's right. Full circle. Oh my gosh, Chuck. So you talked a little earlier about the bite force. This is a good comparison, I think, because it does hit home. Specialist, specialist? It's a weird thing to say.

Experts. Sure. Experts. She means cardiologists. Yeah, experts and researchers say that a megalodon's bite force was akin to us eating a grape, them eating a whale skull. So it could chomp through a whale skull

the same as we could mush through a grape, even those of us with fewer teeth. Yeah, and again, it's not just the bite wasn't so bad, just because the teeth are so big and the mouth has had such a wide diameter. It was designed, basically, to crush. Yeah, to crush, to disable, to disfigure and maim and pillage, that kind of stuff.

That's right. So yeah, it would be able to crush a skull very easily, and it did. As a matter of fact, the podcast Art for this episode has a megalodon eating a whale like it's nothing. Man. Awesome. Obviously, it's an artist's rendering.

Oh, it's not a underwater photograph. But it's pretty cool nonetheless. You know what's also cool is us taking a break. Oh, yeah. So let's do that, and we'll come back, and we'll finish up on the mighty megalodon. Megalodon! On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s,

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

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it, and popping it back in,

as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road.

OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god.

Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander

each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you know, stop, stop, you shouldn't know, you know. So how old are these dudes? Oh, remember, one and a half to two million years to 20 million years is when they lived. Oh, OK. I'm not sure how long they lived,

and I'm not sure that ichthyologists or paleo ichthyologists know yet. Well, it said they guess they became extinct about two million years ago. No, I mean, how long they lived in, like, like, their lifespan. Right, right, I hear you. I bet it was pretty big.

I don't know. Well, I mean, most large, like whale sharks and whales, they have long lives. Right. Unless someone hunts them. But they think they went extinct a couple of million years ago during the Pleo Pleistocene period. And we actually featured an article just a few days ago

about a new study on what they think caused the extinction, because they used to think it had more to do with climate changes that they couldn't keep up with. Yeah, but I believe the same researchers who found that Panamanian nursery also were the ones who conducted this study. Maybe not. But they showed that the global ocean temperatures

rose and declined during this 18 million-year period where the megalodon was around. And they're still megalodon. Yeah, their populations apparently didn't change. So they basically said, no, we don't think it was temperature or climate change that did it. We think it was a lack of diversity in the prey. Well, yeah, and I guess what you were talking about,

like eating a human, we'll say a human is six feet tall. That's still pretty large. And if that's not a cheeset, then you need to eat super large things and a lot of them. You better hope those large things are successful at reproducing as well, because if they go away, you're in big trouble. And they basically think that's what happened.

The food sources became less diverse, and then smaller predators evolved and started competing. And we should say they're probably faster and better at hunting and what happened. By smaller, they mean orcas. Yeah, sure. Like that was their smaller competition for the same prey. Yeah.

That's crazy. Yeah, and who was it? The Zurich's Paleontological Institute and Museum. They examined 200 megalodon records and came up with this new information. And they flat-out said changing climactic conditions do not appear to have had any influence. Yeah.

They're like ocean hot, ocean cold. We love it. Either way. Yeah. And I mean, if you're competing with an organism or a species that is going after the same prey but doesn't need as much as you to eat per day, you're going to lose, evolutionarily speaking.

For sure. It could very easily be what it is. And because megalodon, the recreations of them look a lot like great whites, a lot of people are like, well, they're obviously great white ancestors. Apparently not. Yeah. Apparently they are more closely related to mako sharks,

right? Oh, really? Yeah, mako sharks and poor beagle sharks, although they would share some sort of relation to great whites because they would both be lamina forms. And a lamina form is a shark with two dorsal fins, five gill slits in a mouth that extends back beyond the eyes so they can smile real wide after they eat a whole boat full of people.

I was about to do the jaws line. Smile, you son of a boop. We should shout out Gordon Hubbell. He's a megalodon expert who he had his theory. No, I think it's cool. He had his theory about the food source before it officially came out when everyone else was going to know it was the climate.

He actually theorized this beforehand. So good on you, sir. He's the same guy who says, no, no, no. There's no such thing as this megalodon still, right? Yeah, because we should do one on cryptozoology as a whole. There are people out there that want to believe that somewhere in the depths of the ocean in the deepest, darkest corners that we haven't explored

that there are these giant beasts still living. Right. And actually, they make great points. I mean, look at the sealocanth. We thought the sealocanth went extinct, and then it was caught off the coast of Africa in the 30s, I think, South Africa. And we realized, wow, this thing hasn't been extinct

for a couple hundred million years. And then in the 70s, they found the megamouth shark, which is a heretofore unknown shark species that fed on plankton deep, deep, deep in the ocean. And they caught one off of Hawaii, and they're like, this is new. So cryptozoologists point to these things, and they say, how can you say that there definitely

is no megalodons out there still? And I think that same guy who you shouted out to says, well, here's why, because the megamouth shark, which is a plant eater, lives in this part of the ocean where we just don't tread. We're just now developing the technology to be able to go down there. So our paths wouldn't really cross.

A megalodon would have the same type of habitat that a regular shark has. Yeah, coastal regions. Right. So we definitely would have noticed a megalodon by now. Even if there was just one left in the whole world, we probably would have encountered it by now, because our habitats overlap a little bit.

Yeah. And Acela camp isn't the size of a school bus in fairness. Yeah. So he kind of did a mic drop explanation in there. And they haven't found any megalodon teeth that are not fossils, even though some people have claimed that. It's all BS. Yeah.

Can we say that safely? I don't know. I think so. OK. But it's not to say that some people haven't made great hay out of this stuff, including a guy named, what is that dude's name? Steve Alton, he wrote a series of books called

Meg about a megalodon that likes to battle people and dinosaurs and stuff. And it's great fun. And then, of course, there's Megashark versus Giant Octopus. Have you seen that? No. I haven't either. But Debbie Gibson was in it, apparently.

Well, sign me up. And then there is a sequel to it called Megashark versus Crocosaurus. Yeah, Tiffany is in that. Actually, Urkel. Oh, right, Julia White. Yeah. Good for him.

And well, I guess we've got to talk about the elephant in the room. Discovery Channel. A couple of years ago, Discovery Channel, our former bosses, they aired a show to kick off Shark Week about the megalodon that had the look of a documentary. If you didn't know any better, you would think it was real, where they claimed the megalodon was real

and that it was killing people off the coast of South Africa. And it was this giant beast, 67 feet long, nickname Submarine. And it's terrorizing humans. And it was called Megalodon, the Monster Shark Lives. They, to put it lightly, came under a little bit of fire from the viewing public. Most notably, well, not most notably, but notably, Will Wheaton.

I don't know if Will still listens to our show, but at one point he did. Oh, yeah, Will, you better still listen to it. He was a friend of the show. He wrote a blog post, which I'm so glad he did, that he said a lot of things. But one of the things he said was, Discovery had a chance to get its audience thinking

about what the oceans were like when the megalodon roamed and hunted in them. It had a chance to even show what could possibly happen if there was something that large in predatorying the ocean today. But Discovery Channel did not do that. In a cynical poi for ratings, the network deliberately lied to its audience and presented fiction as fact.

They betrayed its audience during its biggest viewing week of the year. And Discovery Channel isn't run by stupid people. This was not a mistake. Someone made a deliberate choice to present a work of fiction more suited for sci-fi channel as truthful and factual. That is disgusting. Whoever made that decision should be ashamed.

Well, Will Wheaton was mad. He got up on his hobby horse, rightfully so, and called him out. Soapbox? Sure, not a hobby horse. And here's the deal, after the show airs, they have their, what do you call it, when you put a disclaimer? Party.

Yeah, well, they sure they had a party because it was huge in the ratings. But it said none of the institutions or agencies that appear in the film are affiliated with it in any way, nor have approved its contents. Though certain events and characters in this film have been dramatized, sightings of submarine continue to this day, which is total BS.

Well, no. There are a lot of people who say that they are sightings or whatever. And Megalodon was a real shark. Legends of Giant Shark persist all over the world. There's still debate about what they may be. So basically, people were like, Twitter lit up on fire. People went crazy and said, Shark Week is jump the shark

officially, like you're airing fiction as fact. And they came out a year after that last year, or I guess two years later. And the new brand, the brand new chief, Rich Ross. Rich Ross? No, Rich Ross. And said, you know what, we're not going to do things like eating alive.

Remember when they were going to have the snake eat the guy? Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. That was just a huge stain on their brand. So we're not going to do things like the Mermaid's documentary and the Megalodon documentary. What are they going to do? He said they were going to try and get back to educational programming.

So have they done that yet? When did he say that? This is in 2015. And I think he wanted to make a push to sort of be the leader once again in smart educational programming and not chief ratings boys. So we'll see.

Nice. Yeah. Yeah. Last thing I've got is if you love Megalodons and you have a lot of money, you can buy a Megalodon tooth for about $1,500. I wondered about that. 1,500 simoleons.

Boy, I would be worried that thing is fake. Yeah. Although, I mean, if you look online, it'd be tough to fake one. No. I mean, maybe to the discerning eye, but someone can make a fake one and show me right now and say, it looks real to me.

Look at this Megalodon tooth. Maybe the artist shouldn't have signed the bottom. Right. Yeah, right. That's it. I got nothing else. Megalodon. If you want to know more about those,

you can type that word in the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this another one for the Equal Pay Day episode, because we've got something a little wrong that we want to clear up. Whenever you guys touch on, hey, guys, big fan, whenever you guys touch on sensitive topics,

I'm always a little worried, is this going to be the time? They say something that makes me have to stop listening. No. But you never do. And this is from Ellen. And she says, you guys mentioned that in the US, women are guaranteed 12 weeks of paid leave. I have to take that one.

I said that. OK. I'm assuming you're talking about the Family Medical Leave Act. I wanted to point out a few strict qualifications, though, that don't apply to everyone. You must work for a public agency, including state, local, and federal employers, and local education agencies,

like schools, or a private sector employer who employ 50 or more employees for at least 20 work weeks in the current proceeding calendar year, including joint employers and successors with covered employees. And I had a nice exchange with some lady, this woman, who had to quit her job. And she got pregnant because it was under 50 employees.

And she and I both conceded, like, we kind of get it. If you have a really small business and you have eight employees and four of them get pregnant, you're kind of screwed. You're down 50% of your employees. Yeah. And she was like, yeah, I get that. You know, it's tough.

And she said, you know, people should sort of think about these things when they're going to get a job. A woman, if they want to have a baby, maybe go to a place that does have the FMLA qualification. So she, you know, she got both sides of the issue. Right. Which I thought was nice. Also, an employee must work for a covered employer and have

worked for that employer for at least 12 months and have worked for at least 1,250 hours during that 12 months. And work at a location where at least 50 employees are employed at the location or within 75 miles. So just more specificity there. Thank you for that. Yeah. She said, I'm not trying to call you guys out.

I know a lot of people listen to your show, though. And I think it's important that everyone understands how little support parents do have in terms of leave. We're way behind the rest of the world, and it's not something we should be proud of. She said we're only one of only seven countries in the world that doesn't have paid parental leave, because it's also unpaid.

I know. So come on, US, get it together. Yeah, and I'm sorry for misspeaking, but yeah. Also, my eyes are open. Like, I definitely didn't know all that for sure. Yeah, and I feel super lucky now, because our company gave us paid leave, paternal and maternal leave, which I now realize is super generous.

Yeah, it's pretty cool. So how about that? Yeah. And you took it too, like a champ. Yeah, and that is from Ellen. Thanks a lot, Ellen. If you want to get in touch with us for any reason, we would love that.

Just go ahead and tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast. Or join the phone on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.

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

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

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

or wherever you listen to podcasts.