Stuff You Should Know - How Nicotine Works

Episode Date: May 31, 2011

Sure, nicotine doesn't cause cancer, but it does rearrange the brain's reward system. Humans have been ingesting this plant for more than 6,000 years, but we generally understood little of it. Join Chuck and Josh as they explain how nicotine works. 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. That makes this Stuff You Should Know, the podcast. How's it going, man? Podcast intro. Version one. Okay, point one. How you doing? I'm well, sir. And you're enjoying, I guess we

can't say a whole lot of beverage. Not anymore. Remember, we used to just blatantly say stuff. You're enjoying a sparkling water, I can say that. Out of a can. Yep. Frenchy. Yeah, good stuff. Yeah. Why are we just determined to push it to the envelope of saying a brand name? It rhymes with the boy. Oh, so Chuck, you know, I was a smoker for a while. Yeah. And one could make a pretty good argument that I started out at an unreasonably young age. No, you weren't young. I was young. You weren't young. No, I was young. How old were you? Let me paint you a picture. Okay. Okay. So first time I tried a cigarette. It's in the mall. I'm young enough so that the guy who

owns the pub in the mall that has the cigarette machine that I'm buying cigarettes from comes out and is like, well, you could do it. But we made off with our cigarettes and smoked one and like the mall started spinning and everything was just crazy, right? You could smoke in the mall? Yeah. It was a while ago. Yeah. That was the first time. The second time was a few months later, eighth grade. Okay. And my friends and I all decided that it was high time we started smoking. So we pulled all of our money together and ended up with enough we figured for 10 packs of cigarettes. So everybody gave me the money. I got on my bike and rode to the gas station, rode up on my bike like the cashier saw me, this kid who's 13 right up on his bike. No,

14 just turned, put his bike down and walk in and go, I want 10 packs of cigarettes. Assorted brands. Assorted brands. Exactly. I bought like Cools. I bought Marlboro's. I bought Kent's, Derral's, like anything. I like that one. Virginia Slims. And I remember the cashier just like, okay, here you go, kid. And sent me off with a bag of 10 packs of cigarettes dangling from the handlebars of my bike. It's probably like 10 bucks too. It was about 10 bucks. Yeah. Back in the day. And we get back, I get back to the woods, everybody's like, oh my God, and we just started smoking. And like right off the bat, I started smoking tons of cigarettes. Were you inhaling at the time? Yeah. Oh yeah. And I turned green, got sick and still was like,

I like this a lot and smoked for 20 years. That is nuts. And Chuck today is April 28th. And how many days are there in April 30 or 31? I'm going to guess 31. I'm going to go with 31 too. And I am going to say, no 30. Okay. In three days on May 1st, it will be one year since I've had a cigarette. Wow. Man, that's a long time. I kicked it. Congratulations. I smoked too. You did probably never even shared that with me. I had no idea that you smoked. Yeah. I smoked in college like everyone does here and there. Did you have jazz hands while you smoked in college just now? Yeah. But it wasn't ever anything that got it's nicotine never took a hold of me to where I needed a cigarette. It was always very much a social thing. And then when I traveled around

Europe, of course I rolled my own cigarettes and thought I was just super cool. Yeah. But you know what kids? I was not cool. I was dumb. No, I want to add that too. There was absolutely nothing cool about what I did. There's nothing adventurous and many, many, many times over the course of my life. I cursed myself. I cursed that cashier. I even cursed my bike for allowing me to make one of the worst decisions of my entire life that I regretted time and time and time again. You cursed Abraham Lincoln because he was on the two $5 bills that you used to pay for it. No, I think it was probably he was on the pennies that we used to pay for the 10 packs of cigarettes. So nicotine got under my skin, Chuck, as it were, which is one of a few ways it

can diffuse into the human body. That's right. Should we talk about tobacco just for a second here? Let's. At the beginning. It was cultivated as early as 6000 BC. People were chewing on or inhaling tobacco. They realized, hey, this is pretty good. Yeah. Native Americans, I'm not sure what tribes, they used to roll like cigars that were several feet long and somebody would hold it at the end, maybe another one in the middle and you'd walk up and you'd puff on them like really hard and inhale until you started coughing. And then from the coughing, you get lightheaded and supposedly you had a vision. Interesting. Well, I do know that as early as the 1600s, people actually thought, you know what? This might be bad for you. And I bet you

there's a link here to some of these diseases that are killing people in the smoke that we're inhaling. Yes. And I didn't know that. I had no idea it went back that far. I didn't either. Concerns about smoking. Right. And cancer, apparently they were aware of the cancer back then as well. Yeah, I wonder they probably call it like spirit intrusion or something instead. But yeah, they knew that there was something to smoking. They also thought it was medicinal, which as we'll see toward the end of this podcast has actually made something of a resurgence. Yeah. The medicinal properties of nicotine. So this is nicotine. Go. Nicotiana tobacco. Yes, nicotine. Nicotiana tobacco. What did I say? No, I think that's

right. Okay. I said it wrong. I like your Latin Chuck. Thank you. It's making a big comeback these days. It is. So nicotine Josh is a liquid alkaloid. Yes, the only one. Most alkaloids are white solids. Really? Yes. Including caffeine. Okay. I saw on a page that nicotine is the only liquid. All right. Well, I believe it then. It is an organic compound alkaloid is and it's made of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and sometimes a little oxygen in there. And sometimes why? And nicotine makes up about 5% of a tobacco plant if you're talking weight. And but cigarettes contain between eight and 20 milligrams of nicotine per cigarette. But here's an important distinction. You only ingest about one milligram of that into your body when you

smoke a cigarette. It's absorbed. You ingest more but only about a milligrams absorbed. Yeah, good point. Say it in Latin Chuck. Absorb them nicotiana. So like I said, nicotine got under my skin, which is one of three ways that it can be absorbed, right? Yeah, through the skin into the lungs and mucus membranes like the lining of your nose and gums. And if you think who would snort tobacco, that's what snuff was and is done that too. You sniff snuff. Yeah. They still make that stuff. They do. It's a real old timey. Like I think you can only find it at like the customer service counter at a Piggly Wiggly. And it's still there from the 1960s. My grandfather's company actually made snuff in Tennessee. Your grandfather RJ Reynolds? No, he didn't own the company,

but he was like a manager of the workers on the floor, I think. I got you. So he exploited people. Yes. And they also made like candy popcorn and stuff. It was weird. One of those companies that made all kinds of crazy things. Wow. Oh, it's not RJ Reynolds. So nicotine and we're talking about how it gets into your body. It's absorbed. It moves into the blood vessels that line these tissues straight into the bloodstream and then pretty much directly to the brain. Where it does its whammo effects, right? That's right. Out of the ways that you can ingest nicotine into the body, the lungs are the most efficient, right? Which is why they're cigarettes. Right, exactly. The inhaling nicotine through smoking tobacco introduces this drug, this alkaloid, to the

alveoli, which are the little tiny air sacs where gas exchange occurs. And this is the fact of the podcast for me. Okay, let's hear it. The alveoli, right? Little millions of tiny little gas bags. Cute little gas bags. Very cute. If you combine their surface area, the total surface area, they have 90 times more surface area than the human skin. Wow. I imagine that's like an average size person, but still it's pretty impressive. Yeah, which again is why people smoke it. And we're going to say cigarettes a lot, but obviously this includes cigars and pipe smoke in any way you're going to ingest tobacco, dip snuff if you're still doing the snuff. Right. The snuff. Yeah. So, but we're going to say cigarettes mainly. That's fine. Okay. That's the most popular way,

I believe. That's right. 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, 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 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 civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Ready, set, slay. Squirrel friends, the official RuPaul's Drag Race podcast is taking you behind the scenes of RuPaul's Drag Race season 15 on MTV with me, Alec Moppa, and my co-host, Lonnie Love. Alec and I will recap the latest episode, the best and worst looks, and we'll even be joined by some of your favorite queens along the way. One thing's for sure, there is no shortage of queens this season because we are witnessing the biggest cast in RuPaul's Drag Race,

Herstory, and the stakes are higher than ever with the largest cast prize in Drag Race, Herstory. So make no mistake, the competition is going to rev up. Watch season 15 of RuPaul's Drag Race every Friday on MTV. Then join us on the podcast right after the show to recap the episode, debrief on all the looks, and more. Listen to Squirrel Friends, the official RuPaul's Drag Race podcast on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Josh, we said, here's an interesting thing too about the half-life. Is that right? Is that how half-life works? It said that nicotine has a half-life of 60 minutes, so six hours after a cigarette, that one milligram that was in your body is now 0.031.

That didn't seem quite right, but I guess that is. I don't know, Chuck. Well, that's what it says, so that's what we're going to go with. But how does your body get rid of this stuff? How does it process it for removal? Well, several ways. 80% of it is broken down by your liver, right? Okay. Some is metabolized by your lungs and turned into codonine and nicotine oxide. Yeah, and codonine, I looked that up, it's an alkaloid as well, and also an anagram for nicotine. And it does pretty much the same thing as nicotine, just at a much lower potency. Gotcha. And alkaloids, by the way, tend to really mess with humans. There's different types of alkaloids, but under the large umbrella of alkaloids, you have strychnine, nightshade, opium,

psilocybin, hemlock, ergot. Anything that can get you wasted or kill you is an alkaloid. You can also get rid of codonine through urine, so it takes about 24 hours to get rid of codonine that way. So you can actually do a nicotine P test. Yeah, a day after or within a day. You can also do a smell test that works too. With the breath. Or the clothes or the hair or whatever. Here's the fact that the podcast for me, Josh, is that some people have a genetic defect in the enzymes in their liver that the mutant enzyme is less effective at metabolizing nicotine. So some people are born able to smoke less, but retain the feeling they get from smoking longer. There's a time in my life when I would

have called those people lucky. Yeah, well, I mean, I guess if you're going to smoke, it's better to smoke less, but I still wouldn't. Yeah, I shouldn't mess with it at all. Agreed, Chuck. Agreed. It's so good to hear you say these things, because you used to say how much you loved cigarettes. I know, but I still think in this one, even if I did still smoke, I would advise never to take it up. Yeah. Yeah. Chuck, let's talk about the effects of nicotine. It is an alkaloid, which means it's a drug, basically, which means it has an effect on a couple of parts of the brain, right? Yes. And not just the brain, but the body. One of the first responses the body has to nicotine is the release of adrenaline, which kicks in our dear old friend,

the fight-or-flight response, right? Yes. And that's initially, but can also, whether they call it biphasic. Yeah, it can invigorate and relax. Yeah. And that sounds a little odd until you think about like something like alcohol, which has the same qualities many times, which is why, you know, the girl at the bar is all fired up at first, and then later on, it's, why did they date me so much? Right. Or, you know, I can't hold my head up. Right. Right. The last couple of shows, the last couple of comedy shows I've been to, there have been chatty drunk girls who have just been overly courageous in expressing what was on their mind loudly at any given moment. Heckling or just too loud? Heckling. But not heckling like you're a

bad comedian, just like, you know, the guy would tell a joke and should be like, I work at Home Depot. And it was like, you're talking Bob Goldthwaite right now and you have no idea what he's going to do. Zach Galifianakis has some classic YouTube bits dealing with hecklers. Yeah. Oh yeah, this one girl in particular, Slade. It's really good. Everyone I've seen though has done a pretty good job with these people. It's the worst part of the job from what I hear. I would imagine so. So, Chuck, you've got the release of Adrenaline. You also, we have an explanation for why people who smoke tend to eat less. Yeah. You hear oral fixation and I imagine that that probably has a lot to do with people putting on the weight after they quit smoking. Right. But if you smoke, you

can go fairly long without food. And now we understand why. Nicotine sends some signals to your brain. Right. Well, here, let me do it a little dramatic. So nicotine to the body. Hey, body, go ahead and dump a lot of the glucose stores in your cells into the bloodstream. Okay. Yeah. The body says, okay. And the nicotine says, and by the way, I don't want you releasing any insulin. Insulin absorbs glucose in the bloodstream. And the body's like, okay. And then the nicotine goes, okay. Well, now that you have a bunch of glucose in your bloodstream, don't you think that you've just eaten and are full? And the body goes, you know, I do. And the insulin goes, exactly right. The end. Yeah. So that's called hyperglycemic. And like you said, basically, it makes you feel

like you're not hungry. And it also increases your basal metabolic rate. So you're going to burn more calories sitting around smoking than you would if you were just sitting around. And this all sounds awesome. What? I eat less. And I just burn calories sitting around. It sounds awesome. But unfortunately, it's not like, oh, I can lose weight smoking. And that's like exercise because what you're actually doing is killing yourself over the long haul. Right. And speaking of basal or basal metabolic rate. That is something that apparently is very overlooked with people who exercise and count calories and things like that. I just sounded like Sylvester the cat for a second. If you exercise and you burn 500 calories, people are like, well, that's pretty awesome. I just

burn 500 calories, but they're not taking into account the basal metabolic rate, which is had you just not gone to the gym and stayed home, you would have burned 150 calories. So really, you only burn 350 calories. You have to take your net calorie burn to really figure out how much weight you lose exercising. Yeah. Well, I don't ever look at the like on a treadmill. I don't ever pay attention to like, you burn this many calories. I don't either. I just go for time. It's just too disconcerting. Like, you know what? I gave my heart a workout for 45 minutes. Exactly. And I didn't fall over dead. Exactly. And I never weigh myself either. Oh, I do. Do you really? Yeah, I just fixed my scale. Actually, the batteries,

well, fix it. I put a battery in it and it had been out for like four or five months. And I did, you know, I felt myself getting fatter and I weighed myself and I was actually like a pound less than I was six months ago. So it was all in my head. Well, it's not great. Ideally, I'm 20 pounds less than I was six months ago. I've just been reintroduced to my hip bones lately. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. You can start wearing the hip huggers. You haven't noticed? Sorry. Okay, so Chuck, cigarettes will kill you is where we left off because they will raise your bad cholesterol level, damage your arteries and eventually you are in line for a heart attack or a stroke. Yes. And that and well, we'll get into it later.

Let's talk about the brain. Yeah. And I don't think that's much of a spoiler. No, cigarettes kill you. The irony of it is, is the nicotine won't kill you. I mean, the nicotine can kill you, but you literally have to overdose on it and it takes more than you could get from cigarettes. Yes. It's other chemicals, the thousands of other chemicals in a cigarette that kill you. Well, I'm glad you said that because that's a huge point. The other chemicals are killing you. The nicotine is what makes you smoke over and over and over again. Yeah. So it's a one, two punch of death. Well, let's talk about that. Let's talk about what happens in the brain that gets you basically addicted. First up, as with anything,

is the reward pathway is manipulated, right? So just like with cocaine or alcohol or anything like that, dopamine is released, which is how we learn how to eat and reproduce and do anything that causes our own or our species survival. We're rewarded, right? Yes. Well, nicotine unlocks the release of dopamine, which teaches us to smoke again, right? That's right. But even more than that, a smarter neurotransmitter. And I do kind of think that dopamine is kind of a dumb, fat, Chris Farley kind of neurotransmitter, you know, just kind of like out for a good time kind of thing. Acetylcholine, that guy is slick. That's like a Patrick Bateman kind of neurotransmitter. That's right. And nicotine docks to this, it binds to this neurotransmitter,

and that's where, that's where it all happens basically. And may I interject? Please. RIP, Chris Farley. I know for a fact that he was not dumb. He was a very smart guy. Yes. I was talking more about his buffoon-like characters that he played, not him specifically. We don't want to speak ill of the dead. Especially not Chris Farley. That's right. So we just mentioned acetylcholine, which the nicotine binds to this neurotransmitter. It's going to, when you smoke, it's going to increase the release of acetylcholine. And the problem is that acetylcholine is great and the body, everybody loves acetylcholine. The body regulates the release of it in the proper way. But when nicotine gets involved, it's just out of

control willy-nilly acetylcholine going crazy in your body. Right. A bunch of acetylcholine being released means a bunch of activity in the cholinergic neurons, right? So the cholinergic neurons basically tell your body, like, hey, you wake up, bud. Let's go do something. Yeah. Right? Let's go roller skate or something like that. Cholinergic neurons also promote dopamine release. So you're up and at them. You're feeling good. You're feeling euphoric. Endorphins are released, which is the body's natural painkiller. Yep. You've heard of the runner's high. That is endorphins going crazy at the end of your long jog. Exactly. And then lastly, the thing that cements it all is the release of glutamate, which glutamate has been shown to enhance neural

connections. Yeah. Connections between the neural pathways, which enhances memory. You remember we talked about memory. That's right. We didn't talk about glutamate. Yeah. How do we miss that? I don't know. Yeah. Well, what can happen here is if you, when you ingest nicotine, glutamate can create a memory loop of how awesome it is. So now you've got this recurring film playing in your head like smoking's great. Smoking's great. Have another cigarette over and over and over. Yep. A deadly concoction. Yes. So that's what happens. You lose weight. You feel great. Like you said. But you're slowly dying. Yes. But we mentioned earlier that there are medicinal, there's medicinal value to nicotine specifically, right? Yes. Because it has this effect on your

cholinergic pathways. It could help with Alzheimer's. They're finding Alzheimer's is a loss of cholinergic neurons. That's right. Right? Which leads to memory loss. That kind of thing. Yeah. You're not quite as active. You are angry and you don't know why. Right? That's right. They're finding that nicotine can help replace these or it can at the very least stop the loss of cholinergic neurons and promote the activity of the ones that are still around. That's right. Hence, reversing the effects of Alzheimer's or forestalling it. That's right. And Tourette's syndrome is another thing they're looking into now with nicotine patches. Slowly delivering nicotine can reduce the episodes of Tourette's ticks and outbursts. I don't even know if we

covered that in Tourette's. This may be news to us. Yes. Anyone who hasn't heard Tourette's syndrome yet, go back and listen to it. It's a good one. Yeah, it is. But Chuck, again, we want to specify that you are much more likely to die from ingesting nicotine via the current ways that we have it. We have to ingest it. Then you are to gain any kind of benefit. Right? That's right. Cancer, obviously, emphysema, heart disease, stroke, and the nicotine is what gets you addicted and all the thousands of chemicals in the cigarette is what kills you. And it will kill you. I mean, if you smoke your whole life, you're very much a rarity if you're one of those people that's like smoking for 50 years and not suffering any ill effects. That's really rare. Sometimes I feel

death over my shoulder. Really? No, you're healing, man. You can reverse the effects. That's what's so good about it. Yeah, you can reverse the effects, but you can also do lasting damage. You can set all sorts of time bombs in your body after smoking thousands and thousands of cigarettes over 20 years. True, but you're doing good, buddy. 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, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane

stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ready, set, slay. Squirrel Friends, the official RuPaul's Drag Race podcast, is taking you behind the scenes of RuPaul's Drag Race season 15 on MTV with me, Alec Moppa, and my co-host, Lottie Love.

Alec and I will recap the latest episode, The Best and Worst Looks, and we'll even be joined by some of your favorite queens along the way. One thing's for sure, there is no shortage of queens this season because we are witnessing the biggest cast in RuPaul's Drag Race herstory and the stakes are higher than ever with the largest cast prize in Drag Race herstory. So make no mistake, the competition is going to rev up. Watch season 15 of RuPaul's Drag Race every Friday on MTV. Then join us on the podcast right after the show to recap the episode. Deep brief on all the looks and more. Listen to Squirrel Friends, the official RuPaul's Drag Race podcast on the iHeart radio app,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Chuck, we talked about it being psychologically addictive, right? Very much. You do it compulsively. The definition of this is you are compulsively engaging in an activity that you know will harm you. Yes. You're still doing it. Yes, and it is physiologically anything, neuroscientists basically say anything that synthetically turns on your reward pathway is addictive. Right. And that's cigarettes for sure. Yes. Or nicotine specifically. And we also mentioned Chuckers that nicotine itself is harmful if you overdose on it.

Yeah. But it's very difficult to overdose on it because remember there's eight to 20 milligrams of nicotine in a cigarette, but your body only ingests about one. It's very difficult to overdose by way of smoking inhalation. It is. But if you're a baby and you're dumb, you can eat cigarettes or cigarette butts. Yes. And overdose on it. It doesn't take very much. You can take, eating one cigarette can send a baby to the hospital with a lot of problems. Yes. And I looked this up and it says so in this article, but I double checked that adults, if you eat like three to seven cigarettes as an adult, you will likely die.

So don't do that. Don't ever eat a cigarette for any reason. No, but remember we talked about ambient, people on ambient, waking up and eating cigarettes. Yeah. And I was surprised. I thought it was like, oh, eat like three packs of cigarettes and you might get really sick. But if you eat four or five, six cigarettes, you will likely die. Right. If you don't get to a hospital. So there, this all reminds me of a story of, I hope somebody out there can help me with this. It was in a featured article in GQ sometime between probably 1990 and 1994. Okay. Okay. It was about a bank robber. May I, he was one of the more successful bank robbers of all time

because he figured out if you put a clown wig on glasses and then dangle ribbons from the glasses, no one will ever be able to give a good description of you ever. So here's a very successful bank robber for a while. What about just wearing a mask? I don't know. That was the thing though. Okay. This guy finally gets nabbed, right? And he's in prison and he decides he needs to get out. So he takes a pack of cigarettes, right? That I imagine he traded a few honey buns for. He unrolls the cigarettes and puts them in a cup of water.

Let's the cup of water sit overnight, goes around out into the prison yard during like exercise time, runs around a couple of times, comes back in and immediately chugs this cup of nicotine water, tobacco water and falls right over, right? Yeah. So the hospitals like we, or the prisons like we got to get this guy to the hospital. Well, the ambulance that shows up is full of paramedics who pull guns on the prison guards. Get the guy into the back of the ambulance. It says gang posing as paramedics. They take him to an underground doctor who revives him and he lives. Is that, that really happened? According to this GQ article and my memory of the GQ article,

that's what happened. We could find that out a bit. But we can explain exactly what they would have treated him with to overcome this nicotine overdose, which he was surely suffering. Can we? We can now. Well, what would they treat him with? Well, there's a couple of things you could do. You could get the, you could get the nicotine out by giving him IPCAC, something to induce vomiting. Yeah, sure. Which you would probably want to do. You could also give him activated charcoal, which the carbon will attract the nicotine,

the alkaloids, and it will keep the body from absorbing more of it. But that's basically what you want to do is to get out whatever you can and make sure nobody eats any more nicotine. Yeah. And I guess the only scenario no one would want to do that is the, the sleepy hungover morning after when you reach over and grab what you think is that cup of soda. And it's really the thing that all your cigarette butts are into. It's gross. I knew a kid who would still drink beer with cigarette butts in it. Yeah. Smart guy.

So I am not talking about myself. Of course you're not. So nicotine, like we said, it gets in your body like any drug. Your body will adapt, adapt, adapt to that drug and start behaving differently. So that's why when you quit, just like any drug, your body's going to say, wait a minute, like I was functioning on a certain level here. And now you just took the nicotine away. So I don't know what to do. I'm used to a certain amount of color, cholinergic activity. Yeah.

Give it to me. So I'm going to be really messed up for a while. And you're going to be really irritable. Mr. Person who has my body and you're going to be anxious and you're going to be depressed and you're going to crave me a lot for about a month and beyond. But a month, physically, they say is when it kind of will leave your system. But the psychological part, I know some people that quit smoking for a decade and they still crave that cigarette on occasion. I used to, I would meet people here or there who would, you know, who saw me smoking or like,

I quit 30 years ago and I still want a cigarette every day. And it scared me because I'm kind of like, I think I'd rather die than go live like that, you know? Yeah, seriously. And now I understand what they're talking about where it's like, it's so manageable. It's such a passing thought that I don't have it every day. But I mean, I have had it where I'm like, that would be really great. What are your triggers?

Smoking cigarette. Probably having a drink for a lot of people, alcohol and cigarettes are good. You would think so. No, I haven't noticed any actual triggers. A lot of it is association. Like, yes, if you drink, you want it, you want a cigarette. That doesn't, it's fleeting. It's more kind of out of the blue.

Not like stress related. Not necessarily. Interesting. It's just kind of there like in like underneath a certain part of your brain and it just kind of floats to the surface every once in a while. But you just kind of bat it away. Right. It's completely manageable.

Out you. Yeah. Well, that's good. It's different for everybody. And the way it reacts in your body is different for everyone. Your tolerance level is going to be different for everybody. That's why some people smoke three packs a day is because they need to keep recharging that hit of dopamine.

And some people can get by with smoking the occasional cigarette. Yeah. And our advice is to not ever start. Avoid the whole mess. Yeah. And this is coming from a dude who loved to smoke. And now you're just like, no, no, no, no. That's great.

I love it. Thanks, Chuck. If you love nicotine and you want to learn more about it, if you love it on an intellectual level, I guess is what I mean. You can learn more by typing in nicotine. Right. Yes. I imagine you could also type in codenine if you wanted to.

In in the search bar at howselfworks.com, which will bring up this article on nicotine. And search bar brings up listener mail. That's right. He almost caught me off guard. That was so slick. Josh, I'm going to call this a follow up on wacky wills. Yes.

We asked for wacky will stories. And this was a good one. This is from Nate in Galesburg, Illinois. Dear Josh and Chuck and Jerry, guys have been a big fan for years. I heard how wills work. I was hoping you would mention my favorite story of strange will stipulations, but you didn't. So here it is.

And he included a link to Snopes because it's true. Yeah. He wasn't the only one to send this one in, too. Oh, did more than one of these come in? I think so. All right. It's the one I'm thinking of. A Toronto lawyer named Charles Vance Millar died in 1926

with a hefty estate, left a number of strange clauses in his will, most of which are described in the link, the strangest of which is came to be known as the Great Stork Derby. Wacky Canadians. He left a significant portion of his money investment that would turn out to be worth up to $750,000 to the woman who gave birth to the most children in Toronto in the ten years following his death. How would this guy do that?

I don't know. I'm really trying to think of a reason. He was a big fan of coitus. Maybe. Or just trying to populate Canada. I guess. Take over the U.S. once and for all. Was it Toronto?

That's what he says. There were a number of interesting legal challenges highlighted in the link, such as whether or not illegitimate or deceased children counted. That's awful. And ultimately, the purse was split among six women in total, the most money going to four women with nine legitimate live births during the timeframe, each of whom received $125,000. Hope you guys have a chance to mention this uncommon and capricious

equipment from Nate and Galesburg. And quickly, we also wanted to mention Chris was a Marine and then later a Naval Reserve officer. And they were required to have a will. So we mentioned the on the battlefield type of holographic will or oral will. And apparently now you have to prove that you have a will to get into the armed services. So that's the information we got from Chris. Thanks, Chris.

And I can't remember the name of the person who sent us an email and uttered disbelief that we failed to mention Brewster's millions. But my apologies to that person and anyone else who thought the same thing. Yeah, we totally overlooked that one. That's lesser prior. It's good, though. But lesser prior. And John Candy.

God rest his soul. Exactly. If you want to say hi to Chuckers or me, you can do so by going on our Facebook page, facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can also tweet hi to us. That's at S Y S K podcast. And then you can always just send us a good old fashioned email at stuff podcast at howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.

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