Stuff You Should Know - How Ponzi Schemes Work

Episode Date: April 9, 2009

There's been a lot in the news about Ponzi schemes lately. How do they work? And who's Ponzi? Check out this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com to discover how an Italian immigrant created a classic con that's still fleecing investors today. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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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. Chuck, say hi. Hi, welcome, people. This is Stuff You Should Know. Indeed. Chuck's got his little jug of vodka. I got my fresca, and we were ready to go, right, Chuck? No, I don't drink vodka. Liar, Chuck. Chuck, do you know how

we have these web logs now? There's like a Stuff You Should Know web log. AKA a blog, yes. Sure. Yeah, you want to be all hip or whatever. I do know how we have that because I write on it every day. I know. I was just starting a conversation, Chuck. Lay off, will you? Sorry. Remember that post I put up yesterday that you said like you read three times and still couldn't make heads or tails of? Yeah, I didn't get it. Well, there is a part of it, kind of the crux of the whole thing. I don't know if that's the case or not, but anyway, there's an aspect of it, and it was about these two artists. One of them just goes by the name Arakawa, and his partner, and I don't think just an artistic partner. I think that they're life partners, maybe. Her name is Madeleine

Ginz, and they have been quite successful at creating this architecture that's intended to achieve immortality. How so? Well, the way these two have done it is by, through surprising disturbing architectural choices, right? Okay. Basically, their theory is that if you create or if you live in an uncomfortable dwelling, discomfort or comfort leads to laziness and sedentaryness, and then that's ultimately what kills you, wholly unproven, but they design their architecture based on that theory, so they keep you uncomfortable, and it's unfamiliar. I think I know this. I think we actually have an article on this. The floors are undulating floors, and yeah, I've heard of that. They also like moonscape floors, angled ceilings. It doesn't sound like

a very pleasant place to live. Yeah, pretty interesting, though. This one guy, and these things go for, just to build them, they cost millions of dollars, but they have built several. Most of them are lofts in Tokyo, and this one guy who lives in one with his family said that he's lost like 20 pounds and doesn't have hay fever any longer, since he moved in there, yeah. But their whole firm is basically in jeopardy, because they were heavily invested with one Bernard Madoff, who you may have heard of. This guy's reach extends everywhere. We're talking Kevin Bacon, right? And there's a six degrees joke in there somewhere. I imagine Kira Sedgwick, since Kevin Bacon's in there, Gia Gia Gabor, Spielberg, and that's just like the tip of the

iceberg. I mean, thousands and thousands of people were invested with this guy, and it turned out he was a Ponzi schemer. That's right. It's a Ponzi scheme. Yeah, Chuck likes to say it like that in a tribute to the Italian immigrant, Mr. Charles Ponzi, who was running around in the 20s. Yeah, you want to talk a little bit about Mr. Ponzi? Yeah, I didn't know this until I read the article. It's pretty interesting, and you know, Ponzi's all over the news, so it's kind of cool to get some background. Yeah. Oh, and also, we should probably say thanks to all the people who wrote in and requested that we do this podcast. Right. This one's for you. Right. Bernie Madoff, excuse me, himself wrote in.

Yeah, he did. He's like, hey, can you tell everybody what I did? Yeah. So, yeah, in the 1920s, Charles Ponzi, what he did was, at the time there was, if you want to send mail overseas, you would include what was called an international reply coupon. Well, if you wanted to reply. Right. Right. It's basically sort of like when you get something from, you know, magazine and the postage is prepaid to return the card, you know. Right. It's prepaid so that you get that back to say, hey, these people got that. Exactly. Right. So, this is what you did back then. He had an idea. He said, hey, if I go over and buy these in a different country, or they're cheaper, I can come back and sell them in the United States.

Right. And he could do this because these things were internationally recognized. They were the same in any country. Exactly. But apparently they went for different prices in different countries. Right. So, it's not a bad business model, right? Right. I would say so. Right. And things went pretty well at first. He got a lot of investors and made some pretty good money. But the return that he promised, which, what was it again? It was a ridiculous promise. It was, I think, 50% return in 45 to 90 days. Right. So, yeah. That should have been a red flag right there. Exactly. We'll talk about that later. But, yeah, that didn't go as well as he thought. But he kept getting investors and he just kind of kept this all quiet. So, what he would do

is he would pay back some to the initial investors based on the money that the current investors were giving him and just kind of kept going in a cyclical way until he had a lot of, he started, you know, taking a little money for himself too. Yeah. And ended up having, you know, millions of bucks off this in the 1920s before it finally crumbled as a big scam. Well, the reason he was found out was because somebody apparently calculated that there would have had to have been about 160 million of these things. Right. Extent for him to be making the money he was making. Right. And the problem is that there was only 27,000. Exactly. That's kind of what found him out. But what I got from this, what I got

from reading about Ponzi schemes is that Charles Ponzi didn't appear to be a huckster from the outset. Like he, this is actually a legitimate business that he was trying to run. He kind of fell into it, I think. Sure. I think it was an act of desperation. Right. And well, we should probably talk about exactly how Ponzi schemes work. Right. They're pretty straightforward and simple, but I can't imagine that as they just get bigger and bigger. You start to eat a lot of rollades. Right. I bet that was the original Ponzi scheme. And I'm sure he was nervous as it was going. How's it go? What kind of scheme? A Ponzi scheme. Very nice, Charles. Thanks. So do you want to give some detailed explanation

on how Ponzi schemes work? Yeah, it's actually pretty simple. What you do is you come up with an investment, a shell sort of, and you get people to invest in whatever you're saying you're going to invest in. In this case, in the original Ponzi scheme, it was these reply coupons. But nowadays it's usually like a stock thing. In 1980, cocaine was captivating and corrupting Miami. Miami had become the murder capital of the United States. They were making millions of dollars. I would categorize it as the Wild Wild West. Unleashing a wave of violence. My God, talk about walking into the devil's den.

The car fells. They just killed everybody that was home. They start pulling out pictures of Clay Williams' body taken out in the Everglades. A world orbiting around a mysterious man with a controversial claim. This drug pilot by the name of Lamar Chester. He never ran anything but grass until I turned over that load of coke to him on the island. Chester would claim he did it all for this CIA. Pulling many into a sprawling federal investigation. So Clay wasn't the only person who was murdered?

Oh no, not by a long shot. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco. Join me for murder in Miami. Listen to Murder in Miami on the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 1968, five black girls dressed in oversized military fatigues were picked up by the police in Montgomery, Alabama. I was tired and just didn't want to take it anymore. The girls had run away from a reform school

called the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children. And they were determined to tell someone about the abuse they'd suffered there. Picture the worst environment for children that you possibly can. I believe Mt. Megs was patterned after slavery. I didn't understand why I had to go through what I was going through and for what. I'm writer and reporter Josie Duffy-Rice. And in a new podcast, I investigate how this reform school went

from being a safe haven for black kids to a nightmare. And how those five black girls changed everything. All that on Unreformed. Listen to Unreformed on the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So you get these folks to invest and you take their money and essentially use that first rung of people to attract other people to invest. And once you start getting other investors,

you can pay back those initial folks and they can go on record and say, oh yeah, you know, I made a great return. That's exactly right. And that at least even more investors, right? And more rungs and you just kind of, it's sort of like robbing Peter to pay Paul the entire time. Right. But you're pocketing like Ponzi did some for himself, right? At a certain point, you can start skimming off the top.

Right. But it's not like a take the money and run proposition. It's a take the money, stick around and pay people off as much as you can. The problem is is to like, people don't divest very easily when they get a better and unbelievable return on something. They want to keep investing. So if you're like, no, no, you can't invest anymore. People are going to start to get suspicious. So you've got your first rung, you've got your second rung and then so on and so on and so on.

But to sustain it, you have to keep adding more and more rungs. But the more rungs you add, the more difficult it is to pay everybody back. Right. So it's inevitable that it collapses. But some people will know they're investing in a Ponzi scheme. Some of those first rung people. Yeah. And yeah, from what I understand, people can actually make money off Ponzi schemes to get in early enough

and you're smart enough to get out while they're getting good. Right. Because those are the people that are going to get paid first. So they can vouch and say this is a really great deal. Right. Exactly. So yeah, sure. Yeah. So the whole that that's pretty much a Ponzi scheme. And if it sounds a lot like a pyramid scheme to you, you would be right. It's virtually the same structure.

The one big difference is that in a Ponzi scheme, you're not asked to do anything. Right. You're just an investor. They just want your money in a pyramid scheme. Generally, you have to do something like you are buying in to sell something. Amway. No, sorry. Well, no, actually, on Amway's site, they have like on the FAQ section, it's like, is Amway a pyramid scheme?

Right. And they're like, we're a pyramid model, schemes the wrong word to use. Exactly. And actually, the pyramid model has worked for legitimate businesses. Amway, Mary Kay, Avon. Pepperchef. That's another one. So yeah. So I mean, it can work and it doesn't necessarily have to be illegal.

That's the other distinction between Ponzi schemes and pyramids models, is that Ponzi schemes are always fraud. Completely false. Because it's an investment, but the money's never invested. It's so simple. When I read this, I was just like, God, the beauty is in its simplicity. Just like, give me a bunch of money and I will keep it and get more people to give me money. I'll give you a little bit.

And it's just amazing how that works out. Imagine being such an edgy, savvy investor that you actually knowingly invest in Ponzi schemes. Who does that? I bet there's some names on the made-off list. Yeah. I'll bet. But no, he did everything alone. We'll get to him in a minute. Allegedly.

No, not anymore. He confessed, buddy. Well, certain things are still alleged at this point. All right. Well, we'll just go with it. You're such a COA, dude. But I appreciate the O because that includes me. Okay. He wasn't the guy who came up with the scheme. He did it so well that they named it after him.

Sure. But the earliest one we know about goes back to early 1880s in Boston with a woman named Sarah Howe. I don't think I know about this one. Okay. So she actually actively and purposefully built a Ponzi scheme. Right. Although, you know, with it being 40 years before Charles Ponzi showed up, she probably didn't call it that to herself. What was her name? Howe? Sarah Howe?

The Howe scheme. Yes. If she did have enough foresight to know that it would eventually be called a Ponzi scheme, how would it sound in her head when she said, this is the kind of scheme that I'm carrying out? It's a Ponzi scheme. That's right, Chuck. Ms. Howe basically put together a group of thousands of women investors and invested in women's liberty bonds, I think, is what they were called. That's supposedly what the investment was for, but no, it wasn't. She just basically carried out a Ponzi scheme. Right.

And she managed to rake in about half a million bucks before she was caught. And then another guy shortly after, about the turn of the century, his name was William Franklin Miller. And he also built investors for about another half a million. And this is, you know, substantial enough to be remembered 100 years plus later, but Ponzi was the first one. Right. Right? Or Ponzi was the first big one, I should say. Sure. And then you don't really hear about anybody in the world of Ponzi schemes. I mean, I'm sure you can, but nobody's huge doing it right now. Right.

Well, except... Until... Lou Pearlman. Is that where you're going? I was going to go to the Balkans first, but let's do Mr. Pearlman. Okay. Yeah, this is one of my favorites, just because his associations are kind of funny. Lou Pearlman, who I think you have to say his name like Lou Pearlman. I got that impression as well. And he kind of looks like that kind of guy, too.

Yeah. He was... He kind of funded the boy band craze in the 90s. I know you remember the Backstreet Boys because of the tattoo you have on your neck. Quite. And NSYNC was the other one. I don't know if you have a tattoo of NSYNC. I do. I was covering all my bases. So he funded these bands, and it turned out in 2006 that he was running a big Ponzi scheme. He had been for like 20 years. Right. And a lot, you know, NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys were kind of funded on this Ponzi scheme.

I don't think funded, kind of at all. I think they were fully funded. And this guy created the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC and funded them with illegal money. So those Yahoo's kind of owe Ponzi with their careers. Yes, they do. Well, their careers past tense. Right. Sure. Timberlake's done well for himself. Was he in one of those? Who?

JT. I don't know who that is. Shut up. All right. Back to Albania. Yes, Albania. Basically, a whole bunch of people were working this big Ponzi scheme, which, from what I understand also, can extend the life of a Ponzi scheme. Lou Pearlman is an unusual animal in that he could carry it out single-handedly for 20 years. Right. But in Albania, for a while, a group of Ponzi schemers had one set up that built these investors out of $2 billion. Before it collapsed.

Which is in Albania, that is 30% of their gross domestic product. Yeah. That's huge. Yeah. Like how to cripple a country basically. Yeah. Yeah. So I think Albania is probably second world.

So I think a hit like that is just ginormous. And that was a big problem when it happened. It was because when people found out, they started riding in the streets and fires broke out. Right. People died. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the Albania, the old Albania Ponzi scheme. And we should note that Lou Pearlman, he went to jail or received a sentence of 25 years for counting $300 million.

And apparently every million he paid back, they cut a month off a sentence. Which seems really fair. I think so. But Pearlman, $300 million sounds like a lot. It ain't. It was. And then 2008 came along. The big daddy.

Dude, this guy, Bernard Madoff. Right. One of the founders of NASDAQ. Yeah. And there's one reason why it works so well, because he was beyond legit. He was beyond legit. Although he, one of the other reasons he was so successful was that he was smart. First of all, like Sarah Howe, he used affinity fraud.

And affinity fraud is where you're using the inclusiveness of a group against themselves. Right. Right. He used his membership in a uber-wealthy, very exclusive Jewish country club down in Florida to prey on investors at first. Right. And affinity fraud happens a lot. And usually it happens with religious groups.

Somebody comes in and is like, hey, I'm a Lutheran too, and I've got this great investment. Since he's a Lutheran, he seems upstanding. You trust him. And then that's that. Right. But Madoff very much used affinity fraud, at least at first. And then news of his amazing returns got out. But as I was saying, the reason he was so successful is he didn't pull a Ponzi and say,

I'll get you 50% return in 45 days. He offered reasonable, I think 11% was the average, returns over the long haul. Right. That was the key. It was very believable. Well, to an extent, have you ever looked at our prospectus, the T-Row price prospectus? Yeah. Yeah.

Have you ever noticed like, if you look at it, it's like one year, three years, five years, 10 years, and it'll be up at one year, down three years, down five years up. He was offering like a straight, even keel, 11% return. Right. You couldn't lose, right? So that actually should have been a red flag, but it wasn't. Right. And in 2001, Barron's, the financial rag, they published an article on him specifically.

Saying made off can't be offering these returns, mathematically speaking, this isn't possible. Right. And no one listened. Yeah. But chief among the people who weren't listening was the SEC. Yeah. And they've been under a lot of fire lately because they did not listen. They did not investigate, even when it was kind of handed to them like, hey.

Several times actually. There were like two or three formal complaints to them and they never followed up. Well, one reason why, and this is even another reason why he was successful is he was also running a legit business alongside it. In 1980, cocaine was captivating and corrupting Miami. Miami had become the murder capital of the United States. They were making millions of dollars. I would categorize it as the Wild Wild West.

Unleashing a wave of violence. My God took a walk into the devil's den. The car sales, they just killed everybody that was home. They start pulling out pictures of Clay Williams body taken out in the Everglades. Herald orbiting around a mysterious man with a controversial claim. This drug pilot by the name of Lamar Chester. He never ran anything but grass until I turned over that load of coke to him on the island. Chester would claim he did it all for this CIA.

Pulling many into a sprawling federal investigation. So Clay wasn't the only person who was murdered? Oh no, not by a long shot. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco. Join me for Murder in Miami. Watch a Murder in Miami on the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 1968, five black girls dressed in oversized military fatigues were picked up by the police in Montgomery, Alabama. I was tired and just didn't want to take it anymore.

The girls had run away from a reform school called the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children. And they were determined to tell someone about the abuse they'd suffered there. Picture the worst environment for children that you possibly can. I believe Mt. Mays was patterned after slavery. I didn't understand why I had to go through what I was going through and for what. I'm writer and reporter Josie Duffy Rice. And in a new podcast, I investigate how this reform school went from being a safe haven for black kids to a nightmare. And how those five black girls changed everything.

All that on Unreformed. Listen to Unreformed on the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So he could sort of defer when he needed to pay people back and things were getting tight. He could pull a little money out of his legit business and do that. And apparently did so promptly. If somebody wanted to... Yeah, withdrawal. Yeah, they got a check like that.

No questions asked. Like when Kevin Bacon was like, we're heading to Barbados and I need a million dollars because I'm going to buy a hut on the beach. Right. I'm trying to hide my wife from her shame for being in the closer. Right. Yeah. So, yeah, Madoff was very, very successful to the tune of 20 to 50 billion dollars. Yeah, he made off with...

I know he's got the perfect name for it. You should have been like, wait, what's your last name? No, I'm not investing. I bet every headline has already used that. So it's probably stale by now. Yeah, thanks for that Chuck. Sure. What can you do, Chuck?

How do you stay out of a Ponzi scheme unless you're a very savvy investor who's totally unconscionable? Well, there's a few things you can look for. And it also should be noted that a Ponzi scheme is pretty much a one-way street to collapse. Yeah. There's really no way to pull it off in the long run. It's sustainable. Unless I think a lot of people might start these and think, well, I can get out at a certain point, pay everyone back and make a lot of money.

But yeah, it's not a good working model in the end. Well, apparently the point to a Ponzi scheme is to keep it going until they die. Yeah, which is considered a big success. Yeah. Because you live like a billionaire. Right. And then at the end, you die or you off yourself. Yeah.

And did you know, speaking of that, did you know that after he was found out, Madoff was spending 160 grand a month on personal security at his penthouse? Wow. Yeah. Where do you live? Do you know how many in Manhattan? I did. Yeah. Do you know how many yards that buys you?

That's like Delta Force money. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, some things you can look for. The obvious, of course, is if it sounds too good to be true, it is. Yeah. That's the oldest adage in the book, and it's true across the board. So if someone's making you promises on big returns, then you should probably turn around and walk away.

Right. Don't let anyone pressure you into doing this kind of thing. Well, pressure, that's another point, too, is I mean, it's usually going to be a high-pressure pitch. You have a very limited time window, maybe for as long as the person is standing there, and you're made to feel like a jackass if you don't take them up on it. But yeah, pressure is definitely one of the factors as well. And even one, like you said, that Madoff's scam, where he would not promise huge returns, that might make it a little more believable.

But everything, like you said, fluctuates. So if it's a consistent, even if it's a consistent like 5% growth, for years, then that should be a red flag right there. And also, you should ask questions and demand answers as well. Because, I mean, if you're just, if you have a friend who has a friend that has this great investment and you cut him a check and it turns out to be a Ponzi scheme, well, T.S. for you. That was a stupid thing to do. Sure.

You should know what your money's being invested in. You should know who's investing it. You should, and even if it's legitimate, you should be asking these questions. If it's through any of the major brokerages. I know how many fees there are. That's a good habit no matter what. Sure. And the other thing is, even if you're involved in a Ponzi scheme,

even if you get sucked in, it should never break you and leave you bankrupt. Right. Excellent point, Chuck. This is probably the most important point. Well, now I say diversification is a key to a good portfolio. And this is definitely true here. You should not invest all your money in one thing, you're just setting yourself up for bankruptcy. Whether it's a Ponzi scheme or not.

Yeah, exactly. If you do all real estate and you were just totally invested in real estate in 2007, you're in big trouble. I mean, even Donald Trump hit the lowest of the lows at one point, we all forget. I think he's lost a lot of his old edge that he used to have. He's made some bad decisions. Yeah, like the TV show. Sure.

No one needs to see that guy. No, you know, and if you do find yourself in a Ponzi scheme and you're not the type to take the law into your own hands with like a tire iron or anything like that, you could always contact the SEC. I don't know that they'll do anything and they probably won't, but it's worth a shot anyway, right? Right. Oh, and we should just as a sidebar here, I know that Madoff did confess,

but there's a SEC is still coming under fire because he's claiming that he acted alone and didn't have any help with this, which is really, really hard to believe, just because paperwork alone for a scheme this size would be huge. And some people think out there that he probably had his family involved and then did everything he could to cover for them and take the hit. Right. So that's yet to come out. Well, also, even if they weren't involved, their salary came directly from the

bilking of other people. Sure. Even if they somehow were just totally unaware of it, you know, it makes it kind of a, I don't know, it puts their own wealth in question. Right. So, yeah. That's the Ponzi schemes. That was very good, Chuck.

Thank you. Chuck them. That's the last time I'll say that. Are we, are we going to talk about our spoken word album? Yes. Yeah. And then maybe we'll talk about blogs and then listen to mail. Yeah.

Stick around. All right. All right. So we do have a spoken word album. Our first one. And it is about the economy and economics. Everyone knows that we are in the second great depression. And we just kind of decided to make a spoken word album about that.

That's such a, an off, a slightly off-kilter description. It's more like a guide, right? Right. Possibly a guide to the economy. That's what it's called. But it's very big, right? Like there's a lot of stuff in it, right? Yes.

It's called the stuff you should know, super stuff, guide to the economy. Oh. And it's got expert interviews. Josh and I get out of the studio. We go in around the world. Chicken farm? Chicken farm. Don't spoil it.

And Jerry, our awesome producer, she did excellent sound design. And it's got more bells and whistles. And it's definitely a cut above the silliness we do here each week. Yeah. Yeah. And you can find it by typing a super stuffed in the search bar at iTunes. It's $3.99. Frankly, Chuck and I think it's worth it.

I think so. So if you want to get it, knock yourself out. Get it a couple of times if you like. Support us. Yeah. Because it blows up your computer after 48 hours. So unless you keep downloading it fresh each time. Right.

And paying for it over and over again. I'm not sure at all. All right. So there was that plug. Now let's plug the blog. Yes. We've been plugging the blog now. I hope you guys aren't sick of it yet.

But Josh and I blog a couple of times a day. He posts once. I post once. And it's called Stuff You Should Know. You can find it on the right hand side of our homepage at HouseOfWorks.com. Yep. We just cherry pick interesting news items. Kind of like what we do here.

Except it may not be enough to flesh out a full show. Yeah. And a couple of times we've posted on listener suggestions. Like why don't you guys do this? Absolutely. So yeah. Keep the ideas coming. We love them.

We do. It keeps us from having to do any real research. It's true. And you know what that leads us to? Listener mail time. That's right. Okay. Josh, this is an installment of Stuff We Should Know.

Stuff We Should Have Known. No. It's not because sometimes it's additional things. Oh, okay. We messed up. Quit saying that. Yeah. This one is from Sarah.

And Sarah wrote in about the word theory versus hypotheses. Sarah is a teacher. And we say all the time, someone's theory, someone's theory. And she says we've been misusing it. She says, in the Thinking Cap podcast, you repeated, you repeatedly reference theories about savantism and left hemisphere damage. And scientifically speaking, these are not theories. They're hypotheses.

So her basic point is that a theory is not just an educated guess. It's something that a lot of detail and research has gone into to get to the point where you can call it a theory, like the theory of evolution, which is often dismissed as, oh, it's just a theory. But a theory has actually got a lot to it. So Sarah wanted to set the record straight. So we did that. Another little minor correction here.

Josh said, at one point, we were the only country that uses the imperial system. I thought we got this out of the way with the bodies on Everest podcast. We did not officially. US, Burma, Liberia, and Myanmar. Myanmar and Burma are the same place. Oh, OK. Ever since the junta, it's now Myanmar. Wow.

Look at you. Yeah. So Rich from Omaha. Joshua from Euclair, Wisconsin. Stefan from Newark, Delaware. And Gian, or Gian. Gian? They all wrote in and told us that.

And I have one more. And I like this one. Stephanie wrote in and told us that on our aphrodisiacs podcast, we're talking about phallic symbol and fallacies. And we were talking about an oyster. Apparently, there is a word for something that resembles the female genitalia. Yeah. I was interested to hear this because we kept saying female genitalia.

And I wish that she had written in before then. And we knew that phallus only represented the male genitalia. But I did not realize there was one for female genitalia. Play it on us, Chuck. It's called Yonic. Y-O-N-I-C. And she said Yonic, or Yani is Sanskrit for the word womb, vulva in place of origin. And she said she just wanted to tell us this because for one of the first times in her life,

she actually knew something. Yonic. So thank you, Stephanie, for that. Yeah, thanks, Stephanie. Yonic. You're getting it. I'm processing it right now. So Yonic Noah, remember the famous tennis player?

Yeah. There's so many out there. There's actually a reference to female genitalia. I wonder if she knows that. I'm sure she does. I'm sure she does. It's really been out. So if you want to point out that there are other words Chuck and I are unfamiliar with,

basically let me know that I shouldn't call my crackpot theories theories, but hypotheses instead. Or just say hi. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you?

On the new podcast, The Turning, Room of Mirrors, we look beneath the delicate veneer of American ballet and the culture formed by its most influential figure, George Balangene. He used to say, what are you looking at, dear? You can't see you, only I can see you. What you're doing is larger than yourself, almost like a religion. Like he was a god. Listen to The Turning, Room of Mirrors on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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 iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts.