Stuff You Should Know - How Snake Handlers Work

Episode Date: May 9, 2016

Snake handling ranges from professional snake milkers for antivenin to religious handlers who tend to get bitten and sometimes die from it. Either way, it can be a dangerous business. Learn all about snake handling right here, right now. 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

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chubb Bryant and there's Jerry over there. And my hair is now a fourth character. Chuck laughed at my hair, everybody. Well, if my beard can be the fourth character, your hair could be the fifth.

Oh, oh, really? Yeah, we need, actually Jerry's got great hair. She does have nice hair. Stylish, salt and pepper. Yeah, she does have nice hair. Stylish, salt and pepper. Amy Goodman-level tasteful salt and pepper. I'm not sure what that means.

Amy Goodman from Democracy Now, it's very tasteful salt and pepper hair. Oh, really? Maybe that's the thing. It is, clearly. Between Jerry and Amy Goodman, it's the thing. That beats shoe polish black, you know? Like trickling down your forehead.

Yeah. But it makes you happy, you know? Well, sure, whatever makes you feel good. Yeah, I should get some of that beer blackener and comb it into my beard and come in with like that jet black beard. And Clyde Drexler will show up at your house, urge you on. What?

Clyde Drexler. Isn't he in the ads? Yeah. Really? Former Portland Trailblazer, great. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's Clyde Drexler. Oh, wow. I think.

I'm gonna have to check this out. It's him and who was the one, I think Keith Hernandez. I was gonna say the one that Kramer spit on or that got spit on Kramer. Yeah, Keith Hernandez. I think it's Keith Hernandez and Clyde Drexler in the Just For Men commercial.

Gotcha. Well, there's our freed package of Just For Men coming our way now. Which we should say, thanks again, again to Crown Royal. Man, you say you like Crown Royal, they send you some, you say you drank it and they send you more.

I know, it's pretty awesome. I'm brushing my teeth with this stuff now. My lifestyle has improved for the better. Pretty neat. Thank you, dudes. So, I was just discussing before we recorded, I said it's gonna be hard to record a show on snake handling and I'm talking about the religious aspect of it

without sort of, I'm like, I fear for their safety. And I wanna say, you people are crazy. A lot of people do. But we have a longstanding tradition of like to each their own. I just, you know, I hate seeing people die from doing something completely preventable. Yeah, you definitely do.

But handling rattlesnakes and kissing them on the face. From what I've seen of this or from what I've researched, I've not actually seen somebody handle snakes in person. No. But from what I've researched, the people who handle snakes are doing it through total and complete faith. I know.

And there's, even if you did judge them, I think it kind of rolls off their back quite a bit. So. It's not so much judgment. It's just like. You mean it's judgment. No, it's not. I'm telling you, this is my opinion.

And I'm judging your opinion. Oh, that's what you meant by it's judgment. No, no. Okay. No, it's not judgment. I hate seeing people get hurt. No, I know. And die.

Have you ever seen somebody handle snakes? No. You had a religious upbringing. Well, yeah. This is rare though. This is. Yeah, it is. Appalachian foothills stuff.

Yeah, I know. But I mean like we're in Atlanta. We're in Georgia. I didn't know if you ever took like a field trip or something like that. No, that's not, you have no idea how church works to you. I thought there were a lot of field trips. No.

I gotcha. In fact, you don't go to other churches. You're not supposed to do that. Oh, really? Yeah, you stay at your own church. You don't go on field trips to other churches. Aren't there like interfaith banquets and stuff like that? No, yeah, we had a field day.

Right. With all the churches in the county. Right. No, I suppose other churches get together with, I suppose some get together with other churches, but that wasn't my experience. It's typically frowned on in New York. You just keep it in house.

Although we would go to the big youth conferences where all sorts of youth groups together. That's a field trip. Yeah. I'll just kids thrown in the big gymnasiums struggling to fight their hormonal urges. Going, you believe what? Right.

So no, I've never done it. I didn't ask if you'd done it. I knew you'd done it. I never witnessed it. I've never been anywhere near it. Okay, although I have a strange feeling, Chuck, that it's possible we've both been near it just from living in Georgia all these years.

You think? Without knowing it. Because yeah, people who handle snakes religiously, it's actually called holiness serpent handling. Is that correct? Yeah, they'd say serpent instead of snake. Yeah, and it has to be a venomous snake to be considered a serpent.

Yes. But for holiness serpent handling, until 2014, it was, they kept a pretty tight lid on it for many, many decades. Who the handlers? Yeah, the people who practice this as part of their religious beliefs. Yeah, and I think still even most of them

are pretty media shy. You'll see the occasional interview when someone dies. Yeah. They'll go knocking on the doors and they'll give an interview to explain like why they do what they do. But of course it was that TV show, which really, I mean, you're clearly not media shy

if you're doing a reality show. No, it was called Snake Salvation, and sorry, not 2014, but 2013, it was on Nat Geo. And it was all about snake handling for religious reasons. And one of the main guys on the show ended up dying. He didn't die on the show, but he died the next year from a rattlesnake bite. Oh, after it went off the air?

Yeah. It was only on for one season. But his name was Pastor Jamie Coots, and he and another guy named, I believe, Stephen Amblin are, they are holiness serpent handlers who believe in kind of bringing it out of the shadows and into the Christian mainstream. Good luck.

Yeah, if you're at all interested in that concept, you should read Even On to Death. It was in the Chattanooga Free Press. It's a pretty good examination of that whole movement, and those guys in particular. I guess we should talk a little bit about other kinds of snake handling first though. Yeah, because when you see snake handling,

I'm sure when people saw this, the title of this episode, they just assumed we were talking strictly about religious snake handling. Yeah. No, like other people handle snakes as well. Like professionals. In non-religious settings. Yeah.

That's true. They're called herpetologists, or some of them are. These are actually people who study snakes and amphibians, reptiles, and we talked about them on our snake show. And I think we dispelled a lot of rumors, not rumors, but myths on the snake show, which come into play when handling snakes, namely that they aren't out to kill you. Yeah.

But we'll get to that later. Yeah. But people display snakes. Well, there's a few different categories of people who handle snakes. There's people who display them like you drive through Florida. You might see it like a snake and gator farm.

Right. Or they do snake shows. And there's a really famous guy we'll talk about a little more in depth named Bill Haas. Oh yeah. Who was like the man when it comes to that. Well, let's see. Yeah.

And then there are people, there are snake milkers. Of course there's veterinarians who care for your snakes. Yeah, which I mean, they have to handle snakes. There's also rescue and recovery people who come get a snake in my basement. Right. A guy will show up and most likely he's professionally trained. At the very least, you would hope that he has

tremendous amount of experience in handling snakes. Yeah. And they will show up and you'll say, how much does it cost to get the snake out of my basement? And they'll say, how much you got? Exactly. I'd like to see your last three bank account statement, please. And in those cases, you'll probably see

what's called an extension tool if you've ever seen those tongs or those long, they call it a snake hook, sort of a long metal, not a prod, because you're not prodding, that's a bad idea. Seeing your adults use it to grab cans off of the high shelves in their homes. A grabber? Yeah, it's like that.

Sort of. I haven't seen them that actually flex and grab, do they? Yeah. Okay. If you get some money, you're gonna spend it on that. The ones I've seen are just have a flat, it's a long pole and then it has an L-shaped, at a right angle, flat piece coming off

that they pin the snake with. Right. I've read this thing about handling snakes safely for just normal people. Or people who are starting out in the rescue and recovery business. Sure. And you can use just about anything.

The key is extension. You want to put distance between you and the snake. And I wanna say as a legal disclaimer, I'm not at all advising anybody to handle a snake. But what I read was that you wanna put as much distance as possible. So if you have a garden tool and a long one, use that. But you also would wanna use, let's say you have a hoe.

You would wanna turn your hoe upside down and use just the wooden end to manipulate the snake, cause you don't wanna hurt the snake. You just wanna get rid of it, right? Yeah. I relocated a snake from my backyard a couple years ago. What'd you use? I used my hands.

Oh my God. It wasn't big, it was, but it wasn't small. So how did you describe this interaction? I was cutting the grass and I saw the snake, it was about a foot long. Did you positively identify it as non-lethal or non-venomous? Yeah, it was pretty, yeah, it was definitely not.

Well, actually, it had the markings where it could have been a copperhead. Okay. It wasn't just like a green snake. Right, so you took a shot of whiskey and approached it? I approached it and I did use an implement to pin it, but I can't remember what I used. It was something blunt and soft.

It wasn't an ax head, cause like you said, it wasn't a cinder block that you dropped on. No, what did I use? It was, I can't remember. Let's just say like a wooden paddle. Okay. It might have been a piece of wood actually. I got to.

And then I did, like I saw on the TV shows, I grabbed it behind the, you know, right behind its head, got a good hold of it and picked it up. Not bad. And it wrapped around my wrist and I went, and then I ran across the street like Peewee Herman, and threw it in the wood. Didn't throw it, I laid it down in the woods.

Yeah, you shot, put it into the woods. And it was great. I think it was a successful catch and release. It sounds like it. You weren't bitten. Yeah. And I don't, I'm 99% sure I didn't hurt the snake. Good. Yeah. That sounds pretty successful. Yeah. What I was reading in this one article was that you,

most snakes, if you just approach them calmly, and I guess smoothly is a good way to put it. Sure. Don't lunge at the snake. Right. And also don't be like, oh my God, when we go ahead and just kind of come at the snake and pick it up like it's just a stick in your yard, it's probably not going to strike you, supposedly,

according to this website of which I have no affiliation whatsoever. Yeah. And I'm not, my story, please do not take that as a, that was probably pretty dumb for me to do that. Yeah. You know? And even if it's non, I didn't want it, I don't want to get bitten by a snake.

I don't care if it's venomous or not. One of my biggest fears is seeing a snake attach its mouth to my body. Right. It frightens me. Well, I have to say also this site put pretty plainly, do not ever touch a snake that you haven't positively identified as non-venomous.

Because, yeah, I mean, if you, you could have easily been bitten and lost your hand or died or whatever. It was, well, no, I could have gotten the hospital pretty quickly. Okay. Yeah. I mean, if you're, you know, anti-venom works. Apparently a hundred percent of the time.

Yeah. If it's gotten to an, in a timely manner. Yes. And for the pedants out there, we will say anti-venom and anti-venom cause both are acceptable. Yes, they are. So Chuck, let's take a break right here, huh? Sounds good.

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 nineties. 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 non-stop references

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So leave a code on your best friends beeper cause 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 nineties. Listen to Hey Dude, the nineties 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. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

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on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay. Did I say how far a snake can strike? No, do you know? This is what I've got. From the same place that said, just go smoothly and casually up to a snake.

Introduce yourself. It says that any snake greater than four feet can typically strike about one third to one half the distance of its body length. That's a good rule of thumb. Yeah. A snake between one and three feet can strike about one half to two thirds its body length.

And then a snake underfoot can usually strike about its whole body length. Okay, I would take all those numbers and double them. That's probably a good idea. Just to be safe. Yeah. But of course, I'm the guy who picked up maybe a copper head. Right.

Man, that is scary stuff. You do the same thing. You don't want to pay a guy. Probably I would do with this site. What this site was saying made a lot of sense to me. It's like, take a garbage can, tip it over on its side, take a shovel, use the wooden end of it to handle it. To get it into the can.

And just kind of get it into the can. Turn it over, put something on top of the can, and then call somebody. Or you could take the can to the woods or something like that. That's probably what I should have done in retrospect. I was feeling brave. It was those shots of whiskey. I've watched enough Nature TV.

Right. I don't know how this is done. So the last thing that I think we didn't mention is snake milkers. Oh yeah. Snake venom is very valuable. One gram, what you do is you freeze dry it into a powder after you get the liquid.

And you sell it to research labs. Big money. Yeah, one gram of freeze dried venom from an exotic snake can go up to five grand. But it might take a hundred milkings to get that much. Yeah. So do the math. Yeah.

Is it worth it? Yes. Especially if you love hanging out with snakes. And it's a legit job. You can make 2,500 bucks a month or more as a snake milker. Easily, depending on how many snakes you have. That's right. So there are a lot of people that handle snakes.

But all of them, well I should say, all of the people who professionally handle snakes have a rule of thumb, which is don't get hurt. Don't be stupid. Sure. Because there are two ways that snakes can typically get you. Venomous snakes obviously inject venom.

And that's why people milk snakes is to get that venom so that they can create anti-venom. So that your life can be saved if you end up getting bit by a snake, right? Yes. And venom is pretty nasty stuff. I think we did one on like, what's the most poisonous animal in the world?

That sounds familiar. Yeah. And we talked a lot about venom, but it's worth revisiting. Basically, depending on the venom that you're injected with, it can cause tissue damage wherever it's spread. Yeah. And by tissue damage, I mean,

you just completely wipe out your tissue. And if that is blood vessels, your blood vessels bleed and you start bleeding internally. If it's your liver or your heart, those things start bleeding internally and end up shutting down. You can have multi-system, multi-organ failure, paralysis, respiratory distress,

all sorts of horrible stuff. Yeah. If it's on a limb or digit, you might lose that, even if you get the anti-venom in time. Exactly. Because it's so thoroughly destroys the tissue, right? That's right. And it causes a lot of pain too.

Like I was reading about the Texas Coral Snake. It actually has this molecule that opens the gates to your pain receptors. Wow. And just hold them open so that you're just feeling excruciating, unremitting pain. So it's bad stuff.

Yeah. So you don't wanna get bitten by a snake. You also don't wanna mess around with constrictors either. Because they will mess you up as well. Yeah. They will, I guess, wrap around you and then suffocate you, break your back, stop your heart. It's big enough, sure.

Bad news. Bad news. So snakes can be dangerous is the point. Yes. But again, not to feed into that anti-snake propaganda. We're not trying to start a whacking day. No. So getting back to the milkers.

Oh yeah, sorry. They are what's called free handlers. They don't use, you would think like, they should just wear anti-snake gloves. But you need to really feel the snake. I read an interview with the guy that milked snakes for a living. And he was like, no, you gotta feel with your skin,

the snakes are really fast. And you have to react and adjust every little movement they make. And even wearing a glove, even a thin glove, I think glove wouldn't help anyway. But a chain mail glove or Kevlar glove would not, you wouldn't be able to feel what's going on anyway. Right.

Plus you may accidentally crush the snake's head. They're not exactly made of Kevlar themselves. That's true. So when you're milking a snake, when you're free handling it, you basically wanna hold it the way you did, behind the head, right? Where the jaws meet using your thumb and forefinger. Yes, that is correct.

And that does two things. It keeps the head from turning on you. And it puts your fingers and your thumb on those venom glands, which is what they, you know, they just kind of massage it. You can also use electrical stimulation. But the traditional way is to just give a little squeeze and it'll milk those little glands.

Right. But first, before you start squeezing, you wanna basically take the fangs, the front fangs of the snake. Oh yeah, you're not just like spraying it around the room. Into your hand. I miss that part. You put their fangs through a membrane that's pulled over a jar.

And then the venom just pumps out of the fangs into the jar. Yeah, it's really neat looking. It is. It's pretty remarked. It's pretty remarked. It is. Man. Agreed.

And they recommend that if you are milking, if you're a professional milker, you should have a little buddy with you. Oh yeah. Then goes wrong. It's not a solo job. Really, anytime you're handling a snake, there should be more than one person.

I agree. Well, you know, I didn't. I should have called Emily outside. But she wouldn't have let me pick up the snake. I had to keep it quiet. I think I walked up to her and was like, look at this. Yeah. I'm not mistaken.

And they say for constrictors, they have a little handy chart as well. For at least one person for every five feet of snake, unless it's an anaconda or reticulated python, in that case, you want every three feet of snake. Right. An additional human. Those are very heavy snakes.

Females can get up to like 200 pounds, which is 90 kilograms. I saw the Jackass bit the other day again, where I think it might have been in the sequel, where they put a, it's a python or anaconda and one of those pits of little red balls that kids jump in. And they, you know, Johnny Knoxville and the gang

get in there and this thing bites, this huge thing bites Johnny Knoxville, like two or three times. Wow. And things got the head, the size of a baseball. It sounds like a Jackass bit. Hey, hey, to Lance Banks. Yeah.

Speaking of Jackass. Yeah, he was one of the filmmakers behind that. And we had dinner with him in Portland. Very pleasant dinner. So hello, Lance, if you're out there listening. I can't believe that they did that anyway. It was, and he kept getting back in, he kept getting bit. He's bleeding and he keeps getting back in.

I don't know why this isn't ringing a bell. I'm sure I've seen Jackass too a bunch of times. Well, you know. Plus Chuck, you also want somebody around any time you're handling a snake, whether it's a python or a venomous snake or any snake really, because you want somebody to call 911 if something goes wrong.

You want somebody to be able to drive you to the hospital if something goes wrong. Or if a python's trying to get around you, they can keep the tail from fully wrapping around. There's a lot of stuff that an extra person can do. And things go really horribly awry when that doesn't happen. There was actually a very famous case, not too many years ago, of the Venezuelan zookeeper.

I think it was Venezuela, wasn't it? I don't remember. Who was, I think, a grad student working as a zookeeper. And he or she went into a, I guess, a python's cage? A 10-foot Burmese python cage alone during the night shift. And they found the four. Probably just to get something or to give it some food. Just something, I'm sure it was something mundane

and totally not worth losing your life over. And they found the person the next morning, like half swallowed by the python. Oh, my lord. So you always want somebody around. Yeah. Well, should we get into the religious-naked handling? Yeah, for sure.

All right, well, you said it, dude. It's called Holiness Serpent Handling. And we actually, you might think like, oh, they've done this for millennia. Or at least since the 1700s, 1800s. No, nope. We have a definitive start date. 1910 in Tennessee, the Dali Pond Church of God in Birchwood.

There was a preacher named George Hensley. And the legend is that he was having a faith crisis and was reading Mark from the Bible, 1618. Thou shalt take up serpents. And if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them. Oh, that was a good Appalachian preacher. And so he supposedly turned and saw a snake there

and said, I'm going to take this quite literally. The Bible says to take up snakes, so I'm going to pick it up. And he picked it up and the snake didn't bite him. And he said, well, there goes my crisis of faith. That's right. And apparently George Hensley didn't start out a preacher. He started out an alcoholic who had trouble keeping work. And once this happened to him, he found his religious calling

and became a preacher in the Pentecostal tradition. And he actually helped establish this separate group that's kind of within the Pentecostal religion. But the Church of God of signs following is essentially the sect that he helped found. Yeah, these are subsets of subsets and subsets of Christianity. Yeah. And so Hensley's whole philosophy

was you read the Bible plainly is how he put it, which means if it says you pick up snakes, you pick up snakes. It's God's command to you. If it says you can drink any deadly thing and it will not harm you, you're supposed to do that. All churches are independent, so you decide whether women can wear pants or not at your church.

And it was about as simple as that. And it actually took off and became very popular throughout Appalachia from the 1910s till about the 1940s. There was, I think, thousands of people who went to these Church of God with signs following churches. Yeah. And Hensley, for his own record, said

that he survived more than 400 bites until 1955. He was in Florida and abandoned, or I don't know if it was abandoned, but it was a blacksmith's shop. He was doing a demonstration and I guess holding a little religious service. And he got bitten and refused treatment because that's part of the deal. They leave it up to you.

Like Kutz, I saw an interview with him, and he said, if someone gets bitten, I call the paramedics, I have them come down, and then I say, well, now you have a choice. You can either do as God commands and refuse treatment, and he'll heal you if you should be healed. And if it's your time to die, it's your time to die. Or you can say, I'd like treatment, please.

Yeah. But in the tradition of a true believer, Hensley said, no, I don't want treatment, and he died the next morning. Yeah. But he survived a bunch of other bites, like he said. Yeah, 400, he says. Although live by the snake, die by the snake,

is probably a pretty good motto. Sure. A lot of people think that holding a serpent handlers are either worship the snakes because they do keep them in cages on the altar during services, or that they're doing this as a show of faith to basically show, look at how much I believe in God. Right.

Apparently, this is definitively not the case. Though in holding a serpent handlers, pick up snakes. And this still goes on. Oh, yeah. Like there are still churches throughout Appalachia, apparently from Ohio to Florida, where hundreds, if not a few thousand people do this, go to these services. Yeah.

When they do it, they don't do it at every service necessarily. Right. But when they do do it, it's because they believe they have just been commanded by God to show their obedience to God by picking up a serpent and handling it. And when they do it, apparently they just

enter into immediate religious ecstasy. Yeah, it's like they kind of jump up and down and maybe speak in tongues and sort of a trance-like state. I guess we haven't even really described it. I assume most people have seen this at some point. Look up a YouTube video. They're not holding the snake by the back of the head. No.

They are literally just sometimes there are five and six snakes. And they're just holding them, man. They're kissing them on the face. They're rubbing them on their face. They wear them like crowns. Yeah. They'll throw them over their shoulders.

Yeah, the big difference between religious snake handlers and professional snake handlers is that religious snake handlers go to zero degree to establish any kind of safety precautions. Right. That's entirely antithetical to the point. Yeah, they don't have anti-venom shots standing by in a medical kit.

No, they don't. No. That's one. There's 100 things that are different, but sure. Right. I know what you mean. And so this whole thing was very popular among the Appalachians for a good 20, 30 years.

And in the 40s, there was a rash of people who died after being bitten. And all of a sudden, the outside world started to look in and say, what are you guys doing? Yeah. And the authorities were like, well, we don't think you should be able to do that. Right.

And it started to try to pass laws. But none of them, there actually are laws that indirectly prevent people from doing this. And there's actually some that directly prevent them, I guess, in every Appalachian state except for West Virginia. But they're very rarely enforced because of religious liberties. Right? Yeah, religious freedoms.

Yeah. There have been some raids, notably, actually, Kootz place. Kootz place? Sounds like a sitcom. Hanging with Mr. Kootz. Kootz Church was raided as a part of a series of stings in 2008 under the code name twice shy. Really?

Yeah. You're kidding me. Dude, they did there. In one church, they confiscated 125 snakes and made 10 arrests. And then at Kootz Church, I think they got about 75 snakes and arrested a few others, including him. But I don't think they stay in jail very long. I can't imagine what the penalty is.

Well, the grand juries typically refuse to indict them. Oh, really? They just say? They might be charged with it. They might be hauled to jail. But there's no indictment that's handed down so they don't go to trial. But they confiscate the snakes, at least.

Yeah, usually. Because in Tennessee, for example, it's illegal to keep venomous snakes. And the snakes that they're using are very venomous. They're deadly cotton mouths, rattlesnakes, all sorts of very deadly venomous snakes. So they're breaking the law just by having the snakes. But again, they're typically left alone

as far as the courts are concerned. And the reason why you're saying at the beginning of this episode that it's hard to not just be like, stop. I think the reason why I don't have that much trouble with this, I came to see it differently after doing research on it. They have mores involved with this stuff. So more eels?

No, I thought they handled those too. Because they require an aquarium and nobody wants that. Sure. They have just rules around the whole thing where you don't go handle a serpent unless you feel like you have been commanded by God to go do that right then. And you're imbued with the Holy Spirit,

which is protecting you right then. There's no pressure whatsoever to go do that. There's actually discouragement to do it for any kind of show of faith or anything like that. And then children are banned from doing it. They're not allowed to handle the snakes. So after that, you were fine with it? Yeah.

In the same way that you're free to walk into traffic if you want. I find it even less harmful than that because you're endangering the other driver's life if you're walking into traffic. Somebody might steer into somebody else to get around you. This is you and a snake. I do have issues with how the snakes are treated.

Well, that's one of my other big problems. So we'll get into that. We've got to take a break. All right. Come with us. All right. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude 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 non-stop 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 HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Seriously, I swear, and you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. And so my husband, Michael, and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step, kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life, if so, tell 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. Okay, Chuck, we're back. What's the problem? What's your beef? Well, over the years, let's get into some numbers, in about a hundred years, they estimate about a hundred people have died from doing it.

And if you look at the numbers and the number of people handling snakes, you'd think there would be a lot more people dying from snake bites. Pretty surprising, especially considering that most of them do refuse medical treatment after being bitten, they still recover. Correct. It's unusual, it's remarkable. It is. NPR did a story on this in 2013, and some snake experts, herpetologists, started coming

out of the woodwork, specifically the Kentucky Reptiles who has been sort of investigating this on their own for years, and they said, you know what, there's a lot of things going on here that is sort of a rigging of the stacking of the deck and the human's favor. For one, these snakes are mistreated, which is one reason I have a problem with it. By all accounts from their investigations, they saw crowded cages, they were dirty, there was no fecal matter in the cage, which looked like they weren't being fed. They asked Coots about that, and he said, well, my rat connection went away. My rat hook?

My mouse and rat hookup disappeared on me, and he says, besides, they won't eat anyway, I think was his quote, which I don't understand what that means, because snakes eat. They want to eat. That sounds like something someone says when they're like pulling their collar away from there. And he said, they asked him how long his snakes lived, and he said, on average, three or four months, the reptiles do, and Kentucky said snakes should live 10 to 20 years. Oh, wow, he said they live on average three or four months?

Yeah, they're being mistreated. So because of this mistreatment, these hungry snakes, there's a lot of things that happen once you have a hungry snake, and one is they are less likely to strike if they're unhealthy. What else? When they do strike, they're less likely to inject venom, so it's likely to be a dry strike. Yeah, 25%, I think, are dry strikes. But that's just under normal circumstances.

Oh, really? If it's a malnourished and less fed or under watered snake, it's probably even a higher incidence of dry strikes than that. The venom apparently isn't as potent if it's an unhealthy snake. In 2013, they raided a church in Tennessee. I think that's Andrew Hamblin's like you were talking about. Yeah, I think I may have said his first name incorrectly before, but yeah, that's who I was talking about.

And they confiscated 53 snakes that most of them died within months. They were all unhealthy. And so basically, you've got these malnourished snakes that even when they do get bitten, they're maybe even not getting any venom or less potent venom. Right. So yeah, it's rigged in a certain way. Plus also, this article points out, there's a Julia Layton joint. She points out that it's also possible that those of us here on the outside, maybe even

the Holiness Serpent Handlers, overestimate just how aggressive snakes actually are by nature. Yeah. Like you were saying, if you're handling them gently, they're not going to strike you. If they, especially if they don't feel threatened, if there's like, oh, this is just a religious person. Right. They're in the throes of religious ecstasy.

I'll just ride it out. I've been wanting to be gently shaped for a while. So let's see where this goes. Unless a lot of these snakes are raised in captivity and snake experts will tell you if you raise a snake in captivity, it's less likely to strike at you because they don't fear you as they should. Right. Plus snakes don't typically, speaking from an evolutionary standpoint, it doesn't make

any sense for a snake to be like, yeah, I'm going to strike you thing that is way bigger than I am, that I don't prey upon naturally. I'm going to deliver all of my venom. Right. And their venom, they need it to actually eat. They need it for prey. Right. Yeah.

And the snake wouldn't know this, but natural selection would have figured it out by now that if a snake is striking something like a hippo that's coming at it and delivers all of its venom, that hippo is still going to stomp the snake before the venom actually has any effect on it. Yeah. And you've lost all your venom. Right. And you have to, you know, you can regenerate it, but it, you know, it's not like immediate.

Right. It doesn't, in an evolutionary natural selection standpoint, it doesn't really make sense for a snake to strike and deliver a full venom bite. Correct. Right? Yeah. So you add all this stuff together and suddenly the mystery of snake handling still is, it becomes a little clearer.

It makes a little more sense how people are surviving. Yeah. But it's still remarkable that they are not, that more people don't die considering how often these snakes are handled. Yeah. And if you look at interviews with Coots on the YouTube, he'll pick up his chunk of rotted finger that he keeps and show you. He'll say, look, this, you know, my wife had to cut it off at the mid-knuckle with rose

pruners. That was a different guy. That was Bill Haas. Well, no. Coots had happened to him too. Oh, really? Rose pruners again? He literally held up his finger and showed it to the lady on CNN and she was like, ugh.

Yeah. Like you kept that thing? Yeah. Well, Bill Haas' wife cut his off with rose pruners. I think digits falling off as a snake handler is pretty common. I don't think it's like, no, that was that one guy. So yeah, I don't, I mean, there you go. I'm against it because they're mistreating snakes.

Yeah. I have that. That's my issue with it too. And so it's, other than that, I'm like, you want to do it, it's your thing. Yeah. And that's one of those rare instances where you are, again, aside from the treatment of the snake, you're not harming anybody but yourself. Yeah.

There's almost no other instance that's just like that. You know what I mean? Right. I guess I'm getting to be a libertarian. So let's talk about Bill Haas, man, because that guy deserves maybe even his own podcast one day. Yeah. This dude is something else.

Boy, where'd he start with him? He was, well, as a kid, he had a dream to, he was always obsessed with snakes. Yeah. And he had a dream to one day have a snake house open to the public where he could educate people. And he was an educator. He wasn't, he wasn't a religious snake handler. We should point that out up front.

He was a self-trained scientist. Yeah. For sure. That's a good way to say it. Yeah. Thank you. He had a dream and he grows up and makes that dream a reality and really believed, like really believed in his heart and through experimentation that snake venom could be very beneficial

to a human. Yeah. He was actually, after the Miami Serpentarium, which is his famous place that he opened, was in full swing by the late 70s. He was in clinical trials using snake venom to help cure things like Parkinson's and multiple sclerosis with a doctor and the FDA actually came in and shut them down because they were basically doing human experimentation that was unsanctioned, but they were seeing results from what I understand.

Yeah. Apparently he was seeing results with his polio work earlier when Jonas Salk invented the vaccine and he was like, oh man. I guess it's great that it's cured, but I wish it could. It could have been me and the snakes. So this dude started self-immunizing in 1948. He injected one part Cape Cobra venom with 1,000 part saline solution into his forearm and started gradually increasing the amount of venom he would inject into his own body.

Right. And then within a couple of decades, he was injecting every day a cocktail of 32 different snakes and reptiles venom, which is a process called Mithrididism. Yeah, Mithrididism. Okay. Mithrididism was this famous, I can't remember. He was an ancient king and he developed a tolerance to poison because he was so afraid of being poisoned.

So he would drink a little bit. Right. Nice. And so now anybody who does it, it's Mithrididism and that's what he was doing. So he actually did this for such a long time that his blood itself became anti-venom. Yeah. And it actually saved 21 people's lives. Yeah, he would draw pints of blood from his body to keep on hand and he literally several

times flew all around the world with his blood to give it to people to save them. Yeah, and apparently, in I think 1989, he was bit by a Pakistani pit viper and he didn't have any anti-venom. And the White House used back channels to get their hands on some from Iran and saved his life. Yeah. Pretty neat stuff. He has this famous quote, I could become a poster boy for the benefits of venom.

If I live to be 100, I'll really make the point. And he lived to be 100, 100 years old with snake venom pumping through his blood all day long. Yeah. So there's a really neat discussion about this guy in a larger article called The Mithridities of Fandu Lak. I can't remember the guy who wrote it. It's a really great article, I'll tweet it out or something, but it has some stuff about

Bill Hostin. But it's also about this other dude named Tim Freed, who in the article, he takes four venomous snake bites in 48 hours, all of the whole things about whether or not he can live through five. And he's been doing the same thing. Wow. Yeah. So the serpentarium in Miami closed in 1984 because, and I saw that the accident was

in 1977, so I'm not sure why it took seven years to close, but a six-year-old boy had crocodiles and other stuff at the place. Six-year-old boy fell into the crock pit and was mauled. And it really obviously disturbed Bill because he wasn't a bad guy. He wasn't, you know, he tore him up and he shot this crocodile nine times with a Luger pistol. And I guess seven years later decided to close it. Right.

Apparently the dad didn't blame Bill, which is remarkable for the accident, which I just thought was strange. Well, I mean, if he took safety precautions and the kid went around them, then... Yeah, maybe so. It's not that dude's fault. Either way, it's horrible and tragic. And he ended up closing the serpentarium as a result of it, although I didn't realize it was seven years later too.

But he kept his milking operation going. That's right. And his own self-injection routine. Right. And he flew to Venezuela once into the Amazon to deliver some of his own blood to save a boy's life. And he was made an honorary citizen of Venezuela as a result. That is so cool.

Yeah, pretty amazing. He claims to have never been sick a day in his life, didn't take...never had the cold, never had the flu, didn't take aspirin. And this article that you sent says he was unusually youthful looking. I don't know. I looked at pictures. I don't know if he looked a hundred, but... Right.

I don't know about unusually youthful looking. Right. Maybe so. He had a glow about him. Yeah, a glow from venom. I'm going to start shooting that stuff, I guess. Oh, yeah? No, I'm going to stay away from it and just be fascinated by the whole concept.

Alrighty. You got anything else? I got nothing else. I don't either. If you want to know more about snake handling, you can type those words in the search bar at howstuffworks.com and since I said that, it's time for...oh. You know what it's time for...Facebook Questions. Alright, so what we do here is when listener mails have dried up a little bit, we put

it out to the people on Facebook to send in questions and we'll answer over the next two episodes as many as we can that aren't dumb. It's sort of a rapid fire thing, starting now. I'm like Billy on the street. Who? Billy on the street? Billy Eichner? No.

Great TV show. Oh, yeah. Here we go. Yeah, yeah. I haven't seen it, but I am aware of it. It's wonderful. Let's start with Greg Storkin. Good old Greg Storkin.

Yes. He says, if you woke up to find that you had replaced a character in a movie, you know well, what movie and character would it be and how would you handle the circumstances differently? That's a really good question. I feel like Josh has probably had an answer to this for years for the shining, Wink-A-Modecon. Did he spell out Wink-A-Modecon or did it just print out like that? I don't know.

I'm not sure. Oh, no. He spelled it out. I had my answer easy, John Rambo. And what would you do differently? Would you just immediately surrender? I would have, in the very beginning of First Blood, when he drives him across the bridge and says, keep going that way, I would have just kept going that way instead of turning

around and going back into town. Nice. The end. Yeah. John Rambo, that would be a boring movie. Well, it would be very short. Yeah. It would be a short film.

John Rambo, Hitchhiker. That's a good one. Yeah. What about you? I'll have to think about that. All right. Hey, Storkin. We'll see you in Denver, buddy.

All right. Smile, Wink-A-Modecon. This is from Jamie Whitaker. Josh always refers to his favorite book. Josh, you want to say it? 1491. That's right. Yeah.

1491. That's right. Chuck, what is your number one recommendation? I don't know if I have a favorite book, but I always recommend the book, Middle Sex, just because it's one of the great books that I've read. Jeffrey Eugenius. Oh, yeah, yeah. Eugenius.

I think that's right. He wrote, you know, he's written a lot of great books, but Middle Sex is wonderful, so great, great. Great all-around book. Yep. Okay. Nice one, man. Uh, let's see.

Trey Mclam has a great question. How different would our health be if we could sleep every day until we wake up naturally as if alarm clocks were never invented? I would guess we'd all be a lot more mellow. We'd get less done, sure, but we'd be more mellow, like our five-day weekend. Remember that episode? I do. Yeah, I think that kind of dovetails with that quite a bit.

Just kind of doing what you do. There's your answer, Trey. Good one. I don't know about that. It was a good question, terrible answer. Uh, Sam Horne, you've been dropping hints of late about live shows overseas. We'd love to see you in the UK. We have loads of stuff you should know.

Terrible. Sam, we're hoping to come to the UK this summer. We're working on it hard. We're working on it, it may or may not pan out because planning shows overseas can be challenging. Yeah, you have to take a citizenship test. Did you know that? I didn't know that. It's weird.

So we're trying and listening up for updates on that front. Okay, let's see. Jessica Riddell says, I listened to your color podcast, Color With A U, and Chuck mentioned he might have a color deficiency. I'd like to hear a podcast about color blindness and color deficiencies. Please smile emoticon. I think people are putting this in. It's typing it out when you print it.

It's gotta be. Maybe. What's the question? That wasn't a question. No. Okay. Done and done. Good one.

Uh, Chuck, well, they say Josh, Diego Leal, how's the property squatting coming along? That was me. Um, haven't heard anything from a few years. And I haven't heard anything about it. Uh, I'm still squatting everybody. It's working out great. Uh, and as far as we know, um, we don't own the property yet, but we think the county might and there's really, I don't think we're in any danger of losing it.

No. Anytime soon. It's not your next door neighbor back, back neighbor. No. Behind neighbor, whatever. Nope. So yeah, the county, I don't know if you'll ever be able to own it then even through adverse possession.

Maybe not, but I don't think there's anything that can do with it. It's such a small strip. So I think we're good. Are they going to start parking like a tar truck back there? County land. Uh, what about Hippie Robb? Any updates there, Josh? Hippie Robb will forever live forever in the ether.

Great. Uh, Claire Dalby, Dalby. Dalby. Dalby. I'd say Dalby too. Normally. Uh, if you could revisit an episode and do it differently slash better, which one? The sun?

Not a bad idea. The sun I would definitely like another crack at. Um, every once in a while, I can't think of them. I mean, we've done like 800 plus episodes every once in a while. I will leave here and I say it every time I feel that way. I'll be like, that one just wasn't as good as it could have been. And it's always something that's like really important that like the topic is really important to me.

So I'll like overthink it. Yeah. Yeah. And it always pans out fine. I can't think of any that I would just like to go back and do over again. Yeah. My thoughts just kind of let, you know, even if I'm a little disappointed, it, it is what it is.

Yeah. That's a philosophy. I guess. It is. Yeah. It's a boring philosophy. Um, Dan Floyd, are we ever going to get a how Jerry works episode? Nope.

Jerry doesn't want people to know how she works. She operates in stealth and secret. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And she may or may not exist. Uh, Larry Tiffany says, what evidence would we see if the flood epic of Noah's Ark were indeed true?

Well, Larry, we've got something for you, buddy. It's a whole episode on Noah's Ark and the flood. That's pretty, pretty good one. If I remember correctly. I have no recollection. That's good. Okay. Uh, how about one more each?

Uh, Luke Visoring, have you ever been told the topic is off limits? No. Luke. We have not. Uh, we are very lucky in that we are free to program our own content and, uh, our, all the various bosses and company owners we've had over the years have always steered clear of that, which we're very thankful for. Yeah.

We self-regulate. One more. Josh Robinson asks, Josh and Chuck, why do you hate the nineties? Why do you hate my childhood? I love the nineties. I'm. Yeah. I think the nineties were like, okay.

I just don't think that they were, uh, I don't think they produced that much great stuff. Everything just had this kind of superficialness to it. It felt like. Boy, I'd love the nineties. The nineties was my twenties in my college. That's beloved very much to me. And things were great in the nineties in a lot of ways.

Are you nostalgizing right now? No. I just thought we had a ban on it. No, I love the nineties. Great, great music. Great culture. See, I think the music thing is where I have the issue. I wouldn't say it was great, great music.

There is some good music. I don't dispute that, but I think there's a lot of really bad music. That's every generation. Not necessarily. I knew you were going to say that and I was prepared to respond and it is as follows. Look at the eighties, right? Okay. A lot of bad music, a lot of great music.

But there was a lot more good, listenable music. Think of all the one hit wonders in the eighties. There were a lot, lot of singles that were pretty good and listenable even at the time, not just in retrospect. In the nineties, there was a lot, a lot of stuff on the radio was awful. Yeah? Yeah. Like Nirvana and stuff like that?

No, I mean again, there was some good stuff too. There were plenty of good bands, but for the most part it felt like there was just a lot of really bad stuff too. I'll go back to the spin doctors again. I think that is the emblem of the nineties. Yeah? Spin doctors. They were huge for a little while and then I think that also carried into the early 2000s

with a lot of the terribleness too. Interesting. And just like there just seemed to be, and I know the eighties were super vapid, very shallow, but almost to a cartoonish degree. The nineties were unaware of its superficiality it felt like. Like it was trying really hard to not be superficial, but it was failing at it. I think I reject the notion that a lot of one hit wonders equals good. Not good, better.

I got three words for you, walking on sunshine. That was Katrina in the way, so what was wrong with that? Well maybe we just have a different taste. Maybe so. All right. And don't it feel good? Yeah. Yes, it does Chuck.

So that was Facebook questions. Part one. Oh, part one. I was about to say let's never do that again. If you want to get in touch with us you can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. We're also on Twitter at S-Y-S-K podcast. 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, 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.