Stuff You Should Know - How Supervolcanoes Work

Episode Date: April 13, 2017

Until recently, volcanologists thought supervolcanoes were simply massive volcanoes. But further research has revealed that they are far different - and far more dangerous - than previously imagined. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

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

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

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry, so, Stuff You Should Know.

Super Vol-K, Super Vol-K-No. What was that? What was that? You know what that was. Oh, geez, you and that song. I can't help it. For nine years you've been humming the final countdown by Europe.

About every, oh I don't know, every three months or so. It's the world's most effective earworm. Do you do that to Yumi with the final countdown? She's like, it doesn't get to her. It bounces right off of her. She's like, try your worst. Super Vol-K-No's, if you listen to Vol-K-No's. Well, we did that one, yeah.

Or our Yellowstone, or I guess it was Geysers. Yeah, Nature's In You Endo. That was a great title. Then some of this might seem a little bit familiar, but why not cover it as its own thing? Well, it is its own thing. They're starting to figure out. Yeah, like this article even says,

don't even think of it as a amped up Vol-K-No. Yeah, it says stop, stop. They should call it something else then. They really should. I mean, you can make a case that, yes, it's calling it a Super Vol-K-No. It does make sense in a way. Because it is obviously magma pushing up through the earth.

Sure. But that's pretty much where the comparisons end. And that's a pretty deep comparison between a Vol-K-No and a Super Vol-K-No. But there's a lot of different stuff going on. And the more we look into these things, the frankly, the scarier they become. Yeah, I mean, right out of the gate,

one of the big things that is different from a Vol-K-No is a Vol-K-No is usually like a mountain that you can look at. Yes. Let's smoke coming out of it and point to. You can keep an eye on it, in other words. Yeah, and whereas a Super Vol-K-No is usually categorized by a big depression in the earth from a past explosion, like a crater or something.

Yeah, or it might be like nothing, that crater might be fully filled in by this point. Might be a forest. It could be. It could be a hot spot like in Yellowstone, as we'll see, where there is a lot of geysers and hot springs. But the point is, is it's a Super Vol-K-No is a massive amount of magma, a chamber, a magma chamber,

possibly a magma reservoir feeding the magma chamber, something even bigger. And it's connected or near a thin spot in the mantle that it may or may not have created itself in the earth's surface. And that eventually, some things, like the pressure inside is going to build up, there's gonna be enough magma and then kaboom,

things are gonna go south pretty quick. Because these things are so big and so explosive that they can change the global climate, possibly irreversibly on a human time scale. Yeah, whenever I read about stuff like this or even your garden variety, natural disaster, it just feels like the earth is like, one day I'm going to kill all the people.

You realize this. Slowly, but surely. All humans will be gone. I want to just explode you all. Yeah, that's so Gaia, Gaia hypothesis. Is it? Kinda. All right.

But it's not gonna be any time soon in the case of a Super Vol-K-No. Well, we hope. Well, sure. I saw, it's been calculated that they go off every, I don't know, 100,000 or so years. Yeah. The most recent one was something like 24,000,

26,000 years ago. It's not too bad. Yeah. We got a little time. New Zealand. Yeah. So we should say this is spelled T-A-U-P-O. Here in the States, we would typically pronounce it

like Taupo maybe? Yeah. But based on our Maori episode, I would guess that it's actually pronounced. Could you repeat that again? So let's talk about how big these things can be. Sumatra, 74,000 years ago, there was a super eruption. Some say, and of course we don't know,

because it was 74,000 years ago, it's all we can do is kind of make our best guess. Some people think that this almost was an extinction level event in full. It almost wiped out the entire human race. It could have jump-started a 10,000-year ice age, leaving behind a crater or a caldera that was about 19 by 62 miles.

Right. That is huge. That's it, yeah. That was Mount Toba, the Toba super eruption, right? Yes, 670 cubic miles of ejecta. Yeah, and that 10,000-year ice age thing, that's noteworthy. Yeah.

They think that this whole thing was bad enough that it reduced humans down to several thousand people, and that there were plenty more humans before then, but that the effects from shooting gases, yeah, ejecta, but gases that float up into the atmosphere and actually reflect sunlight, cooling the Earth below it, really disrupted a lot of normal processes here on Earth,

cooled it, and made it really tough to survive. That's a hallmark of super volcanoes, is their global effect. Yeah, like a nuclear winter, basically. Right, exactly. Changing the temperature of the Earth. Yeah. Maybe not permanently, but long enough to wear your SOL.

Right. 10,000-year ice age, you're not gonna be happy during those years. These days, North America, South America, and Asia are the greatest risks, and there's one. Actually, it says we're at those three places, the greatest risk, but there's one in Europe. In Italy.

Yeah, that supposedly, and this was from, geez, just like four months ago, I read an article that said that the one in Italy, it's in Naples. What's it called? Campi Flegrei. Or as we say in the United States, the Flegrian fields area. The burning fields.

Yeah, that should give you an indication of what we're talking about. Didn't get that name for nothing. No, but it's right beneath Naples. Yeah, but apparently that one is based on computer modeling and physical measurements. One of the scientists said, we propose that magma could be approaching the critical degassing pressure level

at Campi Flegrei, and basically what that means is, it's not gonna happen like next year, but they have raised the volcano threat level from green to yellow, which means we need to kind of really start monitoring and studying this thing a lot more. Right, the thing is, is they don't know like how to predict, like it could happen next year.

They're saying it's probably not going to, but it could, because we know so little about volcanoes and supervolcanoes in particular that like it could just happen. Yeah, like we don't even know for sure how many there are underneath us. No. But they say like six to 10, maybe potentially active ones

around the globe right now. Right, and then a total of maybe 30 to 40 that have ever been, right? Yes. But yeah, that one, I don't understand why this article overlooked that one in Europe, but it's like Europe's toast basically. Yeah.

It's inevitable, probably next month or two. There was one, I think the biggest ever happened here in the States in Colorado, long before anybody called it Colorado. It was 28 million years ago, and the Fish Canyon Tuff event. So here's where supervolcanoes really kind of come into their own.

Just the massive amount of damage and stuff they spew out, right? The Fish Canyon Tuff event shot out 1,200 cubic miles. So you know what a cube is, right? Yeah. It's like a three-dimensional square. Invented by Mr. Rubik. You can write, exactly.

You can take like an inch by an inch by an inch and create a little cubic inch. You can do that with feet. You can do that with a meter. And you just keep going bigger and bigger and bigger. And eventually you're going to get to a cubic mile or a cubic kilometer. And this Fish Canyon Tuff event spewed out

1,200 cubic miles or 5,000 cubic kilometers of rock, of dust, of ash, of molten lava. Shot it out. And that nuts, that's so much stuff that literally changes the geography of an entire region when something like that happens. Yeah, that's crazy. All right, I'm going to contemplate the cube.

And we'll be back right after this to talk a little bit more about Yellowstone. ["Yellowstone"] On the podcast, Paydude 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. 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 Hey Dude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast,

Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

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

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. ["I Heart Radio App"]

Did you ever watch Jim Henson's The Cube? Remember when we talked about it on the gym? Did you ever watch it? Uh-huh. Trippy. Bizarre. Yes. Very weird.

I think I saw it on Henson Company. Sure. All right. Well, we're going to talk about Yellowstone a little bit, but defining these, and when we talked about volcanoes, defining volcanoes and what makes a volcano or a supervolcano is not an exact science. They don't have strict definitions,

but they do try to look at a couple of different things when they're categorizing these bad mammajamas. Magnitude. Did I just say that? Uh-huh. Magnitude, which is the volume of the magma or the mass of magma that's erupted, and then intensity, which is the rate that that happens.

Right. So if you're looking at magnitude and intensity, like I said, they don't have like a number. They say once it gets over this number. Right. But so I wonder how they do categorize it. They don't. It's just up in the air.

Like, they just do not have it set out so that you can say, well, once it hits this and this, it's officially a supervolcano. It's just not laid out like that. As bad as writers of articles want it to be like that, it's just not at that point. There's just, but there are factors where it's like, yeah, I would qualify that as a supervolcano. I'm Joe volcanologist or Jane volcanologist or Joe versus the volcano.

Sure. Very nice. And they usually do it by comparison, right? Yeah. So as far as intensity goes, that's how fast magma erupts, right? Yeah. In Mount Vesuvius back in 79 CE, with that very famous eruption that covered Pompeii and Herculaneum.

Yeah. If you believe that kind of thing. Right. I've seen it with my own eyes. Right. Yeah. Mount Vesuvius shot out magma and ejecta at a rate of 100,000 cubic meters a second.

Wow. That's a lot, right? Yeah. That's some fast magma. So supervolcanoes erupt at something like tens of millions or hundreds of millions of cubic meters per second. That's a lot too. Yeah.

You don't want to be standing on that road. No. You don't want to be anywhere near it. So that's typically how they're figuring out what constitutes a supervolcano. They look at this volcano and they say, that's bad. Yeah. And they go, but what about this? And they go, oh.

It's super. That's a supervolcano. There is another categorization they use, which is also a great band name, Volcano Explosivity Index. Yeah. See, the index just kind of throws it off, you know? Yeah. Maybe an album title.

Okay. Okay. By the band ejecta. Not bad. Nope. Not bad at all. So this is when they measure ash column height and the quantity of that ash, pumice, and lava ejected.

So not the volume, but how high it goes. I don't know why they just can't combine all that into one big formula. Right. The glaven. Yeah. The glaven scale. Right. But supervolcanoes, it is a scale and the highest VEI category is a magnitude eight,

which means more than 250 cubic miles and a plume more than 16 miles high. 16 miles, dude. Right. That's amazing. Yeah. It's super. It is. So you kind of put all this stuff together.

They don't have it in a single index, but if you combine all this, if you start to get an idea of just how much damage a supervolcano can do, just how massive and huge it is. So, and again, going back to comparisons, Krakatoa was a very famous volcano that erupted in 1883 and it created what's regarded as the loudest sound ever recorded here on Earth. It traveled around the world four times over five days. We know that it did because by 1883, there were weather stations that had barometers all over the world and they would record the shockwave from the sound. Every 34 hours, like clockwork, for five days, it just kept traveling around the world from

this explosion, this volcanic explosion. It was heard by human ears 3,000 miles away. Holy cow. It was one of the most astounding events that's ever happened in recorded history and there's a really cool article just about the sound it made called The Sound So Loud That It Circled the Earth Four Times on Nautilus. So go check it out. I think everybody should read this article.

It's a really cool article. And it killed like 36,000 people? Yeah. And that wasn't a very populated area. No. Krakato was in Java, Indonesia. Yeah. I guess Krakato in the 1880s was probably not New York City.

No. It wasn't. So yeah, the idea that it killed 36,000 people, yeah, it wasn't a densely populated area right around the mountain. It killed a lot of people spread out. Like Naples. Yeah. They're talking about, I think like 500,000 people live in just that immediate area.

Yeah. Yeah. It's just devastating. That would not be good. Man. All right. So we talked about, it's kind of tough to predict these things, kind of tough to pin down where they are and to study them in Yellowstone, which we've kind of danced around

a little bit. Not literally. We danced with the wolves in Yellowstone. Yellowstone in particular is a big deal because of just how big this thing could be. They're talking 30 by 45 miles underground, stretching from northern Nevada through southern Idaho to northwest Wyoming. It's basically a system 350 miles long and about 18 million years old. This just, man, it's just bubbling underground.

It's the trail of volcanic activity that's taking place. Yeah. Which ends at Yellowstone. Right. And the one that's actually the super volcano beneath Yellowstone is like 30 miles by 45 miles. Right. Which is huge.

The one in Europe at the burning fields is about seven miles wide, which is enormous in and of itself, but 30 to 45, that's way bigger, I'm afraid to say. And it's made up of a magma chamber beneath the surface, a few miles beneath the surface. And they thought that that was the extent of the super volcano. Apparently, they did a survey in 2015. They figured out that this chamber has about 2,500 cubic miles worth of magma in it. There's also a reservoir beneath that magma chamber and that that reservoir has 11,200 cubic miles.

All this magma poised right beneath Yellowstone and the pressure's just building and building and building. And that's the other thing about super volcanoes. They seem to erupt not slowly where lava just spills out like in, say, like Hawaii at Kilauea, where it's very famously just this pretty steady flow, but it's not explosive. Right. These things blow up. Yeah.

And when they do, they can bury areas around them in hundreds and hundreds of meters of ash that solidifies and turns into the new crust of the earth. It turns us all into statues. It does. So that was my own eyes, too. All right. Well, let's take our final break and we'll talk a little bit more about what lies beneath Yellowstone Park right after this.

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. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing

on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands

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

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step, not another one, kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right. So Yellowstone has had, um, I mean, it's had events in the past. That's why they know there's going to be one in the future, uh, about 2.1 million years ago, the Huckleberry Ridge event, um, does a great name. I don't think they called it that 2.1 million years ago, but, uh, that had a 588 cubic mile blast and created a crater about the size of four, um, Manhattan's and I assume they

mean everybody knows exactly what Manhattan's size is. Sure, just put Ford New York City's side by side or on top of each other, however you want to arrange them. Yeah. Maybe in a little spin spinning pinwheel. Mush them together in a ball, like use soap bars, remnants, you know. Yeah. Uh, 1.3 million years ago, they had one at Mesa Falls.

That was only about 67 cubic miles of ejecta. That was tiny. But they still consider that a super volcano because no one seems to care that it has no definition. What else? Uh, 640,000 years ago at Lava Creek, that one spit out 240 cubic miles, about a thousand cubic kilometers and apparently it's ash pillar hit 100,000 feet. Whoa.

Wow. That's pretty awesome, right? Yeah. So yeah, they're looking at these things and they're saying, um, this is probably a pretty decent map of what's going to happen at Yellowstone eventually. Yeah, we have an article on our site too called, what if the Yellowstone Super Volcano erupted? And they said it could kill as many as 90,000 people immediately and put a 10 foot layer of molten ash as far as a thousand miles around the park.

10 feet? Yeah. 10 feet deep. That would cover your one story house. Yeah. For a thousand miles. And, um, they said that nuclear winter would probably almost be a certainty. Almost probably.

Uh-huh. Uh, it would basically blot out the sun and cool the earth, um, which would kill our crops. It would be really, really bad. But they said... Yeah. Do you remember, do you remember, um, in 2014-15 when that Icelandic volcano went off? Yeah. 2010.

And the effect that it had, was it 2010? Uh-huh. And the effect that it had on air travel in Europe? Yeah. It was just air travel. And everybody kept waiting for it to clear up and for weeks, like flights were getting delayed, canceled, rerouted, like Europe was just off the map as far as plane travel was going.

It was just plane travel. And that was a pretty small volcano. Yeah. It was in no way shape or form a super volcano. So just that one aspect of transportation being affected, let alone the fact that this could kick off an ice age. It's just so many factors that could come into play that could get us in this way, get us in that way, it could affect our crops through sunlight and through temperature.

It could make us super cold, make our toes fall off. There's just so many different ways it could affect us that we just, the average person is not walking around thinking about this. And they should be. Well, true, but not to be alarmist. The US Geological Survey said that the probability that Yellowstone will blow its top is.00014% each year. Yeah.

So 1 in 700,000, which is on par of any given individual being struck by lightning. So that makes me feel better. Yeah. There's still plenty of lightning out there. Yeah. And you never know what's going to happen. So apparently this, the hot spot causes the earth above it to dome once in a while when it feels like it's showing off, right?

Yeah. I bet the park rangers, the Yellowstone, when they see that are like, oh man, is this it? There was a 2003 temperature increase, just a few inches below the soil in some spots that was hitting like 200 degrees Fahrenheit, boiling the sap and trees nearby. Oh man. It was getting hot. Apparently it started to cool down again, and what's probably going on in these processes, there's a process called incubation, right, where they're just sitting there because the

reservoir and the chamber are, they have finite space. So the more magma that builds up in it, the higher the pressure builds. And if that pressure starts to build and all of a sudden escapes a little bit, that magma is going to shoot up. And as that magma shoots up, it starts to form air bubbles because the change in elevation we're talking is traveling miles very quickly upward. So bubbles start to form as those bubbles break up, they explode. It's very much like champagne, and it shoots out, and it allows more magna to follow behind

it and it follows the same process. So there's huge explosion, and it can actually be hastened by earthquakes, or it can also be- Like that relieves the pressure? Yeah. Delayed by earthquakes, yeah. Yeah. So there's a lot of different factors involved, but during this period where the pressure

is building and building and building, it's the incubation period. And the reason it changes from, say, one year to the next is if it's not getting as much magma, then some of that magma higher up has the chance to kind of cool and solidify and fall back down and pressure is relieved. But we have no way of tracking that. We can just be like, oh my god, the ground is bowing up. Right. That's about where we're at right now.

But don't they generally think that dormancy is like the longer it sits, the worse it's going to be when it eventually does go off? That's what I read. Interesting. Do you have anything else? Yeah, apparently one other thing. If you were around a volcano then one off, I would guess any volcano. It would be like breathing tiny glass needles thanks to all of the silicates that were

ejected into the air. And I have even one more other thing. There was a volcano that went off in 1815, Tambora, I believe, I'm not sure exactly where that was, but the Tambora volcano is credited with the creation of Frankenstein. Really? Yeah. It was the year without a summer and in northern Europe, the summer was super, super cool. Elsewhere there was basically no summer.

It was snow the whole time. But because of that, Mary Shelley and her husband Percy by Shelley, all were stuck inside during a summer vacation and that was when she came up with Frankenstein because they had a scary story contest. Yeah, there was a movie about that. Yeah, but that contest may never have happened and Frankenstein may never have been created had it not been for that volcano going off. Yeah, that was a freaky movie.

I can't remember the name of it. Was it Gothic? Lost Summer? That may have been more than one. I just remember the whole time there was a lot of drugs and Mary Shelley was like, Percy, why can't you be more like Lord Byron? And he said, because I'm Percy. Oh, really?

Who was in it? I'm just kidding. No, man, was it called Gothic? I don't know. I seem to remember that. It was kind of a, why do I think Julian Sands was in it? Oh, it sounds like a Julian Sands movie. It's all very much in the very 19th century drugs.

Yeah. It's in the back of my head. We'll find out. Very deep. If you want to know more about volcanoes and Frankenstein and all that stuff, just type those words in the search bar, HowStuffWorks.com, since I said search bar, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this Cool Uncle from Katie.

Hey, guys, this is about free speech in 1990. My uncle, Dennis Berry, was the director of Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, Ohio. The museum brought in the Robert and Maple Thorpe art exhibit titled The Perfect Moment, which resulted in an uproar as seven of the photographs were seen as pornographic from some conservative folks. My uncle defended the artwork as freedom of speech and was subsequently arrested, charged with obscenity, and went to trial. It was the first time in history that a museum was actually taken to trial with criminal

charges over the contents of an exhibition. He spent a few nights in jail, received death threats, and was harassed all over town, but he stuck to his firm beliefs that artists have the right to express themselves freely in America and, furthermore, deserve to have their work exhibited. During the trial, art experts were brought in to help the jury decide if they were pornographic in nature. Can you see Matlock being like, I say so, is a bullwhip in a man's rectum art? I never saw that show.

Was he Southern? No, that was Foghorn, Lakehorn, but yeah, he was definitely Southern. Ultimately, the jury concluded that Maple Thorpe's work was, in fact, art and that my uncle, Northern Museum, was not guilty of obscenity charges. That is so cool. Very cool. Do you remember that? I remember that case.

Oh, really? And when Maple Thorpe, like, it was a huge deal. Maybe it's because I was in Toledo at the time, so they made a big deal out of it, but it was pretty big. She said to this day it's still the most famous trial of freedom of speech in the art world. Boom. And as an artist myself, I'm pretty darn proud of my uncle's actions way back when. He admits himself that the events and effects of that trial never really go away.

He's still recognized for his actions, and museums and galleries across the country have been able to show challenging artwork that perhaps would have been cast aside, had my uncle and his awesome First Amendment lawyer, H. Lewis Serkin, not won that trial. That's awesome. Ultimately, the result of the trial left a positive legacy for Contemporary Art Center, and my uncle went on to become the founding director of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where he had to defend offensive song lyrics as art in order to get them displayed in the museum.

That is such a great email. I love that email. He's a pretty interesting guy to say the least, and that is from Katy Berry and Katy. Boy, tell your uncle, Dennis, that we have a lot of respect for him. For real. Like, not fake respect, like we usually dole out. No, like, seriously, that's a great story, hats off to your uncle. You know one thing I'm sad about that we didn't mention in the First Amendment episode was

that whole Two Live Crew episode. Oh, yeah. You remember that? They all went to, like, I think they went to the Supreme Court over their lyrics, didn't they? Yeah. It was a big deal. Everybody expected them to just lay down and roll over and nope.

Two Live Crew don't roll over for nobody. No. You know, we're going to do one on the PMRC at some point, so we'll probably cover it in that. Okay, good. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us. We're at SYSK Podcast. We're at Josh M. Clark.

You can hang out on facebook.com slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant and facebook.com slash stuff you should know. All you have to do is 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. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.