Stuff You Should Know - Q: Are we in the midst of cyberwar? A: Yes

Episode Date: September 25, 2012

There's a secret war going on around us, and it's happening on a daily basis. The Air Force recently launched a new unit specifically designed to carry out and defend against cyberwar. Go deep into this new and alarming type of war with Josh and Chuck. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Flooring contractors agree. When looking for the best to care for hardwood floors, use Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner. The residue-free, fast drying solution is specially designed for hardwood floors, delivering the safe and effective clean you trust. Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner is available at most retailers where floor cleaning products are sold and on Amazon. Also available for your other hard surface floors like Stone, Tile, Laminate, Vinyl, and LVT. For cleaning tips and exclusive offers, visit Bona.com slash Bona Clean. The War on Drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call,

like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid for it. Be sure to listen to the War on Drugs on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. 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 with me as always is Charles W. Chuck Bryant. We call him an authority on cyber security, the internet, everything about it. Yeah. An expert, you would say. Hey, should we say hello to our latest celebrity fan?

Who? We just learned today that Miss Kristen Bell, the lovely and enchanting and nerdy Kristen Bell. Is she nerdy? Very nerdy, like prides herself on. I mean, it doesn't surprise me that she listens to the show. Yeah. Because she's on record as being a big nerd. That's cool. Which is one reason I like her a lot. And she's curating a Newsweek page, right? Yeah, like things she likes are kind of one of those deals that they do in magazines now. Yeah. And she listed us. That's pretty awesome. How about that? Thank you very much for that. I'm a huge fan of Party Down, which she was in and other stuff that she's been in.

For getting Sarah Marshall as it goes. Yeah. And you got to see her sloth video online that she did on the Ellen show. It's pretty funny. Okay. Highly recommended. Okay. So that's all I got. That's all the sucking up I'm going to do. Should we say hi to another fan? Slightly less famous, but pretty cool. Yes, Sam. You want to give it a little back story? Yeah. I'm cool with giving some back story here. Sure. We had a live trivia event here in Atlanta a couple of years ago. And at the event was a little teenage fan named Sam.

Teenage, you mean like just post tween? Yeah. Like 13. And his mom brought him. Yeah. And he's a big fan. He's just like really sweet kid. Mom's very sweet as well. Yeah. Very nice family. Flash forward a couple of years. We got a South by Southwest. There's Sam again. Apparently mom drove him to Austin to come see our live podcast. Yeah. They weren't there to see. I spoke to mom afterward and was like, so what else are you guys going to see? She's like, nothing. We're going back. Crazy. I was like, what else did you see? She's like, nothing.

They came to see us. So then we were like, all right, we got to think of something for Sam to do because he's proved his metal and Sam wrote in and sent his resume and like all the reasons we should put him to work. And it's just like, dude, if the future is secure, if kids are like Sam, for sure, I'm not worried about a thing anymore. Yeah. So we, we racked our brains and we found out there's like a surprising amount of adult only tasks that we do like at any given time. Sure. And we're like, all right, we have to, we have to figure out something that's age appropriate for Sam. That's right. So long story short, I was getting kind of thin on podcast topics.

I put Sam on the case and he sent me like a stellar, stellar list with reasons why we should do these. And this is the first one. This is one. And he had a lot of overlap on once we had already recorded that aren't out yet. So that just goes to show you that Sam is like, he gets the show. Right. And so as Sam's picking these out, we're going to let you know if this is a Sam one, but this is going on the summer. We're going to call this the summer of Sam. That's right. Sam's choice. All right. So that's the longest intro ever. That wasn't even the intro, man. Well, let's get to cyber wars then. But let's start bossy. Well, you know, Chuck, have you ever been to Bellingham, Washington?

No. Okay. I have not. Have you been to Washington? Been to Seattle. Isn't that where Van Nostrand lives? I am. Or is it Oregon? Now, he sees Washington. Okay. So in Bellingham, Washington on June 10, 1999, at the Olympic Pipeline Company, a systems control and data acquisition system. There's systems twice in there. But a SCADA or SCADA system, which is basically like a computer program that like can make a valve turn or turn something off or something mechanical, right? From from digital binary instructions, right? Sure. This Olympic Pipeline Company system was operating on this, this type

of program. And something went wrong. And one of their pipes started leaking a lot, like millions of gallons of gasoline. Yeah. And part of it erupted into a fireball and killed three people, injured many others. And they went back and looked at it. I think it was just a system malfunction. Right. But the fact that this came along, this happened because of the system control. And it happened in 1999 as the dot com bubble was starting to grow and like the internet was really becoming a huge thing. Yeah. People who are into cybersecurity now point to this as evidence of exactly what somebody could do during a cyber attack. Wow. Even though they think this was just an accident, right? Irrelevant. Okay. But they weren't like

pointing to that as well. No. Okay. No, they don't think that had anything to do with it. But they were saying, this is what it would look like if somebody had wanted to attack. Like this is what a cyber attack would look like. That makes sense. Because it's not just the Olympic Pipeline Company that's using these systems all over the United States, companies, law enforcement agencies, military, yeah, banks, yeah, public works, all of these things are all running on what amounts to windows. Yeah. It's as simple as that. Yeah. Microsoft systems, many of them. And as Jonathan Strickland wrote this from Tech Stuff, the article. Yeah. And as Strickland points out, a couple of things. Microsoft has been kind of chastised over the years for their security or

lack of security in some of their programs. And the other thing he points out is the Internet's grew so fast and everyone got on board so quickly that it kind of outpaced what we could even do security wise. Right. It was all of a sudden, government agencies and power grids and emergency services and weapon systems, water and fuel pipelines, all this stuff is running on computers and a lot of it through the Internet. And we don't quite know how to guard against a cyber attack. No. And apparently, even as far as like the knowledge of how to guard against cyber attacks goes, the United States is lacking compared to like China and Russia. So we're kind of in this really weird position right now where we've

realized that all of the ponies are hooked to a single basket of eggs. And all it's going to take is a couple of black cat firecrackers to scare all the horses off. That's the best analogy I can come up with. Did you just think of that or did you? I just thought of that. My imagination's back. I can tell you where I time travel to. Awesome. Where? I can't think of anything. All right, let's go back a little bit in time. I don't think we need the way back machine for this because we're just going to 1997. We can just like walk outside. Yeah, that'd be the waste of time for the way back machine. 1997, some pretty smart people caught on early that, hey, we could be vulnerable to something like a cyber attack. So let's look into this. Let's

put a red team on it. Red team is our friends that act as enemies to try, you know how they hire these people to like break into your home. Yeah, those are red teams, basically. Right, like from Star Wars. Yeah, exactly. So let's get a red team. Let's name it this mission something really cool out of a football playbook. Let's name it project eligible receiver. Do you know how many times I had to look at that before it finally sunk in what words I was looking at? Oh, really? It is. It does look kind of funny. It looks like Eleanor Rigby when you glance at it. At least I think so. Yeah, it doesn't to me. I was thinking more of like a radio receiver or something like that. I think it just means about football. No, it's totally eligible.

Just saying like I read this many times before I was like, Oh, okay. So a lot of this is still classified. So we don't know everything, but basically they hired some hackers, which is what you do to test your security. They being the Department of Defense. Yeah, Department of Defense saying, Hey, can you nerds hack into the Pentagon system? And afterwards we won't assassinate you. Exactly. And the nerds were like, just watch this. And it took three days before the Pentagon even knew that they were being cyber attacked by the red team. Like pretty successful and very sobering. Yeah. So they, they, it was, I guess kind of an eye opener for the DoD. And they, I'm sure used it to step up security, not fast enough though, because after this red team attack,

operation eligible receiver, an actual attack, which they later came to call, what was it, moonlight maze? Yeah, this is one year after that, the test. A year after it, somebody launched an attack and it was a, I guess what's probably the most typical kind of cyber attack where you insert some sort of software to basically spy and get files and gather data and download sensitive materials, right? Yeah. And apparently took two years before NASA, the Pentagon, and other agencies in the U.S. government noticed that accidentally noticed that this, that they were being spied on cyber wise. Yeah, they got data like strategic maps, troop assignments and positions, not good. Right. Very scary. And they traced it back to Russia,

doesn't necessarily mean that it came from Russia in its origin. But at least that's where they traced it to. And this is cyber warfare, like it's happening. It's been going on since the 90s, pretty much. Yeah. That's not is a cyber war coming. It's like, how do we prevent like a cyber war from bringing us all down? Yeah, pretty much. And it's apparently from looking into this, there's like two camps, there's like a gloom and doom camp where it's like, yeah, somebody really wants to mess things up, they're going to be able to, it's going to be pretty easy. Yeah. And the sunny optimistic camp is kind of like, no, you know, we know what we're looking for now, like sure they could launch an attack, but we'll, we'll be able to stop it in time for

before it can do like a lot of damage. Yeah. So we'll see, we'll lay out everything for you can decide who's right. That's right. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take America's public enemy. Number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute a 2,200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah. And they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs, of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm the prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops, are they

just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, everybody. I'm Tyler Florence and I'm Wells Adams. We're the hosts of the new podcast Two Dudes in the Kitchen. You might be asking yourself, why do these guys have a podcast? Because we love food. You and I have known each other for a while. We got a chance to click together on television, on Food Network back in the day. And I gotta tell you, there's no two better guys are more equipped to take you guys on a journey through the kitchen. It's all

about great recipes. It's all about connecting with fantastic techniques and having a great time while you're doing it. This is a podcast for you, for you to call into, give us your feedback. And we're here to answer your questions and kind of get those kitchen burners fired up. I got a lot of questions just because I'm not nearly as good of a chef as you are. So I'm going to be asking you a lot of questions and you guys out there can ask them as well. It's going to be a lot of fun. We're going to learn a lot. And you know what? Most importantly, we're going to eat good. We're going to eat good, man. Eat good in the neighborhood, man. We're here for you. Listen to two dudes in a kitchen on the iHeartRadioApp Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

So we've already mentioned that on the defensive side of things, the US is sorely lacking. But on the offensive side of things, we've actually done this ourselves more than once. During the Kosovo war, Strickland points out, we used computer attacks to compromise Serbian air defenses, basically kind of scrambling their information. So they had bad, I guess, coordinates. Well, the stuff on the radar screen wasn't apt. It wasn't accurate. Yeah. Okay. Or appropriate. Did you see that one? So we did this. We launched it and it worked. So that's a good thing. But it's also a bad thing if you're like, was it Bush the first or Clinton and Bush the second? Bush the second in 2003

in Iraq. And Clinton, well, they were both like, we don't think we should be doing much of this because a couple of reasons. A, it basically opens us up as like, hey, they did this, so we can do it right back. And B, I think they could have drained some banks of terrorist cells. And they said we kind of depend on the integrity of the banking system worldwide. Like we don't want to start messing around with this. So apparently with with cyber warfare, it's very much like when you build that virus, it's out there and it can be captured and studied and redeployed against you. Yeah. So what they were saying with Clinton and Bush, who were saying like, no, we're not going to use a virus to drain those bank accounts because they could be, it will eventually come

back on us and our banking industry is not secure enough to withstand something that we ourselves make. Because apparently the U.S. is pretty good at making viruses. Oh, I'm sure. Should we talk about some of the different ways that this can go down? Yeah. The Pearl Harbor attack? Yes. I had the feeling strictly might have named this one himself, but it's not true. He went to a lot of trouble to explain why it's called the Pearl Harbor strategy. I think he could have just left it there. The idea here is that it's pretty much in your face. It's a massive cyber attack where they infiltrate and then they sabotage systems much like Pearl Harbor was a big surprise and a big attack. It wasn't, I mean, it was sneaky, but it wasn't quiet by any means or stealthy,

I guess the word. The other ones are pretty much stealthy. Yeah. Part of a Pearl Harbor attack, I believe, can be a distributed denial of service attack, which is basically like when you try to get onto a website or whatever, you're sending a request to the server to let you on. A ping? Right. Yeah. Now, if you assault that one server with millions of pings and it's trying to accommodate everybody as is appropriate and apt, basically they crash is the point. You can crash a server by hitting it with millions of pings all at once. Just slows it down to the point either where it doesn't work or it crashes. Yeah. And that's what Anonymous likes to do with like MasterCard during the whole WikiLeaks thing when they made that. Was it MasterCard or Visa

Crash? I cannot remember. I remember when that happened though. It's basically just launching a bunch of server requests at a specific server and the server's like, no, no, and this falls over. Is that why people say ping, by the way? We say let me ping. You want me to ping you? You're ping him? Yeah. I hate that. It's better than Java Storm. I don't even know what that is. Drinking coffee while you're having a brainstorm. Like let's go get coffee and brainstorm something. Java Storm. People say that. Yeah. I don't say it. I've never heard of that. That ping and meta are the three things that I will never say. Epic. Yeah. Maybe the worst. To call something epic. Oh, I don't mind epic. Oh, man, I hate epic. At least that's a real word. Especially epic fail.

Oh, well, yeah, sure. Okay. Back to it. Viruses, Code Red, Slammer, Nymda. These are viruses that Strickland has mentioned that spread very quickly across the internet. And there's a couple of ways this can go down. You can do it immediately and release a virus. You can have all these other computers deliver the virus. You can put sort of like a delay timer on your virus for it to go off in two years automatically or manually whenever you want to. It can be waiting for you to hit the button and then launch the virus that way. Or I think for the user of that computer to do, like, say, Control Alt Delete will trigger it or something. Oh, really? Yeah. That's pretty scary. Yeah, don't press those three buttons. I did that all the time on my PC. Oh, my God. Chuck,

I think we should talk about right about here is I think where Stuxnet fits in. Who? Stuxnet. Say it one more time. Stuxnet. I don't know what that is. You know what Stuxnet is. Is that in this? Yeah, it's the Iranian. It's the virus that the U.S. and Israel unleashed on Iran. It's a perfect example of this. It is. You're right. So let's talk about Stuxnet. Stuxnet. It's a great name. It was an offensive, a cyber attack offensive in 2010. They think it maybe was the first one ever the U.S. launched like a strictly for sabotage attack. Basically, they wanted to disable Iran's centrifuges. Yeah. So they could not enrich uranium. And they did this through the new 24th Air Force based out of Texas, right? Texas in

Georgia. Yeah. What's the Warner Robins? Robins Air Force Base. Yeah, Robins Air Force Base. Yeah, those two places are where the 24th is stationed. Yeah. And this is the first all cyber unit pretty much. Right. Pretty cool. Right. Their whole task is to wage cyber warfare. And I imagine to be defensive against cyber attacks. But I don't know if they had to do with Stuxnet, but they probably would have. I think it was being developed before the 24th was ordained in 2009. I think it went back to 2007 when it was started. But basically, the CIA got their hands on centrifuges that they knew Iran was using. And they had just as many as Iran did of the same kind. And they studied it. And they built this virus based on this configuration of centrifuges running windows

and Siemens switches. Right. Yeah. And then they build a virus to go infiltrate it. I thought it was called Operation Olympic Games. It was. But the malware, the virus itself is called Stuxnet. Okay, that's what I couldn't figure it out. But you're right. It was called Operation Olympic Games. Yes. And this whole operation was this huge sweeping, awesome, massive, secretive. Basically, imagine like the CIA. Do you remember Uncommon Valor? Oh, yeah. Okay. Do you remember when their training at that replica of the camp? Yeah. Okay. The CIA did that with Iran's centrifuges for the nuclear program. And they figured out exactly how it worked. And then they figured out the best way to break it. Was Gene Heckman bankrolling the whole thing? Oh, yeah. He was there

to get a son out. He was just staring at this menu of guns and silhouette that he wanted to order. You remember that? Oh, yeah. I thought that was so bad. Yeah. But that was a huge, huge movie for like dudes our age. No, I'm saying bad isn't like good. Oh, okay. Yeah. Gotcha. So Stuxnet Olympic Games happened. And like you said, it was the first offensive cyber attack. Most of the other ones have come in the form of sneaking in and lying around and watching and waiting and spying. Well, Stuxnet had that too. Oh, is that the initial phase? There was a companion program called Flame that somehow this is the part that's the biggest mystery. The Iran's nuclear program is not connected to the internet. So somebody got that in on thumb drive, okay, infected their

local system and flame sat there and basically just studied everything, told the US how the configuration was set up. Okay. And then they built it. And then they inserted Stuxnet. And basically it made all of their data look like everything was operating normally. But it was telling their centrifuges to spin out of control and basically break themselves. It's like Ocean's 11 when they built the replica vault. Exactly. It showed the replica video. There's nothing going on. So basically the Pentagon has been watching a lot of movies. But this is a hugely successful attack, if not at the very least for American cyber warfare, because it supposedly set Iran's nuclear program back by at least a year, if not more, in hopes that this would let us continue

talks. Yeah. And I think it said one of the aims was to make them feel stupid. And they said it worked. Yeah. Like they've done something wrong. And that's why these systems were failing. It's pretty scary, man. But the point is now is, okay, that's out there. Stuxnet is out there for anybody who can get their hands on it. That's the name of it. It's a great name. All right. Stuxnet with an X. With a new Getty Center. But it's out there. And the US is now basically just the computer equivalent of Hiroshima was just launched by the United States. Yeah. And nice little setup there. A lot of people are comparing these days of the early days of cyber warring to the early days of nuclear bombs, and that there's not a ton of defense. Not anyone

really knows what they're doing. It's sort of a chaotic mess that everyone's trying to get their finger in the pie, though. Yeah. And other countries like China, I believe, Russia, who are apparently better equipped to defend against a cyber attack than the US. So basically the US is really playing with fire. Well, and that's why Clinton and Bush were declining to use these. This is one of the reasons why, you know, this opens us up to counterattacks and this may not be the smartest way to, like, we wouldn't go out and just drop a nuclear bomb on a country. Right. Oh, wait. Did. Right. Oops. Twice. Yeah. What else you got? Let's see. Yeah. We talked about the system controls and data acquisition systems. Yeah. That was basically that is the Achilles

heel of infrastructure. And the United States, one of the reasons why we're not set up to defend against a cyber attack is because we are so connected to the Internet. Yeah. Everything is. Yeah. Iran, North Korea. Yeah. Not quite as much because a lot of their stuff is off the grid just by default. Sure. Because they don't have the infrastructure that we have. So just the robustness of our own infrastructure is one of the, one of its vulnerabilities as well. Yeah. That's a good point. As far as defense goes to, I forgot about this stuff. Strickland says, like, the first step is education. As far as educating consumers over, you know, antivirus software and how they search the Internet and stuff like that. So I give that a medium, but this guy, Richard Clark,

he's a security expert. He blames things on companies like Microsoft who he feels like rushes through programs before they are fully security tested. Yeah. Because they want to make, you know, they want a few coins to rub together by selling this stuff. And the consumer doesn't want to wait. And the stockholders don't want lots of testing because they want those new products on the market. Right. So it's a bit of a rough position. And, you know, private companies run most of the net, you know, it's not like this big government thing. So he contends, Clark does, that it's up to these private companies who own the Internet's infrastructure to really make it more robust in a defensive sense. Right. Which is good in one sense, because then you have a dollar

amount in the form of lost profits attached to a security breach, right? So a company's going to try to protect it, which is good. Yeah. But at the same time, it's like, yeah, if you're putting out products, though, and you have competition and your competitors' products are safer, and you're just rushing stuff to market, then you're going to lose out ultimately by the same economic forces. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take America's public enemy. Number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2,200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah. And they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs, of course, yes,

they can do that. And I'm the prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Step out of piss y'all. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. 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 asset for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, everybody. I'm Tyler Florence. And I'm Wells Adams. We're the hosts of the new podcast, Two Dudes in the Kitchen.

You might be asking yourself, why do these guys have a podcast? Because we love food. You and I have known each other for a while. We got a chance to click together on television, on Food Network back in the day. And I gotta tell you, there's no two better guys are more equipped to take you guys on a journey through the kitchen. It's all about great recipes. It's all about connecting with fantastic techniques and having a great time while you're doing it. This is a podcast for you, for you to call into, give us your feedback. And we're here to answer your questions and kind of get those kitchen burners fired up. I got a lot of questions just because I'm not nearly as good of a chef as you are.

So I'm going to be asking you a lot of questions and you guys out there can ask them as well. It's going to be a lot of fun. We're going to learn a lot. And you know what? Most importantly, we're going to eat good. We're going to eat good, man. Eat good in the neighborhood, man. We're here for you. Listen to two dudes in the kitchen on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. And Jonathan also points out too that, you know, a scary way this can be implemented is as a one, two punch with a physical attack. Yeah. So I mean, this is the one that wakes me up in the middle of the night is a cyber attack is launched and the electric power grid is shut down and gas lines and water lines start going

haywire. Yeah. And then all of a sudden in comes the red dawn team parachuting in. Well, that's what we did to Iraq in 2003. We sent a cyber attack that messed with their, I guess, their air defense systems. Yeah. And then we invaded. So that's happened before and we've done it. It doesn't surprise me. Yeah. Cyber war. We're in the midst of it. We're in the midst of it. Pretty crazy stuff. Get your what? Norton antivirus. That'll just solve everything. Yeah. Education. Education. That's all. That's the only thing that's all we can do to prevent cyber war. If you want to learn more about cyber war and read this article by Jonathan Strickland, you can type cyber war one word in the search bar at

HowStuffWorks.com and it'll bring it up. I said, Jonathan Strickland, which means it's time for a listener mail. It's time for a lot more than that. I'm going to call this beer and fire. Hi, guys. I'm a professor of history and a long time active of your show. I use a podcast of my college classes to talk about how we use history and entertainment. I'm writing about the great Chicago fire podcast, especially as it relates to my research. See, I study the history of alcohol and I teach a class on the history of beer. Pretty cool. We study the economic, social, and cultural history of beer and we make beer in class and do weekly beer tastings. What? Yeah. Anyway, aside from the stuff you mentioned in the show, the Chicago fire is important

because it wiped out about three quarters of Chicago's breweries. Something like 18 breweries were destroyed by the fire. Of course, people still wanted beer. Chicago and Upper Midwest was populated by a lot of Germans at the time. This gave birth to the beer industry in Milwaukee. Before the great fire, Milwaukee was a beer town, but not a major supply center. Schlitz especially is a good example of how the Milwaukee beer industry reacted to the fire. Joseph Schlitz, the founder, at first donated thousands of barrels of beer to Chicagoans in the weeks after the fire, been sensing an opportunity he then opened a distribution point in the city. After all, there were still hundreds of thousands

of thirsty Chicagoans. He opened Schlitz Tide Saloons. By the 1880s, he was selling about 50,000 barrels of beer in Chicago alone, which is about 17 percent of their total. Wow. Total daily intake. The slogan for Schlitz, the beer that made Milwaukee famous, came out of this period because of the beer sold after the fire. So that's where they got the name. By 1902, Schlitz was the largest brew in the world. A title it would trade back and forth with Budweiser until the 1950s. He goes on to point out that Blatz and Papst followed similar trajectories. Stuck in it. Stuck in it. And the Chicago brewing industry sadly never recovered from the fire,

although beer drinking remained steady. And I don't have Professor Beer's name. So we'll just call him Professor Beer. No, I'm sure he'd appreciate that big time. Yeah. I'm sure that's what the students call him. Thanks, Professor Beer. Yeah. And if you want to write in, I'll say it on a later show. Okay. And if you teach, especially something interesting, or use stuff you should know to help you teach, we're always interested in hearing that. We want to know about it. Okay. You can tweet it to us at syskpodcast. Put it on facebook.com slash stuff you should know.

Or you can send us an email like Professor Beer did to stuffpodcastatdiscovery.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? 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. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app,

Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Here's today's Fortnite weather report. iHeartland has been hit by a major blizzard. The snow has turned iHeartland and Fortnite into a winter wonderland. With new festive games, including a winter themed escape room, a holiday obstacle course, ice skating, hidden holiday gifts, and more. Look out for upcoming special events from your favorite artists and podcasters all month, along with scavenger hunts and new how fan are you challenges. So embrace the holidays at iHeartland in Fortnite. Head to iHeartRadio.com slash iHeartland today.