Stuff You Should Know - Selects: How Fever Dreams Work

Episode Date: April 25, 2026

Fever dreams can be unsettling experiences. These ramped up nightmares are vivid, detailed and only happen when the human body experiences a fever. What is it about the combination of fevers and dreams that make these night terrors so hellish? Learn all that and more in this classic episode.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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This is from July 2017. It's the episode, How Fever Dreams Work. And quite honestly, you guys, I picked this one because I don't remember much about it. So I'm going to listen to it all over again myself. So I hope you do as well. I hope you have a great Saturday and a great weekend. Here we go with How Fever Dreams Work. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. How are you? I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry. Jerry's got a salad. Everything's normal, which means it's time for stuff you should know. That's right.

Jerry's got the Schwarma special, she said. Oh, really? Yeah. She loves it. How you doing? I'm good, man. I'm feeling despite myself kind of relaxed. Okay.

I'm not feeling feverish if that's what you're driving at. No, that's not what I was driving at. Yeah, no, I'm not. You get fevers a lot? No. Not anymore. Although I haven't for a long time. Like, I've never been like a fever person.

I've probably had like a handful, maybe. How many fevers have you? had. Not a ton since I was a kid. Yeah. Not a lot

of adult fevers. Right. I mean, I've had like hip hop fever. I've had rock and roll fever. Yeah, yellow fever. I've had

a fever for a flavor of a pringle. Oh, man, me too. What are those? Those aren't even potato chips, are they? They're potato crisps. Man, those are good.

They're mashed together potato parts. I don't think I want to know how those are made. No. It's like chicken McNuggets. I think a unicorn just poops them out.

Have you seen Unicorn Pizza? It's a little much. Oh, what is it? There's a restaurant in New York. I'm not quite sure where. Maybe Lower East Side. They have Unicorn Pizza. It's like dough.

Okay, good start. Like a nice pastel colored frosting instead of sauce. Yeah. A mound of cotton candy. Nerds or pop rocks maybe. Oh, good Lord. And then some other stuff. Supposedly it tastes kind of good.

I'll eat anything that has enough frosting on it. I like frosting, but I'm not into like sugary candies, really. Oh, like nerds and pop rocks and stuff? Nah. You know, I did brain stuff once on pop rocks. That was interesting. Yeah? Yeah.

Your tongue actually warms the pop rocks to the point where they melt, and since they have CO2 trapped inside during the manufacturing process, that CO2 suddenly is released in a pop. So it's just a little bubble of CO2? Yeah. That's got to be good for you. I'm sure It's funny

I had a roommate in college Like not many adults Eat candy Like people eat chocolate and stuff like that candy bars but Right candy candy I don't know When an adult is just a little strange

Don't you think? Yeah You eat candy? Sure Like what? Mentos Not mint mentos Like candy mentos

I like those Well I had a roommate That would go to the Convenient Store next And this was college granted Right But he still eats the stuff, I think. Okay.

And he would go with, like, $15 and buy, you know, like giant sweet tarts, you know, those big chewable ones. Sure. And, like, fun dip and nerds and just all kinds of candy. Fun dip. Remember? Or lickamade? It was the same thing, I think, yeah. It was just a sugar stick that you dip in sugar.

Right. Like, I don't have a foot, but I've got my lickamade. Oh, man. Can you guys out there in podcast landtel over stalling? Because we are big time because we happen upon a topic that no one really knows what's what. Yeah. I mean, we're talking about fever dreams. We know about fevers.

Yep. Kind of know about dreams. Yeah. But apparently no one's really gotten to work on figuring out what fever dreams themselves are. So it's largely anecdotal. Yeah. So you're going to have to bear with us on this. We'll leave that there for now.

Yeah. But I guess a good place to start is by talking about both those things separately. And starting with fevers, you know, you've always heard 98.6 Fahrenheit is the normal internal body temperature of human. In 92, there was a big study that said it's really 98.2. What? depending on how old you are, what time of day it is, what you're doing, where you, if you put it in your butt or under your armpit or in your mouth or in your ear. Or all of them at once?

That'd be something else. It can vary a little bit. So I think there's a bit of a slight sliding scale to that number. Yeah, for sure. But I think the key is it's going to be roughly around there. and even if you have an average body temperature that's not exactly 98.6, let's say you typically tend toward 97.5.

You run cooler. Yeah. Yeah. Your body temperature is still during the average day going to fluctuate plus or minus about a degree Fahrenheit either way. Yeah, so I looked a little bit into the 98.6, and the original dude that came up with that

was a German physician named Carl Reinhold August. Fontelic. That was good. It's a good one. When? 1868, he wrote a book. Well, he did his studies where he had this temperature rod. He would stick under the armpits of all these people.

He's like, where do you want it? Yeah, exactly. And everyone always says armpit. You know the comedian Rory Scoville? No. You should just check him out. Okay. He does these weird things.

Like, he'll just do his whole routine with the German oxen. accent okay like for no reason whatsoever I like the sound of that and he did one about stealing old people like kidnapping old people for the German accent he's from South Carolina I think but he's done shows with like a severe Southern accent and then one just normal accent and then he'll do a German thing he just likes to mess with people I guess so he's correct I will check him out thanks man he's one of my favorites so anyway um 1868 he wrote a book called after these It's called Dos Verhalten, Der Erkenfarmer, and Kankenheiten. That is good.

And it's funny, the real translation I think of that is on the temperature in diseases, but if you type it in Google Translate, it comes out as the behavior of the intrinsically warm in sick units. That's the subtitle. Yeah. Cullen. So anyway, he's a guy that came up in 98.6, and that stood for a long time. That's just so, that was just based on his observations, his study, and it stuck. Yeah, it was an average.

It wasn't like this is what you should be. It was just the average of all these people. Right. And then 130 years later, we finally got around to verifying whether that was actually true or not. Well, I mean, it says in 92 that they said it was 98.2 from another study, but then everything I still read says 98.6. All right. I know what you're talking about, though. I had heard in the last few years that they're like that 98.

6 jazz is kind of made up. Right. So the point is, is that your body is going to be roughly somewhere around there, right? That's your normal body temperature. Yes. And then depending on the time of day,

it's either going to be a little cooler in that or a little warmer than that. Yeah. And our body temperature is regulated by something called the hypothalamus. And like I said, depending on the time of day, your body temperature is going to fluctuate.

And that's tied to sleep, apparently. So as your body temperature is rising, usually in the late afternoon is about where it peaks during the day, that's associated with wakefulness, alertness. Yeah. Not necessarily just having a high body temperature, but an incline in the temperature in your body. Yeah. Means you're awake, you're alert. You're ready to go, right?

Yeah, ready for action. When it starts to decline, that's associated with drowsiness, and it hits its trough. your body temperature is at its lowest right about before you wake up. Right. And that's actually associated with REM sleep. Yeah. So there are some stuff starting to come out. Just bear with us, everybody.

We're laying the groundwork. So your body temperature changes. The hypothalamus is directing the whole thing. And sleep and wakefulness has something to do. It's related to your body temperature changes. All right. Good night. You take it from here.

Well, you know what? Let's take a break because, okay, I'm not sure where I should go. We'll be right back. You have the desire to help. The College, LaCite, you offer the program Dependance and Scenta Mental. Acquare the competences essential for accompanying and support the people confronted

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Listen to Deep Cover the Family Man on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, I was being coy. You set the stage very nicely. Okay. So if your body gets, let's say some bad bacteria gets in it. Yeah. And your body is alerted. Warning, intruder is coming.

your immune system kicks into gear and starts producing this biochemical material called a pyrogyn. Okay. This is my new favorite thing the body does. Oh, yeah? Yeah. Well, you knew that before, right? Or did you just not know the mechanism? I mean, I knew humans get fevers, and I knew the fever was to kind of like cook out everything.

I didn't understand the mechanism. I guess to answer your question. Well, take this part then. Oh, yeah? Can I? Yeah. So these pyrogens, right? They are these biochemical markers that are released by the immune system in the body.

Yeah. Or, and this is why I love this, there's some bacteria, some pathogens that make humans sick that produce pyrogens naturally. Yeah. So when they show up, they just start releasing them and they just give themselves away. Yeah, they're big dummies in that way. Right. They're like, hey, where's the party? They kick open the door.

carrying like a pony keg under one arm. Their gut sticking out. It's just, that's like that kind of bacteria, right? Uh-huh. So the pyrogens enter the bloodstream, and they travel to the hypothalamus. Because remember, the hypothalamus controls your body temperature. And this is what they do, Chuck. Are you ready for what the pyrogens do?

Yes. They go to your hypothalamus and they dampen the heat-sensing neurons in the hypothalamus. and they excite the cold sensing neurons in your hypothalamus, and they trick your hypothalamus into thinking your body's suddenly gotten very, very cold, so that your hypothalamus turns the temperature up and says, don't let any of this heat out. We got to warm back up. It tricks your body, your hypothalamus, and you're creating a fever.

That's right, and they do this because, well, they don't do this because, but what happens from there, they do this because they're dumb, but what happens from there is, like you said, the fever, what a fever is, and why you want that fever for at least a little while, that it does. It's trying to cook and burn and bake that bacteria until it dies. Right. It is your body's fighting.

Like when you hear, you know, like your fever broke, that's usually a good sign. That means that your fever did its job and it's cooked all that bacteria up and you're going to be on the men soon. Yeah. So basically that's what's happening. and this is the great thing about a fever, but, you know, fever makes you feel like crap because it's a lot of hard work to kill all those things.

Well, it is. There's a lot of your sympathetic nervous system is kicked into high gear, which I found out is one reason why they say you want to feed a cold starve of fever because you don't want to introduce digestion because it requires the parasympathetic nervous system. Right.

Right? Fight or flight. And you don't want those two things going on while your body has a fever, it's just a lot of extra work for it, right? But one of the things that is going on when your body has a fever, when that temperature rises, it's hard enough on your organs, but it's also hard on the level just the fact that they're operating outside of their normal operating temperature. Yeah.

And that makes it very hard on them and can actually cook some of the ingredients inside yourselves. Yeah, I mean, it's like working in a too hot of an environment. It's just never fun for anyone. Right. Although I guess some people love that stuff. Yeah, but they're still, they might like it, but they still aren't working fast. Yeah, that's true. You know, they might be happy, but they're slow.

So if you have a fever, what's considered a fever now in 2017, if you're an adult and your oral temperature is above 100.4, or if your rectal or ear temperature is above 101, then that's considered a fever. If you're a kid, good luck getting anything besides the rectal temperature because it's just tough. You have basically no right. Well, yeah. But you have his wiggly kids who aren't like, sure, stick something in my ear for four seconds. Yeah. But up the kazoo, there's not really anything we can do about that. All they can do is say glaven.

Yeah, exactly. So the rectal temperature for a kid above 100.4. and with adults, like, you don't have to really worry about your fever too much. If it tops 105 for any period of time, you probably want to do something about that. That's what I saw was the 105 degree Fahrenheit mark was about where you should start to worry. Yeah, as an adult, and you're going to feel so awful if your temperature is 105. You've probably already been to a doctor at that point. Let's hope so.

For kids, it's different, though. if you don't want to let your child get up to 105, that's bad, bad, bad. So what is it for kids that you really want to start worrying about, did you say? You know what? I'm not exactly sure. I mean... It probably depends on whether you're a first-time parent or this is your second or their kid. Well, and it varies with the age, you know, it's like zero to 18 months. It's something. I gotcha. Like what you should do is...

Go consult your doctor? Yeah, exactly. But, you know, any kind of temperature you should, for a child, you should kind of be a little more. alert about. Right. But we're not medical experts here. No, we're not. And everything we're saying

assumes that you have health care coverage. That's right. All right, so that's fever in general. You got anything else on that? Yeah, one other thing. The pyrogens...

Pyro, by the way. It's no mistake. Man, I did have something. No, coincidence. No, it's not. What is it? Latin for fire? Greek word for fire.

Yeah. Pyro. Eat. Deflap. right um great great song it really is a whole album right yeah yeah they just mentioned it in rock of ages yeah it comes up they should have a song called pyromania i wonder but that's pretty cool it's like the antithesis of your band your album and your song all being the same name like big country oh i love that song sure but it's pretty uncreative you're basically saying like

like, here's our basket, and we're going to put every egg we have into it. That's the one thing we came up with. I saw a David Spade bit once, and he was talking about, he was complaining. It wasn't even comedy. He was just complaining that he went and saw Big Country, and they didn't play the song Big Country. No. Yeah. Really?

He's like, it's the name of your band. It's the one song everybody came to see, and they didn't play it. He's funny, too. Well, the long and short of it is I totally forgot what the other thing I had to say about Pirates. was. So I'll probably think of it. Oh, I know what it was. Pyrogens, as your immune system grows in ages and you become a grown-up, the pyrogens have a little less of an effect on you. So where if you're a kid and your immune system is young and inexperienced, your fever is going to shoot up quick and it's going to get hotter faster. So you do want to

stay on top of a kid's fever because their immune system is not used to pyrogens coming and messing with their hypothalamus. adults it is. Yeah, it'll spike much faster. This is a good point. That's what I was trying to think of. Yeah, that's true. You need to take that rectal temperature,

way more than you're comfortable with. I don't recall that ever having been done to me. Well, because you don't remember being a baby. No, but my parents were pretty strict. Pretty stern. No, by the time a kid is old enough to where you can say, like, hey, put this under your tongue or hold still for a minute while I put this in your ear.

Yeah. But pre that, when they're not sentient humans and they're just, you know, crying, whiny little sacks of flesh. I got you. You got to stick it right up the butt. Okay. Jerry's laughing. She almost spit out her swarm a salad. Gary's done plenty of that, so she knows.

Okay, so into dreams. I always think we've done a general show on dreams. I think we did, finally. I didn't find it. What? Still? No, I saw Lucid Dreams. dreaming? Can you control your dreams?

That's the same thing, wasn't it? I think that was the same episode. Yeah. But no, we did one on dreams. I didn't see it. Wow. I can't believe it. I can't believe it.

Well, this contributes to the little by little. Someone will know. Okay. Jill Hurley, where are you when we need you? Our statetician, the minister of stats. Right. All right, well, we'll talk about dreams a bit here then, even though we've explained this in various episodes here and there to some degree.

But dreams, you know, if you're a psychologist, you really love to spend time talking and dissecting dreams, interpreting dreams. If you're more into the neurology side of science, you don't really care about that kind of stuff. In fact, for many years, they thought it was called activation synthesis hypothesis, which was you go to sleep and all these synapses are just randomly firing, and they don't really add up to even a story. You just do that when you wake up because you're human. Yeah. But that, I mean, that's complete BS. Well, you almost get the impression that they came up with this,

and the neurologists came up with it to stake out their territory in response to years of psychoanalyst saying, this is what dreams are. They're like tapping into the collective unconscious, or your repressed memories, neuroscience said, no, nothing. Yeah. They're just your stupid wet brain going crazy while you sleep. Yeah, which we all know now is not true.

I saw another one too. What's that? Threat simulation theory. Have you heard of that one? No, but that's a great band name. Basically, it's your training to be a ninja while you sleep. Like, your brain is running threat simulations. Constantly.

So that it's, like, working itself out, like, getting more and more agile and quick. Interesting. So you can get better at running from a saber-toothed tiger If you actually encounter it I could see that early on maybe Sure and there is an evolutionary advantage to it So evolutionarily speaking it would make sense The point is it that one came along and was like no

There's obviously some reason for dreams it's not just random Yeah well and then maybe I could have seen that early on But then at some point someone around the fire had a dream about Tuktuq's wife and woke up and went, whoa. Right. There was no saber-toothed tiger in that dream. I'm not sure what that meant. But I better not tell Tuk-Took.

Right. And then they went, what's a rectal thermometer? It hasn't even been invented yet. So these days, they've done actual studies with EEG machines and MRI machines. And especially in Italy, these Italian researchers basically put people to sleep, not put them to sleep in a sleeper hole they lay them down

in a nice Italian bed feed them some pasta fuzzul and get out the rectal thermometer yep and they hook them up to all these wires and machines and then they will wake them up at different points in the night

and say hey what were you dreaming of we'd like to talk about it and study what was going on with these machines right and they actually what they found supports the current the prevailing theory

I don't think it was their theory. I think it was around, but their research supports it called affect regulation theory, which is basically that we control our emotions or we process our emotions through our dreams. Yeah. And these Italians found support for this in that when they woke people up

and asked them what they were dreaming about, the ones who had the best recall were the ones who had the most theta waves in their frontal lobes. Right, which are slow-moving waves, right? Yes. And when you look at an EEG machine, if you looked at those dreamers brainwaves, it looked like the brainwaves of somebody who was sitting there forming and recalling memories. Right.

So these people said, that's what they're doing. That's what all of us are doing. While we're dreaming, we're forming memories. We're taking emotions that we've experienced through the day and we're creating memories out of them so we can file them away. So we're processing our emotions and our dreams. that's the point of dreams that's the current understanding yeah and then uh i mean other parts of the brain that have been active all sort of deal with emotion uh whether it's the amygdala and the hippocampus or uh the lingual gyrus which i think we just talked about that in another episode i don't recall

can't remember um but they're all areas of the brain that relate to emotion and memory right and some with visual activity and you know that kind of makes sense i like that theory yeah and then under that current theory. So that's like the explanation for regular dreams. And you can't just have a theory for dreams without including nightmares or else your theory's broken, right? Right. So the affect regulation theory considers nightmares. Basically, it's an emotion that's being put into the process of creating a memory, a false memory, right?

A dream memory, I guess you put it. But it's a real emotion, right? And it's so big it breaks the problem. And all of a sudden, this process of creating a fake memory, a fake experience goes haywire. And now all of a sudden you're enduring some terrible, horrifying experience because the emotion that was being processed was too big and got out of control. And now you have a nightmare. T.S. for you. Yeah.

I think we did one in night terrors, right? We did. For sure. Right. And sleep paralysis. We've covered it all, I think. I guess we really haven't done a dreams one. All right, so let's take another break.

We're going to come back and finally talk about fever dreams. You have the desire to help a real difference? The College, LaCity, you offer the program Dependence and Sentence Mental. Acquare the competences essential for accompany and support the people confronted to safety mental and of dependence.

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Keith Giamanka seemed like a mild-mannered suburban dad, but secretly he became someone else, a master of disguise who went on a crime spree. At the time, did it seem like a crazy idea? It seemed very crazy, but I felt so desperate that I felt it was, the quickest, easiest way out. Did you allow yourself to think about how it could go wrong and what that might look like? No, I didn't want to manifest that. I was trying to manifest success.

Every family has its secrets. But what happens when you discover that your dad has been living a double life? That is not the look of an innocent man. This is going to change my life and my family dynamic forever because everything that had, existed prior in my reality is now untrue. Listen to Deep Cover the Family Man on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get

your podcasts. You robbed me of a Saturday Night Fever reference. I just want to go on record as saying that I was wrong. So Chuck, here's where everything just kind of goes totally off the rail. We've talked about fevers. We've talked about nightmares. the problem is really understanding both doesn't necessarily amount to understanding them together right so knowing what fevers are knowing what dreams are it doesn't mean you know what fever

dreams are but you can make stuff up if you want yeah and i'm boy i don't even think we even said if you've never had a fever dream you might even know we're talking about oh yeah you're kind of dumb at this point in the podcast but the fever dream is um basically a nightmare on steroids. Yeah. It's just so vivid and so real and scary. Right. That happens, you know, when you are sick with a fever.

Yes. Obviously. So they're fever dreams, right? So they are a thing. Yeah. But the scientific literature on them is super thin. Basically non-existent. Kids seem to get them, if not more, at least they stand out more to children.

Right. And so anecdotally, people seem to recall having fever dreams more when they were kids. Right. Whether or not that's true or just a memory is, or, you know, what do you call it? Like a memory bias or whatever. Yeah. No one really knows. Yeah, well, yeah.

I mean, we don't really know. Because I don't remember the last time I had a fever, and if I did, whether or not I had a fever dream. I don't think I've ever had a fever dream. I did when I was a kid. I don't remember having fever dreams. Yeah, I remember being sick as a kid and having, like, nightmare. was when I was sick. So, like, they're noticeably worse

than your average nightmare? Yes. Really? Mm-hmm. So would you keep waking up from them? Mm, that I don't remember. See, that's a big question to me. Well, let's talk about the anecdotal theory

of what is behind fever dreams, right? Okay. So when your body's undergoing a fever, we said that your body's not functioning at its top performance. No. And that includes the brain. The brain itself is an extremely special organ, if you didn't know already.

It's like, I think, 2% of the body's mass, but it requires 20% of the body's energy. Yeah, and the neurons compared to regular old dumb cells, they burn or they need about between 300 and 2,500 times more energy than a regular old dumb cell in your body. Right. And so when all these chemical processes, when all of this energy is being exploited to power cells, it produces the byproduct of heat. Yeah. So the brain is super sensitive to overheating, right? Already, just under normal circumstances. Yeah, and it's generally taken care of by your body, like it's cooled down and regulated.

Right. So if you have a fever and your brain is not operating at optimal conditions, but you're asleep, so it's trying to go through its normal processes. If you have a nightmare, it's entirely possible that that nightmare is going to be far, far worse because the normal processes have broken down. Or it's even further possible.

Apparently, the amygdala is frequently implicated with nightmares because it has to do with being terrified or angry or fearful. The amygdala might be functioning, at an abnormal level. Yeah. And it's just basically going haywire while you have a fever. Yeah, and then the fact that most dreams occur

during REM sleep, and I think that's when your body is warmest during sleep anyway, right? That's when, see, this is where it all gets kind of hinky. During REM sleep, your hypothalamus says, I'm done, I'm not working right now. So it stops regulating temperature, which is usually why your body temperature

is lowest right before you wake up, Oh, I thought it was highest right before you wake up. No, it's highest in the afternoon while you're awake. It's lowest right before you wake up. I feel like I always wake up hot. You, I mean, you may be, like, sleeping with too many blankets. Your room might be a little too warm. I use no blankets.

Or maybe it's my stupid, you know, schedule of my AC. I mean, it could be. You know, it might have cut off a couple hours before or something. Right, it could be, right? And it fires up after I get up. Because supposedly, when you are sleeping and you're in our, REM sleep, your hypothalamus is not regulating temperature during that period. So if you are already hot, and remember high body temperature is associated with wakefulness,

then maybe you are waking up more frequently than you normally would, and when you wake up in the middle of a dream, you're more prone to remember it. If you wake up in the middle of a nightmare, it's going to seem even worse than one that you had and woke up normally from. Yeah, I mean, I had a series of not nightmares last night, but just sort of anxiety dreams. And I don't have any anxiety about anything right now. I think it was just after reading all this stuff. Oh, yeah? I'm just suggestible.

You had anxiety dreams? Yeah. Huh. But not about like... Nothing specific? No, like there's, you know, usually if I have anxiety dreams, I'm just like because something's going on in my life, I'm anxious about. Sure, yeah.

But I'm... It was just the research, huh? I think so. Man, you were dedicated. But they're also. celebrity dreams because I you know I've talked about those before no yeah yeah that I have just celebrity dreams all the time but they're just very normal that I'm just like friends with celebrity people but were they were they anxiety ridden last night yes like I was hanging out

with the band Luna okay Dean Wareham of Luna all right and that was but there was but there was I can't remember exactly what was going on but you know there was anxiety involved like I was trying to get somewhere and couldn't get there like the typical stupid dream stuff You guess it. You know? Yeah. But somehow, Dean was in there somehow. Yeah.

Have you talked to him today? I don't know him, but I think I know why they were in there. That's all I'll say. Oh, okay. Wink, wink, wink. I guess so. Here's another thing that was in our own article I thought was interesting, just a little tidbit, was that some recreational drugs like meth and ecstasy can raise brain temperatures.

Right. That is one of the reasons they think that it, like, kill so many brain cells when you do those drugs. Yeah, supposedly you're not supposed to take ecstasy in warm climate. Yeah, never, I've heard that. Yeah, just Norway. Well, there you have it. Only it's fall barred.

What else? Is there anything else in here? No, man, I can't believe we stretched this one out as far as we did. All righty. We never have to talk about fever dreams again, Chuck. Good. If you want to know more about fever dreams, well, you might as well start at House to Work.com, there's nothing wrong with that. And you can also just go around and look at how sparse the research is on the internet for

yourself. And if you are a researcher and you know more stuff about fever dreams that you can point us to, let us know. In the meantime, I think I said search bars somewhere in there, which means it's time for listener mail. You know what? I think another reason the anxiety dreams is because I'm barreling through the season of Fargo. The third season?

Yeah, and the two episodes I watched last night, which I believe were, if there were 10, I think it was 8 and 9, were both just like ratcheted up with tension. I'm sure that's what it was. And I think that probably had something to do with it. That happens to me sometimes I'll be watching something, and I won't realize how on top of me it's gotten,

and then all of a sudden it goes to an ad, and I'm like really uptight about this scratch-and-dent washing machine sale that's going on somewhere and I don't understand why. And I'm like, oh, wow, that TV show really got to me. Yeah, I think Fargo had something to do with it. I think you may have nailed it. All right, I'm going to call this one Garden Variety Fanmail, which we don't read a lot of these. So I'm going to.

Dig in. Hey, guys, that's all this is, fan mail. You guys are doing a great job. Always have. It's clear that with every episode, you take great pains to provide the most accurate information you can in the most thoughtful way possible. How ironic. I bet you would read this on the fever dreams of this thing. This has never been more evident to me than in the episodes you did on puberty.

I know it's been a little while since he's came out. But just listened to them and it was touching to see how frequently you tried to reassure young listeners. What they're experiencing is normal and that there was nothing wrong about what was happening. To hear two grown men do their best talk to young boys and girls about such sensitive material was a pleasure. Yes, at times I could practically feel you nervously twitching while trying to discuss menstruation. in an informative yet reassuring way, but it was absolutely charming. Just reaffirm what we've always known at you two are just a pair of great dudes. Oh, that's nice.

Yeah, I like this guy. I've only been listening for a few years, but I'm a lifetime fan now. If you're keeping count, I'd like to put in a vote for DC for live shows. Josh, E, D-G-E-E, sorry. E-D-G-G-E is Edge. And then, add two L's. Edge-L? Edge-all, sure, yeah.

Josh Edgel or Edgel? I like Edgel. Or Edgel. Edgel. Or Edgel. I think Edgel. Edgel sounds like a kid next door. Josh Edgel.

It's Josh. And Josh, you know what? We usually come to D.C. once a year. I don't think we're coming this year, though. No, we probably will be there early-ish 2018. Yeah, D.C. is always great to us. So we'll definitely be back. Yeah.

Soonish. Yeah. And you can always fly somewhere in the continental United States toward Canada. Josh. Take that Asala Express up to Brooklyn. Exactly. That's a pleasure train.

There you go. There's rectal thermometers everywhere. And if you want to get in touch of this, you can send us both and Jerry an email to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts to My Heart Radio, visit the IHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Joy is essential and it's also elusive, but now there's a new and exciting way to start your journey toward a more joyful existence. Joy 101.

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