Stuff You Should Know - Selects: How Nitrous Oxide Works

Episode Date: May 29, 2021

For about 175 years people have been huffing nitrous oxide for everything from vision quests to anesthetic to get plain old high. And after all that time we are only now beginning to understand how it works on our brains. Get the scoop in this classic episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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, 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 podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Good morning or good afternoon, everyone. Happy Saturday. It's Chuck here of stuff you should know. It is February 8th, 2016, and Saturday select time because we are going back to that day to talk about how nitrous oxide works. And honestly, the reason I picked this as the select is that I

don't even remember doing this one. So I'm going to listen again. And so should you. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles, Evie, Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry. And this is Stuff You Should Know, the podcast. You're making... I'm giggling like a schoolgirl. You're making a... I think I just topped you schoolgirl-wise. Echo-y, reverb-y sound. So this could only be about one thing. Nitrous oxide. That's right. N2O. That's right. Hippie crack. The bitter mistress. Whippets. It's jazz juice. Yeah, why not? Yeah. I mean, those are the street names that has medical

applications. Some of those are made up. Yeah. We're going to cover the whole gamut here. Yeah. Medical use and recreational use, dangers. Yeah. We're going to do an episode on nitrous oxide. That's right. So, Chuck, we should probably start not at the beginning, but not at the end, somewhere in the middle. Yeah. Because the history of nitrous oxide is extraordinarily interesting. Just the history. Yeah, we're going to tell it out of order, like pulp fiction. That's right. See if you can recognize characters from other movies, like Vincent Vega's brother. Yeah. Michael Madsen was Vincent Vega's brother. Did you know that? Yeah. Oh, you knew that? I did. Well, well, I don't think that's not the most heavily guarded secret. Did you notice that

red apple cigarettes make an appearance in more than just pulp fiction? Yeah. All right, I'm done. Did you notice that Quentin Tarantino likes to write 275-page scripts? Yeah. But that's nothing compared to the 580-page tome that Humphrey Davy wrote on nitrous oxide. Very nice, little segue. All right, so we're not even talking about Humphrey Davy yet. He's at the beginning. He's not even at the beginning, but he's toward the beginning. We're going to talk instead about the sad saga of one Dr. Horace Wells. Boy. DDS. Very sad. Yeah. So Dr. Horace Wells was a dentist in New Haven, Connecticut, I believe, in the 1840s. What is DDS? Is that dentist? Dentist, see? Is that what that means? That's what I've always assumed it was. And at this point,

everyone knows we just make most of the stuff we say up. That's right. So you're right, sir. He was a dentist in Hartford, Connecticut. Oh, it was Hartford. I said New Haven. Well, what's the difference? As long as it's in Connecticut. And this was in the 1830s. Oh, really? I said 1840. Oh, man, really? Yeah. Maybe we should start over. All right. He was a dentist in the 1830s, and he recognized something that all dentists of the day recognize, which is everyone hates your guts because you are causing excruciating amounts of pain on a daily basis to your patients. Yeah. It's like, here's some whiskey, maybe? Yeah. Bite on this broomstick. Well, actually, you can't do that because you're doing dentistry.

So you can't even do that. Yeah. You ever heard the term, it's like pulling teeth? That's where it comes from. Right. And so Horace Wells, DDS, dentist, dentist, see? He felt pretty bad about this enough so that he went to a traveling exhibition once that came through town. And this was in the 1840s. And it was staged by a man named Gardner Colton. That's a great name. Gardner Quincy Colton. Yeah, he sounds like a rich kid from Texas. Yeah, or like a sideshow showman, which is what he was. Right. And he actually was in medical school for a little while. And while he was in med school, he was introduced to the wonders of huffing nitrous oxide. Yes. And he said, I'm not going to

do medical schooling more. I'm just going to drop out and hit the road with a tank. The old hippie crack. Yeah, exactly. And show people what's what. And so at one of these demonstrations in Hartford, sometime in the 1840s, he saw Colton give this demo and, I guess, right afterward saw a man run into the stage or fell off the stage and hurt his leg. Yeah. And Wells went over and was like, are you okay? And the guy's like, what are you talking about? And he said, the bone is sticking out of your leg, sir. And he's like, what's a bone? No, it wasn't that bad. But he did say, interesting. Yeah. Here's what I'll do. I'll get Colton to come into my office tomorrow. And my buddy colleague, John Riggs, I'll get Colton to

administer the gas and I'll get Riggs to pull one of my teeth. And he did so. And he said, I did not feel so much as the prick of a pin. Yeah. And he said, I think we're on to something here, something called pain-free dentistry, aka, please stop hating me. Right. And so Wells followed in this really great tradition that really stopped in, I guess, probably about the 20th century, mid to late 20th century, of where if you were a scientist, you were your own first human test subject. I bet people still do that. Yeah. Apparently in Marvel Comics, they do. One of the greatest articles I've ever read in any magazine anywhere in all time throughout the universe in perpetuity is called Blood Spore. And it was about the murder of a mycologist, a scientist who studies

mushrooms. Wow. And it's really, really interesting. There's all sorts of weird like cold case stuff to it. But there's also like an underlying thread where if you're a mycologist and you discover a mushroom, you try it out on yourself. Right. Like that's just what they do still today. I think that you try it on yourself after you fed it to your children just to see what happens. Maybe your dog first and then you try it on you. Man, I'll bet those mycologist dogs wear bandanas and are super laid back, you know. What's the name of the article? I want to check that out. Blood Spore. It's in Harper's, which means it's behind a paywall, but it's almost worth a year subscription just for that one. Wow. And Harper's archives are definitely full of good articles.

Agreed. So Wells was pretty happy because he knew he was onto something there. And he said he performed just dental procedures for the next few weeks and months on dozens of patients. And they were all like, this is great. Works great. Didn't feel a thing, Doc. And he said, I think I'm ready. I want to present this to some Harvard medical students in the establishment. And he got on stage and he went to pull a tooth and the guy started screaming. Yeah. So like after all of these tests, successful tests, when he finally gets up the gumption to give a successful demonstration, it goes as bad as it could. And it's actually called the humbug affair because the medical student shouted humbug and what was the other

one? Swindler. Swindler Adam. And he's like, no, I'm not. I'm not. I swear. This is for real. I really care about my patients and the room started spinning and he fell over. And when he came to, he was on skid row, hooked on chloroform and nitrous oxide. Yeah. He later went on to say that Although, wait, let me, let me clarify. You technically can't get hooked on nitrous oxide, but he was huffing a lot of nitrous oxide. Right. Well, although Davey, well, we'll get to that. Okay. That would be a spoiler. He went on to say that he thought that he had probably withdrawn too much too soon from the guy because as we'll go on to talk about here in a little bit, when you stop breathing in nitrous, you go back to normal pretty quickly. Very quickly.

So he kind of just aired, I don't know, I would have gone a little bit overboard for the demo. Sure. On the safe side. I would have been like 99 pal. But yeah, he became, well, like you said, not hooked, but a heavy user of ether and chloroform. Oh, yes, ether. In the, on his 33rd birthday, he was, I think, awaiting arrival of his, he ended up living alone, moved and was waiting on his like wife and kid to come to London. But by this time, he'd sunk into like a terrible depression. Oh yeah. Right. And he was alone because his family wasn't able to join him yet. And he flipped out on his 33rd birthday and went out on the street and threw acid on these two women. Flipped out after going on like a chloroform bender.

Yeah. Yeah. And went to prison and in prison, he sort of reached, he kept doing chloroform and ether in prison because I guess you could get it and hit rock bottom and under an ether binge slashed his femoral artery and his thigh died. Well, yeah, he talked to the guard escorting him home to get his shaving kit and at home. It's like I need a big razor. I think at home or maybe back if he was getting chloroform in prison, it could have been there. He huffed a dose of chloroform to anesthetize himself and then he cut his femoral artery. So to the end, he was a believer in anesthesia. I guess so. However, years later in 1864, he was, he was recognized by the ADA, the American Dental Association, as a pioneer of using,

not ether, but what are we talking about, N02. N2O. And dentistry, N2O. Yeah. And do you know who got him to that point? Well, yeah. Gardner Colton. That's right. He set up practice as a dentist after all and it was his successful demonstrations that got the ADA on board. So now we need to go back in time. Yeah, even further back. That's sort of the middle. So we're in the wayback machine. I guess we didn't point out we were in there already. I think everyone just assumed. And we go back 70 years previous to Horace Wells to a guy named Jason Priestley. Dylan. Sorry. No, Brandon. Joseph Priestley. Oh, that guy. Jason Priestley's dad. Yeah, or great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather.

I don't think there was any relation actually. You don't know. You're right. Joseph Priestley, he was an Englishman and he began. Just like Jason Priestley. That's right. And he was a big, he was an enlightened thinker and he was a contemporary Ben Franklin and he was a smart guy on a lot of different subjects. He was a polyglot. Yeah, that's a good word for it. Cool guy. And no, I'm sorry, he was a polymath. A polymath? A polyglot is somebody who speaks a bunch of different languages. Polymath is somebody who's in a bunch of different fields. He may well be both. Yeah, probably. I never know. He was an enlightenment guy for sure. And in the 1770s, he was studying a love, I think we should go back to using only old

terminology because what they called gases back then was the study of the airs. Yeah. Which is great. Totally makes sense. Yeah. Gases. That means to shoot a duck. And he actually lived next to a brewery, so he had a lot of access to CO2 and very smartly created a device called the pneumatic trough to isolate gases, collect and isolate these gases and he was good at it. So, well, a guy named Stephen Hales actually created the first pneumatic trough, which is actually pretty, it's simple invention. It's neat though. Yeah. So, like you have a tube, let's say you have a fire and you want to collect carbon monoxide from it. You basically have a tube that collects it, the smoke that's coming off of

it and the tube goes into a vat of water and up into a glass bell jar that's upside down, it's inverted so that there's air at the top. I think the principle's similar. Yeah. And so, the smoke goes into the water and then goes up and is filtered through the water and what the gas you have on the other end is whatever you're looking for or a bunch of different gases that you can study in pure form. Simplistically beautiful. It is. So, Priestley had his own that he made the pneumatic trough and this guy actually isolated eight different gases or airs for the first time, which apparently is a record still. Yeah, I don't know what the record is. Like, most gases discovered in a single lifetime. Okay. I guess. All right. That's good. It is.

I don't know that there's any more gases to discover, I wonder. And who studies that kind of thing? What do you call somebody who studies gases? An aerologist, an aerosist. Well, if you do that, write into us because I want to know all about that and if there's, if you guys think there's any gases left to be discovered here on earth. Agreed. All right. Let's take a break before we talk about Humphrey Davy. Okay. Because he's, this is where the story gets really good. 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 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. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikler. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been

trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. That was quite a break. Yeah.

I can't believe you broke that lamp. I was upset. All right, Humphrey Davy, he worked at a place called the Pneumatic Institute and they used gases for therapy, curative therapies. Yeah. And he got into using them on himself, which like you said, was sort of the thing to do at the time. You experiment on yourself. Right. Plus, as the author of this Rolling Stone article from 1975 that I read pointed out, he was also like 20 at the time. So it totally makes sense that he would like half a bunch of nitrous oxide. Right. And then call it science. Right. But he, I mean, it really was science. So this guy apparently had tried it a few times

before, but then his big experiment, his first huge experiment was on Boxing Day of 1799, right? Which is December 26th. It's very important that you remember December 26th, 1799. Why is it important? Well, it was Boxing Day, but it was also literally Box Day because Humphrey Davy got into a box and had some guy pump in, was it like 20 quarts? Yeah. He stepped into a seal box and he requested a physician, like a real doctor, to release 20 quarts, because otherwise it'd just be crazy. Right. He released 20 quarts of nitrous oxide every five minutes as long as I'm conscious. That must have been the safe word is I'm passed out. And he went for an hour and 15 minutes like that in this box. Not bad.

And then he stepped out and apparently grabbed some oil skins or also called gas bags. Yeah. And huffed another 20 quarts right afterward. Yeah. And they were like, how are you still standing? And he goes, I'm not, I'm flying. He basically did. He had a great disposition to laugh, which eventually is where laughing gas would come from. He talked about shining packets of light and energy. He talked about objects dazzling in their intensity and sounds amplified into a cacophony that echoed through infinite space and losing all connection to external things. It's pretty cool. So there's this really great article on the public domain review and it's called, Oh, Excellent Gas Bag. Is it gas bag or air bag?

Air bag. Air bag, I'm sorry, which is a quote from a poet that was friends with Humphrey Davie who became the poet laureate of Great Britain later on. And the author really does a good job of describing what nitrous oxide does to you, almost suspiciously good. So they say that the first signature was its curiously benign sweet taste, followed by a gentle pressure in the head as he continued to inhale. Within 30 seconds, the sensation of soft probing pressure had extended to his chest and the tips of his fingers and toes. This was accompanied by a vibrant burst of pleasure and a gradual change in the world around him. Objects became brighter and clearer and the space in the cramp box seemed to expand

and take on unfamiliar dimensions. Now under the influence of the largest dose of nitrous oxide anyone had ever taken, these effects were intensified to levels he could not have imagined. Should I keep going? Sure. Do you want to, do you want to take over? No, go ahead. I think it's better when we break it up. Well, I'm going to read the southeast part, so. Okay. His hearing became fantastically acute, allowing him to distinguish every sound in the room and seemingly from far beyond, a vast distant hum. Perhaps the vibration of the universe itself. In his field of vision, the objects around him were teasing themselves apart into shining packets of light and energy. He was rising effortlessly in a new world whose existence he had never suspected.

Somehow the whole experience was irresistibly funny. So Robert Southey, his buddy, you mentioned the future poet laureate. Right. He brought him in afterward. He was like, I got to get some more people in on this. That's fantastic. Right. I got to share this. Yeah, that's what you do. So he brought in Southey, got him high, and he wrote his brother, Tom, a letter that said, oh, Tom, exclamation point. Such a gas as Davey discovered, the gaseous oxide. Oh, Tom, again, exclamation point. I have had some. It made me laugh and tingle and every toe and fingertip. Davey has actually invented a new pleasure for which language has no name. Oh, Tom, I am going for more this evening.

It makes one strong and so happy, so gloriously happy. Oh, excellent airbag exclamation point. Pretty great stuff. No wonder he was the poet laureate. So in the summer of 1799, after they closed the shop down, the pneumatic institution during the day, he would invite surgeons and playwrights and poets and chemists and anyone who was interested, who we could get the word to, to come in there and huff nitrous. I was about to say under the guise of experimentation, but it really was because he learned that he was really finding that there was a language experiment because no one could accurately describe what they were feeling with English words. Right, exactly. He found that very strange and significant that

people would just come out and just couldn't put it into words, their experience. Sure. I mean, it was a brand new sensation. There was one guy, James Thompson said, we must either invent new terms to express these new and peculiar sensations or attach new ideas to old ones before we can communicate intelligently, or I'm sorry, intelligibly with each other on the operation of this extraordinary gas. I think Samuel Taylor Colleridge, the great poet, put it best. He put it really succinctly. He basically said that it was like coming in from the snow into a warm room. Yeah. So what happened was he did these experiments with these people. They eventually

got kind of tired of it. He experimented on himself, like not even in the room, he just would fill up a big balloon or not a balloon, but a soap bag and just walk around England huffing. Right. And he found himself getting psychologically hooked at least. Yeah. Because he said, he confessed that the desire to breathe the gas is awakened in me by the sight of a person breathing. So he would just see someone walking and breathing and think, oh man, I wish I had some gas. That's why they call it hippie crack. Yeah, exactly. Sure. So everyone else fell away. He was only experimenting with himself for a little while. Then he brings in Coleridge and they really buddied up. And I think they

were just kind of saw eye to eye on the gas. Right. Like neither one of them wanted to cease using it. And so again, though, you have to point out all this time while he's under the, he's just huffing nitrous basically constantly. Humphrey Davy is still remaining a man of science, right? Sure. So remember December 26, 1799 was the day that the boxing day experiment took place, right? Yeah. By Easter, just a few months later, he'd written a 580 page scientific treatise on nitrous oxide and its effects on humans and animals. Should I read the title? Yeah. Researches, chemical and philosophical, chiefly concerning nitrous oxide or deep, oh man, what is that word? Deflogisticated nitrous air and its respiration was the name

of it. Yes. So in that book, he mentioned something kind of, I guess offhandedly, he says that as nitrous oxide appears capable of destroying physical pain, it may probably be used with advantage during surgical operations in which no great effusion of blood takes place. Yeah. So not like open heart surgery, but maybe if you're going to set someone's broken arm. Right. So he says this, but it's another 40 years before Horace Wells starts trying to use nitrous oxide as an anesthetic. Up to that point, it's basically just a high society drug that people have like nitrous parties with. Yep. That was the fate of nitrous oxide from 1800 to about the 1840s. And then Horace Wells picks it up and it becomes brought into the

medical field. Yeah, they finally start using it for its intended, well, what would end up being its intended purpose that's still used today. Right. And in fact, nitrous oxide is the number one inhaled anesthetic in the medical profession. Ask for it by name. And here's the deal though. When you get it at the dentist, they can actually vary it, but it never goes more than a 70-30 mix. I saw that too. This article says it's always a 50-50 mix. That's not right. So it's no more than 70% nitrous. Yeah, which is very much key as you'll learn, because one of the big dangers of doing it recreationally is not mixing it with oxygen. Right. If you mix it with oxygen, like, you're fine. You're totally fine. Right. So it's kind of nuts, Chuck, that with nitrous

oxide, we spent at least 150 years. And still today, we're not a million percent sure, but at least 150 years using it medically without understanding how it worked. Yeah, like you said though, it's still a little dicey. It is a little bit dicey. Now, it makes you feel good. Right. It does the trick. And it kicks in your dopamine and all the pleasure receptors. So it's classified as three things. It's an analgesic, which means that it kills pain. It's an anesthetic, but it's actually not a true anesthetic. And it's an anxiolytic, which means it diminishes anxiety. And so I found this 2006 paper and it basically says, here's what we think is going on. All right, hit me. So with an anxiolytic, it triggers the same response in the brain as a benzodiazepine, which is like

Valium or Xanax or something like that. So it actually does cut down on anxiety, which is why the dentist will use it for little kids or patients who are nervous about going to the dentist. Get a little gas, probably not a 70-30 concentration. Just a little bit and it'll cut down on your anxiety and you're totally fine, Doc. Go ahead and do whatever you like. As far as an analgesic is concerned, it actually does have a tremendous amount of an ability to cut down on pain. And it does so by activating your opioids that those are released. Opioids are produced in the brain and your opioid receptors are activated as well. And then it also goes to your spinal column and messes with its ability to process pain there too. And they say that something like just a 30%

concentration of nitrous oxide is equal to about 10 to 15 milligrams of morphine. Yeah. And that's if it's 50-50 or below with oxygen, it's on the analgesic side. I think up to the 70% is when it is known as an anesthetic. Right. And so it's not technically an anesthetic in that if you huff that until you lost consciousness, you're probably in big trouble. You don't want to use nitrous oxide for that and anesthetists know that kind of thing. But it's used usually as an aid to a general anesthetic, right? Right. And it does have anesthetic properties, but it's a dissociative anesthetic, kind of like ketamine, which means that it goes after your NMDA receptors, which have to do with memory formation and they control like neurofiring,

right? Yeah. And it has a dissociative effect, which is why when you're on nitrous, you feel like you have left your body. You've gone back in time, you died and are being reborn. Yeah. And we'll talk a little bit more about childbirth later, but one of the quotes I saw from a childbirth nurse, they said the mothers who use it during childbirth are sometimes they can still feel pain, they just don't care about it, which would be the dissociative quality. Exactly. But I don't get, because you said it was... An analgesic? Yeah. I mean, I guess maybe childbirth is so painful, it can't knock it out completely. And also, I mean, like with anesthetics of any kind, or even analgesics, any person's going to have different reactions, varying reactions to different

drugs, you know? Sure. So that's kind of the current state of understanding with what nitrous does to the brain, right? Right. You can also find nitrous elsewhere outside of medical settings too, right? Yeah. You can find in a can of ready whip, or if you... a lot of chefs will have their own nitrous canister to put whatever they want in it, to be used as a propellant. So it works really well with fatty liquids and heavy creams and things. So what happens is the gas is in there, compressed into a liquid and mixed with the cream. Because it's fat soluble. Yeah. It mixes really well. Highly pressurized. Right. But as soon as you open that thing up, it turns back into a gas and expands it like four times. Right. So that's

why the whipped cream will come shooting out. What's neat is you could buy ready whip 20 years hence after it sat in a garage in Tampa, Florida, say somewhere hot and muggy. Sure. And you shake it up and pour it out and that whipped cream will be totally fresh, not the least bit rancid. That's because nitrous oxide totally displaces air and oxygen. So no bacteria can form inside a can of ready whip or any other instant whip cream. Well, and that displacement of oxygen is also why you can die if you, let's say, put a bag over your head to intensify your high if you're using it recreationally. Well, we'll talk more about that later, right? Yes. Okay. Before we break though, let's mention cars because anyone who has ever seen Fasts and Furious is... Or is a Sammy Hagar

solo fan? I can't drive 55. That's right. Does he talk about nitrous? No, but it's just assumed that there's nitrous involved. Well, you've heard, you may have heard or seen on TV or movies about using nitrous in your car, like you have that little tank, or you may see one of those cheesy cars in a parking lot with the little tank in there. Yeah. And basically what it does is cars run burn hotter, engines burn hotter and go faster with more oxygen. And if you crank in that nitrous oxide, it's just basically going to ramp up the oxygen levels going into the engine. Right. And with more oxygen, more gas gets burned, right? Faster. More gas gets burned, more horsepower is produced because the gases expand and pump those pistons even harder.

Then you're too fast and too furious. Yeah. For the roads. Maybe even doing a little Tokyo drifting. Have you seen those, any of them? No, but I believe they're the most lucrative movie franchise in the history of all movies. Well, because they made seven of them. Yeah, but like the first one made a billion dollars worldwide in its first week or the last one, the last one made like a billion dollars. It's crazy how popular they are. I think I saw the first one. Yeah, I've never seen any of them. But that's about, it's just not my bag. No, I don't, if you like that kind of thing, that's great. I'm glad you have that. I've never been a car guy. Yeah. You know, like I like my

cars, but I've never been like, oh man, look at that sports car. Sure. I sure would like to dry fast in that. Yeah. Well, remember when we hosted or judged that Red Bull thing? Oh yeah. I was talking to a young jock and I was talking to him and he started talking about cars and I'm like, wow, we don't have anything common, do we? Yeah, Josh and I judged a soapbox derby contest sponsored by Red Bull and young jock and local Atlanta rapper who was super cool. He's a very nice guy, but he was a car dude and I'm not a car dude. I know. You're not a car dude either. Well, I got my pickup truck. Yeah. I'm like, look at those tires. Pretty neat. They really make contact with the asphalt, don't they? All right. Well, let's take a break and go learn

more about cars and we'll come back and talk about some of the recreational use and dangers. But we're done talking about cars, right? Yes. 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. 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 my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah,

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 iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangeh Shatikar and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately I've been wondering if the

universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. By the way, if you want to know about cars,

if you're into that kind of thing and you love us and you're not getting your fix from cars from us, go listen to car stuff. You're definitely not getting your fix about cars from us. I can tell you that. You can get it from car stuff. Ben and Scott have it locked down over there. Yeah. I bet you they've covered nitrous. I'm sure. In the automobile. They've covered everything. All right. So recreational use. It has its medical purposes and its food and auto purposes. But nitrous is very famous for becoming a big, especially at concerts. That's why they call it hippie crack. In the 70s, you started being able to buy this stuff like a big balloon full of it at like a concert festival or let's be honest, at a Grateful Dead show.

All right. I'll post that Rolling Stone article on the podcast page for this. Really interesting. It is. But it's also a, what is that? Oh, it's called secondhand embarrassment. What people get from watching the Jeb Bush campaign. Secondhand embarrassment. Well, yes. Well, you've never heard it before. For somebody. Yes, exactly. You definitely get that from reading this because the writers, very earnestly, super 70s. Oh, really? Yeah. One of the people who has interviewed as an expert of source is the guy from High Times. Only in the mid-70s. Did you get away with calling up the High Times guy and just using him like a regular source? You'll see what I'm saying. Like it sounds normal. Yeah. You read the article and you'll be

like, yeah, this is super 70s. Well, in the 70s is when it started becoming a big concert going activity. Oh, wait. I know what I was going to say. College dorm rooms. In this Rolling Stone article, they were saying like, if you go to, like a lot of it was set up in Berkeley, California, and there were like places all over, not just at concerts. Sure. It was everywhere. Oh, yeah. In the 70s. Yeah, yeah. Because a lot of people were like, acid's cool, but this stuff like, you can just stop and five minutes later, you're back on your feet. Yeah. So it was like a big deal to them. Well, which is one reason they call it hippie crack because the high is short-lived and you want to do another one. Sure. And go listen to our crack episode.

Should we talk about why the high is short-lived? Well, let me finish my thought. Sorry. So earlier in the 19th and 20th century, though, like you said, when it was sort of the backroom parlor game of the high society, it made its way into Hollywood and back in like the days of making high times and movies like, or not high times, the, what was the one? Casablanca. No, the famous pot movie. I'm totally blanking out on the pot movie. Reef or Madness. Reef or Madness. There were movies about huffing, though, as Charlie Chaplin was in one in 1914, where he played a dentist, well, someone posing as a dentist who had huffed gas. Have you ever seen that Chaplin thing where he

does coke and jail and ends up like pulling the bars apart? It's pretty hilarious, actually. And there were several movies early on called Laugh and Gas, not just one. Right. And they weren't sequels. They were just multiple movies called Laugh and Gas. Yeah. I'm sure you could get a decent amount of people into a theater to watch people doing Laugh and Gas. Sure. And then they thought, man, I could go for some Laugh and Gas myself. All right. So what were you going to say about? Oh, why the high lasts? So it's such a short period of time. So it's constant while you're huffing it, right? That's right. Because you're huffing nitrogen gas or nitrogen

oxide gas, right? Yeah. And it's displacing oxygen. I'm sorry, nitrous oxide gas. And it is displacing oxygen. But as long as you're huffing in a safe supply of oxygen as well, your brain's continuing to function, but your opioid receptors are also going crazy and your dissociative NDMA receptors are going crazy too. And so you're high, but you're staying alive because you're taking in enough oxygen, right? Yeah. The thing is, your body doesn't metabolize almost any of that nitrous oxide. Something like 0.004% of nitrous oxide is metabolized. For the most part, you huff it in, it's dissipated through your lungs, into your bloodstream, and then brought back out and you exhale it. So it resembles almost exactly the same form that

it went in when it comes out, which means that there's no hangover and it's expelled from your body through breathing, just normal breathing, after you take the nitrous away, which is why so many people were like, you can have crazy visions on this. This is what the hippies were saying. Sure. You can have crazy visions on this and it takes you to other universes. And then five minutes later, you're fine. Sign me up. Let's call the high times guy and see what he thinks about it. Let's get a quote from him. I did find a study though and I think it was last year published in clinical neurophysiology that they hooked people up to an EEG and had them huff nitrous. Really? Yeah. And the guy there said, nitrous oxide has control over the brain in

ways no other drug does. And what they found was it altered, basically created slow delta waves for up to three minutes across the front of the brain every 10 seconds. I wonder if that's what makes the wah, wah, wah sound? Well, it's basically what they found is it lasted for three minutes after you think you're okay. Oh yeah. So it's still doing damage even though you think you feel fine for three minutes, which completely surprised them. Oh yeah, I could see that. Especially, I mean, if the effects were off, you would think you would physiologically be back to normal too. Exactly. That is surprising. I found another study from, I'm not sure when, sometime in the last few years, where they studied the effects of it on rats and found that short-term low concentration

exposure and low concentration meaning like 50 years, like what they use medically would, like the effects of it on the brain neural cells is reversible. But it is very true and this is why everybody hears about nitrous oxide is that when you huff, it kills brain cells. That's absolutely true. It creates apoptosis, which is pre-programmed cellular death in your neurons. It causes your brain cells to die because of a lack of oxygen. Nitrogen or nitrous oxide displaces oxygen and your brain needs oxygen and when your brain cells don't get oxygen, they die and your brain undergoes hypoxia. Not good for you. No. Plus the fact that it goes after NDMA receptors, which are responsible for the myelin, which is the sheath that coats your nerves. That can lead

to brain damage that last two. The thing is, and this is a rat study, it seems like it's prolonged exposure or exposure of super high concentrations that create irreversible damage. Yeah, they've done a lot more studying about it in the UK than here because up until this year, it was legal. Oh, they outlawed it? Yeah. Well, I guess the results of the study weren't promising. Well, I mean, this was only, what is it now, mid-February? Yeah. It was only like two weeks ago that it literally came on the books as officially law. And there were big demonstrations in England like massive huffing parties on the lawn of, I don't know where they decide these things. Is it Parliament? Buckingham Palace. Sure. I'll say Buckingham Palace. Because they're like,

this is, what are we going to do at Glastonbury Festival every year now? Sure. And they... Nice buzz marketing, by the way. What, the Glastonbury Festival? Yeah. Well, we're not going to that. I know. I was saying, nice. Okay. Well, they do it a lot there. That's why the festival people said it's like a big litter offender. Because... I could totally see that. Canisters and balloons are just everywhere. Yeah. And birds pick up the balloons and... They try to fly off of the canisters but tear their legs off because they're not strong enough to lift them. So worldwide, it was in 2014, it was the 14th most used drug in the world. And...

Really? Yeah. 14th. Would you think it'd be higher or lower? I didn't even think about it. I think it's just... That stat just totally caught me by surprise. 14th. And the Independent said that the UK's largest drug and alcohol charity, Alastair Bohm, they said, you know what? We can't credibly deny that compared to other drugs, it's relatively low risk. The risk from taking it from balloons are quite low. And to back up what you said, he said, where there have been stories about deaths, they tend to be from people who are using canisters in masks. And that's when you get into danger. That's stupid.

Let me get out this old World War II gas mask or let me put a bag over my head or let me get in a car. And then you're not getting that mix of oxygen and then you die. First of all, kids, if you are putting a plastic bag over your head for any reason, you're a dummy. That's a dumb thing to do. Well, yeah. You're reaching... You're going down the wrong path in life. That's a great way to put it. Because I don't want some kid to be like, I am a dummy and that's why I do these things. That's self-defeating. Come on, come on, son. But there have been plenty of incidents of death. Joseph Bennett, a 17-year-old from

North London, died in 2012 after falling into a coma. And then just this year, a 21-year-old student was found dead in his room with 200 spent cartridges. So just chasing that high is the problem. I mean, you shouldn't try it at all, but you're going to die when you have those high, high, high concentrations. Yeah. I mean, that's the problem with nitrous. I mean, if you're being administered nitrous, even in a medical setting, you can have a bad reaction to it and it turns out you're allergic to nitrous and you're dead or you're in a coma. Yeah, but you're in a coma. If you are in, right, but even if you're in a medical setting, you're flirting with death.

You're right there on the edge of death. And if you're doing it outside of a medical setting, your likelihood of dying or suffering some sort of horrible, adverse reaction to it is even more through the roof, right? Especially if you're taking hits straight out of a tank and you're not taking breaths of clean air in between, yes, you very likely could die. And it's not just hypoxia that gets you or asphyxiation. You can also die from passing out and hitting your head. Yeah, or I saw this one sad case. I think it was in the United States, this lady's son wandered out into traffic and got hit by a car. From nitrous? Yeah, because he did nitrous and was just so spaced out,

he just kind of walked out into traffic because you're not aware of what's going on at the time. And chasing that high like I was talking about, it would feel so good, you're like, but it's so fast. You're like, well, how can I prolong that experience? I'll just stop breathing regular air in between. What a waste. Yeah, it's just, it's not smart. No, it doesn't. No. I think we got that across, didn't we? I think so. You know who doesn't do nitrous? Know how, no way. Who? Scientologists. Why? L. Ron Hubbard hated nitrous oxide. Really? So much so that he stopped going to the dentist. He had famously terrible teeth.

He did have bad teeth. And he didn't go to the dentist. And he, in 1938, he did go to the dentist to have some work done and they put him under with some nitrous. And he had a near-death experience and came back and he wrote a manuscript called Excalibur and it's unpublished. And in Excalibur, L. Ron Hubbard claimed that anyone who read it either went insane or committed suicide. I remember reading about that. And all of this knowledge was given to him from his nitrous oxide experience. So he determined that nitrous oxide is very bad. It's a hypnotic. It makes you too suggestible. And you should avoid it at all costs. Interesting.

Yeah. He writes about it in Dianetics saying it's bad jam. He's the only person to ever do it and not say this is great. He had a bad time on it. Well, let's talk about childbirth unless you have anything else. No. So in Canada, in Finland, Australia, and the United Kingdom, traditionally women have used this and still do today during childbirth. Sure. Up to 60% in the UK and about 50% in those other countries. But it's not in the US in 2011, less than 1% of hospitals even offered it.

I've never heard of that in the US. Well, that's all changing now. Basically, the medical establishment is basically saying there's really no good reason not to. It's just sort of stubbornness in our history and being fixed in our ways of offering the epidural and other kinds of drugs during childbirth. Yeah. So there's been a big push lately to have it as an option at least for women. Labor machines are only 50-50. You can't even alter the setting to go any higher than that. And it's self-administered. The woman has the mask and she breathes it when she feels like she needs it.

And at any point, she can be like, nope, I want the epidural. The thing is, epidurals can be really expensive. Nitrous is super cheap. It is super cheap. And again, it's as effective as 10 to 15 milligrams of morphine for taking care of pain. So they're basically saying women should have the option at least if they want to try it out. It's a lot cheaper than an epidural safer and they haven't epidural. I mean, there are narcotics and epidurals. They're a lot of side effects and they really haven't found any side effects with that 50-50 mix under like a controlled supervised setting. Well, the big fear though is that... Aside from dizziness.

The kid is going to absorb some of this and there's going to be neural cell death in the baby as it's delivered. Has that been proven wrong? They don't think there is any danger to the kid so far because they said it's filtered through the lungs and not like the narcotics that are filtered through the liver. So they said so far, they haven't found where it hurts the baby in any way. Plus it lets you remember being born. I just think the self-administration part is pretty interesting. Yeah. It lets the woman feel more in control supposedly of their own comfort. Right. So I'm all for it. Why not? Well, yeah. I mean, if it doesn't have any adverse effects, why not is a pretty good question. You got anything else? I got nothing else.

That's nitrous oxide, N2O, Humphrey Davey, the gas. If you want to know more about nitrous oxide, type those words in the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com and since I said search bar, it's time for a listener mail. No, Chuck. No, no. What is it time for? It's time for administrative details. So Chuck, first and foremost, I really want to thank John Morgan over at Queen Charlotte's Pimento Cheese Royale. Oh, yeah? He has hooked us up. Good, good stuff. Wonderful stuff. Pimento cheese. Like the best Pimento cheese you can buy on the planet. Better than Palmetto cheese? Yeah, I think so. All right. Yeah. Yeah, it's good. And there's like some, yeah, it's really good. Go try that stuff. Queen Charlotte's Pimento cheese Royale. All right. We received Christmas cards from

the Cavanaugh's, the Lees, the Loses, and you know, Hillary and Mike who we're talking to. Oh, yeah. They hook us up with the cheese. Yeah, with a Flathead Lake. Flathead Lake or just Flathead Cheese? I think it's Flathead Lake. I think it is, too. It's delicious. Hillary, you're the best. Yeah, thank you. And the Nelsons. So thank you for those Christmas cards. Mike over at Shaker and Spoon and the rest of the gang. I thanked them before for sending the box. Go check out Shaker and Spoon. It's awesome. Great gift for yourself, for somebody else, where they send you all the ingredients you need to make cocktails, including recipes. You just add booze and wow your friends. And what better time to go off a page and thank Crown Royal when we offhandedly mentioned that

the Crown Royals, Rye Whiskey, won the whiskey of the year. Right. And I was like, man, I'd love to try that. They sent us some. Someone heard it. Yeah. And they sent us six bottles of booze. That's right. Nice guys. Holy cow. Did you try it? Not yet. I guess you just found it today in the office. So you tried it. That'd be 1955. We should mention Crown Royal basically every time. Yeah. Every episode. So Crown Royal. Ashley Miller, thank you for the wonderful Lego candy that you gave us in San Francisco. Yes. Thank you for that. And I think in Los Angeles too, remember? She just follows us around with Lego candy. Well, at least in California, yeah. Lucy Brooks sent us a nice letter. Good luck with the rest of the granny list. Lucy, thank you.

Congratulations and best of luck to Allison and Chuck for their wedding in Cleveland. Yes. Connor and Beatriz Marinen sent us our beautiful wine cork, Rhys Chuck. Oh, is that who sent that? Yes. Jerry loves that too. She won't set it down. Good luck with your alcoholism. Just kidding. Thanks to Eric Young from Squamish, BC for the typewritten letter. Eric has a site called pigeonsandink.com where he offers the service of writing typewritten letters on others' behalf. Yes. And he uses a Squarespace site. Pretty awesome stuff. How about that? Yeah. Kelly from the Elephant's Trunks sent us some awesome toys. Thank you very much for those, Kelly. Thank you to Em from Melbourne, Australia,

Vianoxville, Tennessee for the homemade sourdough hot cross bun. Yes. That was good. And then Elizabeth Henry sent us a signed copy of Who Killed Mr. Moonlight by the one and only David J of Bauhaus. Oh, wow. I made a joke about Bauhaus. And Elizabeth Henry said, oh, David J is my boyfriend's dad. I'll get him to sign a copy of his autobiography and mail it to the guys. Who is he in Bauhaus? He played bass. Wow. Yeah. He also had a good solo career too. Yeah. Yeah. Sean Erskine, thank you for the stuff you should know, bottle cap logo art. That was great. Yes. Jeremy and Irene Camilla, K-A-M-I-Y-A sent us glass on teak, which is amazing, Chuck. Let me just describe this. They basically take an awesome piece of teak driftwood and then

blow a glass bowl so that it molds on the bottom to that specific piece of teak. Yeah. And then, buddy, you've got yourself a beautiful place to house a goldfish. Put it used for a hurricane lamp for a candle. Keep your keys in there. Maybe hold those jellybean counting contests with. Who knows? Sky's the limit, but it's awesome and attractive and it looks really, really cool and mid-century modern. So go check out K-A-M-I-Y-A-C-O.com. Dorian Wilson, owner of Revival LTD. They make cool shirts and the proceeds of those shirts go to people in Brazil, displaced by the World Cup. Is that right? Oh, yeah. Wow. And you can find that information at RevivalGlobal.com. Yes. Johnny Wood, who works for Yakima, the outfitter, the biking

outfitter. Sure. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah, Yakima. Yeah. They make like bike racks. Thank you. Yeah. He sent us some swag. Yeah. Got a took that I wear. Yeah. And he travels around selling Yakima stuff, which probably sells itself, you know what I mean? Yeah. And he listens to us on the road. So thanks a lot, Johnny. This is one of my favorites of recent memory, Ravi Zuppte. He made the bullet pins. Man, and he sent those so long ago and it's so, we've just been lax. So thank you for those. It's really neat. He's an artist called the Mightier Than series. His pen is mightier than the sword. And he takes like bullet casings and makes these fountain pins from bullet casings. Yes. It's really neat. It makes a statement and it's

cool looking. Yeah. We got a nice letter from Jenny Cochran. And that is that. We want to thank Matt for the handmade hinge game. H-E-N-G-E is in Stonehenge. And Lori Geshe for the copy of her kid's book, Copperlight, Colin, a really crappy story. Very nice. And she sent us some real copper lights, which is fossilized poop. Oh, that's right. I remember seeing that. I have a piece tucked in my cheek right now. Thanks to our buddy Gary for the homemade cookies. And then Beth Vumanic Lopez sent us a copy of Unbound. Colin, how eight technologies made us human, transformed society, and brought the world to the brink by Richard L. Courier. Thank you very much for that hard copy, no less. In my final one, I had a bunch of people send very lovely gifts for

Ruby. Oh, yeah. My baby when we got her. Yeah. And I'm not going to read off all of their names, but you know who you are. And it was very, very nice. You know who you are. They do. I've got a last one. All right. Which seems chompy following that heartfelt thing. But thanks a lot to Brett Goodson for sending us port cloud stuff. Port cloud, pork grind chips, soap, and pork dust. You're like, I'm not too big on breadcrumbs. I'd rather them be porky. Port cloud has you covered. I think that was decidedly nonchumpy. Thank you. A nice thank you. Brett Goodson, thanks. All right. Well, we're going to finish up. We have quite a few more and we're going to finish up in the next episode, I think. Yes. And as always, thank you to those who send

in good thoughts and letters and handmade fun gifts. It's very nice. We really appreciate it. It's the best. Yep. So if you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Badie. 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'm Munga Chauticular, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.