Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Your Dirty Bed

Episode Date: November 10, 2021

Is your bed dirty? You bet it is. Are chimpanzee beds dirty? Not as dirty as yours! 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. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck short stuff. Let's go. Let's go.

Let's go. It's short stuff. Yeah. So this one is courtesy kind of of NC State University. Go both back. Oh, yes. Thank you. I'm glad you said that. Couldn't remember, huh? You were about to say Tar Heels. I might have been. Oh, I'm sorry. Bad, bad, bad move. I was going to call them the Golden Pirates of Love. Oh, that's good. I like that. Well, if you ever found a university, I expect you to use that as your mascot. That's Barry Manilow University. The Golden Pirates of Love. I saw that guy in person in concert front row center. Yeah. When was that? In Vegas. I don't know. 2013, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18. Was it great? Oh, one of the best ever. I mean, I was a huge, huge Barry Manilow fan as a kid.

You would have loved this. I had like four or five of his records and I'm sure my mom was just like, what is going on with this? Doesn't he know that's not cool? That kid ain't right. Right. But we're not talking about that. We're talking about your gross bed and the fact that you lay in it every night. Yeah. How often do you change your bed sheets? Once a week. Yeah. Same here. I think that's normal. Yeah. I mean, it's not like I use the bathroom, take my clothes off and then just go to bed without cleaning myself off every night either. But it turns out that from investigations into the human bed, you would get the impression that all of us do something very similar to that every night because apparently human bed is,

like you said, really, really gross on the microbial level at least. Yeah. And the point is not to gross you out because it shouldn't gross you out. That's kind of my point. If you're doing a once a week changeover, that's not too bad. No, because we don't live on the microbial level, so we couldn't care less. That's right. But when you get in your bed, there are trillions of microbes that make up your own human microbiome and you're shedding this stuff. You're shedding, well, kind of gross stuff at times, but it's on that microbial level, so you just try not to think about it. But there are fecal, oral, and skin bacteria, fecal bacteria that you're shedding in your bed on a nightly basis. Yes. Under normal circumstances outside of this episode,

you don't really think about that. But that's also the reason that your parents taught you never to lick your own sheets. You know? Yeah. Well, you got to get the food stuff out of there first, so you lick it then. Well, you just make a cup with one of your hands, the palm of one of your hands, and then you use the other hand to scoop that stuff into the cup and then you eat it like that, like a handful of nuts. Don't ever lick your sheets. It's just gross. All right. That's a good point. So the point of all this is, like you said, it's not that gross everybody out, Chuck. It's to basically say humans are primates. Let's find out how much our beds differ from other primates, but isn't that correct? Yeah. And these researchers at NC State University, I think in

2018, did this. And they found, as far as we go, about 35% of the bacteria in our beds come from us. Like I said, the oral and skin and fecal bacteria. And they were like, well, that makes sense. 35% coming from our own bodies. And we are really curious because chimpanzees are close to us what the deal is with them, because here's the thing I never knew about chimpanzees. They make their bed. They build and construct a brand new bed for themselves every single day. I did not know that either. I think that's a very refreshing fact that I had no idea about chimps. I see them in a different light now and I feel like kind of a jerk for thinking they were a little dirty before. Yeah. So they wanted to find out like what's going on in a chimpanzee bed. And

what they were kind of zeroing in on is not like, ooh, how dirty are they? But how much of their own microbiome is in their bed compared to other stuff from their environment? Since they're, you know, these beds are up in trees. Like are there tiny little insects all over the place and like grow stuff from them? Yeah. Or is it mainly just stuff from the chimpanzee? Yeah. The researchers were like, it's gross enough talking about human beds. Let's try to make everybody barf by talking about chimpanzee beds. Should we cliffhanger it there and take a break? You bet your sweet chimpanzee. Yeah. All right, we'll be back with Zippy the Chimp right after this. 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. 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. 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 Atikular. 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 second hand 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 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, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, we're back with Zippy the Chimp. Is that a new chimp or is that like a throwback from the 50s? Zippy was an actual lovey, as my daughter calls him, little stuffed animal. Oh, okay. That I had when I was little and it had a hand that you could squeeze. Was he wearing red overalls and a red cap? I think Zippy had red. Do you remember when we used to make like galleries on the blogs as part of our job? You made knockoff loveys, right? I found like the, I made it one of the best galleries ever. It was like the most unsettling

dolls of all time and I think it was like 50 or 60 of them. But Zippy was definitely in there. Those are weird times when they're like, the page view is equal money, guys. I know. If you could come up with like a hundred pictures, let's say. It was a step up from the knockoff wallets they had us sewing prior to that. I thank God for the blogs coming along. Yeah, so Zippy wore red and then my mom was so great. Also, one of my favorite books growing up was Kodoroi the Bear, the department store bear. And Kodoroi wore green Kodoroi overalls and my mom took a teddy bear, a lovey that looked like Kodoroi and made homemade these little green Kodoroi overalls for him. That is so sweet. And I still have that now.

My daughter has it in her room with her other 50 loveys. That is very sweet. That is a great story. I'm glad you use that as a tangent and not because that this article is a little thin. Well, we are killing some time, aren't we? So we're talking about this study where they wanted to basically compare human beds to chimpanzee beds to just basically make chimps look bad, point out how great humans are. And they went back and they looked at their findings and they went, what? And found that, no, no, no, chimps actually are pretty clean if you compare beds to beds between humans and other primates, including chimps. Yeah, I think they got, they went to Tanzania, which is a great place to go if you want to get some chimps. And they got swabs

from 41 chimpanzee beds or nests. They call them nests too. And then they tested those for the diversity, the microbial biodiversity. And then I think for 15 of those nests, they even used vacuums because I talked about the insects and stuff that you're invariably going to get when you live in the woods in a nest. Sure. Try to not get them. Yeah. And they wanted to see kind of what was in there. So they vacuumed up about 15 of them. And then like you said, they thought they were going to see about the same thing, which is that chimpanzees had a bunch of gross stuff from their own bodies in their beds. And they found the opposite. They found almost entirely, the beds were almost entirely lacking. They did find that the bacteria, environmental bacteria,

is what dominated the nest and not chimpanzee gunk. Yeah. No oral, no skin, no fecal bacteria even. And get this everybody, like if you sleep naked, yes, you're going to get some fecal bacteria on your bedsheets. This is inevitable no matter how clean you are. I'm sorry, we're talking about microbes here. It's okay. It's okay. It's normal. Chimpanzees do not traditionally wear pants of any kind. They sleep naked all the time without variation, unless they live at a house and they wear pants. But that is definitely not the norm. Among chimpanzees in the wild, no pants. And yet, not a single type of fecal bacteria that's known to inhabit chimpanzees' feces was found in their nests in any of the nests that they studied, which means, sad to say everyone, chimpanzees are way

cleaner than you when it comes to beds. Yeah. I mean, what we've done is we've gotten rid of, you know, we don't wear our shoes in bed, heaven forbid, and stuff like that. So we're not tracking in as much stuff from the outside. We generally change into jammies or heaven forbid if you sleep naked in your bed like you were just talking about. I can't do that. Never have been able to. I have a friend who warned me never to sleep naked because he was in a house fire once. And his life was actually saved by the person whose apartment he was at. And he was sleeping naked and ended up outside in this condo complex, totally naked in the middle of the night because of this fire that, again, his life had just been saved from. So he was grateful to be alive, but also

ungrateful to have been naked. And I don't believe he ever slept naked again after that. And he said one of the neighbors gave him like a blanket or something, but he was standing out there naked for a little while, thanks to that house fire. Yeah, I sleep on top of the covers generally, like sometimes I'll snuggle up under and like the dead of winter. But I basically just sleep completely on top of a bed. And the thought of sleeping completely on top of a bed completely naked is makes me feel vulnerable. Yeah. I think it's disgusting. Nobody wants to see that. Sure. And, you know, I don't know. I just, I feel really vulnerable. Like, oh, yeah, like somebody could come along and punch you in a terrible place. Anything. Just whatever. I just don't want my

parts exposed like that all night for like eight hours in a row. So instead, you wear nothing but a blazer. A porky bigot. Yeah. Oh, that's good stuff. So anyway, where I was going is, is that our beds don't have a lot of that outside stuff. Right. Because we change into other things and we don't get that stuff on our bed generally. So it's just a less diverse set of microbes in our, in our bed. It's mainly from our bodies. Yeah. And there's no mystery to why chimps beds are cleaner. They make their own nests, their beds night after night from scratch. They just get a bunch of twigs and leaves and make a new bed every single night, which is pretty neat that they're like, it's gross to sleep in the same bed twice. I can't believe humans do it. That's right.

So we want to shout out once again, NC State University and their paper, The Ecology of Sleeping Colon, the microbial and arthropod associates of chimpanzee beds. Very nice. It's quite a read. Very nice. And since I said very nice twice, that means, of course, short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.