Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Live in Nashville: The Biosphere II Experiment

Episode Date: January 2, 2024

Hello, friends! Join us today for our annual live show release, recorded in beautiful Nashville. On the docket? The Biosphere II Experiment!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, this is Carlos Miller. Here at 85 Self-Shield, comedy is king, but we're also here to support and elevate black own businesses that are doing amazing things. On our show, The Black Market, I sit down with entrepreneurs who are changing the game in every field, like sublime donuts. Good day since, Cafe Burbank Street, and many more. So tune in to The Black Market, available in the 85 South Show feed. Listen on our Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, this is Shannon Dordy, host of the new podcast Let's Be Clear with Shannon Dordy.

So, in this podcast, I'm going to be talking about marriage, divorce, my family, my career. I'm also going to be talking a lot about cancer, the ups and the downs, everything that I've learned from it. It's going to be a wild ride. So listen to Let's Be Clear with Shannon Dirty on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know,

a production of I Heart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark, Thirst Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Jerry's not here with us, but all of these beautiful people are at the Sherman Horn Symphony Center in Nashville, Tennessee. Man, a lot. That was great. Like I literally can't hear right now. What? Oh no. All right, everyone. I want to talk about, I can't believe, by the way, that this was earlier this year.

Doesn't it seem like eight years ago? Yeah. It seems like that blue oyster coat rodeo. That's right. That's right. In fact, it was earlier this year on the morning of January 5th. I met Josh at the airport in Atlanta at Hart's Field

at a departure gate for what would be our very first ever research field trip after 15 years. And we had a great time, by the way. Spoiler. The flight was booked for Tucson, Arizona, because Tucson is very close to Oracle, Arizona. Specifically, 32, 540, biosphere road in Oracle, Arizona. Nothing? Okay, that's good. That's cool. We can work with it. If you don't know what happened at biosphere road,

then strap in because you're about to hear the story of the biosphere to experiment. Yes. Raise your hand if you have heard of this at all. A couple of people. That's good. That's good. That's good. That's good.

Has anyone seen the documentary Spaceship Earth? It's very good. Oh, right. Isn't it great? Yeah. We'll highly recommend the documentary and I'll say this about 20 more times. Highly recommend you going to visit the biosphere today. It was really, really great.

If you haven't seen the documentary, most of the show probably won't make any sense to you. We probably should have thought that through. We'll just talk to you. Biosphere 2 might make you think like, wait a minute, what it was biosphere 1, hadn't heard of it, I missed it. Don't worry, you're actually on biosphere 1 right now because biosphere 1 is planet Earth. Biosphere 2 was a highly ambitious project to seal off a little piece of Earth from the

rest of it and see what happened basically. Yeah. And it could have been a great many things, right? Depending on who you ask. Oh, yes, I have that list right here. It could have been an incredibly expensive piece of performance art. Sort of, okay, we'll take that. A massive hub for gathering scientific data. Not as massive as they intended, right? An audaciously ambitious attempt to replicate Earth. For sure. OK. The project that created the modern environmental movement.

I like that I'm the judge of all this. In part, I will say. OK. Afraid? Now, wouldn't have fraud. Afailier. Sort of failure. A spectacular. Sort of a failure. A spectacular success.

Not that either. No, definitely. Somewhere in the middle of those two. You guys can be the judge of all that yourselves because we're going to tell you about the biosphere 2 project, which was born in the 80s. It debuted in the early 90s, but the whole thing was rooted in the 60s.

And you will see that it was super duper rooted in the 60s. Because the people involved, we should just say out front, they weren't a cult. It's going to seem at various turns that, yeah, guys, these people are a cult. They were not a cult. We did as much research as we possibly could. And they weren't a cult.

It just seems like they were a cult. They were culty. Yeah. Cult of Jason maybe. Cult of Jason. It's like when you're reading the real estate ads. It's like they're not in the cult neighborhood, but they're pretty close. It's cult of Jason. So like you said, it was rooted in the 60s, in particular in a city called San Francisco,

California. And this was during one of their many summers of love that they've had over the years. A very charismatic hippie named John Allen, he went by the name Johnny Dolphin. I refused to say that twice. I call him John Allen. They had nicknames. I was about to say cute, but they really weren't that cute. But John Allen was kind of a magnet. He was a genius, depending on who you talk to.

Very smart guy, obviously. But he was a magnet for kind of like-minded people at the time in 60s San Francisco, which is to say super creative, very, very smart. And as it turns out, also very ambitious, which could find the face of other sort of hippy diffie-ish types out there at the time. Right. And like you said, he was essentially a certified genius. He had a master's degree in business from Harvard, not to Shabby. He had, if you don't mind, I have to read this, a certificate in advanced physiological systems for engineers from the University of Michigan. Sounds made up, but apparently it's legit. And he had a 4-H ribbon. I thought you can say he had a

certificate in advanced physiological systems for engineers from the back of a serial box. That's what it sounds like. It definitely sounds like the kind of thing you would get at a strip mall at University. He was also trained as a metallurgist. He was a management consultant. He was like I said, a super smart guy. He had a lot of kind of famous hippy-dippy creative smart friends like William S. Burrows, Buckminster Fuller in particular. He would have a pretty outsized influence on John Allen.

And this project that we're going to talk about in a couple of ways. One was the idea of synergy that Bucky Fuller was really into, and as you will learn with Biosphere 2, synergy was a big, big part of things, or it was supposed to be at least. And the geodesic dome, which everyone knows, is Bucky Fuller's sort of, you know, pet design pipe dream that became a reality. Yeah, for sure. They incorporated it into the biosphere.

That's right. So this group that formed a round John Allen that was not a cult, they were hanging out in San Francisco. They were into creating art and doing performance pieces. And they would put on these odd plays under the name the theater of all possibilities. And I don't mean odd, like as an occasional, I mean like odd plays.

They're really tough to watch, because you're watching adults use their imagination, and that is just uncomfortable to watch. And they did it a lot. Like that was kind of their thing. So much so they took it on the road, the touring company was called the Caravan of Dreams. And you can't say either of those names without going like this. I know. Those are written in an arc on every poster of my way. So they were doing these

little, and some of these are in the documentaries that show some of their little performance art pieces. And it's really something. They say things like free movement and stuff like that. But they were in San Francisco in the 60s and then left San Francisco, California in 1968 because it had gotten too commercial. They were a hard core. OK, these are how out there that these people were. And they moved to New Mexico, out in the middle of nowhere, and formed a little not a cult. They formed a sort of a communish kind of thing

called the Synergya Ranch. Yeah. And so there, they kind of expanded their horizons. They still put on odd performance pieces in place. They also not do that. No, it was really in their skin. They felt the call. Yeah.

They also sort of building things too. Like they got interested in just making things with their own hands. And a really good example of what they could do is called the research vessel Heroclides. Yeah. So here's the thing with this energy ends. They were all really smart, but it's not like they took an old boat to make this research vessel, and they sanded down the deck and re-stained it and kind of spruced it up a bit.

Like, I could, well, I couldn't do that either, actually. I could try to. They built from scratch a ship, not a boat, like a ship, and they weren't ship builders, they weren't architects. They figured out how to do it. This is kind of how ambitious and smart they were. There was a woman there who led the, I guess, architectural side of things.

She was not an architect named Margaret Augustine. He's going to come back to, not haunt us, but she'll come back a couple of times. Is she going back there? But they were super smart. And they built this ship that is still sailing today. Yeah, I mean, it has been for 50 years basically. And again, they built it from scratch. No knowledge of shipbuilding. And it was in that kind of like, Tandu spirit that the biosphere project was born. And the whole idea was to build this self-sustaining habitat that was closed off from the rest of Earth

that could sustain human life very important. And to use it to study this new field called biosphirics, which is creating closed systems to study Earth's ecosystems in kind of minute detail. And it was new because they had essentially made it up. But the whole thing had merit because at this time, in like the early 80s, scientists around the world were starting to notice that Earth was getting out of whack in a lot of unsettling ways and had kind of concluded that if we didn't figure out

what to do about that, things would be very bad for life on Earth very soon. In spoiler alert, we did figure out what to do about it. We didn't do it, and now we're all doomed. Just FYI. So to study something like Earth's ecosystem, like very complex stuff, there's a couple of ways you can go about it. You can get in a lab and you can bring stuff in and you can study it there.

And in that case, you're going to get really precise measurements and really precise data, but it's not out in the real world. So you sort of get what you get. The other way to do it is to go out in the real world and study stuff. And people had been doing both for a very long time, and it's always been that trade-off for science. Like you go out in the real world,

and you're gonna get real, like, more natural results, but the data is not gonna be as accurate because you don't have all your toys out there, necessarily. And what biosphere offered was basically the chance to kind of take the best of both worlds and do both all at once. Yeah, and also because it was kind of compact in size, stuff that happened on biosphere

1 over the course of very long time scales happened much shorter in biosphere 2 because it was tiny. So you could actually track carbon isotopes as it made it through the carbon cycle, which is kind of useful. And it would make a bitch in test bed for offer, offer habitation on Mars, which they predicted would happen by 2005. A little bit off. Not quite there yet. But like here's one example of sort of the ideas that they think could spring from this

was, they thought those just, and we'll meet all the biospherians soon enough. Spoiler alert, that's what they were called. They went from synergy ends to biospherians, but one was named Linda Lee, she was a botanist, and what she wanted to accomplish there, one of the things at least, was to figure out how little tissue that you could get, like how few cells that you could collect and still yield a viable plant. And the idea being like one day,

maybe we can have like a jungle in the size of a shoe box that you know, like jets and stuff, like add water and you get a jungle kind of thing. Yes, she even brought her own shoe box inside. It being 1991, it was a LA Gears shoe box. Oh. Did you? Okay. That was a nice surprise. I thought that was off the dome.

It's still great. Thanks. So if you put all this stuff together, this is like a really good idea that the Synergyans had. And they were just the kind of people to do it as we've seen. But you can really argue that the project would not have happened. Had a guy named Ed Bass, not been a member of the group. And he had been since, I think, his early 20s. He joined in 1974. And the reason he was so important is because he was a billionaire. Yeah.

Specifically, because, you know, this thing was going to require a lot of money, as we'll learn. But he was the son of a guy named Perry Bass. And Perry Bass was at the time one of the richest dudes in the United States. He was a billionaire. He was a Texas oil tycoon. And somehow had one son that became an environmentalist. I don't know if he was like the shame of the family. I do know that that Thanksgiving was probably a little awkward

when he brought up this idea to pops. I think his parry is probably like, son, you gonna do what? You gonna give how many millions for a bio something? Why can't you start a monolig baseball team? Like your brother Bobby. And that's fairy bass, everyone. That was a great fairy bass, everybody.

Yeah. Indeed. But Ed Bass was in, and he funded the thing to the tune of, between $150 and $200 million, 19, what, $80? Something dollars? Yeah, it's like you're double that now. Yeah, $19, what, 80, something dollars? Yeah, it's like you're double that now. Yeah, all right, double. So, we're usually more accurate and are

updated in-placian conversions. Double-ish. So, he was actually, he'd financed a lot of projects for the group. They had this thing where he would buy like a plot of land somewhere in the world and they would like build something on it or improve it somehow. And there's still stuff around today.

There's the Hotel Vera in Kathmandu. It's a hotel they own. There's the October gallery in London. Our gallery? Yeah, yep. And so they called it the eco-prinereal spirit. So like they were hippies, but they weren't shy about making money, too.

And that's what this whole biosphere project was, in part, to advance, for sure. Yeah, because he thought, all right, here's what we're going to do. We're going to launch this massive science project, which I think ended up being, at the time, the single largest privately funded science project in human history. And he said, but here's how we can make a little scratch off this, a little cheese. What do you kids say these days? What else? Bread, I think they say bread.

Is bread back? Little bread? Little, uh, Sicimilians? Sure. Little, little Nashy? Yeah. Nash tag. Nash tag?

Nash tag? Nash tag, eco-pronereal. Nice. All right. Nailed it. Jerry cut that up. Did not nail it. Uh, so his idea was, here's what we're going to do. Nashedeg, eco-pronereal. Nice. Nailed it. Jerry cut that up.

Did not nail it. So his idea was, here's what we're going to do. We're going to start this big project, and we're going to eventually come up with all these great data and these science ideas that we can patent. And then one day, when we need to live on Mars, NASA is going to go, hey guys, how much to license that jungle in a box you came up with, an ed vassage sit back and cackle and make a ton of money. So that was one way to make money, and then they had another great idea to make money, right?

Yeah, they were going to charge tourists, 1295, to come gawk at the people who were sealed off in the biosphere facility, and they did. That's right, it's all glass. You can just peer in and make fun of them all day long kids. So they formed a venture, or a LLC I guess called Space Biosphere Ventures. And in true synergy and fashion, all these hippies who had no experience being CEOs and directors of a large multi-million dollar corporation were now exactly that. That's right.

And they said about getting to work, like there was an architect named Phil Haas. And I believe he pulled out every tacky style he could think of to create this place. Chuck likes it. It's amazing. It looks like the headquarters to heaven from a movie in the 80s. It's always struck me as you know.

That's exactly what it looks like. There's like barrel roofs, there's that geo-design dome. The thing that really gets it for me is everything is made out of this like shiny powder-coded aluminum tubing that really locks it into like 1990. And that's exactly what it looks like still today. It's like buck Rogers in the 20th century. Or their Disney's vision of tomorrow land-basic. Very much so. It's very much like that. Except moldy. Yeah. Put a pen in that. So the plan, the original plan was for a biosphere to run for 100 years. And like every couple of

years or so, just so, just cycling a new team of biospheres to take the place to the old. They would go into some like airlock. They would swap places. They would keep it sealed. Because we'll stress that a bunch. The whole point was to keep this thing sealed.

Like the problem happened. They couldn't be like, well, let's just open up the doors and bring some stuff in to help us along. They really wanted to see what it would be like. And the only way to do that was to seal it up tight. So, a hundred years was the original goal. New spread around the world. People were seriously jazzed.

I have no idea how I missed this because I was like early college at the time. I knew nothing about it somehow, except my only thing I could think of is I was in early college at the time. Sure, yeah. I was a center-of-the-noise in the news, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. Uh, how do you think it's going? Good? I think I could think of as I was in early college at the time. Sure. I was a sinner I watched in the news, you know what I'm saying?

Yeah. How do you think it's going? Good. I think it's going quite well. So, Bar? Yeah. Oh, yeah, okay. Well, then that means we have to take a message break.

So, please bear with us. That's right. Because we'll be right back. Stuffy should know. Hi, this is Jiselle and Robin and we're the host of Reasonably Shady on the Black Effect Podcast Network. I absolutely love our podcast. Yes, it has been so much better than I expected. Yes, because we get to share our lives with everyone.

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Many of us have experienced a moment in our lives that changes everything, a moment in our lives that changes everything. A moment that instantly divides our life into a before and an after. On my podcast, a slight change of plans, I talked to people about how they've navigated exactly these moments. Something died in me that day. It never came back. I'm so grateful that something you did emerge, a new me emerged, a new me was born. I also talked to experts on the science of change about how we can live happier, healthier lives. These momentary experiences of all, they tend to, through their challenges to your belief

system, help us be more resilient. Because as we all know, the only constant is change. So let's make the most of it. Listen to a slight change of plans on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Many stuff with Joshua and Charles. Stuff you should go on. We're back everybody. You guys can thank Jerry for that.

You go to don't buy your stuff at the post office. Sleep on this mattress or buy the, was it the 2012 camera? Yes. Oh, you guys still hear that one, anyone? Some of the old ones. Are you? I don't know what salesperson made that for every deal. So it was quite a deal. Yeah, that won't go away. All right, so finally, we're back everyone.

Thanks for coming. Finally, finally, finally, on September 26, 1991, eight people, four men and four women, who we will meet very shortly, called the Biosphereians, began their first, what was to be a two-year mission of the 100-year experiment, and were sealed off, was a big press thing. They wore these, a mork from work, space suit, jumpsuit things. Very, very weird, for real. Like, broad shoulders cinched it the waist. They're like, don't forget,

we left San Francisco for New Mexico in the late 60s. That's how hard we are. That's right. Just want to drive that home. And I think also somebody is playing the flute as they enter. So the floutist, if I'm that mistaken, that kind of, when you watch the doc,

it's kind of funny, because they couldn't get the door to seal it first. And everyone was like, oh, that's the whole point. You know, they couldn't open it. That's what it was. Yeah, it was too sealed. And they were all just standing there like this. But they got in, they sealed themselves in. And here were the eight biospereons.

Oh, me. I knew it was me, I'm just teasing. First up is Mark Nelson. We mentioned him first because he was, I guess, considered the captain of the team mostly because he was the truest believer of this group of true believers because they had selected from the group of synergians. They didn't like go find the greatest scientists in the world or like astronauts or anything. They just said, hey, you seem enthusiastic. I like the way you do the free body movement stuff. Get in there, get in this red jumpsuit.

That is seriously who this group of eight people were. That's right, you can be our Ryan Tanny Hill. He's not here, there's no way. No, he's got football to play this weekend. Abigail Owing was the next person we're going to mention. She was a marine biologist. Jane Pointer is next. She was in charge of the farm and the farm equipment and stuff like that.

And she was in the documentary document, or you will see, it's very controversial because Jane Pointer actually is the only bi-spirion to leave what you weren't supposed to do during the experiment. She had an accident where she cut off part of her finger in a rice huller, I think. They'll do it. Whatever that is, apparently, got a whole rice.

And I just thought it came in a bag with a little piece of finger in it. Yeah, exactly. It's the lucky bag. That means you get a million dollars. I don't add too much water because that thing becomes a full finger. It turns into a dinosaur's place. But it was very controversial when it happened because she had to leave

because she needed a hospital to take care of her briefly. But here's the deal. She came back in carrying these two large duffle bags that she didn't leak with. And they weren't supposed to do like, oh, by the way, we forgot all these things, go get them. The whole point of this whole thing, once again, it was to seal yourself in

to see if it was possible, not to cheat a little bit, because it would render the results kind of moot. So she comes in, these duffel bags will come back later. I don't know what was in them. I don't even think they ever found out. I think it was probably 15 pounds of weed. That's what I might have brought back in. I'm just saying.

The upside is there's no hospitals or duffel bags on Mars, so people weren't really super happy about it. You know, like the old song goes. Sure. So, the next guy is Roy Wallford. He was the crew physician. He was the oldest one.

Super old. He was like 65. Right. But he was a great shake because his scientific interest was at the intersection of anti-aging and nutrition. And he had come up with his own diet. He called it the calorie-restricted optimal nutrition diet or crone diet.

Terrible name for a diet. They were like, you know that's the same name as a bowel disease. He said, oh, I know. Yeah. So he really wanted to get his chance at like experimenting with these people with the crone diet. And by by goodness he got his chance as we'll see. That's right. Next up we have Mark Van Thillow.

He was a Belgian scientist and he operated the life support equipment including what you'll hear a little bit more about this giant lung in the bottom of this facility that breathes for the facility. And here's a little tip. If you ever go to Biosphere 2, again, you can still go there. It's amazing. Take the time to take the tour, sort of the underneath tour. It's like 12 bucks extra, which Josh sprang for, by the way.

Fade my way in. Like a good date. I've never even asked for it back. Appreciate that. Yet. At the end of everything. Like a good date? Never even asked for it back. Appreciate that. Yet. At the end of everything, at the end of stuff you should know, you're going to be like, and here's this.

$12, please. Plus inflation. So, he was dating Abigail Auling. There were two couples among this group of eight. It just can get a little thorny. The reason we know that they were a couple of reasons. One, they mentioned it in the documentary. But two, even if they had an asset that there is a shot

sort of in the background at one point where he feeds her a banana on camera. And not like peel a banana and like, would you like, here's how I would do it with you. Would you like to break off a piece of banana, Josh? What, yeah? No, he stuck how I would do it with you. Would you like to break off a piece of banana, Josh? Do you want to get this? Thank you. No, he stuck it in her mouth with his hand.

Thank you for not demonstrating that on me. It was really. I mean, things have changed. I know the workplace has changed. But even in 1991, you don't do that to a female co-worker. You don't do that. It's never been OK. The first office, you did not feed someone a banana like that.

It's true. That's what it says on the teacher. There was Sally Silverstone who was the most widely liked of the group. We get the impression she got along with everyone. She was an English social studies teacher. And I think she was in charge of the food basically, right? Yeah, she was the chef. I mean, she made banana, everything out of bananas. So we'll see. She ended up writing a book after we're called Eating In. Thank you.

Cohen, from the field to the kitchen, the recipes from Biaspora II, she originally called it eating in, colon, guys I mean really eating in, but they changed the title. He was next. Tabar Macalum's next. He was in charge of the analytical chemistry lab. He was one half of the other couple, which ain't pointer.

And they're actually still involved in this kind of stuff today. They're like, they formed some company that is exploring how to live off of Earth. That's cool. You know why? Because he never fed her a banana on camera. That's right. And then where was he from?

He was from European too, I think. No. No, okay. He was from US. A. Oh, all right. Music City? Sure.

He was a little gnashian. So the last person is Linda Lee. And Linda Lee was the biome design manager of the desert rainforest in Savannah. And she was the one who was looking for that jungle and a box idea. Right. All right, so that's the Atom.

That's the eight people. There are also 3,800 species of plants and animals in there. They put in everything from cockroaches to kind of till the soil and make it even richer. They put in these little primates that look kind of cat-like. They have huge eyes. They're adorable. They're called bush babies. Anyone ever seen a bush baby?

If you want to take out your phone right now and look, we won't be mad. They're so cute that we're pretty sure that they were just put in there just because they're so cute. They had to have something, right? Sure. And here was the ideas.

They were going to, it was all about synergy. And we talked a lot about synergy on our show, how in nature, like everything is working together, ideally, to help everyone out. And that was the idea here in nature like everything is working together, ideally, to help everyone out. And that was the idea here in a shrunken version of Earth, is you're going to have plants that are pollinated by these specific, very specific, because it can bring in everything. It's not Noah's Ark for good and sex, because you know, that was real.

Check. I'm not sure if you knew that. They brought in things to pollinate those specific plants. We need these insects. We need these plants, because they're going to maximize oxygen for us. And we're going to breed stuff out, and they're going to breed stuff in.

And it's going to be a beautiful exchange of CO2 and oxygen. And everything's going to be working in synergy with each other to make this a grant success. Exactly. Because it was a sealed facility, everything had to be recycled. Like you said, their breaths were recycled with the plants. Their wastewater was put through this marsh, and then they ended up drinking their own pee, essentially.

It was, and that's the appropriate response to that. It was pretty amazing. Like the whole design was pretty amazing. Like the whole design was pretty great. And all of this was in five different biomes. And a biome is a type of ecosystem that is a really specific type of ecosystem that's made up from the interactions of all like that every rock and raindrop and rubber tree and reindeer, all interacting and all sorts of different, and it would be a weird, weird biome. But they're all interacting and all sorts of complex ways and all of those complexities

formed the characteristics of that biome. In elementary school when they said, Josh, what are the four hours and you should have said, well, you told me. Blurred out, reading, writing, arithmetic, you said, rainbows, Josh, what are the four hours? And you should have- I said, well. Blurred it out, reading, writing, rhythmatic. You said, rainbows, rain deer, what else? I like yours. I said, rain drops, rocks, rubber trees, and rain deer. Shh.

Yeah, thanks, man. Thanks. Yeah. Man. That's a carpenter song, if I've ever heard one. You know, she was a hell of a drummer. Karen Carpenter., if I've ever heard one. You know she was a hell of a drummer. Karen Carpenter.

Sure, I think I've seen you guys know that, right? There's videos of Karen Carpenter just getting down on the drums, which I never know. She was the Neil Perk of her day. Where are we here? Should I put on my glasses? No, I shouldn't put on my glasses. Alright, let's talk about these biomes. There were five of them in total.

Each, like you said, each ecosystem had a very specific set of interactions, supposedly within it. But as we'll see, there were variables that didn't let that happen. One was the, and we walked through each of these. They're still there today. The tropical Amazonian rainforest has a 20-foot waterfall. Pretty cool.

It's amazing. There was a savanna. Very useful. There was a coastal fog desert, kind of like the west coast of Mexico, like South of California. What else was there? There was a fresh water marsh. And get this, you guys.

There was a mangrove marsh. They had saltwater mangroves there. My favorite plant on planet earth, they had on little earth out there. And that flowed into the showstopper, which was a nearly 700,000 gallon ocean. It had a coral reef. It had a 150-foot stretch of beach. And it was operated by vacuum pumps. I mean, of this because we were in the underneath door and I was like, Josh, look at this. They're just a random pole that had a button that said, ocean on, ocean off. I've never wanted to press something more in my life. Pretty great.

Then the humans, they lived in their own little biome, the anthropogenic biome wing. And for some reason, they'd decked it out in the purplest purple you've ever seen. It's so cool. I suspect it was some sort of emotional experiment. They wanted to crack them. Because there's no explanation.

But I was like, was purple big in 1990? I was like, no, no, it's never been big. Because it's time to print somehow, but I can't. Only prints could pull off purple, you know what I mean? So alongside the purple wing that they lived in was an agro forestry plot where they grew their food. And for a short time, it was probably the most productive quarter acre of cropland

in the entire world. Short time. That's just a hint of where the thing's going. And then many of it all, like we said, was the tour that you can take now had all the computers and stuff, which, if you go, it's kind of funny to laugh at the stuff now, these late 80s computer systems. But they did the job back then, this stuff now, these, you know, late 80s computer systems.

But they did the job back then, this giant lung, that you can still stand over. It's very intense, very cool. So the whole thing was put together in a three acre facility. Sounds pretty big, until you stop and think about it. And because this is 1991, the best measurement that we can put it in is SMUs, standard mall units. So if you had gone to Rivergate mall in 1991 and walked around the sears there, you would be walking around a sears that was a little less than four acres in size, which means that these people were stuck for two years inside a facility smaller than a sears.

A sears! A sears! A sears! A sears! I'm sorry. Are they still around at all? Is there still sears or did that complete the go away? No.

I don't think so. I got a maybe from Rogai. Did you get one of these? It doesn't tell me much by the way. No. All right, so life inside the biosphere was pretty interesting. They're sealed off again. Smaller than a what? Sears.

Oh. Sears. And anger management is really pinging off. Thanks. That was such a quick anger management is really paying off. Thanks. That was such a quick switch. It slips out here. It's good.

So obviously, you know, all this stuff is very obvious, but we just want to kind of drive it home. You're not going out for coffee. You're not ordering a pizza. You're not, there's nothing you can bring in. It's just you, you can't go have a drink at the bar if you want one. Like you were in there with what you got, what you can grow. There's a lot of small animals, there's a lot of insects, there's cockroaches, there's

a bunch of hippie-dippy science types. I'll live in together and work for more, actually, they didn't wear those jumps. It's like, you know, because they had to work really hard. As soon as they left that press conference at the beginning, they're like, let me get out of this stuff. Of course, it was all glass, so they all to work really hard. As soon as they left that press conference at the beginning, they're like, let me get out of this stuff. Of course, it was all glass, so they all saw them change clothes. Right. But no Chinese food, they couldn't get ramen delivered.

None of that stuff. I would not be. All they had was what they had, what they could grow, and that 14 pounds of weed in those duffies. And don't forget the tour bus after tour bus of gockers and school kids who paid $13 to come look at them. So in addition to being sealed off from the rest of Earth for two years, they were exhibits in a human zoo essentially. And there's

a little shot in the documentary where some guy is like trying to take a picture of one of them and he stops and he's like, he did that and it's documented and I think he's a jerk. So if all this sounds awesome and it does to you and the audience and you don't know what happens next and you're thinking, God this is amazing. He's ambitious. He's trying to do real science. They put all this money into it.

They got a geodesic dome. They got those duffies, full of whatever. You're right, it sounds amazing. And if you're wondering did it go wrong, it did. There were a number of real design flaws in this thing. And I don't think it was necessarily because they weren't hadn't done this kind of thing before, because they had, besides themselves, figuring out this out. They had teams and teams of, you know, legit scientists from all over the world like contributing.

So everyone was kind of pitching in and involving themselves with their expertise. So I don't think it was a lack of that. It was just maybe not the most thought out thing to begin with. Like the whole idea that you could, I mean, the biggest problem was it couldn't carry out the science they wanted to, because Earth doesn't have five biomes in a three-acre space. That's one thing. They didn't seal them off from each other.

Now when you go and visit their doors between all these, they built walls and stuff, and you go from the rainforest and shut the door behind you, and you go into the desert, and that, you know, kind of works in a way. But when it's all right next to each other, it's not natural, nothing is going to work and they just didn't think of that, I guess. So pretty much any like actual science they were trying to do as far as the biosphere experiment was moot from the beginning because again they didn't seal the biomes off from one another. You had an Amazon rainforest 30 feet away from a coastal fog desert, right?

And as a result, the desert actually didn't stay desert because the more rain you made in the jungle to increase plant production and then boost oxygen, it meant more fog rolled in every day in the desert. And so the cacti got choked off by all the moisture and it turned into like scrub land. And Linda Lee came in at one point and was like, what the hell? So the cacti got choked off by all the moisture and it turned into like scrub land. And Linda Lee came in at one point and was like, what the hell? This place is very moist, by the way. If you go to visit, I know that word triggers some people. I'm sorry.

No, the way to describe it, it is moist. Not cool. Moist, moist, moist, moist, moist, so moist. Oh, like you've been to greenhouses and stuff, that kind of moisture, amplify this because there's waterfalls and jungles and stuff. So moist. Sorry. What else happened?

There was a massive influx of nutrients from that mangrove marsh that I love right into the ocean such that there's these great shots at the beginning of them like scuba diving next to the reef. This is amazing. And a year later, it's just so choked with algae because it's so nutrient dense that scuba diving dried it pretty quickly. Yeah, it turned into a green slimy ocean and we keep using the word nutrients, but you could also replace that with poop. Right.

That's true. And then the trees, the trees. Or it's just weird. So they grew really, really tall, but they were too weak to stand up under their own power, their own structure. And they figured out that that was because there was no wind inside of the biosphere. Outside on biosphere, one, the wind pushes on trees, and in response, trees grow something called stress wood, which gives it a lot of structure. The trees inside of biosphere, two, didn't have any wind,

so they didn't grow that stress wood, which meant they had to be lashed to the inside of the geodesic dome 80 feet up. Like a giant piece of cooked asparagus, just sad to see. I didn't know about this part. And in fact, I went at when I went in January. I had purposely, I think I watched the documentary, but I purposely didn't look at the stuff you put together,

because I just kind of wanted to experience it for the first time. But on the plane, Josh was like, you know, I heard that they lash these trees to the tube because they're so weak. And he was really kind of not obsessed, but you were really sort of into this idea, like a encyclopedia brown sleuth. And we got there and Josh was so funny. He was like, look, look, they're still lash.

And he looked up there and sure enough, there's like vinyl cord tying these, what is it again? Yeah, it's weak trees. And you were just, you were so disgusted. I cracked the case. So we mentioned they started out with 3,800 species of plants and animals, 40% when extinct, which I know that sounds like a lot,

but that's actually better than they thought they were going to do, right? Yeah, but let me put that in the background extinction rate real quick though, all right? According to background extinction rates, they should have expected to lose 0.0512 species out of 3,800 over two years. They lost 1,520 species over two years. That's in on biosphere one, is what you would expect? Yes.

Yeah. But like Chuck said, it was still better than what they predicted, which was 70% extinction rate. So 40% is like a triumph compared to that. That's true. And here's the weird thing that happened in Biosphere 2 was that some of the things, in fact, many of the things ended up really, really thriving, were things that they didn't even bring in and intend to thrive. For instance, morning glory vines, they can be lovely, we all love

them. They grew so extensively, they basically, and this will become a recurring theme, as they had to spend so much of their time doing other stuff rather than what each of them had their own little expertise in. They didn't get to do the things that they had expertise in. So they're out there, as we will see later, farming all day, weeding all day, chopping this morning glory vine, and that's going to build resentment when you can't do your little chrome project. Or Linda Lee didn't even get to take the stuffing out of her LA gear shoe box. Yes, she didn't.

Because she's chopping back those morning glory vines. Right. There was a species of ant called the crazy ant that took over the place. It actually outcompeted the 11 species of ants that were introduced purposely. No one knows how the crazy ant got in. But it's shoe, probably.

Probably. Yeah. It took over, though. And they're still there today when we were sitting there looking out over the ocean, kind of holding on this railing, our hands were just covered in them. Fortunately, don't bite or anything, but we were like, oh my god, we've heard about you guys.

It's about you guys. Can't believe we were a little starstruck, actually. It was pretty neat. It made up for the last trees, I think, for sure. A little bit. All, I mean, not all, but most of the pollinating things they brought into pollinating specific plants died off. So they ended up having to hand pollinate crops,

which I don't know why that sounds dirty to me, but that's what they did. And to top it all off, well, I'm not going to talk about the Bush babies. You talk about the Bush babies. You're going to make me do this? I can't do it. So remember the Bush babies, the super, super cute little

primates? Well, one of them got into a wiring panel and was electrocuted, which is just, that's got to be a bummer day in biosphere, too, you know? Like, I'm sure you could smell it throughout the whole facility. I bet they're like, hmm. I bet that's what you think, eight of this. How loud of that bush, baby.

Right. They did make lemonade out of lemons, though. For example, they found that salamanders played disproportionate role in trapping carbon in soil because it eats a lot of the leaf eating insects that released the carbon. They had introduced salamanders, but they made the observation all the same. So that's all well and good.

Things aren't going great. There's a domino effect tapping in nature because things aren't helping each other out. Synergy wasn't happening, you guys. But there were two really big giant hurdles that would affect the entire outcome of this experiment. Both things they didn't count on. Both things are very important, and they are eating and breathing.

Yeah. I think it's going pretty good. Still going pretty good. I think so's going pretty good. Still going pretty good? I think so, you guys still enjoying yourself. Well, if I'm not mistaken, Chuck just set us up with a cliffhanger, which means we're going to take one more message break. That's right. Stuff is should know.

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Hunger number one. They initially calculated that we're going to live on about 2,500 calories a day, not too bad. They never got very close to that. They had to farm their own food, like we said. They had farmed some on the ranch in New Mexico, like sort of like we farm. Actually, there may be some legit farmers here.

God bless you. That's right. But like, I farm in my backyard a little bit. I farm. This is a kind of farming they did. They weren't like professional farmers. They did an okay job growing stuff. Well, in true synergy and fashion,

none of them had any experience with subsistence farming. And I guess they hadn't thought that through when they sealed themselves off for two years. Right. Tried to grow their own crops. At first, I got about 1800 calories a day. Not terrible. You're pretty hungry, but you're living.

That rose to about 2,000 at one point when the farm was going pretty good. Again, you're fine. You're probably hungry on 2,000 at one point when the farm was going pretty good. Again, you're fine. You're probably hungry on 2,000 calories. But again, these people are working really, really hard every day. So they're burning through those calories very, very quickly. And again, they have to spend all their time now weeding and farming and doing all these

things that they thought that Linda Lee was probably primarily doing. And they're not able to run their experiment. So again, tension is increasing as they go. But Dr. Walford was like, yes. Yes. That guy. Because he had a captive sample for two years to study his cronidia, and he actually was vindicated.

Everybody dropped a shocking amount of weight. I think the average was 21% of their body weight for men, 14% for the women, and the thing is their blood markers started to show improvement. Like their cholesterol levels were actually good and their weight finally stabilized and they actually got to this weird level of healthy from that calorie restricted optimal nutrition diet.

And Walford was, he was pretty happy about that. He was like, isn't it great everyone? Screw you, Woffer. They did the cartoon thing where he's like taking a nap and they look at him and he's like, he turns into a roasted turkey in his bed. The point is everyone, they were hungry all the time. They were hungry. They lost the enzymes that they formally had to digest meat. They didn't have a lot of meat to begin with, but they certainly couldn't digest anymore in their guts.

They ate peanut shells, just, you know, like, let's just eat that whole peanut where I'm even shelling these things. To get more calories, they ate things that grew. They ate tons of sweet potatoes because the sweet potatoes pretty successfully. So their skin turned orange.

Yeah. They ate a ton of... They ate a ton of... Beats. They grew a lot of beets. They grew a lot of bananas. You know what happens to beets the next day in the bathroom? So can you imagine these people are all subsisting.

They've got orange skin. Their bathrooms look like a crime scene. And they are eating so many bananas, they made banana wine, and in the documentary they talk about how awful it tasted, and how quickly they drank it. Yeah, yeah. But I just just first, like,

let's all get into the mindset of living for two years on sweet potatoes and be beats. That is cruel. Yeah. That's like somebody saying moist over and over again. What about the coffee though? They thought a coffee ahead of time. This is where I would have signed out. I've been like missions over for me. They were planning, they actually did grow coffee upland in the rain forest, but they miscalculated and it turns out they could put together one cup of coffee every two weeks, which meant everybody got six cups over the entire two years. Yeah, not one cup each, like that's even bad.

Yeah, they got three cups of coffee per year each. It took four months to make a pizza because they had to start by growing the wheat. They harvested their salt from the ocean, and then their only source of milk came from three goats, star dust, division, and milky way. Okay, beats, sweet potatoes, and goat milk. Yeah. I don't understand why you guys aren't more grossed out by that.

You guys eat a lot of beats and sweet potatoes and goat milk together? I mean, like they're fine on their own and, you know, normal amounts, but you put them all together for two years. Guys, this is Nashville. They're back to the land. They're real American. Hey, I'm a real American. I can get back to the land, but I don't want to live on sweet potatoes and beets and goats

milk for two years. Can we not all agree on that? All right. Okay, thank you. We can finally move on from that part. Whatever socialist, fascist communists, because those are all the same thing. How am I going to get political? Sorry.

Hengreness is a real situation here, though. It became a real problem. The group starts to divide a little bit. There is one faction, because things aren't going well, so there's one faction that's still very much following, because John Allen is running the show from the outside. They were following John Allen's word still, of John Allenites. And then there was another faction that were like, I don't think we should listen to this guy anymore. He's not even in here.

And they went, he's right on the other side of the glass. He can be out looked and right outside the glass. John Allen was like, I had a burrito and was like, oh, me? So like a real division grew within the ranks. And it got kind of ugly Interpersonally between them. Yeah, Abigail Alling said she was spit at twice In Roy Wallford later said that's how I thought It's a new and two

Poor Roy things got worse for him, by the way. Game night dried up pretty quickly, though. Is the upshot of all that? For sure. I'm sorry. You're the upshot guy. That's okay. You can use it once in a while.

I thank you. Appreciate that. The anger management is really working. So that's the Hungryness. Number two is the breathing trouble. Yes. So about a year I guess into the mission they started to notice that their oxygen levels were going down. Their CO2 levels were going up and either

one of those is bad but them working in conjunction that's really not good. And it turned out that the atmosphere grew to about a level somewhere around Cusco Peru, which is way up in the Andes, and in true synergy and fashion, none of them had any experience living in Cusco Peru. So they were suffering like big time. They reported having to take breaks walking up the one flight

of stairs. They were hurting, for sure. And they looked around and they figured out that at least part of the problem was that the soil was about five times richer than you'd find out on biosphere one. Which meant there were tons of little microbes. They were sucking up the oxygen as they did their thing and releasing a lot of CO2. That was problem one. Yeah, and that one's a little frustrating because you know at the beginning they're like,

we really need to grow stuff. So let's get the best soil and bring that stuff in. And no one ever was like, but wait a minute. That's not how it is. Like we should bring in realistic soil. Great band name, by the way. Realistic soil? Sure. No, no, no, no. Yeah, it's natural they know. Yeah. Okay. Oh, you know what? That's my band with the nine other guys. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, earlier. Yeah, I was going to say it was like an hour ago. I just still, the way your brain works always surprises me. Thanks, man. After all these years.

So it was being so good. The diamond dozens? Yeah. That's probably a real band here. Probably. They're backstage right now. So the soil, yes, we did the soil. So normally, the plant life in biosphere

too would have sort of reckoned with this, and they would have worked overtime, they would have stepped up and sucked that CO2 out of the air and burped up oxygen, and everyone, it would have been tenable at least. But that wasn't happening. The plants were working hard, and the levels just weren't changing, and they could not figure out why. No, because there's a lot of CO2 that should have been in the atmosphere that was mysteriously missing. So they looked around again.

What is going on? And they discovered that concrete is an excellent carbon sink. It just sucks it right out of the air faster than plants. And biosphere 2 happened to have 110,000 square feet of exposed concrete. And that concrete was out competing the plants for that CO2.

So the plants couldn't pump out oxygen, and yet the CO2 levels were still higher than they should be, which meant the biosphere was in trouble. And it wasn't immediately apparent what they should do about the whole thing. Yeah, they weren't sure. I mean, there were basically two decisions. They were like, well, listen, we can sort of blow the spirit of this whole thing, and we can bring in oxygen and pump in oxygen and stay in here and probably risk the scorn of the media and the scientific community

and stuff like that, render most of the science mood, or we can leave, and they didn't want to leave. So in the end, they decided they're going to bring in oxygen. Yeah, and they did, it saved the day. Initially, when the biosphere project got underway, the media was super duper on board. Somebody actually wrote that it was the greatest scientific endeavor since humans landed on the moon.

It's a pretty amazing thing to call it, right? Just a few years later, Time Magazine named it as one of its hundred worst ideas of the 20th century. Alongside the Titanic, DDT, and sailing the Exxon Valdez in a Prince William Sound. Man. Bad stuff. They really turned on them in the press.

Not only that, reports start to come out of some other things. They had a CO2 scrubber in there to help out that they didn't tell anyone about. It obviously wasn't enough to, and that was kind of how they talk about it later, was like, it wasn't even enough to solve our problem. So it's not like we were cheating that much. Just a little bit. We were still in really bad shape, but that makes you feel any better. But they didn't tell anyone.

They didn't disclose this. So that was a problem. Those two duffies that she brought back in from the hospital, those came back to put in the press. They were like, what was in those duffies? We had the camera footage. You left with nothing. You came back with these two big duffies.

And she was like, I don't know. And not really sure what that was. It's cool, man. Don't be a drag. Man, you sold that. I was like, oh, go. Go, go, go. So sentiment started to turn publicly on them.

And then the very scientists that helped them started to turn on them. Yeah, because word got out that the trees were like lash to the teo-desic dome in the ocean. Not a pretty sign. And into a sea of green slime. So these mainstream scientists that had helped design the place really started distancing themselves. And they figured out that if they criticized the way it was executed,

they could kind of give themselves an alibi. So the media turned on it, the scientific community turned on it, and the public turned on it as well. Yeah, it was not a good scene. Years later, if years later, in 1996, that original OG, synergy, and Biosphere, and Mark Nelson, he came out and wrote about it and said, listen, the whole purpose of this thing, it was like a beta test. We were supposed to go in there, see what worked, what didn't work, as you would expect, and then the second team would come in in year three, and rectify some of these, and then see what worked and went didn't.

And it's a hundred year experience, you guys. It's a long game. The problem was they painted it like it wasn't a beta test. Like it was kind of this perfect amazing thing out of the box and they had chances and that's what's so frustrating about this whole thing. They had chances time and time again to come out with PR basically that talked about the stuff and was up front. And they would have had a much better time selling it to the public when things started

going bad than if they stood their ground, which is what they did. And we're like, no, I don't know what you're talking about. Everything's going great. Yeah, because any time something came up like the Duffel bags or the CO2 scrubber, whatever, John Allen and his inner circle decided the best route was to cover it up or lie or obfuscate. And it was very obvious because in true synergy and fashion, none of them had any experience lying to the press. So it was really kind of obvious that they were full of...

Yes. Saltwater Marsh Pupu. Sure. So the whole, there was like this two-year ongoing PR disaster. And really more than anything, that's probably what sunk the project. That's right. But regardless of what the world thought and what the press thought, they brought in that oxygen, it sustained them. It's actually kind of a fun moment because they were very despondent at this point

in the documentary. They're weak, they can't breathe, they're walking around, just like slugging around. And then that oxygen gets pumped in, and they're like almost dancing around this place. Yeah, it's pretty great. Brought in some house music. And they brought it in for better for worse,

and finished the experiment. They did stay in there to their credit for the entire two years and emerged on September 23rd, 1993, as Mark Nelson would say, profoundly changed, right? And then as scheduled, Mission 2 went in after Mission 1, I think, like a few months afterward, Mission 2 was slated to just stay in for a year, but it didn't last nearly as long. Well, also Mission two only had three people, Pauli Shore, Brendan Frazier, and Steven Baldwin. So has anyone seen BioDome?

Wow, that is a genuinely good movie. This is my takeaway from Nashville beats sweet potatoes Biodome. Yeah Huge town for that stuff. Right. It's a yeah, I watched it for research Seriously, I still didn't I've saw him watch it And maybe the only person on the planet who's ever watched bio-dome for research purposes But it paid off because they actually captured a lot of the spirit of everything that went wrong in there.

They probably. It just never went right. Like Paulie Shore got it too in the end. So Ed Bass, you remember Ed, he was the billionaire son who funded this thing. He sort of fed up with all this bad press, the divided factions. It's really become pretty ugly at this point. So he said, all right, you know what, I'm gonna stage a hostile takeover of my own company.

And John Allen, you're out of here. I'm sorry, I love you man, I love all the preform dancing we did over the years. All the crazy creative kid stuff that we dreamed up, apparently not under the influence of drugs, which was highly surprising. They were kinda straight, straight at right, supposedly. Just weirder and weirder.

Don't believe it. And it became way more prerunner, unless eco after this point, went in a more twisted direction when they brought in a new board, and a new CEO named Steve Bannon. Yes. For real. And in the documentary, they said the name Steve Bannon. Yes. For real. And in the documentary, they said the name Steve Bannon, I went, well, that's a coincidence. And then, Waltz is in Younger Steve Bannon.

I was like, really? Yeah. They put the guy. What a villain to introduce in Act 3. Exactly. It was very surprising. The guy used to be able to buy Coke off of an Air Force 1. That's who they put in charge of biosphere 2 at the end.

That's right. He was only wearing one collar shirt at the time. You're right. Did not get into that. Whatever that look is, where you wear it to. I don't know where you're going to be. Are you guys seeing that? All right, I'm wearing this shirt.

Imagine if I had like an iZod Polo underneath it with another color that's up, that's Steve Bannon's look. He's the only guy that does that. So maybe credit to him? No. No. Two color shirts. Anyway.

So Mark Van Thillo and Abigail Alling were rightfully concerned about this new direction. They were worried about the safety of the Mission 2 crew, so they went in and broke the seal to the facility. They gave it a bunch of beer until it peed, and then opened up the air and let it in. Really? Beats, sweet potatoes, biodum, and brick-and-the-seal. Brick-and-the-seal. At the bar. Lil' Nashy.

Lil' Nashy trends. Yeah. That's what I'm hoping. Do you ever nickname the city and it worked? No. Not in all the times I've tried. I'm pretty good at it. You ever heard of the big apple? Holy cow is that you? That was me. Wow, Lee. I Called it the old cow pasture

Just intake So they busted them out. I like to think it happened like in the dead of night I'm not sure if it was that dramatic, but that's how it plays out of my head at least. And that was the end of biosphere, too, as far as that project goes. No, 100 years, that $155 to $200 million closed system lasted for less than three years total. And it would never be a closed system again.

Like, you can visit it now. So it's obviously not a closed system. It's very cool, but you can walk in that door And it would never be a closed system again. You can visit it now, so it's obviously not a closed system. It's very cool, but you can walk in that door and through lots of other doors now, and visit all those biomes. And it is still legitimately amazing. Yeah, it is amazing, but because it was never closed off again, the spirit of the project was really lost forever.

And because the press turned on it and the scientific community turned on it, we still today have this idea of biosphere too just being a complete, kluji mess. Kind of a laughing stock that some hippies tried that really didn't work out. And that's all true. But there's a lot of stuff that gets overlooked too. Apparently hundreds of papers came out of the biosphere project. And some genuine scientific discoveries did as well, that low-tech wastewater system that didn't really work for them because of their

ocean turning slimy actually has worked in other developing parts of the world. It's used all over. That's right, which is great. Yep, there's also the discovery that ocean acidification bleaches coral and kills it off. That came out of biosphere too as well. That's right. That's a big problem these days and then all started there. Well, the bush babies? Sure. When happened to them? They became extinct.

Yes, they went extinct. The bush babies went extinct everybody. I don't know why you keep giving these to me. Well, this is a silver lining at least. There is a silver lining is that while they were there, before they went extinct, they actually managed to reproduce. And if you were creating this test bed for off-earth habitation, that's a really big deal.

So you've got some mammals to reproduce in a closed-off system. So good things did actually happen. But probably the biggest contribution that biosphere two gave us was it reinvigorated humanity's love of earth, I guess. It kind of peaked previously in about 1970 with the first Earth Day. Then everybody was like, I hadn't heard it. Coke came before. let me start doing that instead. Went that way for a couple of decades, and then the bio-screens came back and like, blue everybody's coke right off their table and got them focused again on- Steve Bannon jumped on the floor.

Right. So, yeah, I mean, it fascinated the world with environmentalism again. And it kind of kickstarted that next wave of environmentalism in a real way. It really jump started things on the welfare of the planet and for a little while, at least. And the thing that's frustrating is to think about like, where would we be if it hadn't gone that way? Like, we would be, I think last year would have been year 30 of this amazing experiment. How much further, and we made some pretty great strides, but how much further would we have been along in terms of caring for our planet, had biosphere, too, just really solved everything

to begin with, and just kicked as much ass as everyone thought I was going to kick. Sure. It's sad to think about it. It's also possible that it was just too, it actually was too clueless to produce any scientific value, but we'll never know. Ed Bass got Columbia University to take it on as an annex at one point for their science departments that dissolved eventually and now when you go and visit you will see University of Arizona branding everywhere because they they run it

now and that's one of their research facilities and they still carry out science there, real science. If you ever decide to go, and again, I recommend you do, you're going to be staying there in Tucson not too far away. There's a great Mexican restaurant, downtown Tucson, called Pinka, that we ate, and it is delicious and wonderful. It really is very good. Great cocktails.

And then today, they say that if you do go take the tour, there's a legend that goes that you should hang back and get out a sight of the tour guide, especially in the rainforest biome, and just duck behind some bushes and hide there for the rest of the night. After they lock up, if you're really, really quiet, you look around, you might just catch

the ghosts of the bush babies. And if you look really, you might just catch the ghosts of the bush babies. And if you look really, really closely, you'll see that one of them has its hair standing on end. And that's the story of biosphere too, everybody. Thank you. Thank you. You're welcome.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Nashville.

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