Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: Are We in a Cyberwar?

Episode Date: August 17, 2019

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

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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, ya 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 Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey there, everyone. It's me, Josh, and for this week's S-Y-S-K Selects, I've chosen a classic episode on Cyber War. It's almost certainly hopelessly out of date by now, but it is an interesting intro to Cyber Warfare.

And we learned that Chuck hates the word Stuxnet. So listen out for that. Kick back and enjoy this classic episode of Stuff You Should Know. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.

With me is always is Charles W. Chuck Bryant. We call him an authority on cybersecurity, the internet, everything about it. An expert, you would say. That's right. Hey, should we say hello to our latest celebrity fan? Who? We just learned today that Miss Kristen Bell, the lovely

and enchanting and nerdy Kristen Bell. Is she nerdy? Very nerdy. Like, prides herself on, I mean, it doesn't surprise me that she listens to the show. Yeah. Because she's on record as being a big nerd. That's cool.

Which is one reason I like her a lot. And she's curating a Newsweek page, right? Yeah, like, things she likes are kind of one of those deals that they do in magazines now. Yeah. And she listed us. That's pretty awesome. How about that?

Thank you very much for that. I'm a huge fan of Party Down, which she was in, and other stuff that she's been in. Forgetting Sarah Marshall, I was going. Yeah, and you got to see her sloth video online that she did on the Ellen show. It's pretty funny. OK.

Highly recommended. OK. So that's all I got. That's all the suck enough I'm going to do. Should we say hi to another fan? Slightly less famous, but pretty cool. Yes. Sam.

You want to give it a little back story? I'm cool with giving some back story here. Sure. We had a live trivia event here in Atlanta a couple of years ago. And at the event was a little teenage fan named Sam. Teenage? You mean like just post tween? Yeah.

Like 13. And his mom brought him. Yeah. And he was a big fan. He was just like really sweet kid. Mom was very sweet as well. Yeah, very nice family. Flash forward a couple of years.

We got a South by Southwest. There's Sam again. Apparently mom drove him to Austin to come see our live podcast. Yeah, they weren't there to see. I spoke to mom afterward and was like, so what else are you guys going to see? She's like, nothing.

We're going back. Crazy. I was like, what else did you see? She's like, nothing. They came to see us. So then we were like, all right, we got to think of something for Sam to do, because he's proved his medal.

And Sam wrote in and sent his resume and all the reasons. We should put him to work. And it's just like, dude, if the future is secure, if kids are like Sam. For sure. I'm not worried about a thing anymore. Yeah, so we racked our brains and we found out there's a surprising amount of adult-only tasks

that we do at any given time. Sure. And we're like, all right, we have to figure out something that's age-appropriate for Sam. That's right. So long story short, I was getting kind of thin on podcast topics. I put Sam on the case.

And he sent me a stellar, stellar list with reasons why we should do these. And this is the first one. This is one. And he had a lot of overlap on once we had already recorded that aren't out yet. So that just goes to show you that Sam is like, he gets the show.

Right. And so as Sam's picking these out, we're going to let you know if this is a Sam one. But since this is going on in the summer, we're going to call this the summer of Sam. That's right. Sam's choice. All right, so that's the longest intro ever.

That wasn't even the intro, man. Well, let's get to Cyber Wars then. Let's. Bossy. Well, you know. Chuck, have you ever been to Bellingham, Washington? No. OK.

I have not. Have you been to Washington? Been to Seattle. Isn't that where Van Nostrand lives? Oh, yeah. Or is it Oregon? No, he's Washington. OK.

So in Bellingham, Washington, on June 10, 1999, at the Olympic Pipeline Company, a systems control and data acquisition system. There's systems twice in there. But a SCADA or SCADA system, which is basically like a computer program that can make a valve turn or turn something off or basically. Do something mechanical.

Right, from digital binary instructions, right? Sure. This Olympic Pipeline Company system was operating on this type of program. And something went wrong. And one of their pipes started leaking a lot, like millions of gallons of gasoline. And part of it erupted into a fireball

and killed three people, injured many others. And they went back and looked at it. They think it was just a system malfunction. But the fact that this came along and this happened, because of the system control, and it happened in 1999, as the dot-com bubble was starting to grow and the internet was really becoming a huge thing. Yeah.

People who are into cybersecurity now point to this as evidence of exactly what somebody could do during a cyber attack. Wow. Even though they think this was just an accident, right? Irrelevant. OK. But they weren't pointing to that as like, OK.

No, they don't think that had anything to do with it. But they were saying, this is what it would look like if somebody had wanted to attack. Like, this is what a cyber attack would look like. That makes sense. Because it's not just the Olympic Pipeline Company that's using these systems. All over the United States, companies, law enforcement

agencies. Military. Yeah, banks, public works. All of these things are all running on what amounts to windows. Yeah. It's as simple as that. Yeah, Microsoft Systems, many of them. And as Jonathan Strickland wrote this from TechStuff,

the article. And as Strickland points out, a couple of things. Microsoft has been kind of chastised over the years for their security or lack of security in some of their programs. And the other thing he points out is the internet's grew so fast, and everyone got on board so quickly, that it kind of outpaced what we could even do security-wise.

It was all of a sudden, government agencies and power grids and emergency services and weapon systems, water and fuel pipelines. All this stuff is running on computers and a lot of it through the internet. And we don't quite know how to guard against a cyber attack. No. And apparently, even as far as the knowledge of how

to guard against cyber attacks goes, the United States is lacking compared to China and Russia. So we're kind of in this really weird position right now where we've realized that all of the ponies are hooked to a single basket of eggs. And all it's going to take is a couple of black cat firecrackers to scare all the horses off. That's the best analogy I can come up with.

Did you just think of that, or did you? I just thought of that. My imagination's back. I can tell you where I time travel to. Awesome. Where? I can't think of anything. All right, let's go back a little bit in time.

I don't think we need the Wayback Machine for this, because we're just going to 1997. We can just walk outside. Yeah, that'd be the waste of time for the Wayback Machine. 1997, some pretty smart people caught on early that, hey, we could be vulnerable to something like a cyber attack. So let's look into this. Let's put a red team on it.

Red team is our friends that act as enemies to try. You know how they hire these people to break into your home? Yeah. Those are red teams, basically. Right, like from Star Wars. Yeah, exactly. So let's get a red team. Let's name it this mission something really cool out

of a football playbook. Let's name it Project Eligible Receiver. Do you know how many times I had to look at that before it finally sunk in what words I was looking at? Oh, really? It does look kind of funny. It looks like Eleanor Rigby when you glance at it. At least I think so.

Yeah, it doesn't to me. I was thinking more of like a radio receiver or something like that. I think it just means about football. No, it totally does. Just saying, like, I read this many times before I was like, oh, OK. So a lot of this is still classified,

so we don't know everything. But basically, they hired some hackers, which is what you do to test your security. They being the Department of Defense. Yeah, yeah, Department of Defense saying, hey, can you nerds hack into the Pentagon system? And afterwards, we won't assassinate you. Exactly.

And the nerds were like, mm, just watch this. And it took three days before the Pentagon even knew that they were being cyber-attacked by the red team. Right. Pretty successful and very sobering. Yeah, so it was, I guess, kind of an eye-opener for the DoD. And they, I'm sure, used it to step up security.

Not fast enough, though, because after this red team attack, Operation Eligible Receiver, an actual attack, which they later came to call, what was it, Moonlight Maze? Yeah, this is one year after that, the test. A year after it, somebody launched an attack. And it was, I guess, what's probably the most typical kind of cyber attack

where you insert some sort of software to basically spy and get files and gather data and download sensitive materials, right? Yeah. And apparently took two years before NASA, the Pentagon, and other agencies in the US government noticed that, accidentally, noticed that they were being spied on, cyber-wise.

Yeah, they got data like strategic maps, troop assignments, and positions, not good. Very scary. And they traced it back to Russia. Doesn't necessarily mean that it came from Russia in its origin, but at least that's where they traced it to. And this is cyber warfare. Like, it's happening.

It's been going on since the 90s, pretty much. Yeah. That was not is a cyber war coming. It's like, how do we prevent a cyber war from bringing us all down, pretty much. And apparently, from looking into this, there's like two camps. There's like a gloom and doom camp where it's like, yeah, somebody really wants to mess things up.

They're going to be able to, and it's going to be pretty easy. And the sunny optimistic camp is kind of like, no, we know we're looking for now. Like, sure they could launch an attack, but we'll be able to stop it in time before it can do a lot of damage. So we'll see. We'll lay out everything for you.

You can decide who's right. That's right. MUSIC On the podcast, Pay Dude, the 90s, called David Lashor and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, hey dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Ah, 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. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy, teen crush boy bander 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, 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 Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Swat, fly, up, up, up, up, up, s, k, s, j, k, b, k, n, m, m, m, m, m, m, m, m, m, m, m.

You should know. M, m, m, m, m, m, m, m, m, m, m, m, m, m, m, m, m, m, m, m, m, m, m, m, m, m, m, m, m, m, m, m, m, m, m, m. So, we've already mentioned that on the defensive side of things, the US is sorely lacking, but on the offensive side of things, we've actually done this ourselves, more than once. During the Kosovo War, Strickland points out, we used computer attacks to compromise Serbian air defenses, basically kind of scrambling their information, so they had bad, I guess, coordinates.

Well, the stuff on the radar screen wasn't apped, wasn't accurate. Yeah, okay. Or appropriate. Did you see that one? So we did this. We launched it and it worked. So that's a good thing, but it's also a bad thing if you're, like, was it Bush the first or Clinton in Bush the second? Bush the second in 2003 in Iraq. And Clinton, well, they were both like, we don't think we should be doing much of this because a couple of reasons. A, it basically opens us up as like, hey, they did this, so we can do it right back. And B, I think they could have drained some banks of terrorist cells. And they said, we kind of depend on the integrity of the banking system worldwide. Like, we don't want to start messing around with this. So apparently

with cyber warfare, it's very much like when you build that virus, it's out there and it can be captured and studied and redeployed against you. So what they were saying with Clinton and Bush, who were saying like, no, we're not going to use a virus to drain those bank accounts because it could be, it'll eventually come back on us and our banking industry is not secure enough to withstand something that we ourselves make. Because apparently the US is pretty good at making viruses. Oh, I'm sure. Should we talk about some of the different ways that this can go down? Yeah. The Pearl Harbor attack? Yes. I had the feeling Strickland might have named this one himself, but it's not true. He went to a lot of trouble to explain why it's called the Pearl

Harbor strategy. I think he could have just left it there. The idea here is that it's pretty much in your face. It's a massive cyber attack where they infiltrate and then they sabotage systems, much like Pearl Harbor was a big surprise and a big attack. It wasn't, I mean, it was sneaky, but it wasn't quiet by any means or stealthy, I guess the word. The other ones are pretty much stealthy. Yeah. Part of a Pearl Harbor attack, I believe, can be a distributed denial of service attack, which is basically like when you try to get onto a website or whatever, you're sending a request to the server to let you on. A ping? Right. Yeah. Now, if you assault that one server with millions of pings and it's trying to accommodate everybody as is appropriate and apt, basically

they crash is the point. You can crash a server by hitting it with millions of pings all at once. Just slows it down to the point either where it doesn't work or it crashes. Yeah, and that's what Anonymous likes to do with MasterCard during the whole WikiLeaks thing when they made it. It was a MasterCard or Visa crash. I cannot remember. I remember when that happened though. It's basically just launching a bunch of server requests at a specific server and the server's like, no, no, and this falls over. Is that why people say ping, by the way? They say, let me ping. You want to ping you? You're ping him? Yeah. I hate that. It's better than Java Storm. I don't even know what that is. Drinking coffee while you're having a brainstorm. Let's go get coffee and

brainstorm something. Java Storm? People say that. Yeah. I don't say it. I've never heard of that. That ping and meta are the three things that I will never say. Epic is maybe the worst. To call something epic. I don't mind epic. Oh, man, I hate epic. At least that's a real word. Especially epic fail. Oh, well, yeah, sure. Okay. Back to it. Viruses. Code red, slammer, nimda. These are viruses that Strickland has mentioned that spread very quickly across the internet and there's a couple of ways this can go down. You can do it immediately and release the virus. You can have all these other computers deliver the virus. You can put sort of like a delay timer on your virus for it to go off in two years automatically or manually whenever you want

to, it can be waiting for you to hit the button and then launch the virus that way. Or I think for the user of that computer to do, like, say, control-alt-delete will trigger it or something like that. Oh, really? Yeah. Ooh, that's pretty scary. Yeah, don't press those three buttons. I did that all the time on my PC. Oh, my God. Chuck, I think we should talk about, right about here is I think where Stuxnet fits in. Who? Stuxnet. Say it one more time. Stuxnet. I don't know what that is. You know what Stuxnet is. Is that in this? Yeah, it's the Iranian. It's the virus that the U.S. and Israel unleashed on Iran. It's a perfect example of this. It is. You're right. So let's talk about Stuxnet. Stuxnet. It's a great name. It was an offensive, a cyber attack

offensive in 2010. They think it maybe was the first one ever the U.S. launched like a strictly for sabotage attack. Basically, they wanted to disable Iran's centrifuges. Yeah. So they could not enrich uranium. And they did this through the new 24th Air Force based out of Texas, right? Texas in Georgia. Yeah. What's the... Warner Robbins? Robbins Air Force Base. Yeah, Robbins Air Force Base. Yeah, those two places are where the 24th is stationed. Yeah, and this is the first all cyber unit pretty much. Right. Pretty cool. Right. Their whole task is to wage cyber warfare. And I imagine to be defensive against cyber attacks. But I don't know if they had to do with Stuxnet, but they probably would have. I think it was being developed before the 24th was

ordained in 2009. I think it went back to 2007 when it was started. But basically the CIA got their hands on centrifuges that they knew Iran was using. And they had just as many as Iran did of the same kind. And they studied it. And they built this virus based on this configuration of centrifuges running windows and Siemens switches, right? Yeah. And then they built a virus to go infiltrate it. I thought it was called Operation Olympic Games. It was, but the malware, the virus itself is called Stuxnet. Okay, that's what I couldn't figure it out. But you're right. It was called Operation Olympic Games. Yes. And this whole operation was this huge sweeping, awesome, massive, secretive. Basically, imagine the CIA. Do you remember Uncommon Valor? Oh, yeah. Okay.

Do you remember when they're training at that replica of the camp? Yeah. Okay. The CIA did that with Iran's centrifuges for the nuclear program. And they figured out exactly how it worked. And then they figured out the best way to break it. Was Gene Heckman bankrolling the whole thing? Oh, yeah, he was there to get his son out. He was just staring at this menu of guns and silhouette that he wanted to order. Do you remember that? Oh, yeah. I thought that was so bad. Yeah. But that was a huge, huge movie for dudes our age. No, I'm saying bad isn't good. Oh, okay. Yeah. Gotcha. So Stuxnet Olympic Games happened. And like you said, it was the first offensive cyber attack. Most of the other ones have come in the form of sneaking in and lying around and watching

and waiting and spying. Well, Stuxnet had that too. Oh, is that the initial phase? There was a companion program called Flame. Right. That somehow, this is the part that's the biggest mystery, that Iran's nuclear program is not connected to the internet. So somebody got that in on thumb drive. Okay. Wow. Infected their local system. And Flame sat there and basically just studied everything. Told the US how the configuration was set up. Okay. And then they built it. And then they inserted Stuxnet. And basically it made all of their data look like everything was operating normally. But it was telling their centrifuges to spin out of control and basically break themselves. It's like Ocean's Eleven when they built the replica vault. Exactly. And showed the replica

video. There's nothing going on. So basically the Pentagon has been watching a lot of movies. Yeah, pretty much. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you

remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the I heart radio app, ample podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I heart 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. Ah, 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. 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 you 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 I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. But this is a hugely successful attack. Um, if not at the very least for American cyber warfare, um, because it supposedly set Iran's nuclear program back by at least a year, if not more in the hopes that this would let us continue talks. Yeah. And I think it said one of the, the aims was to make them feel stupid. And they said it worked. Yeah. Like they, they shamed something wrong. Yeah. And that's why this, these systems were failing. It's pretty scary, man. But the point is now is, okay, that's out there. Stuxnet is out there for anybody who can get their hands on it. And whoever that's the name of it. I know. It's a great name.

All right. Stuxnet with an X with a new giddy center. Um, but it's out there and the US is now basically just the, the computer equivalent of Hiroshima was just launched by the United States. Yeah. And nice little setup there. A lot of people are comparing these days of the early days of cyber warring to the early days of, of nuclear bombs and that there's not a ton of defense. Not anyone really knows what they're doing. And it's sort of a chaotic mess that everyone's trying to get their finger in the pie though. Yeah. And other countries like China, I believe, Russia who are apparently better equipped to, to defend against a cyber attack than the US. So basically the US is really playing with fire. Well, and that's why Clinton

and Bush were declining to use these. This is one of the reasons we're like, you know, this opens us up to counterattacks and just may not be the smartest way to, like we wouldn't go out and just drop a nuclear bomb on a country. Right. Oh, wait, we did. Right. Oops. Twice. Yeah. What else you got? Let's see. Yeah. We talked about the system controls and data acquisition systems. Yeah. That was basically that is the Achilles heel of infrastructure. And the United States, one of the reasons why we're not set up to defend against a cyber attack is because we are so connected to the internet. Yeah. Everything is. Yeah. Iran, North Korea. Yeah. Not quite as much because a lot of their stuff is off the grid just by

default. Sure. Because they don't have the infrastructure that we have. So just the robustness of our own infrastructure is one of the, one of its vulnerabilities as well. Yeah. That's a good point. As far as defense goes to, I forgot about this stuff. Strickland says like, the first step is education. As far as educating consumers over, you know, antivirus software and how they search the internet and stuff like that. So I give that a medium, but this guy, Richard Clark, he's a security expert. He blames things on companies like Microsoft who he feels like rushes through programs before they are fully security tested because they want to make, you know, they want a few coins to rub together by selling this stuff. And the consumer doesn't

want to wait. And the stockholders don't want lots of testing because they want those new products on the market. So it's a bit of a rough position. And, you know, private companies run most of the net, you know, it's not like this big government thing. So he contends, Clark does, that it's up to these private companies who own the internet's infrastructure to really make it more robust in a defensive sense. Right. Which is good in one sense because then you have a dollar amount in the form of lost profits attached to a security breach, right? So a company's going to try to protect it, which is good. Yeah. But at the same time, it's like, yeah, if you're putting out products though, and you have competition and your competitors' products

are safer, and you're just rushing stuff to market, then you're going to lose out ultimately by the same economic forces. And Jonathan also points out too that, you know, a scary way this can be implemented is as a one-two punch with a physical attack. Yeah. So, I mean, this is the one that wakes me up in the middle of the night is a cyber attack is launched and the electric power grid is shut down and gas lines and water lines start going haywire. Yeah. And then all of a sudden, in comes the Red Dawn team parachuting in. Well, that's what we did to Iraq in 2003. We sent a cyber attack that messed with their, I guess their air defense systems. Yeah. And then we invaded. So that's happened before and we've done it. That surprised me. Yeah. Cyber war.

We're in the midst of it. We're in the midst of it. Pretty crazy stuff. Get your, uh, what, Norton Andy virus? That'll just solve everything. Yeah. Education. Education. That's all that's the only thing that's all we can do to prevent cyber war. If you want to learn more about cyber war and read this article by Jonathan Strickland, you can type cyber war. One word in the search bar at howstuffworks.com and it'll bring it up. I said, Jonathan Strickland, which means it's time for a listener mail. It's time for a lot more than that. Uh, I'm going to call this beer and fire. Hi guys. I'm a professor of history and a long time active of your show. I use a podcast of my college classes to talk about how we use history and entertainment. I'm writing

about the great Chicago fire podcast, especially as it relates to my research. See, I study the history of alcohol and I teach a class on the history of beer. Uh, pretty cool. Yeah. We study the economic, social and cultural history of beer and we make beer in class and do weekly beer tastings. What? Yeah. Uh, anyway, aside from the stuff you mentioned in the show, the Chicago fire is important because it wiped out about three quarters of Chicago's breweries. Uh, something like 18 breweries were destroyed by the fire. Of course, people still want a beer. Uh, Chicago and Upper Midwest was populated by a lot of Germans at the time. Uh, this gave birth to the beer industry in Milwaukee. Before the great fire, Milwaukee was a beer town, but not a major

supply center. Uh, Schlitz especially is a good example of how the Milwaukee beer industry reacted to the fire. Uh, Joseph Schlitz, the founder, at first donated thousands of barrels of beer to Chicagoans in the weeks after the fire. Been sensing an opportunity. He then opened a distribution point in the city. Uh, after all, there were still hundreds of thousands of thirsty Chicagoans. He opened Schlitz Tide Saloons. By the 1880s, he was selling about 50,000 barrels of beer in Chicago alone, which is about 17% of their total. Wow. Total daily intake. The slogan for Schlitz, uh, the beer that made Milwaukee famous, came out of this period because of the beer sold after the fire. So that's where they got the name. Uh, by 1902, Schlitz was the largest brew in the

world. A title it would trade back and forth with Budweiser until the 1950s. And he goes on to point out that Blatz and Papst followed similar trajectories. Stuxnet. Stuxnet. And, uh, the Chicago brewing industry sadly never recovered from the fire, although beer drinking remained steady. And I don't have Professor Beer's, uh, name. So we'll just call him Professor Beer. No, I'm sure he'd appreciate that big time. Yeah. I'm sure that's what the students call him. Thanks, Professor Beer. Yeah. And if you want to write in, I'll say your name on a later show. Okay. Um, and if you teach, especially something interesting, or you use stuff you should know to help you teach, we're always interested in hearing that. We want to know about it. Okay. Uh, you can tweet it to us

at syskpodcast, put it on facebook.com slash stuff you should know, or you can send us an email 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 iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back

and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 band are 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.