Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How Lie Detectors Work

Episode Date: May 11, 2019

Instead of actually detecting lies, polygraph machines sense physiological variations, ostensibly brought on by guilt. The results are subject to interpretation, and therefore controversial. Join Josh... and Chuck as they investigate the polygraph. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 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.
Starting point is 00:00:17 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
Starting point is 00:00:37 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.
Starting point is 00:00:57 Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hello there, it's me, Josh, and for this week's SYS Case Selects, I've chosen our classic episode on lie detectors. It's a pretty nifty little episode about a pretty dodgy piece of forensic science
Starting point is 00:01:17 with a wow of a backstory. It is classic stuff you should know. So I hope you enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark. With me is always is Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Liar.
Starting point is 00:01:43 You could tell. There's ways you could find out, Chuck. Sure. We'll get to that in a minute. This is Stuff You Should Know, let me finish. Okay. And it's You Lie. Remember that guy?
Starting point is 00:01:55 Oh yeah. Joey Pants or whatever the congressman's name was. Yeah, Saturday Night Live had a funny skit that he had gotten a whole group of people to all stand up at once, wouldn't it, the deal? Yeah, tell it. And well yeah, and he supposedly had a whole group of senators that were gonna all stand up and yell,
Starting point is 00:02:11 you lie, and then he was the only one that did it. Yeah, because he was out of the room when they were like, no, we can't do that. Yeah, I think that was it. Let's just not do that. It was funny. So we're talking about lie detectors, but let me take you back to a little place in time
Starting point is 00:02:28 and space called the Jazz Age, early 1920s. Yeah? No, that's the beat next that did that. Oh, okay. I'm sure a jazz person snapped their fingers at one point. Sure. Okay. But not like that.
Starting point is 00:02:44 All right. It was more like Coltrane style. Just like that. Gotcha. Anyway, this is 1921, Chuck, in Berkeley, California at UCLA Berkeley. And there is a place there called the College Hall, which is a women's dorm.
Starting point is 00:03:04 And in that year, there was a string of thefts, cash, rings, pretty much anything of value went missing for a little while there. And there's a man working at the Berkeley Police Department. This is in the girl's dorm? Yeah. Okay. Called College Hall.
Starting point is 00:03:26 Gotcha. There's a man working in the Berkeley Police Department. His name is John Larson. And John Larson was the first cop ever to have a PhD. And he had gotten interested in this device called a Cardio Pneumocycograph, which had been invented just a few years before by another guy named William Marsden.
Starting point is 00:03:48 And William Marsden was a lawyer and a Harvard shrink. And he also, as an aside, created Wonder Woman with her lasso of truth. Really? He's the guy who invented what's now called the polygraph. But what about the Wonder Woman? He created Wonder Woman, the character? Yes.
Starting point is 00:04:08 He was kind of a Renaissance man. But that's William Marsden. John Larson works at the Berkeley Police Department. And he's become interested in this thing, the Cardio Pneumocycograph. And he realizes, okay, this is a perfect chance to apply it. So he rounds up some suspects. He does some normal police work
Starting point is 00:04:27 and finds out who the suspects are in this hall. Right. And he rounds them up, brings them down the station, and he starts hooking people up to this machine. And he gets to this one woman. Her name is Helen Graham. And... Guilty.
Starting point is 00:04:42 Yes, pretty much is what he does. He goes, Ms. Graham, this machine is saying that you took the money, did you? And he said that he noted on the machine a sharp drop in blood pressure, followed by a sudden rise. And then after that, this woman flew into a rage. She tried to attack the machine, she went crazy. So they basically string her along for a few days.
Starting point is 00:05:05 And then finally she confesses. And it's the first time that a polygraph was ever used to solve a crime, ever. That was probably the heyday, because before people knew what it was, they could just say, this machine says that you're guilty and they would be like, oh my God, how does it know? That's exactly right.
Starting point is 00:05:24 Very early on, some of the early proponents, specifically a guy named Leonard Keeler, recognized the placebo effect value. Before anyone knew there was a placebo effect, but the placebo effect value of a polygraph, that just the idea, if you believed in this machine and that it could root out lies, then it could force you to confess,
Starting point is 00:05:44 just being hooked up to it. You weren't going to pass it. They should have called it the guilt box. They called it the magic lie detector, is one of the things that they called it. Yeah, Leonard Keeler called it that. He worked with John Larson at the Berkeley Police Department. And eventually over time, John Larson
Starting point is 00:06:00 saw what he considered the truth behind the lie detector and the fact that it kept being called lie detector, which is driving him crazy. Yeah, sure. And he eventually distanced himself from it later on in his career. But Leonard Keeler ran around marketing it to anyone and everyone saying, just having this,
Starting point is 00:06:19 is going to not only help you hire more truthful, forthright people, but it's going to keep them in line while they're working for you because they know you've got access to this thing and you can strap them to it at any time. Wow, yeah, so that's where the polygraph came from. Yeah, there's a little prehistory too,
Starting point is 00:06:37 just to give them their due. In 1895, Cesare Lambroso, he's an Italian criminologist. He measured changes in blood pressure for police cases. And in 1904, a device by Vittorio Benossi measured breathing. And so they were early 1900s, late 1800s. They were kind of on the scene
Starting point is 00:07:00 of measuring these things. And Dr. James McKenzie in 1906, first mentioned the word polygraph with his instrument that he didn't use to root out the truth, but for, he did use it when giving medical examination, so. And then right before the polygraph was the unigraph. Unigraph?
Starting point is 00:07:20 Which was part of what's still used today in the polygraph. It measured respiration. Pretty cool, yeah. But then you add to it a couple of other things and you got the polygraph. We could stop here. This is interesting enough right now. So there's no, really?
Starting point is 00:07:37 No. There's no one walking the planet who has anything to do with polygraphs that call them lie detectors. And anyone, even the most ardent defender of polygraph technology would correct you if you called it a lie detector. They would be like, it's not a lie detector.
Starting point is 00:07:58 Because you can't detect a lie. It's impossible. The whole basis of a polygraph is that it is a set of medical instruments that use to measure changes in things like your heart rate, your respiration, and sweatiness, basically. I would fail.
Starting point is 00:08:16 Well, a lot of people do fail. And we'll get to that. But, oh, because of your sweat. Oh yeah. That was, okay. They would even hook me up. They just, like, dude. You look so cool.
Starting point is 00:08:28 Yeah, you're so sweaty right now. So when you're hooked up to this machine, the whole point is that it measures these physiological changes. And the idea that you're going to undergo a physiological change is based on the concept that a person hooked to this machine who is guilty will experience fear that they're going to be detected.
Starting point is 00:08:48 So this machine is designed to detect that fear. That's right. Which is really roundabout. But for a century almost, these things were used and abused. And it took a while for people to kind of catch on that there's a lot to criticize here with polygraphs. Yeah, for sure.
Starting point is 00:09:08 And it's like it's a shoe up in shock. 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
Starting point is 00:09:34 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 non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?
Starting point is 00:09:49 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
Starting point is 00:10:01 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.
Starting point is 00:10:18 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
Starting point is 00:10:33 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.
Starting point is 00:10:47 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.
Starting point is 00:11:02 You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Starting point is 00:11:21 All right, so let's get into this. First of all, we need to point out that analog polygraphs are what you have long seen in movies and TV when they have the little jittery, looks like a seismograph on the paper, scrolling by. And you're hooked up to all these different things on your chest and your forehead and your fingertips. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:11:44 And you're hooked up to all these different things on your chest and your forehead and your fingertips. Yeah. These days, they do that digitally, but it's basically still the same technique. Yeah. They just don't use the little scrolling needle. Do they have a name for that?
Starting point is 00:12:02 I'm sure they do. It's called an ink filled pen. It is? Yeah. Okay. But the three things that they do, Josh, they measure your respiratory rate, as you said. They take pneumographs, which are rubber tubes filled with air,
Starting point is 00:12:14 time around your chest and your abdomen, and that is going to measure whether or not you start breathing heavy, essentially, when you get nervous. Right. It monitors your breathing pattern and any changes to it. And it does it pretty cleverly, right? Yeah. With bellows, they're filled with air.
Starting point is 00:12:31 So when you breathe in real deeply or have a change, it's going to displace that into the bellows. Originally, the bellows were literally attached to the mechanical arm that showed the change. These days, it's a transducer that converts it digitally, electronically. Right. It converts it to an electrical pattern. Right?
Starting point is 00:12:53 Yeah, that probably just says why. But it's actually the same thing. Yeah. No, I think it looks a lot like it. If you look, there's a picture of a modern one in the graph. It's the same thing. It looks just like it. But yeah, it's not a paper readout any longer.
Starting point is 00:13:05 Right. Which is kind of interesting. This technology hasn't changed on a very fundamental basis for like 100 years almost. Yeah, I mean, the early one from McKinsey in 1906, they say that a lot of the same components are still very similar today. Right. You also are going to have, so you're going to have two tubes, one around your chest, one around your abdomen.
Starting point is 00:13:27 Yes. That's keeping an eye on your breathing. Yes. You're going to have a blood pressure cuff, which keeps an eye on your heart rate and your blood pressure. And it does it through sound. Right? Yeah, I didn't realize this.
Starting point is 00:13:42 So when the blood comes in and out of your veins, it creates sound and sound can also be used to displace air, causing a bellows to contract, which again, move the arm on the scroll and now is created or turned into an electrical pattern. Yeah. But it's the same thing. But it's sound, which I just think is very neat.
Starting point is 00:14:04 Well, and what's also neat is the sweat one. I figured they would have some sort of like a moistureometer, just to detect moisture, but it's called galvanic skin resistance or GSR. Or electrodermal activity. That's right. And they hook up these finger plates to galvanometers and they are basically measuring the skin's ability to conduct electricity.
Starting point is 00:14:26 And if your skin is moist, it's going to be able to conduct electricity easier. Yes. And that's what they're measuring there. It's like the ones, the little heart rate monitors that they clip to your fingertips in the hospital, but these things measure electricity instead. Yes.
Starting point is 00:14:43 Which if you are dry, you're going to conduct less electricity. Yeah. If you're wet, you're going to conduct more. So since you have so many pores on the end of your fingers and you sweat when you're nervous, there you go. Done. So you put all this together and it paints this picture. The ACLU, among other people, have decried as just,
Starting point is 00:15:08 what are you doing here? Basically is what the ACLU says, right? What you have is a picture of a person who is undergoing stress, maybe feeling embarrassment, is maybe just scared to be there, maybe doesn't like having things wrapped around his or her chest, maybe doesn't really like the person asking the questions. The results of these changes in pattern, the data is totally subjective.
Starting point is 00:15:43 That's right. Which makes polygraphs totally subjective, which takes it in large part out of the realm of science. Yeah. Voodoo science is what they call it. Although proponents will say that a well-trained forensic psychophysiologist, which is the examiner, can get through all that to still get a good result. They're like, yeah, they know all this stuff.
Starting point is 00:16:06 And if you're good, then you can factor that in and still get a good result. So let's talk about what the forensic psychophysiologist does. Apparently I've seen anywhere between 5,000 and 10,000 of them in the U.S. at any given time. Yeah. And some of them belong to professional organizations. I think probably maybe half or a third, depending on where you are on that estimate, belong to any number of professional organizations. Some have no accreditation whatsoever,
Starting point is 00:16:40 but are still able to open up shops depending on the state they're in. These have zero laws about being a forensic psychophysiologist, a.k.a. a polygraph examiner. That's right. But there are programs out there. Who wrote this article? Kevin Bonser? I don't know. I think so.
Starting point is 00:17:01 He interviewed a guy who founded the Exiton Academy. Exiton is a manufacturer of polygraphs. Right. And they founded this academy as well, where you go through a certain amount of training to become a forensic psychophysiologist. And he actually interviewed that guy? Yeah. His name's Bob Lee.
Starting point is 00:17:21 That's Lee. Lee. And Lee says that if you come to their academy, you have to have a baccalaureate degree, a bachelor's, right? Or you have to have at least five years of investigative experience and an associate's degree. You have to take a 10-week course, and after you complete the 10-week course, you have to carry out 25 polygraph examinations and submit them to be reviewed. So these are like real-life ones.
Starting point is 00:17:50 I guess you're working with your local police department or whatever. Maybe you're already a cop. And you have to submit it to the Exiton Academy board for review. And once they're all reviewed and everybody's all thumbs up, you are a licensed, I guess, but you're not licensed because there's no licensing body. Yeah. You graduate, I guess, is what they call it. Right.
Starting point is 00:18:16 So that's as accredited as it gets, I guess. And like you said, proponents of polygraph testing say that if you're a good FP, you're going to be able to structure everything correctly so that you can see past somebody who sweats a lot like you, or who gets stressed out easily like me, and design your questions appropriately, and you're going to be able to figure out whether this person is deceptive or not. Yeah. So how would you do that, Chuck?
Starting point is 00:18:49 Well, we should talk about the test itself, I guess. You're going to go in and you're going to get a pre-test before you get strapped up to anything. Right. It could take about an hour. This is just you, and those are the only two people in the room. You're not surrounded by folks like in the movies and stuff. Yeah. Although in the movie sometimes it's just two people, I guess.
Starting point is 00:19:08 But the pre-test, you're just going to get an interview basically about why you're being investigated. They're also going to be profiling you and checking you out and just seeing what kind of questions you respond to and what might make you nervous, just so they'll be better informed about how to properly question you once you're all strapped in. Right. And the pre-test when you're just kind of hanging out with them casually, the examiner is also kind of getting info out of you that you might not be aware of.
Starting point is 00:19:36 Like if you talk leisurely about your favorite beer at one point and how you like it a lot, and then later on it also comes up that you have to drive a lot. They might use that for a control question, which could be something like, have you ever driven under the influence of alcohol? And a control question is something where you would have to admit guilt, and you may not want to. But it's such a broad question that just about anybody is guilty of it. Like have you ever lied to somebody?
Starting point is 00:20:10 Have you ever stolen anything? That kind of thing. So where if you say no, they now have a baseline for what it looks like when you lie, that they can make a reasonable assumption that you have just lied, and any of the data captured on the polygraph they're going to use to analyze everything else off of. And that's pretty much it. That's the test. And afterward you have the post-test where they look at all the data and chart out whether or not
Starting point is 00:20:42 they think you're deceptive and where. Like on this question, you're deceptive. On this question, you may have been deceptive. It's kind of hard to tell. On this one, you definitely were deceptive. So, and it's all in relation to that control question, that baseline, right? Yeah. So if your deception, if on questions where, I mean,
Starting point is 00:21:02 they're going to have to talk to the police as well, too, and say, what do you want to know out of this person? So they'll design questions around that as well. So they may have a question like, are you wearing a blue shirt? That may be question one. That's irrelevant, right? Right. Question two is, have you ever lied to your boss?
Starting point is 00:21:20 That's the control question. And then question three is something like, you know, did you steal the cookie from the cookie jar? Like that's the one that the cops want them to ask. Right. They'll compare the results of Q3 against Q2. And if they're the same or you can't really tell, that's an inconclusive test. Right. So that's it.
Starting point is 00:21:45 You said that's, that's polygraph. 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 non-stop 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.
Starting point is 00:22:32 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. That 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. Seriously, I swear, and you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you.
Starting point is 00:23:24 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.
Starting point is 00:23:41 Oh, just stop now. So tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Pretty easy. It is. It's jarringly easy considering that it's used in legal cases a lot, right? Yes, that's true.
Starting point is 00:24:15 People try to battle the lie detector in various ways. There are little tricks that the internet says works, like taking a sedative or putting any purseprint on your fingers, which it seems like they would make you wash your hands. Putting a tack in your shoe. And any time you get asked a question, every single time you stomp on the tack. And the idea is that you're just going to skew the test so they all look the same. So your body has the same reaction no matter what's going on. I guess if you press on the tack, your physiological response could overwhelm any response to the question, right?
Starting point is 00:24:50 Exactly. Like I said, these things are used in legal cases but with caveats, right? If you undergo a polygraph, whether you fail or pass, it doesn't really matter. Legally speaking. Right. Because of, unless you're in New Mexico. Yeah, this is the only state that allows it. Just openly, like if you take a polygraph, like it's admissible in court.
Starting point is 00:25:18 Every other state, usually the both sides have to agree on it being admitted. Or the judge has to say, yeah, we're going to admit this one, right? Yeah, and federally the judge decides whether or not they're going to admit it. Right, and I guess state judges kind of follow that federal ruling of polygraphing. Yeah, and it's sort of a crapshoot if a federal judge is going to allow it or not. There's no precedent really to where they say we have to or we don't have to. Right. So what are the problems with this?
Starting point is 00:25:51 The problems with a polygraph are that it's subjective, right? That's a big one. But also because it's subjective, you can get what are called false positives and false negatives. Yeah, and you don't want that because then the test itself is just not valid. Right. But I mean that a lot of people use that as evidence that polygraph, polygraphy. Shouldn't be done at all. It's not valid.
Starting point is 00:26:20 Yeah. A false positive in polygraphing is when you find somebody who is deemed deceptive but was telling the truth. False negative is when somebody who wasn't telling the truth is deemed truthful, like Gary Ridgway, the Green River killer. They had him for a little while and gave him a polygraph and he passed and they let him go and he went and killed a bunch more women. All right?
Starting point is 00:26:46 That's right. I didn't know that actually. Yeah. And also the federal government is the largest consumer of these exams and if you work for the federal government, you've probably had one to get the job. But you can't do that in the private sector thanks to the Employee Polygraph Protection Act and the late 80s. They said you can't force your employees to do this.
Starting point is 00:27:10 You can request it, but if they don't want to do it, you can't fire them because of it. You just can't do it. Right. Not in private land. Right. Unless you have a contract with the government and then that's not valid. Right. But yeah, the federal government is the largest opponent to them in court, but also the largest
Starting point is 00:27:29 consumer. I can imagine that. And there's been a lot of cases that shaped its admissibility or not, but the polygraph, it seems like it's kind of on its way out. I wrote an article about MRI being used as lie detectors. Oh, really? That's starting to kind of come into fashion the more we start to understand like how lies are born in the brain, being able to see it and saying this is the pattern that will happen.
Starting point is 00:27:56 If this person is lying and then that pattern happens, they say, well, we know you're lying. We just saw that lie form in your brain. That makes sense. Yes, but at the same time, people who understand MRIs say it is way too early to be doing that. And even if we can do it with 100% accuracy, there are a lot of moral and ethical questions to it as well that we need to address first. Always. And then penile plesimography.
Starting point is 00:28:22 What's that? So remember the numerographs that go around the chest and the abdomen? Imagine one of those that goes around the penis and it does the same thing. It detects changes in contraction and girth. That's a perfect way to put it. Yeah, wow. And it's used to detect arousal. They use it for sex offenders.
Starting point is 00:28:45 It's under at least as much attack as regular polygraphs. But I wrote this blog post called Using Science to Root Out Late in Homosexuality Among Homophobes. A study at UGA used penile plesimography to find if anyone who they had deemed homophobic became aroused when exposed to homosexual pornography. Wow. Yeah, it's one of the better posts I've ever written. Geez. All right, that's our future, I guess.
Starting point is 00:29:20 Penile plesimography for everyone. Maybe. Everyone with the penis, at least. And then Chuck, lastly, I want to encourage everybody, if this has piqued your interest about lie detectors, to go watch the shoe store job interview clip from Mr. Show on YouTube. Oh, yeah. You remember that one?
Starting point is 00:29:41 Mm-hmm. That was very good. My friend, Paul F. Tompkins, and he has a breakthrough. Oh, was he in that one? Yeah. Yeah. Good old PFT. Yep.
Starting point is 00:29:51 And that's it for lie detectors, right? Yeah, I want to take a test. If there's someone in the Atlanta area that administers these and would be willing to give me a lie detector test, I would love to do that. Okay. And I'll watch. Yes. As long as I can, you know, approve the questions.
Starting point is 00:30:08 Yes. Or not approve them, but I don't want to be, like, rooted out as some miscreant. It's a little late for that, Chuck. Just keep it above board. If you want to know more about lie detectors and play with some lie detector flash animation, you can do that by typing in lie detector in the search bar on howstoreforks.com. And that means it's time for listener mail. That's right, Josh.
Starting point is 00:30:35 This is from Brad. If you remember, we had a list of suggestions from a listener not too long ago that thought our podcast could be a lot better if we changed a few things. Brad has some suggestions of his own of how we can make the podcast better. We should both have nicknames. We do. That zazz up the actual name like welcome to stuff you should know with JC and the dingo. Sit back while getting a big helping of knowledge from Choco and the duck.
Starting point is 00:31:03 I second the suggestion to remove the personal anecdotes. Should be moved to a separate podcast called the Josh and Chuck memoir. Daily one-hour podcast can recount your lives from birth to present, focusing on depressing stories that are marginally factual. It's in development. Yes. Chuck, please raise your voice. One octave.
Starting point is 00:31:23 Josh, lower yours. One octave. What? Okay. So now this is how I talk. I talk like this. The opening of the podcast should be a description of what each of you ate that day and the number of trips to the bathroom.
Starting point is 00:31:36 This allows the listener to keep track at home. Hedgehogs, brain surgeons, arcades, and Bolivian politics are under-represented on your podcast. At least 20% should be about these subjects. Do not exclude listener mail instead create a quieter audio track, reading the listener mail and overlay it on the rest of the podcast. That way, listeners can hear both the mail and the main content at the same time. That's a pretty good idea. Why not set the podcast?
Starting point is 00:32:05 I think you would literally drive people insane if we did that. Why not set the podcast to a backdrop of tribal drums and jungle animal noises that would give it an exotic feel? That's over the listener mail track? Over the whole thing. So that'd be three tracks deep. Yes. And it would lead to suspense for the listener to wonder if you'll be eaten by Jaguars.
Starting point is 00:32:27 When it was clear from the podcast on mummies neither of you had ever been mummified, please refrain from explaining topics that you don't have personal experience with. And then the final suggestion, just retell episodes of this American life. That last one went down like the Dave Letterman top 10 list. So that's Brad. Thanks, Brad. Those are all great ideas. I like three tracks all in one, streaming at once together.
Starting point is 00:32:52 Listener mail quietly, the podcast, and tribal drumming. And jungle noises. Let's see. If you have access to a polygraph and want to hook Chuck up to it, let us know. You can let us know on Facebook at facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast and you can send us a regular old email at stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works.
Starting point is 00:33:23 For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio 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 I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever
Starting point is 00:34:01 you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart 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, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye.
Starting point is 00:34:31 Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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