Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How Pollen Works

Episode Date: April 6, 2019

For about 375 million years, plants have been using pollen (aka plant sperm) to propagate their species. And the technique has stuck around because it works. Join Chuck and Josh for a cozy look at the ins and outs of plant reproduction. 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. Hello everyone, it's Saturday and it's Chuck, and that means it's time for another stuff you should know select. We go all the way back to July to 2013 to discuss pollen. I'm not sure when this is gonna come out,

but if I'm timing it right, it should be sometime during pollen season, and that's why I picked it, because understanding the enemy is the first step toward defeating it. And so many people have bad problems with allergies and pollen, and to understand how that really works in your body,

it's kinda cool and it really helps. So I hope you don't have any problems with pollen, hope you're doing okay, but learn all about how pollen works right here, right now. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant,

and that means it's time for Stuff You Should Know, the itchy, screezy, skeezy, scratchy edition. Not skeezy. No. That's not. The itchy, scratchy, sneezy edition, that's what I meant to say. There you go.

It's funny how you can mix words together and come up with other words you didn't mean to say. Jerry's eyes are itching. Yeah. Well, we should say, we were just talking about the pollen count here in Atlanta. That's pretty much all we ever talk about, ever, when the camera's not on or the mics aren't recording.

That and Coca-Cola. Oh, you know how everyone comes to Atlanta and they're like, oh, every street's named Peachtree. Let's go drink a Coke, because those are the only two things we've ever had. Exactly. All right, sorry. Yeah, that's fine.

So you wanna talk about pollen some more? Yeah, it's low right now in Atlanta. 39. 39. Yeah, it's low right now in Atlanta. 39, that's moderate. Yeah, well, low for us. Right, but according to the pollen scale,

the scale that they used to count pollen and then designate it somewhere along the pollen spectrum, 39 is considered moderate, not even low, moderate. When it's really bad here in Georgia, it gets to about 9,000. Yeah, those are the few weeks that the streets run yellow when it rains with yellow water. Yeah.

It looks like pee. Yeah, your car's totally covered in it. You're covered in it. It's just everywhere. Everywhere. Yeah, but now we're about to tell everybody, we're basically gonna turn everybody into a palinologist. Yeah.

To an extent. You should be a big fan after this. An amateur palinologist. I think about a third of all the plants and vegetables and fruits and vegetables we eat are here thanks to pollen. So if you like eating food, it doesn't come in a box. Thank you, pollen.

Thank you, pollen. Is it just a third that pollinate or a third that are just angiosperms or gymnosperms? A third that pollinate. Wow. What's up with the other two thirds? Well, you know, bananas. They're clones of one another.

There you go. There's like, there's the one. There's like, I think 1,000 varieties of bananas. And thanks by the way to Damn Interesting for this information. But there's like 1,000 varieties or species of bananas. But each one, like if you eat like a type of, just one of those species of bananas,

you're eating an exact clone of every other banana in that species. Because many thousands of years ago, humans just stumbled upon the banana, which is a hybrid of two basically inedible fruits that came together to form the delicious banana, but made them sterile. All banana plants are sterile.

And the only way that they're allowed to propagate is by human hand. They're delicious. I did a Don't Be Dumb about that. Oh yeah? Yeah. Well, you just did it again. Yeah.

You can check out Don't Be Dumbs on our website, stuffyshouldknow.com. Wow. All right. Anyway, pollen. Yes. It's been around for a while. I know in our bee podcast,

we talked about how bees and pollen kind of emerged side by side 100 million years ago. Some say it could evolve. Right. But pollen actually goes further back than that. In this article, it says about 375 million years ago is when the plants started getting clever in spreading their seed literally using pollen.

That's right. Different techniques. And I think that the gymnosperms were first. You think so? I believe so. Yeah. And the author of the article here points out that the reason why it evolved was

so plants didn't have to be dumb and rely on water to carry their junk, to fertilize other junk. Right. You know, they're like, how about wind? Or how about that bat? Or how about that beetle? Yeah. Or how about that bird pooping it out? That's right.

Yeah. And like I said, I think pollen grains or plants spread their seed literally. Plant pollen is what amounts to plant sperm. Yeah. It's like always go to the kids science pages to research first off. I mean, they're good.

They're colorful. Yeah. If we want to pollination very simply, people reproduce, animals reproduce, they need male and female parts. Plants and flowers are no different. Right. They need male parts to connect with the female parts

to make an egg. And in this case, pollination is how it's done. Right. It's basically how that sperm, the pollen reaches that egg. Which is the ovule. Yeah. Right. And once they get together, magic happens.

That's right. But let's talk about the way it looks, first of all. Yeah, there's like a lot of different looks to pollen depending on the plant. Yeah. And all of these variations, it can be like a cone, literally a pine cone. Yeah, and look at, you know, just look up microscope pollen

on Google Images and you'll see all sorts of weird, colorful shapes and sizes. Yeah, some look like blowfish. Yeah. Others look like sputnik. Really? Yeah. I didn't see the sputnik.

Some have ribbed edges. Yeah. For, and all of these adaptations are mutations. I guess they became adaptations. Allow that pollen to kind of better ensure that it's going to be carried to where it needs to go. Yeah, it has a purpose. It's not just like, hey, this one would

look neat if it looked like a starfish. Exactly. It serves its purpose in the end. Some have wings, kind of, what amount of basically wings because they're carried on the wind. Oh, yeah? Yeah, like dandelion pollen, that's carried on the wind. True.

Well, dandelion's self-pollinate, too. We'll get to that, though. Yeah. They're slippery little guys. Yeah, they are. They're also high in phytonutrients as well. Oh, yeah? Dandelion greens are.

Oh, the stems? No, the leaves. Oh, the little leaves under the yellow part? So here's a rule of thumb. There's a New York Times article that came out very recently about phytonutrients and how we basically bred them out of our food. And the rule of thumb is the bitterer, or more bitter,

the plant, the higher it is in phytonutrients. Phytonutrients have kind of a bitter, astringent taste. And we tend to not really like that. So we stopped eating those things over time and replaced them with sweet things that aren't necessarily good for us, like potatoes and other starches. Yeah, well, bitter things can also kill you. That's probably the reason why.

Maybe so. That's a pretty good point. But bitter stuff that you know won't kill you. Did you dandelion leaves? God, I need some right now. But back in the day, I bet people were like, that tastes bad, and it killed tuk-tuk. So let's just not eat it.

Right, exactly. All right, so should we talk about pollination? Talked a little bit about pollen. Now we need to talk about how plants make little baby plants. And it's pretty simple. Like I said, the male part. And it really helps to follow along if you go to a handy-dandy little visual aid, I found,

because they really break down the male parts and the female parts. The female has the pistol, and that's P-I-S-T-I-L. And within that, you have the ovary, which sits down low in the plant, and the stile, which is a long, thin appendage, I guess, that contains pollen tubes. And then at the top, you have your stigma, which

is going to catch the pollen. Yeah, and that's the female part, right? That's the lady. OK, don't be confused, because it is phallic in nature. Yeah, true. But it's still the female part. And the male has the filament, which is a long stem,

and then the anther at the top, which holds all the pollen. Yeah. And that's pretty much the long and short of the parts. And is that just angiosperms that you're describing, or is that all pollinating plants? I think these are just the angiosperms. Well, we should say quite explicitly that there's basically two ways that plants can pollinate.

There's gymnospherms and angiosperms. And the big difference between the two is that gymnospherms, literally that means naked seed, which by the way, gymnasium means place to be naked. Genosium in German. Did you know that? Yeah. So gymnospherms, naked seed, there's

nothing protecting the seed once it's produced. And a seed is just a fertilized ovum, or ovule, right? Yeah. Angiosperms produce something to protect that seed, whether it's a shell, like a nut, or fruit, like an apple, with the seeds inside. Right. Because an apple is just an enlarged ovule, ovary.

And the seeds are the fertilized ovules. Yes. Well, you can also cross-pollinate or self-pollinate. Right. Those are the other two differences. So you were saying what of dandelions self-pollinate? Well, they can do both. But they do have a cool little feature.

They basically grow up. This is when they're still the little yellow flower. They have these little florets that grow up. And if you look, well, you probably can't see, if you look really, really close though, these little florets that grow up. And as it grows, it carries the pollen on its little stem. And then eventually gets to a point

where it doesn't start growing up anymore, and it splits, and then starts curling back on itself to, you know. No way. It picks up its own pollen from its own style. And it's self-pollination. It's not gross or like perverted. There's a lot of plants out there, though, that have mechanisms to prevent them from self-pollinating.

Yeah, it can't be good or bad. That's what I couldn't figure out. Well, the plants somewhere along the way figured out, like, hey, the wider the gene pool, the better off we are. Because the more room there is for adaptation, mutations, and then adaptations, right? Yeah, but in here, the author said ideally it cross-pollinates,

but I don't think that's the case always. Well, it's not ideal. It's just some doing some don't, right? I mean, if you look at it like from just an animalistic or an organism viewpoint, right, like with us, if you just get a bunch of Mennonites together and they just reproduce with one another, there's going to be defects that just

are propagated throughout this little gene pool. But if the Mennonites spread out into the larger country as a whole, those defects are going to, I guess, be kind of watered down by the size of the gene pool. I think it's the same thing with self-pollinating and cross-pollinating. Yeah, because it's interesting, because things like peanuts are self-pollinators, and that's why they thrive.

But corn has a mechanism to not allow itself to self-pollinate. Like, I think the sperm is ready at a different time than the ovule is ready to accept it, so it's a timing thing. The thing is, peanuts would probably be able to talk if they didn't self-pollinate. And they sound like Jimmy Carter. So there's a lot of mechanisms that plants have to prevent themselves from self-pollinating.

Some might have either just male plants and just female plants. Some may be where the male part of a plant has both male and female flowers, for example. Diocese? Yes. The male flower might come out before the female flower on the same plant so that they're not the timings off a little bit.

And then there's some that are just they'll signal a biochemical marker. If pollen from the same plant gets near the ovule, it'll just basically turn barren. So it's just incapable of fertilizing itself. Or like corn where the timing's thrown off. So they rely on cross-pollination. Which is pretty cool.

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 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. OK, 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 will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, 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 Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So let's, let's get explicit again here. Gymnosperms. Yes. Naked seed. How does this happen? Like, we'll use the example of a pine, a loblolly pine.

Yeah, a pine cone. It's fun to say, but that's a conifer. Conifers are ancient. I believe they were the first pollinating plant. Oh, really? Yeah, I think so. Nice. So let's talk about it.

Well, the pine cones, they're, they're little male pine cones, little female pine cones. You might not realize that, but you've got quite a show going on in your backyard at certain times of the year. Right. And basically, once you get the two together, you get a male pine cone and a female pine cone together. The male pine cone fertilizes, well,

the pollen comes in contact with an ovule, and the pollen starts to go to town. It absorbs a bunch of water. Yeah, well, the female pine cones will sticky, too, that helps, by the way. It does. It helps collect the pollen. Right.

So the female, or the pollen, the male, the male part of the pine cone germinates, and it starts growing what's called a pollen tube, which basically allows this pollen to directly fertilize the ovule. Once that happens, the ovule basically becomes a seed, and the seed is released from the pine cone. They go everywhere. And then they're eaten by birds and pooped out elsewhere,

carried along in their trampled biorhinoceros. Sure. Who knows what just got loose from the zoo? Yeah. But then that seed is carried along. But it's not protected by anything. It's just a seed, and hence a naked seed, hence gymnosperms. Right.

So angiosperms, they have kind of like a similar process, whereas there's a pollen tube that's grown, and the male pollen has come in contact with the female pollen and all that. Yeah, and we're talking about flowers in most cases here. With angiosperms, they're the only one that flower and produce fruit. Yeah, so when you think about your garden with the honeybee

and all, that's angiosperms. Right. So that's a non-naked seed. And that's where the fruit comes in or the shell comes in. And angiosperms have developed a mechanism to protect the seed, to better ensure survival. And if you think about it, to entice the things that transport these seeds to go ahead and do their thing.

Yeah, there's like every flower has some sort of cool shape or scent or color or something that matches with some little insect or bird or bat that's going to be enticed, like the bumblebee and the foxglove. They go hand in hand because it fits up there just perfect. And it has a little colorful landing strip on the bottom petal to guide the bumblebee in. And it's just like nature's, it's just like harmonious.

Right. There's that one orchid that I believe Darwin predicted the existence of a type of hummingbird that had a very long curl beak that had co-evolved with it. And he was absolutely correct. So cool. Remember, it's in that movie, Adaptation. Yeah, that's a great movie.

And then you can learn a lot from that movie. Yeah, it's a great attention. Yeah, anything that, what's his name? Charlie Kaufman writes? Yeah. Well researched. Agreed. The fruit is another thing, too.

Animals love to eat fruit. Yeah. The fruit is basically, once a fruit, piece of fruit drops to the ground, that means those seeds are ready to go. They're ready to become seedlings. But first, they need a fox to eat the apple, carry it in its stomach.

Right. Over several meters or miles or whatever. And then poop it out. And then you have seeds that are basically just planted. That's amazing. They take purchase. And a new tree begins. We're a seed.

Her insides were a rocky place where a seed could find no purchase. You're right. So pollen grains are actually created. I guess we should step back a second and talk about meiosis. That's the cells are dividing and growing. Eventually you get a little pollen. It looks like a little dust spec to our eyeball.

But it contains the sperm. It's not actually the sperm. It contains the sperm therein. And the pollen is in pollen sacs at the end of the statement, which we talked about. And that little two-lobed antler. I almost said antler. Antler.

Yeah. It's like a gunther. Eventually it'll find its way to the stigma and travel down to the ovary. And in the case of angiosperms, there are two sperm that are used. I don't think we said in the case of gymnosperms. It's only one of the sperm is used, right?

Yeah, in a pollen sac there's two sperm. But you just need one for the angiosperm you need two. Yeah, because one is actually fertilizing the egg, and the other is developing into endosperm together alongside in what will eventually be the seed. And if you think that sounds gross, like the endosperm is like a protein basically to keep it all alive.

Yeah, that keeps the seedling happy and healthy. So when you're eating corn, you're actually eating the endosperm. Each corn kernel is actually, it's like that starchy endosperm. Right. Delicious. Which the seed loves to eat itself.

And that's true. So we talked about bees. We talked about birds, foxes. Mentioned poop a couple of times. Fox gloves. Yeah, and you were saying that basically every flowering plant especially has some sort of mechanism to attract at least one kind of bug

or animal that's been proven to help pollinate, transport this pollen. And so, I mean, for the most part, we enjoy them. Like, you like the scent of a good flower, right? Oh, yeah. Sure. But you might not like the devil's tongue. Yeah.

Which is a Sumatran plant that apparently reeks so badly. Smells like a decomposing flesh basically. Yeah. Did you see this thing? I've seen it before, yeah. Truly remarkable. Yeah. It's like two feet tall.

And it's like it basically flowers or blooms like once every like 10 years or 20 years or 200 something like that, right? I'm not sure. If it's the same one I'm thinking of. But it's stinky. Right. And the reason why it's stinky is because it pollinates with the help of a type of carrion beetle that's

attracted to decomposing flesh. So the plant attracts this beetle that likes to eat decomposing flesh by putting out the smell of decomposing flesh. That's so gross. Yeah, but it's pretty spectacular. It is. Yeah, and the philodendron, something

you might have in your house, it actually does the same thing. But it doesn't stink always. There's actually a chemical reaction that takes place and heats it up to emit this odor that the beetle is attracted to. Which sounds pretty gross too. But it all works. And I would Google that the Sumatran devil's tongue.

It's pretty cool looking. The flower itself is two feet. It's not like, oh, what a long stem. It's just this huge flower. It's amazing. And then you were also saying, was it foxglove that provided a landing strip for bumblebees? Yeah.

So flowers, in general, typically have certain types of, like their color will be based on the kind of creature that helps pollinate it, whether it's diurnal, meaning it's awake during the day, or nocturnal, meaning it's awake at night, right? Right. I guess that's in case of bats and stuff like that. Yeah.

And then our old friend nectar is a big lure. And basically nectar is around, right? Just because it tastes delicious and is enticing? From what I understand, yeah. It's basically like a little enticement, like you said, for like a bee or something or a bird. Yeah. Come get it.

Because it's placed by the stamen. That's right. Or the way that the anthors are situated, just the way they're placed in the flower. If it gave it an advantage to bump up against that bee, then it's going to be successful in the long run. And live out as a species. That is nice stuff.

That is pretty good. So Chuck, we've reached a point where, I mean, ever since we started selectively breeding plants, domesticating crops. Like, hey, that's pretty. Right. Or, hey, I like this banana. Yeah.

Or that's hearty. And it grows in my awful, hot area that I live in. Exactly. Many reasons to do so. Right. You know, we wanted to keep plants. We wanted to keep the bad stuff out, keep the good ones we wanted in.

But it never became more crucial until we started genetically modifying crops. And now, all of a sudden, not only are the corporations saying, hey, man, you can't cross-pollinate with our stuff or else that's patent infringement. And a nearby farmer says, I'm not using your seeds. It's the bees. You can't blame me.

And the farmers who don't want GMO stuff in their crops say, hey, man, you need to keep your crops over there, because I don't want your GMO crud in here. I have an organic farm. Exactly. And your junk is blowing by the wind. It's a touchy subject. We should do that as a whole, the GMOs.

I agree. The idea of patenting genes in general and let alone crops, it's really interesting. But there's been some pretty clever, simple ways of getting around this problem that's posed by pollination of GMO crops with non-GMO crops. Yeah, well, distance is obviously one thing. It's pretty simple.

Don't put my farm near your farm. But they have to do all kinds of studies to see how the wind reacts and how, like, how far does that bee fly? Yeah, and they found in certain parts of Africa, bees will go about four miles, three kilometers. That's their range for food. That's a lot.

But I mean, just using that kind of thinking thought process, though, like, OK, well, this guy's growing this over here, so I can't grow this here. Right. That will prevent that kind of pollination, though. Yeah, another thing they can do is, sort of like with the corn, they can time their crop rotation to time out so where they're flowering at different times

and not interfering with one another. Right. But it's a touchy subject. Like, from what I understand, there's a lot more going on than is preferred by, like, the organic farmers of the world. Sure. And in the GMOs, they can then say that you're infringing? Yeah.

Just because they cross-pollinated to their crop? Right. Even though you didn't buy their seeds or even want their seeds, if a bee carries their seeds, their crops pollen over to your crops, then you start to develop plants that have the GMO characteristics that's patented according to the corporations you're infringing on their patent.

It's a very tricky ground there, isn't it? I don't think it's tricky ground. If you ask me, you should not be allowed to have a patent on any living organism. Oh, well, yeah. You know what I mean, though. That's my opinion. It gets tricky in courts and in studies and in corporations.

The courts, though, tend to side on the corporations side, typically. Yeah. Let's do that one, though, soon. GMOs? Yeah. All right. So that's it for pollen.

If you're interested in how pollen causes allergies, then you should listen to our How Allergies Work episode. That was pretty good. Yeah, I was going to recommend that. Nice work. Thanks, man. So if you want to learn more about pollen, in the meantime, you can type that word in the search bar

at HowStuffWorks.com. And since I said search bar, it's time, of course, for a message break. Stuff you should know. 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 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, OK, 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 will my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, 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. And now, how about some listener mail? Yeah, we have a correction. It's been blowing up lately.

Oh, man, I'm sorry. You know, it's crazy, that's the second time I've done that in a podcast. On that same thing? I don't remember what the other podcast was, but I've mentioned it before, and we've gotten tons of corrections about it. And I didn't learn my lesson.

Well, this guy was really nice about it, so I'm going to read his. And it's an important correction, because anytime you're talking about drugs. So to recap in the PTSD podcast, we got the two drugs, a beta blocker called propanenol, which helps with PTSD, infused with propofol, which is what killed Michael Jackson. And so this is from Chris.

He's a big fan. He's listened to every episode on his commute in Southern California, which we now stings. So he said what we just said about getting the drugs confused. He said, I can see how you guys can mix it up, because the names are very similar, but they're significantly different, obviously. Propanenol is relatively mild and commonly prescribed

and very little potential for overdose, while propafol is a very powerful drug with extremely high potential for overdose and rarely administrated outside of strictly monitored medical settings. It is actually a hypnotic agent that must be administered intravenously, as we talked about Michael Jackson's drip, and is often used in conjunction with general anesthetics,

like most general anesthetics. Its steep dose response curve significantly increases the risk of overdose, where the effective dose is only slightly below a lethal dose. That's kind of scary. Yeah, it really is. I mean, when you're on that, you're right along the border. Yeah.

Well, he says Michael Jackson's case is extremely rare, so he was essentially exposing himself to risks similar to those associated with general anesthetics used during surgery with a high potential for overdose and death on a daily basis for relatively trivial purposes, which were, in this case, insomnia. Yeah, but from what I understand, he had years-long insomnia.

This guy was not sleeping at all. They would give him everything first, and then they'd try that last resort. And sometimes it still wouldn't work. Really? Yeah, he was really in bad shape at the end. Well, he probably had a resistance to certain things like that.

So Chris goes on to say, I'm not certain about the exact amount of risk posed by a propofol administration, but I believe the risk of death is something on the order of tenths of a percent, meaning he would have died according to the statistical model within a couple of years of daily use, like pretty much guaranteed. Frankly, he would have been better off using heroin

that whole time in spite of his ironically strict, yet poorly informed anti-drug stance. So that's from Chris. Thanks. Chris, that was a genuinely awesome email. Yeah, it was good. And I'm sorry, everybody, for getting so wrong. Well, I mean, the names are just confusing.

Yeah, but I mean, one's like a blood pressure medicine. The other one's like pretty much a general anesthetic. I know, but what gets me is that half of the emails were like, well, yeah, they just sound alike. So you goofed it. And half of them were like, those drugs couldn't be any more different. Like you really thought that it was just,

it's like a verbal typo. Right. Thank you, Chuck. Yeah. Thanks for letting me off. So anyway. If you have a correction for us, we really do like to get those.

We like to know what we're talking about. Sometimes we get things wrong. Sometimes I get things wrong, but we do want to be corrected in the nicest way possible, because that's usually who gets their letter read, right? Exactly. Yeah. You can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast.

You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. And you can join us at our home on the web, the greatest website in the history of humanity, stuff you should know. All one word dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lacher 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. 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, 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.