Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How the Panama Canal Works

Episode Date: March 2, 2019

It's on more than one list of the Seven Wonders of the World and for good reason - the Panama Canal is one of the great feats of engineering ever undertaken. First conceived of in the 1580s and finally completed in 1914, the canal has a fascinating history (including a stint where it was considered U.S. soil). Learn all about it on this 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 everyone, hope you're having a good weekend. Chuck Bryant here, co-host of the podcast you're listening to. And I am in charge with picking this week's Stuff You Should Know Select episode.

It is from April 2, 2013, the day after April Fool's Day, but don't worry, this isn't how 3D printing works when I famously fake quit and was replaced by Ben Bolin. No, no, no, this is the episode about the Panama Canal. So interesting, I love Civic Projects, I love huge, unwieldy projects that seem impossible to complete, and the Panama Canal was and is that.

So I know you're gonna love this one, everyone, how the Panama Canal works. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, with me is always is Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and that's Stuff You Should Know, the podcast, the two of us together with a couple of mics, and our voices.

You know what I've been singing all day, of course. Panama. Over and over, and I just whistled it, and Jerry was like, oh no, I got that stuck in my head. Yeah, when we were growing up, my sister was singing it, and I realized that she was singing Turn and Run. Like, what, what? She's like, that song, that Van Halen song.

Don't be an idiot. She thought that's what they were saying? Yeah. That's so interesting, because there's so many misinterpreted song lyrics famously over the years, but I never have heard Panama as being one of them. Yeah, especially since the song is named Panama. Yeah.

Parentheses Turn and Run. Maybe they were talking about the people who were working on the early French effort to build a canal in Panama. Yeah, boy, that didn't go over so well. We'll get to that. Oh, OK. Spoiler, the French didn't build the Panama Canal.

I thought we were going to get to it right now. No, all right. Do you want to talk about Degama to Balboa? Which one, which one is George Costanz's favorite explorer, was it Degama or Balboa? Oh, man. It was one of the two. I think Degama.

Was it? Yeah, I think so. OK. That was a funny conversation, though. So yeah, Balboa back in the day was wandering around in a region called Darien. And he summited a peak there and was like, holy cow, if I look this away, I see the Pacific Ocean.

And if I look at that away, I see the Atlantic Ocean. Or the Caribbean. And the only thing between these two big bodies of water is this little isthmus of land. Yeah, I'm going to have a lot of trouble with that word. That's OK. Just say strip. OK.

So the strip of land here is the only thing in between. And we should figure out a way to use this as a thoroughfare. Yeah, yeah, because this is it. This connects the world. It does, exactly. At the time, the Spanish were trying to trade with the Chinese. And we're doing a pretty good job of it in the Philippines.

And the best way to get to that was to come across the Atlantic and go into the Pacific. That's right. It worked very, very well. And the idea of just having a place where you could go straight through rather than go all the way down South America and then back up, it was just mind-boggling. It's like you said, it opened up the world.

This guy got it immediately. The problem was it would take about 400 more years before anyone finally got around to completing it successfully. Well, yeah, and forget the rest of the world. The United States just like, hey, I want to ship this by boat from New York to San Francisco. How can I do that? I can just like kind of sneak around Florida, right?

Nope. Blocked. Right. Well, then what do I got to do? You got to go 8,000 miles, nautical miles, around South America to get to California. Right. Or when you and me and I were in Nicaragua,

we were in a town that in the 19th century was a way station for minor 49ers going on to California. Oh, yeah? And they would sail on to Nicaragua, take a train, and then ship out from Nicaragua up to California. Except the handful that was like, I think I might just kick it here in Nicaragua. Exactly, yeah.

I bet you there were some dudes that did. Oh, definitely, I'm sure. But yeah, there was a continent in the way. And the idea that it was just this little narrow strip of land and now. That made a lot of people say, this is the place to be. In the 18th century, the Scottish showed up. Yeah.

They tried to establish an outpost, failed spectacularly. There's a great section in 1493 about it. Oh, really? Yeah. The Spanish were there, the French were there. They established pretty good outposts there. It was very clear that this little area, which was then part of Columbia, is now present day Panama,

was going to be a hop and spot. Because there was no thinner portion of the North or South American continents than this one. And everyone needed to figure out a way to get through. Yeah, and it wasn't as easy as like, hey, let's just dredge all this sand and let the waters meet. Because that's not too hard. It's like dense jungle and mountains

and the continental divide. So my first thought was like, how hard could it have been? I didn't realize how treacherous that area was. Yeah, and I think that Balboa and a lot of people who succeeded him thought the same thing. Like, how hard is it? Sure. But it is.

Like, that continental divide, that's a tough thing to break through. That's why they call it a divide. Yeah, well, that's where two tectonic plates come together and form a mountain range. And like, that's, you're cutting through not one, but two tectonic plates, everybody. Wrap your head around that.

Seriously. Let's talk about it. Because obviously, we were successful eventually. But the first attempt was not. And the first attempt was by the French, who in the 1820s, I believe, started to undertake what is known as a sea level canal, which is basically, they were going to cut their way straight

through the isthmus of Panama. That's right. And canals were all the rage at the time because of steam technology. So all of a sudden, you didn't have to use the very cool and quaint towpath and have a mule walk alongside of a river or a canal. Have you ever been on one of those?

Well, yeah, a lot of them now are like jogging trails and stuff, which, that's great. It makes for good use. Sure, exactly. I don't see any mules on them these days. But it's great that people can use these towpaths now to, like a nature trail. Yeah.

Yeah, so the steam technology gave the French the idea that, hey, man, we can build a sea level canal here. Because we can just dig right through it. We have steam. We don't need the mules for the towpaths any longer. All we need is some good steam shovels. And we're going to cut right through this continental divide, right through this jungle.

And as a result of this ambition, 20,000 people died. Yeah, and they were able to get a little far, thanks to the railroad there in Panama. Believe it or not, it was the first railroad in the world to connect both sides of a continent. Wasn't very big, but it didn't need to be. No, right. Which is kind of great.

But that allowed the French to get in there. They were deciding between Nicaragua and Panama at the time. And they said, like you said, we can do sea level. We don't need these locks. Yeah, if you look at a map of Nicaragua and look at Panama, like the idea of going through Nicaragua over Panama is just nuts. Yeah, and we'll explain how the locks work,

but it essentially just raises and lowers your ship. Right, for sure. And a little bay station of water that's flooded and then drained. Right, actually, that's how a lock works. So the French organized this thing called the Compagnie Universale du Canal Inter-Oceanique. Very nice. Thank you.

And led by a guy named Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had created a sea level canal through the Suez, connected the Mediterranean and the Red Seas. It was a big deal. Sure. So they brought him in, and he's like, sure, we'll do another sea level canal. I'm feeling good about this.

And he's like, I did the Suez canal with my eyes closed. Exactly. I can do this with one arm tied behind my back. What he didn't realize was that digging through a bunch of sand is not like digging through two tectonic plates. No. And a bunch of jungle and malaria. And like I said, 20,000 people died as a result of this.

Like this guy was like, no, we can do it. We can do it. We're going to do a sea level canal. We can do it. And then finally, he was like, I don't think we can do this. It was too late. A lot of people were dead from yellow fever and malaria, from accidents.

It was privately financed. So a lot of people lost a lot of money, too. Exactly. And this company goes under. Well, he tried to salvage it, though, first. He tried to hire Gustav Eiffel of the Eiffel Tower fame. Right. He said, hey, I think we need those locks after all.

And you're good at building big steel things. So can you help? And he was like, of course I can. And then it was too late, though. The business was done. Right. And they had done a little bit. Well, they had done a lot.

They made 11 miles of canal up to that point. Not bad. It's about a quarter of the way there. Right. But when did they start, Chuck, the 1820s? 1820s, yeah. So Chuck, as we understand it, they started in the 1820s. And this thing went bust by 1902, I believe.

Well, that's when Congress, I mean, they were bussed before that, but that's when the US stepped in and said, hey, we'll buy your junk. Oh, I'm sorry, 1888. So in about 60 years, they had managed to dig 11 miles of canal, build a bunch of buildings. They had a lot of equipment and supplies there. Sure.

And yeah, the US said, we smell a really, really great opportunity. And Congress said, let's spend some cash. We're feeling good about things these days. We annexed Hawaii recently, Puerto Rico, Philippines. What else? Why not take over this very ambitious project? Why it's the American Century by now?

And we can stick it to the French at the same time. Exactly. So they did this in 1902 with the one stipulation that said, you know what, you guys have to Columbia Controls Panama right now. And you guys have to work out a deal with them. And we tried, and that failed. So we said, you know what, we're just going to overthrow

Columbia then and give the control to the Panamanians. Yeah, we supported this Panamanian independence movement and threw off the shackles of Columbia. And Columbia was like, what did you just do? Because we gained control of that. We followed that congressional mandate and gained control of this Panama Canal Zone. Basically, the swath that went through Panama was

considered American soil thanks to a treaty from, I believe, 1902, the Hei Bunal Varia Treaty, where Panama signed over the Canal Zone. There was no Spanish translation of this treaty. So basically, the US went in over through Columbia and control of Panama, supported Panamanian independence, and then robbed Panama of its canal in one fell swoop in like a year.

Yeah. And Columbia was like, well, I guess we'll just start exporting cocaine and massive amounts. Exactly, we'll get you back. One day. So in the end, they paid about $40 million in 1904 for the assets of this French company. Just a lot of money back then.

Sure. And about $10 million as this very cheeky article, by the way. Did you notice? It was cheeky. A little. She referred to it as alimony of sorts to Panama. $10 million to gain the rights to this canal zone.

And basically, hey, we're going to run the show. We're going to finish your canal from the 11-mile mark to the ocean where it belongs. And like you said, I think there was a certain amount of snub to it, right? Probably so. But they said, you know what? We got to do first, though, is we have to decide on if we

can go sea level. Like, was it just the French we're incompetent, or is it really impossible to do sea level? Yeah, like we need to do our own due diligence, basically. And they did that, and Theodore Roosevelt chose chief engineer, John Frank Stevens. And he was like, it's all about the locks, dudes. If you want a canal here, you're going to have to go

over these mountains, not through them. Right. So here's the thing. And this is just brilliant, because there was another problem with this isthmus. And there's this thing called the Chagras River. And it is very temperamental. It was prone to flooding, all sorts of crazy stuff

associated with this river. So not only did you have the continental divide, and the jungle, and the malaria to deal with, once you completed it, what were you going to do with this river? Sure. Stevens came up with this great idea, that you go over the mountains, and you go over the mountains, you kill two birds with one stone by damming the river, and you

create a lake that will carry you over the mountains. Gatun Lake. Yeah. I'm sure that's not pronounced correctly. Think about that. That is one of the most brilliant feats of engineering I've ever heard of. The Panama Canal?

Yeah, but that specific aspect of it. Oh, sure. Damming the river to create a lake so you can go over the mountains. That's just incredibly beautiful. The whole thing, too. And at the time, dude, in the early 1900s, it's just like it's amazing that they could pull this off.

Yeah, because they're all wearing nickers and stuff. Yeah, there's some awesome documentaries out there, by the way, you should watch. In fact, there's one cool, just go to the YouTubes and put in Time Lapse, Panama Canal, and it takes you the full route in a minute and a half instead of eight to 10 hours. And it's kind of neat. The boat goes in, sinks, and then, not sinks, but lowers,

and then raises, and then it tools along in the lake for a little while, and then sinks, and lowers, and raises. Yeah, because it's like an eight to 10 hour transit, right? From deep water to deep water, eight to 10 hours, depending on your boat, I guess. Once you finally get clearance to go through. That's right.

So he's dammed up the river, created Gatun Lake. Yeah. Ships going toward the Pacific. Going to enter at Limon Bay in the Caribbean. Go through a couple of locks upward, and it's like walking up steps, basically, except it's a big boat, and it's done with water. And then they navigate through that lake for a little while,

and then go toward Panama City through another series of locks, and down, down, down over the mountains. And boom, you are connected to the rest of the world. Right, so when they agreed on the lock method, they had one other thing to handle. I wonder if that's why this got it. Maybe they were getting confused with locks, meaning lakes. Right, maybe that's why it's there for God's sake.

They were like, where are all the locks? They're like, they're right there. They're like, no, but where are the locks? So there was one other big problem that had leveled the French effort, which was yellow fever, which you can be immune to if you're exposed to it in childhood, but if you're from New York, you're not. So you go down to Panama, and you are stung by a mosquito,

and you die. The thing is, nobody knew that it was mosquitoes until a guy named Ronald Ross, in 1897, studied mosquitoes in India and found malaria present in their stomachs, and that it was transmittable through their saliva. Yeah, they didn't know what it was. There were all sorts of different theories. Yeah, they thought it was maybe from unclean living, whatever.

When they found out that it was the mosquitoes, that changed everything. So they instituted this really rigid anti-mosquito program. They cleaned up the country, basically. And basically, came close to eradicating yellow fever in the area, which paved the way for this lock system to be built. Yeah, and you can thank Colonel William Gorgas for cutting up that sanitation squad.

And yeah, it worked, and that was the key, because you can't have your workers dropping dead of yellow fever every day. Right, they have to drop dead of landslides. Yeah, even though a lot of these workers were poor black people, I think 85% of the people that died were black. And a lot of people still died, but it wasn't like the 22,000 dropping dead from yellow fever. But it was still a very dangerous project.

Mudslides, all sorts of drownings, things like that. But it was still a very dangerous project. 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,

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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. 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 we've got the yellow fever licked.

We've settled on the lock system. Yeah. And John Frank Stevens is replaced by a guy named Lieutenant Colonel George Washington Goethals. And he was a lock expert. And he looked at the plan and he said, you know what? We're going to divide this up into three sections. That makes perfect sense.

It does. You've got the Pacific section that's going to be working from Limón Bay, which, by the way, means lime in Spanish. Did you know that? I did not. So they're working from Limón Bay to the newly created Lake Gatun.

Yeah, that was the Atlantic Division, yeah. Oh, OK, you're right. So the Atlantic Division is synonymous with the Caribbean. Yes. And then so you've got the Atlantic Division working from Limón to Gatun. You have the Central Division. This is the hardest part.

They're working in Lake Gatun to basically create a channel through this continental divide. You don't have to cut sea level, but you do need to make sure these ships aren't going to run aground in the mountain. Sure. And then you have the Pacific Division, which is working from the end of the continental divide pass,

which is Pedro Miguel locks, down to the Pacific, right? That's right. And like we said, the railway, the Panamanian railroad is there. And we had awesome gear at the time. It was no longer men with chisels and sledgehammers and stuff. It was steam shovels, rock drills, dynamite.

And they moved 96 million cubic yards of earth and rock. Right, which is 73 million cubic meters. That's right. And it was really hot, though. And it was a pretty bad scene. And they called that Hell's Gorge. And it was dangerous. And that's where I think most of the lives

were lost on this second pass. Yeah. And that was definitely the hardest work. But they made it through. And by 1914, a crane that was used in the construction of the Panama Canal was the first thing to ever make it through all the way. Yeah.

And they were like, sweet. Yeah. And eight months later, it was open for business as far as I understand. Yeah, big business. Should we walk people through or, I guess, swim people through? Yeah, I think we should. OK.

You approach from the Atlantic. You go through the Gatun locks. It's going to lift your vessel up 85 feet, which is pretty awesome. Yeah. And take you to Gatun Lake, very nice there. You're going to wind through that channel for about 23 miles, then enter the Gallard Cut, about eight miles through there. And you're going to reach the Pedro Miguel locks.

And then they're going to lower your ship about 30 feet to the Mirror Floors Lake. You're going to pass through this. It's about a mile long. And then the two-step Mirror Floors locks are going to return you finally back to sea level to seven mile passage from there to the Pacific. And all told, you've gone 50 miles in about eight to 10 hours.

Yeah. And mind-bogglingly, I saw that it takes 52 million gallons of fresh water to move a ship from one end to the other. Wow. 52 million. And they're getting all that from Lake Gatun. Yeah, and I imagine it's just recycled back into the system, right? No.

What happens to it? They lose most of it. It either flows back into Lake Gatun, or else it flows out into the oceans. Oh, OK. Which is not necessarily good. They're worried that Lake Gatun may become brackish. Oh, yeah?

And Lake Gatun is now the freshwater supply of Panama. And they're using a lot of it up. Yeah, well, it's always presented a bit of an environmental quagmire, especially with their plans to expand, which we'll get to. But right now, they have two-way traffic. They're looking to make that a three-lane highway. Which would actually, adding that third lane,

will double the amount of traffic, which is crazy. You would think it would increase it by a third. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe it's wider. Oh, maybe. Maybe it allows for two ships at a time. They just jam like eight in there at once. I don't know.

I do know that if you are a large enough ship, they don't let you drive yourself, because you got one drunk sea captain, and all of a sudden, your locks are out of commission. So they use electric towing locomotives to tow those big bad boys. Right. And we should say, just briefly with the locks,

if you want to move a ship upward, you flow into a lock. The lock closes behind you. And it fills up with water, so that you can float over the lip of the next higher lock, that the gate closes behind you with that one, and it fills in with water, and so on and so forth. Yeah, it's remarkably basic.

Yeah, and then the opposite takes place when you're stepping down. It's just basically going into a little square pool, raising or lowering the water level, so you can go up or down. It's really neat. Yeah, and if you've got a minute and a half to kill, you can take this voyage in high speed on the YouTube.

So like we said, the US used gunboat diplomacy. And I guess good old fashioned, old timey 1902 swindlin' to gain control of the Panama Canal Zone. And it had complete control until 1979, when Jimmy Carter, Malaise Forever, did you ever see that, Simpsons? They unveil a statue of Jimmy Carter, and it says Malaise Forever on the base,

and one of the townspeople goes, he's history's greatest monster. Oh boy. Anyway, Carter negotiated with the leader of Panama at the time, General Omar Torrios Herrera, and said, hey, how would you like this thing back? Give us 20 years. I think they said, hey, we'd like this back.

I like to think of American Magnanimousness, right? Sure, so we said, you know what, we've had it for this long. Plus, we're talking Carter, it's entirely possible. He just started contacting people and said, what does the US have that we can sell or give back? That's a good point. So yeah, he sold like one of the presidential yachts was sold by him.

Oh really? Yeah. Why, because he thought it was frivolous? Yeah. That's awesome. And Panama Canal, he's like, how about this? Let's get rid of a significant portion of our economy. Anyway, he gives it back after 20 years,

and on December 31st, 1999, which is why I suspect they made it a 20-year deal. Yeah, I mean, they had to transition. You can't just hand the keys over and be like, all right, send your crew in. Right, but not only that, like why not a 15-year deal, or an 18-year deal, or a 10-year deal? They went with 20, because it was going to end

on December 31st, 1999. Oh, a new millennium. Yeah. Actually, that didn't start till 2001, though, right? Yeah, but, you know, OK, it's symbolic. Right. OK. So the Panamanians take over, and immediately

start taking flak, because the thing's aging, traffic's jammed up. Yeah, they've done a good job with it, though. It's just by nature of how things are these days. They're victims of circumstances. Yeah. 5% of the world's trade goes through the Panama Canal. We sold them a lemon of a canal.

Right, the millionth ship went through in 2010. 144,000 ships go through a year, and it's a very narrow little strip. Yeah, you know what that means? Waiting in line. A lot of waiting in line. Plus, also, there's an upper limit to the size ship that can go through.

It's called Panamax, is the ship size. I've never heard of that. Yeah. What a great name for the biggest ship that, you know, Panamax, what could be bigger than that? Well, these ships that are called Post-Panamax. Exactly. A lot of shippers are like, you know what?

I'm tired of waiting. It's actually going to be more economical for me to build a ship that can't go through the Panama Canal, but can hold a lot more. And I'll just sail around the lower part of South America. And that's kind of increasingly happening. Plus, Nicaragua threatened to open their own canal. So Panama says, OK, wait, wait, wait,

let's hold a referendum and see if we can expand this thing and modernize it and save the canal. And Panamanians said, yes, let's. So in 2006, they approved this third lane. It's expected to be open by 2014. Is Nicaragua still planning a canal? I don't know. I don't know if that shot it down or not.

Well, and there's also talk now of a Northwest passage thanks to what some people might say is climate change and melting ice caps. There may be a way to get there by land. Henry Hudson is clapping in his grave. So we'll see if that happens. I don't know, I didn't get a chance to really look into that research and how real is that.

Right. Even still, the Panamanians will probably make their $5.25 billion investment back eventually, although it took the US a good 40 years to make $400 million back. Yeah, I think the 1950s was when they finally broke even, huh? Yeah. That's crazy.

Yeah. And you break even by charging a toll. I don't think we even mentioned that. You obviously, like any way station or passage, you've got to pay according to how much stuff you got. And it's like, I think the record is, I looked it up, it was like $150,000 or something. Yeah, they do it by tonnage.

The thing is, is if you are carrying a lot of really expensive natural gas, you're going to pay a lesser toll than if you're carrying a bunch of less expensive or even equally expensive coal, which isn't fair. And if you're transporting a lot of raw steel, why should you pay more? So they're trying to figure out a new toll system,

especially for the newly expanded version of the canal that takes into account the value of what's on board rather than just the weight. Right. So they should make a little more money that way. Yeah, I don't know if this is still accurate, but the record that I have is $153,662. And the cheapest was when a dude swam across it.

And he weighed like 150 pounds. And so they charged him, what, like $0.36? Yeah, back in 1928, Richard Halliburton. And he swam the Panama Canal. And I guess it was some sort of publicity stunt. I'm sure people love doing stuff like that back then. Yeah, but if you look at this high-speed route on YouTube, it's pretty neat.

And there's a lot of times where you're like, oh, look out for that boat. And then it turns and you're like, oh, OK. So there's a lot of activity out there. Yeah. It's not a pleasure cruise. Well, no. And it's not one ship at a time.

They have, like you said, two-way traffic, right? That's right. And they try to keep them going through as efficiently as possible. And I should say also, the new locks that they have can serve about 60% of the water used. So they'll address a lot of environmental concerns, hopefully.

I got a couple of little facts here if you're interested. The entrance to the canal on the Atlantic side is 22 and 1 half miles west of the Pacific entrance, which is interesting because it has a unique S shape. And then the locks themselves are 7 feet thick each. So if you're wondering how to keep out that much water, like to basically dam up the oceans, you need to do it with 7 foot thick concrete.

92% of the workforce is Panamanian right now, which is pretty great. And that's about all I got. 60 million pounds of dynamite was used to construct this thing. That is some nice stats, Chuck. Yeah, it's not bad. Cool. You got anything else then?

No, the rest of these are kind of boring. Panama Canal forever. If you want to learn more about the Panama Canal, you can read this very good article on howstuffworks.com. Type in Panama Canal or turn and run canal. See what happens when you do the ladder. Chuck, hold on. Let's take a message break, huh?

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 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. It is time for Listener Mail. Josh, I'm going to call this one Listener Mail. It's not about Listener Mail.

Hey, guys, I'm currently on the 7 train heading to Queens for Manhattan after a long day of working as an auditor at a CPA firm. As usual, I'm listening to your podcast. This time, it was the Death Mask episode. And you were concluding with some Listener Mail. In this instance, it was from Martha regarding peak oil. And I think Martha was talking about the auditing of oil reserves.

And he says this to Martha, she was correct for the most part regarding the audit of oil reserves held by entities whose stocks may be publicly traded on the stock market. Just one thing I was so aghast by that I felt I needed to type this from my phone as I'm on the train still, the SEC does not perform any audits of its own on these companies.

It is firms like the one I work for that audit these companies, albeit under SEC guidelines, actually PCAOB, Public Company Audit Oversight Board Guidelines, if you want to get technical. The SEC may perform a type of audit, but when they do, they're usually auditing an audit firm or an audit that has already been done by an audit firm as part of some kind of investigation.

What? So they'll audit and audit like the SEC doesn't audit themselves. I got you. That's the long and short of it. I said audit 12 times. I've actually been through one of these audits, and it is no fun at all. For some reason, it seems everyone

whom works at the SEC is what you stereotypically picture as an accountant with no humor. Plus the word audit loses all meaning when you hear it. That's right. I digress, though, guys. If you pull up a 10K annual filing for any public company, you can see in the audit opinion the audit firm, which performed the audit for that particular year.

Hope that clears things up, Henry Gomez and Henry. I'm not sure if that cleared it up, but if I was an accountant, I would probably say yes. I hope very much cleared things up. Very nice. Thank you very much, Henry. That was very nice of you to correct somebody who is correcting us.

Yeah, and I'm sorry. I'm sorry you got to take that stinky 7 train, man. Is that a terrible train? Dude, that one's like the old red train that looks like it's about to fall off. It's like the Midnight Me train? Yeah. Have you seen that?

No. Man. What's Midnight Me? That's a Midnight Me train. It's got Vinnie Jones and Bradley Cooper in it. It's actually based on a Clive Barker short story. Oh, because that's an old joke between me and my friend PJ, who you've met, I believe.

Yeah. At Cookouts, famously, PJ's a great chef, home chef. But he was so, he would typically take so long, we refer to his meals as Midnight Me. And then I made a joke about cold cooking a steak one time. Nice. It took like 24 hours. Yeah, no, this is different.

This is not a slam on PJ. No, we love the Midnight Me. If you have anything you want us to know, if you want to correct somebody who's corrected us, or you just want to say hi, whatever, 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 always find us on our website, right?

That's right. Stuffyoushouldknow.com. MUSIC For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. MUSIC 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 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 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, 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.