Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: Sherpas: Warm, Friendly Living

Episode Date: April 7, 2018

Pop quiz: What word denotes a nation of people, a last name and an occupation? If you guessed 'Sherpa,' then congratulations: You're correct. But what exactly is a Sherpa? Tune in and learn more as Chuck and Josh explore the culture of the Sherpa people. 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. Happy weekend, everybody. This is Chuck here, bringing you my selection for the Stuff You Should Know Select episode on this fine Saturday. This one is from April 5th, 2011.

Sherpas, colon, warm, friendly living. And I know for a fact Josh came up with that title because I thought it was very fun. And it really kind of embodied what Sherpas are all about. You know, Sherpas will lead you up Everest or maybe some other mountain range in the area. And the more we dug into Sherpas, the more we realized just what warm, hospitable,

amazing people they are. And it's really easy to overlook the Sherpa because you will often hear about the wealthy climber of Everest and not much about the Sherpa that really got them there. So this was our bid to shine a little light on the Sherpa. So here we go with Sherpa's Warm, Friendly Living. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know

from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the Sherpa. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Did I just say Sherpa? No, you said welcome to the podcast. Why would you say welcome to the Sherpa? Because the Sherpa is a nation of people

and also a last name and also an occupation. Yeah, that's pretty good. Well, that's the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me as always is Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Tins Ignore Gay Bryant. Sherpa? Yeah.

Yeah, Chuck, we're talking about Sherpa today. Yeah, is it Sherpa or Sherpas? I have no idea. Because I see both in this article. I do as well. Let's find out, shall we? If everyone will just hold on a second. He's actually looking this up.

Chuck, most people do this before their hit podcast. Have you ever seen, well, I'm sure this won't make it in. You never know. It'll never make it in. I bet you it does. Have you ever seen Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the first one? That was not the first one.

Yes, it was. Raiders of the Lost Ark was the first one. Yes, that's what I meant. I'm sorry. Temple of Doom was too. What was I thinking? I don't know. You've seen Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Oh, yeah. OK. Scores of times. So you know when he goes to meet Marion for the first time after like 10 years after Jiltinger? Yes, the drinking scene. Yes, the guy, the huge guy that Marion is drinking with, or I guess in a drinking contest with.

It's like they kept hearing me say Chuck over and over again, right? That, my friend, was a Sherpa. Was it? I'm pretty sure. He looked Mongolian to me. No, they were definitely in like Nepal. OK.

Yeah. It even said Nepal. Remember, he flies in the plane and it's like Nepal. The red line takes him to Nepal. Yeah. All right, so let's call him a Sherpa. So Sherpas is plural of Sherpa. That's what I thought.

I thought so too. The Sherpa people are actually pretty fascinating. They're pretty isolated. And they haven't been where they are, which is the base of Mount Everest in the Solukumbu area region of Nepal for more than actually about 500 years. And when they arrived in the Solukumbu region, they found it uninhabited.

And the reason why is because the Sherpas are pretty much the only people on the planet, besides maybe Ethiopian Highlanders or Peruvians in the Andes, who could conceivably live in this area. Because, again, it's at the foot of Mount Everest. Yes, and we recorded a podcast on Tibetans in altitude sickness. Yeah. So if you want to know all about that,

refer to that podcast. But Josh, you're right. They migrated from Tibet from the province of Kham to the northeast corner of Nepal around the 16th century because of warfare. Yeah, and as I understand, they're very peaceful people. Oh, very. So they would have been fleeing warfare.

I would say so, not running toward it, headlong. So they migrated there. There was a lot more forest and wood and fuel, for fuel at the time, which was good. And they could grow wheat and buckwheat at the time. And that's about all they could grow, but that was enough. Later on, potatoes really changed the way they do farming because they grow a lot of potatoes now.

Yeah, I think the potato was introduced in the mid-19th century. And that kind of changed everything in 1880, I'm sorry. But if you think about it, these people, when they first arrived in the area, they moved to the Kumbu Valley, which is higher up, actually, than the Solu area. And it's about between 11,000 and 13,000 feet. And they're like, this is a little too high. Everybody's a little sick.

So we're going to move a little further down to the Solu region between 6,500 and 10,000 feet. It's still extremely high. It's still extremely rocky. And they whip this part of the Himalayas into shape. They created terraced farm fields. Guatemala, baby, remember that? Yeah, down a slope.

You can create. You can farm on the side of a mountain. People do it. But think about this. I mean, how did they figure that out? I'm very curious. Well, I mean, it's not rocket science. You need flat land.

And if you have a steep side of a mountain and you cut into that, you can create a series of steps, essentially, which is flat land. Cherry's in there laughing. Yeah, I know. I would have been in trouble. Cherry's like, I've been to Guatemala three times. I know all about step irrigation.

And I know how to do all that stuff. Right. I would have been like, man, I wish it were flat around here. I guess I'll just sit here until I die. Right. So you'd be a bad sherpa. Oh, I'd be terrible at it. One of the reasons why I'd be terrible at it

is because I will get in my car to drive 500 feet from, say, store to store. Do you do that? Yeah. Like over there at the Edgewood, like you'll go to Target and then you'll drive to Kroger? I haven't been there in a while. But I have, yeah.

Yeah, totally. Totally. I mean, I'll walk. I walk more now than I ever had before in my entire life. Does it depend on the weather or what's going on? Definitely depends on the weather. It depends on my schedule very often. I get that.

If I'm in a hurry, I might do that. I would make a terrible stripper, though, because they don't have wheeled anything there. A terrible stripper? I would make both, terrible both. Yeah. Well, I know what Aaron Cooper is going to make this time. Exactly.

Yes, as I just said, I think it bears reiterating. Mr. Joke Guy, there are no wheeled anythings there. There's no cars. There's no wheelbarrows. Don't even use wheelbarrows. Which, now we've reached another reason that would be a terrible stripper, they have to carry everything.

I can barely carry a thing of dog food out of the grocery store to my car. And that's with a car involved, which has wheels which they don't have in the Solukumbu region. That's right. They carry everything, Josh. And they use, we actually saw this in Guatemala, too, the plumb line?

Trumpline. Trumpline. Yeah. The plumb line is a little different. Yeah, what they'll do is they'll, let's say, get a big load of firewood, and they'll wrap it up in a... Spank it on the bottom. Spank it on the bottom.

They'll wrap it up, and so they can wear it on their back in a big bundle, and then attach to the top of, let's say, they lay it in a hammock and fold that over, a hammock-like thing. And then that is attached to a band that's like a headband. And so it goes around their head, and it takes a lot of the weight off their back. And we saw these in Guatemala, dudes walking up the road.

And I thought, man, look at that. That's like ancient engineering still in practice. And you're like, man, I want to, I got to do more of that. And you got back here, and you're like, give me your cheeseburger. And my Jansford backpack. Anybody who's ever seen the front cover of Led Zeppelin 4 is familiar with this concept as well. Was he wearing one of those?

He should have been. If he wasn't, because that's a big old bundle of sticks that guy's carrying. That was a bustle in his head, Joe, honey. So Sherpas can whip a mountain into farmland. They can live on buckwheat, and then several hundred years without the potato, and then the potato. And yak.

Yak. Milk, and yak meat. Right, and yak. They walk everywhere. Yak butter. They carry things everywhere. With the yaks. And they are basically a mountain, they're mountain folk.

They speak a Tibetan dialect that's virtually their own. They don't have a written language. No written language. Until the 1960s, there was no formalized education. They just lived, they carved a very meager existence out for themselves. Yeah. And thanks to a dude named Sir Edmund Hillary,

they now have the foundation that he set up. And we'll get to Edmund Hillary in a second. But everyone, come on. You know who he is. He's the first man to ascend Everest with Tenzin Norgay Sherpa. Yeah, to summit. To summit.

What did I say, ascend? Yeah. I mean, you got to get to the top. Right, or else what? He just blew 65 grand. That's about how much it costs these days. Yes, it does. So through his foundation and later years,

he became to love the peaceful Buddhist of the Sherpa people there. And so he's like, you know, instead of a foundation, we're going to do things like bring some schools, bring some hospitals, give these kids access to health care, things like that. So he did that. And that helped a lot, although nowadays the schools

aren't in great shape, evidently. It's kind of hard to get there. So they're doing what they can. You can take the folk out of the mountain, but you can't take the mountain out of the folk. You know what I mean? That's right. They are very friendly, very peaceful, very compact.

Very strong, great attitudes, apparently. And that's not just Chuck saying that. Chuck, you're basing that on the guy who basically took these very isolated, happy, self-sustaining, self-sufficient people, mountain people, and introduced them to the world. Or no, introduced them to the people who would introduce them to the world, right?

Right. What is the Englishman who's credited with saying, hey, if you want to get up Everest, you need yourself a Sherpa. That was Alexander Kellis, not Tenzing Norgay, not Sir Edmund Hillary. Right. Well, Tenzing Norgay was a Sherpa.

He's far too modest. I'm under the impression to have been like, you want to get up Everest, you get yourself a Sherpa. Sherpas, they're not big self-promoters. The English have been the biggest promoters of Sherpas. And Alexander Kellis was his name? Yeah, Kellis. He tried to make it up Everest and failed,

but there was a point in time where, well, if you look at a mountain, it's not like a cone. You know those Styrofoam cones that you can get at the craft store that have actual volume? It's a cone. Yeah. The mountain is not like that. It has all sorts of craggy peaks and different faces.

And if you go up one side and make it up easy, that doesn't mean that you can go up any other side and make it up easy, right? Yeah. So the place where the Sherpa live is actually a pretty good way to get up Everest. But it was closed off. Nepal, as a country, was closed off to the rest of the world

until, I think, 1949. Yeah, Everest was confirmed as a high-speak in 1865, but it wasn't like all of a sudden the floodgates were open and every Brit in the world said, I must conquer that mountain. They said that, but they were like, but how to get to it? Right. And they thought. 1949, it happened.

Right, but in between, they're like, well, let's just colonize that place and then figure out how to get up. Yeah, exactly. 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. Hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast

and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. MUSIC True. And when India began colonizing, I'm sorry, when England began colonizing India,

Darjeeling across the eastern border of Nepal was a big popular tourist spot for British military, political officials. Big wigs. Big wigs. That's where they met the Sherpa. And that's sort of where the mountaineering profession for the Sherpa kicked off because all of a sudden,

there were Englishmen saying, I can now get in here to ascend and summit this mountain. Right. But I need some help because I'm not carrying all that junk. Yeah. And it's not like Sherpas are the only ethnic group around Mount Everest. But as people soon found, like you said, they were sturdy.

They are compact. They can carry tons of weight. And they have a cheerful attitude. So Alexander Kellis introduced the Western climbing community to the Sherpa. And in short order, Sherpas became extremely famous after, like you said, Sir Edmund Hillary summited Mount Everest.

Yeah. And he was one of 400 people on that expedition. I never knew that. I just thought it was Sir Edmund Hillary got in his car in England and drove to Nepal and said, hey, Tenzig, take me to the top. But it was a big group of people. And they were the only two that made it.

Right. They were the last ones. And they just kept on going. But yes, it was Tenzig Norge Sherpa. That's his last name. Yeah. Because as you said, at the beginning of this, it's a group of people.

It's a profession. And it's a last name. That's right. So from that moment on, everybody knew what Sherpas were. Right? Oh, yeah. They were no longer confused with alpacas in popular culture. People were like, oh, they're a group of people.

Yeah. Literally the people from the East. That's right. And they, like you said, they're not grandstanders. They don't get a lot of attention. And I made a joke. I believe it was either Dead Bodies on Everest or the Tibetan Altitude sickness about Sherpas

being unsung at the time about how you always hear about the Indian or the Brit standing on top of the mountain. And you don't see the Sherpa behind him carrying all their junk. And that's really true. Because when, well, you know what I mean. When Hillary ascended and summited, he got a knighthood and Norge got an honorary medal. And you think, well, of course.

I mean, they're going to give the British guy the knighthood. And they're going to give the foreigner a medal. Untrue, because Sir Edmund Hillary is from New Zealand. That's right. He wasn't British. So technically, he wasn't a citizen of Great Britain. And neither was Tenzing Norge. And they still didn't get the same thing.

Yeah, it was called the British Everest Expedition. Was the 400 people. So that's why I think a lot of people probably thought Hillary was a Brit. But he was not. But again, our Western culture is a little different from Sherpa culture. Like you said, they're not grandstanders.

They're not publicity hounds. The ones who are involved in climbing and trekking do make a pretty substantial amount of money, especially in comparison to what the average person makes in Nepal. Yeah, they make about $2 grand for a trip. Right. And the gross domestic product per capita of Nepal in 2007

is like $331. Yeah, that really puts into perspective. It does. They're rich by other standards, I guess. Extremely rich. Very wealthy. But I guess in addition to making money, they help other people ascend Everest

to attain their personal glory, for the other people to attain their personal glory. Which is kind of, there's a lot of dichotomy between how the Sherpa view Mount Everest and how they interact with it, that the Western influence kind of puts them in this weird position because they follow a form of Tibetan Buddhism, which says that you should perform selfless acts and help others, right?

Yeah, and being at the top of Everest to them means you're closer to enlightenment. Right, if the people are going to climb up anyway, you might as well go with them for two grand, sure. But you might as well go with them to make sure that they don't kill themselves, right? Yeah, very selfless people. It is, but at the same time, they're

helping the West kind of exploit Everest. Some people worry that the Everest experience is being cheapened since Hillary submitted Everest. I think like more than 2,300 other people have, right? Kind of loses its closeness to the Buddhas when all these other footprints are everywhere and there's a couple hundred dead bodies on the mountain. Yeah, I think Norge kind of summed up

there how they feel about Everest when he called it, when they asked him how he felt about being up there. He likened it to a mother hen and said, what else? He said that this was, quote, warm and friendly living. How about that? Yeah. And then Hillary shoved him back down. He's like, quiet you.

Get out of my picture frame, Norge. Here's your medal. So like you said, the region now, Josh, because of the massive amounts of tourism and not massive like Grand Canyon massive, obviously. But still for Mount Everest, it's a lot of people going there trying to climb it. We did talk about pollution there now.

And so the very thing that brings the Tibetan Buddhist Sherpa's enlightenment has also kind of denigrated the area somewhat. Yeah, well, it's about 20,000 people passed through that area per year. And now you can go play pool. You have internet access. You have the trappings of modern living.

And you also have the drawbacks of modern living. Deforestation. Yeah. Pollution. Yeah, exploitation, that kind of stuff. Right? That's right. And this is what we should point out in Sagarmatha National

Park, where about 3,500 Sherpas live. And Sagarmatha is the word for Everest, right? The Sherpa themselves call Everest chomolangma. Chomolangma. Chomolangma? It's close. No. But that's not it.

OK. Chomolangma, which means roughly goddess mother of the world, or mother hen. You want to talk about a couple of famous Sherpas? Yeah. We can talk about Edmund Hillary all day long, but you never hear about Apa Sherpa. Yes.

And all he's done is ascend and summit Everest 17 times. More than anybody else in the world. Not bad. Yeah. What about Babu Chihiri? Chihiri Sherpa. Yeah. Camped on the summit of Mount Everest for 21 hours

without oxygen. Yeah, usually what happens when you climb Everest is you get your picture made. And you say, wow, this is really unbelievable. This is amazing. All right, let's go back down. Right. And you have 5 million canisters of oxygen at your disposal.

Because I'm really high. Yeah. Who else? There's Lakpa Gailu Sherpa, who holds a world record for the fastest Mount Everest ascent, 10 hours, 56 minutes. And 46 seconds. That's a lot. Not bad.

Wow. Thank you. 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 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. 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 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. Oh, 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. You have Ming, Kipa, Sherpa, who, oh, what's the big deal with Ming? Ming just climbed Everest at the age of 15 years old, not on his Xbox in real life. Yes.

And then there's Pessang Lamboo Sherpa, who was Chuck. The first woman, Sherpa, in some of the Everest. Which apparently, when women started climbing Everest or serving as Sherpas to climbing expeditions in the 70s, this was probably the biggest problem internally for the Sherpas, that Western tourism was having on their culture. Yeah.

You know, a woman's place traditionally is at the farm in Sherpa culture on the side of the mountain. And I guess there was some static for a while. And then finally, more and more women started doing it, and were doing it successfully. And that was that. Yeah. And evidently, when the husband, if the husband is the Sherpa

worker, goes on one of these trips, then the female becomes the head of the household at home if she's not a Sherpa herself, and will take care of things just like the husband would. That's nice. Yeah. What else is here? I love these people.

I think we would be, you have a fun place in your heart for Sherpas. They remind me of the people of Guatemala, you know, kind of short and friendly and. Warm, friendly living. Stocky. Yeah. It makes me kind of wonder, there's so many similarities,

Chuck, that. Huh? Huh? Yeah. Because think about it, everybody calls the people the Sherpa, right? Yeah. They're people from the East, but that's

in reference to where you are in Solukumba, Kumbu, right? What were they called before they moved West? The people? Mayan? Maybe. Finally, Josh, for my part of this podcast, if you think this. Someone is off the rails.

Do you think the Sherpa have it bad with not getting any recognition? There's also something called a porter. Yeah, and a lot of Sherpas grow up serving as porters. As porters, that's basically the job below the Sherpa who does even more of the heavy lifting and gets even less money. And less oxygen, less clothing.

Yeah. And other outer wear. Yeah. And there's an actual international porters group, right? Yeah, protection group that are advocates for their safety and fair wages. Because obviously, if you've got very poor person

doing a lot of hard work, they're probably being taken advantage of in some way. So Chuck, we would be remiss to do a podcast on the Sherpa and Everest in Hillary and not mention the Yeti. I don't know much about the Yeti. I didn't look at that. So the Himalayas are the home of the Yeti. The abominable snowman?

It's another way to put it. Which is basically like the cold, extreme cold high altitude version of Bigfoot. Is that right? Yeah. OK, I just always thought that's what we thought of, but I didn't look into it. No, it is pretty much.

Oh, OK. It's a biped, a very furry, heavy, large biped that's mysterious and lives out by itself. It's Bigfoot, but in the Himalayas. It's like in Empire, like on Hoth. And it's more like the abominable snowman in the Rudolph Christmas specials. They look kind of like the thing in Empire.

Kind of, who looks like. Yeah. It's Bigfoot. It's Bigfoot. Wow. Anyway, Hilary himself was actually a believer in the Yeti. He went back after summiting Everest. He went back again in 1960 to look for the Yeti,

because he'd seen Yeti footprints, what he took to be Yeti footprints. Oh, really? Uh-huh. Interesting. He found nothing, though? He didn't. And a lot of people think that these were just some other animals,

footprints that melted in the snow and expanded as the snow melted. Right. Who knows? Yeti, again, you have taught me something, my friend. Thank you for that, because I couldn't figure out how to wrap this one up. I feel like we should apologize for the light nature of this, but we just recorded right before this on the nuclear disaster

in Japan, so I think we were rife for a little riff. Plus, also, we should point out in true Sherpa style, Chuck. They'd want it this way. Well, think about this. There are all sorts of trappings of Western influence and degradation of culture. There is a dwindling of population. I think at its peak, this area was home to 25,000 people.

Now it's down to 3,500, like you said, in the park, right? Yeah. There was a National Geographic survey of Sherpas saying, are you concerned about Western influences on your culture? And they were like, eh, not overly. Can you hand me the Tivo remote? You're sitting on it. Do you have any mountain dew?

Go to the vault. So that's it, the Sherpas. If you want to read more, there's actually some more in there, especially more on their Buddhist religion, I believe. We didn't cover that fully. Yeah, there's more goodness in there for sure. You can type in Sherpas or Sherpa, if you want to be safe, in the handy search bar

at howstuffworks.com. Written by Kristen Conger of Stuff Mom Never Told You. That's right. That's true. Excellent podcast. Yes, it is a great podcast. And they did a great job at South by Southwest. They did.

And since I said handy search bar and South by Southwest, that means it's time for Listener Mail. That's right, Josh. This is a little more Disney dirt. And most of the Disney dirt we got wasn't very good. We got a bunch of, yeah, there's really nothing going on there. There's underground tunnels, but that's no big deal. We got a lot of those.

And it's really not like you guys think. We finally got a pretty good one. And this is from M. And M seems like she would have been one of the employees that I might have been hanging around with that know about the dirt. Some people apparently don't even know about this stuff. And I hope we don't get in trouble for this. Hey, guys.

Hey, guys. I just finished listening to the tickling podcast, Excited That You Asked For Disney Dirt, as a cast member at the happiest place on earth for almost four years. I gleaned some interesting tidbits of information. For starters, in a workroom behind Pirates of the Caribbean, there exists an infamous Mylar table,

which has a longstanding reputation for being a favorite place for cast members to be amorous with one another after hours. I can't imagine how clean such a table might be, but many cast members have been known to participate in tradition simply for the sake of being part of the legend. It's more like the Mile High Club, I guess.

On my attraction, the Jungle Cruise, it said that one can't be a real skipper until they have urinated into the river. No, such he says. I suspect it is much about thinking, you know, you can create the, what is it the most, what, the happiest place on earth, but if you staff it with board and nihilistic 20-year-olds, it's going to end up like this.

Yeah, someone's going to be in the river. But most of the time this is done before or after park operating hours when a skipper can take out a boat alone and relieve him or herself often into the hippo pool. As you can imagine, it's harder for girls to participate in this rite of passage out of sheer logistics, but I do know some women who have managed to become real skips.

I think it'd be more physics than logistics. She says the mechanics boggles my mind. Now for the gnarly stuff. Under Space Mountain, there are stored 60,000 body bags. Supposedly, they're there in case of a natural disaster or some other emergency where people may be trapped inside the park for an extended period of time. I don't believe that.

I don't believe it either. The food freezers in the storeroom down the hall are also over six feet tall for storage, if you know what I mean. It's quite morbid and a popular site for telling ghost stories. I've got plenty more. If you want some off-the-record ghost stories, this was on the record.

Jeez. Or personal anecdotes for my time as a jungle cruise skipper, I'd be happy to share. Keep up the great work from M. Well, I would love to hear the off-the-record ones. Me too. What is your name? M. I'd like to take her to lunch.

Yeah, well, please at least send us an email, OK? I don't think we'd be allowed to go out to lunch with that girl. Our significant others would kill us. Chuck? Josh. You got anything else? No, I'm done. All right.

What should we call for here? How about if you've ascended Everest? No, it's boring. OK. If you are interested in your state's seceding from its current geographical boundaries, we want to hear why. That's right. Send it in an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Want more How Stuff Works? Check out our blogs on the howstuffworks.com home page. 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 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.