Stuff You Should Know - Tardigrades: Nature's Cuddly, Indestructible Microanimal

Episode Date: February 14, 2017

You can burn them, freeze them, shoot them into space – they wouldn’t bat an eyelash, even if they had eyelashes. Go into the microcosmos and learn about the tiny animals that are so astoundingly durable, they can survive conditions not found here on Earth. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude 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 HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast on Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry and

Mrs. Stuff You Should Know about tard grades. Never heard of these little guys, really? And now they have shot into the top five alongside the octopus, and that's the other one that I have. Jellyfish? Jellyfish. These little dudes want to hug them. I might be hugging them right now.

You could, well, probably not. Probably not, but I love them. Okay. They're cute. Tell them. They're tiny. Yeah. Hardly anybody knows what they are.

I would say 99% of people listening do not know what this is. Really? So I was under the impression that they were kind of a big hit on the internet within the last couple of years. Well, I'm not hip to that stuff, so maybe it might have been a part of a meme, a political meme. Yeah, I think tard grades had a moment. But it turns out that they've been around for much longer than the internet.

Yeah. Yeah. Hundreds of millions of years. Yeah. Somewhere around the neighborhood of 600 million years, which would make them pre-Cambrian explosion, which makes them really old. P-C-E. Yeah.

So before we get into that, let's tell you what we're talking about. Yes. Tardigrade, also known as a water bear. Cute name. This is my favorite. Moss Piglet. Yeah. Pygmy Rhinoceros.

Yeah. Pygmy Armadillo. I don't like armadillos ever since our leprosy episode. Oh, right. They are little tiny, microscopic animals. Animals. Multicellular animals that reproduce sexually in a lot of cases that are, well, they're animals.

They're not just like, they're not bacteria, they're not viruses, they're not bugs. They're very, very small. They get to be about a half to one millimeter in size, depending on the species. And they're also super cute, depending on your view of things. Yes. First thing you should do if you're at home or if you're not driving, let's say, is pull out your phone or your desktop. Pull out your desktop PC.

And look up Tartigrade and just look at a little picture of it. And so you know what we're talking about. If you ask me, people liking it to a panda bear, I don't quite get that, although they've seen the picture of the one on its back, then I don't think I did. Very cute. It looks like you just want to scratch this little belly. But it looks to me like if a moth caterpillar and a naked mole rat had an unholy union. That was awesome.

That was the best analogy I've ever heard. That's kind of what it looks like to me. Unholy union. Yeah, they managed to do it somehow. Tell the dildonics. The name Tartigrade is from Latin and it actually means slow walker, which is cute in and of itself. Yeah.

It actually was named by this Italian scientist named Lazaro Spalazzani. Tell him the name of his book. I love this name. His book was, oh boy, Opuscoli Deficia animale i vegetabil. Not bad. Not bad. You didn't raise your fingers though. Oh, that's right.

But he named this guy. He found this. He discovered, apparently before him in 1773, a German pastor named Johann August Ephraim Goetze discovered it. But he is the one, Spalazzani is the one who named it Il Tartigrato, which means slow stepper. Yeah, and the reason he called it that is because if you look under a microscope at all the stuff, which is all the rage in the late 18th century. Oh yeah.

Look at all the stuff. What was his name, Anton von Liebenhoek, am I saying that correctly? I don't remember. I'm pretty sure. After he started to invent microscopes and their use spread, people started looking at what was in debris and ring gutters where you add water to it. And they found that when you add water to stuff that was just dried up dust and a rain gutter, all of a sudden you saw that there was a bunch of things that came to life.

And most of those things move around really, really fast, just darting about like, oh, it's over here. Let's go over there. I want to go over there. They have like very short attention spans, right? Tartigrades lumber about, they kind of fall and flip over a lot as they're climbing over like pieces of dust and other particles, and they move much more slowly and I guess deliberately compared to their other microscopic friends in the rain gutter debris.

So that's where they got their name. They have eight legs. Yeah, a little short, little stubby legs. Right, and their rear legs are inverted, right? So they're facing forward instead of backward. And they- No, they face backward. They face backward instead of forward.

Yeah, and all their legs have little claws at the end for climbing. For climbing. And the first three pairs of legs are used for swimming. The back are used for climbing only. And rudder work. The front one's paddled and they steer with their rear. They make dream hands with it. And what are they climbing over?

Well, it depends. You can find them all over the place, but mainly if they're on dry land, they're living in moss, fallen leaves, stuff that you would find in a gutter. Lichen, yeah. Yeah. Things that typically have moisture in them because water bears, tartigrades, survive when they're surrounded by moisture, right, when they're amid moisture. Fresh water, salt water, dead matter.

No, it doesn't. It depends on the kind, of course. Right. So they apparently originated in the sea because the species of tartigrades that are marine-based are the least evolved, I guess you'd put it. Then yeah, you've got freshwater ones. And then you've got ones that are terrestrial that you can find on land. And those are the ones that live in lichens and moss and stuff like that.

And all of them, again, are part of this branch of the family tree that's its own phylum. Tartigrata is a phylum. And this article makes the point that if you look at humans, we share a phylum, Cordata, with snakes and every other vertebrate on earth, right? These guys have their own phylum. They're in their own club. They really are. So this has two things, that they're a very ancient line and that there is a ton of them,

a lot of them. And there are. There's water bears everywhere. Yeah. And we mentioned that they're animals. And if you look at a picture, it's probably from a, well, not probably, it's definitely from a microscope. And so, you know, you think that, again, like it's just some sort of bacteria or something.

But it's not. It is an animal. It has a brain, has a nervous system, it has a little stomach and little tiny intestines, it has a little tiny anus, a little tiny esophagus. And they don't have heart and lungs or veins because, I was going to say open source. They are open hemicoil, as the lady on the internet said. Yeah, which means that gas exchange and nutrient exchange happens because every cell in the tardigrade's body is touching the interior body cavity.

So as food and air goes through the mouth and out the, his tiny anus, right? Those nutrients and those gases get to get passed into the cells that get passed, that it passes by. Yeah. So it's an apartment. It's actually extremely efficient. Sure. So there are about a thousand species or more of tardigrades, 600 or so on land, about 300

marine, and about 100 in the freshwater. They lay eggs, some of them have sex, some of them don't. Some of them self-fertilize. Yeah. It's pretty interesting stuff. What else? They eat the fluids of plants. Or some of them are carnivores.

Yeah, the fluids of animals. Right. But it's always got to be fluid. Yeah. They have like a piercing mouth part, I believe, that can pierce cell wall and just suck the fluids and proteins and stuff out of a cell, and depending on the species, that cell may be plant-based or it may be animal-based, including other tardigrades, which is decidedly less cute cannibalism.

So if you're sitting there right now and you're thinking, I don't see how this rivals an octopus. These are just tiny little, maybe kind of cute, but tiny little animals. What's the big whoop? Right after this break, we'll tell you what the big whoop is. 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, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear.

Then you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. And so my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step, 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. All right, we're back with the big whoop about tardigrades. Despite the size of these things, how big were they again? Uh, in a, if you look at a magazine article, they're about half the size of a period at the end of a sentence.

That's a, what's a magazine? No, that's true. You say that, but it's true. I know. So sad. That's a good way to put it though. Change. So it's the worst.

They're that tiny and they are one of the toughest, most resilient creatures on the planet earth period. They're probably the most resilient animal or organism on earth. Amazing. All right. Let's talk about it. Let's talk about temperature. Yeah.

They like it at like 75 degrees and nothing else, right? So what's weird is there's this long standing tradition in biology of trying to kill tardigrades under really not so conditions. Yeah. Let's see what these little guys can take basically. I'm not quite sure how it started, but somebody figured out fairly early on that they could withstand amazingly cold temperatures, right? So we're talking like down to basically absolute zero, just a couple of degrees above absolute

zero. And to understand how crazy anything could survive at absolute zero. That's where atomic movement-based ceases is at absolute zero. There's no movement of atoms or molecules any longer, right? Because that's what heat is. Heat energy is the movement of atoms and molecules. So cold by contrast is the cessation or the lesser movement of atoms, right? We're talking negative 272 Celsius, negative 459 Fahrenheit.

So tardigrades have been kept at that temperature for 20 hours. And then thawed out, and they said, that's what you got? You got a tic-tac? This is great. I think I fell the fly on my shoulder. Yeah, seemingly unharmed. They put them on ice at negative 200 Celsius, so not absolute zero, but they've iced them down for years in a row, thawed them out, and they were right back to normal, amazing.

And on the other side, they've exposed them to extraordinarily hot temperatures, like 150 degrees Celsius. And we should say, so the fact that they're surviving, that's like, wow, 150 degrees Celsius. That's hot, absolute zero. That's cold. The reason why it's so incredibly just mind-boggling that tardigrades can survive this and still be animals is that they appear to be the only life that can survive these conditions. The reason why is, if you freeze in your multicellular, your cells are liable to freeze themselves,

and there's going to be all sorts of cellular damage when the ice crystals form in your cells. They're going to rupture your cells because ice expands when it freezes, right? Yeah. I think it's also less thick. It's also less thick. Two. Yes, we did frostbite.

Yeah, frostbite. The fact that they can come back to life after being exposed to these really cold temperatures means that they've got something going on that's keeping their cells from rupturing. Science has no idea why. On the other hand, with heat, tremendous heat, when you expose a cell to 150 degrees Celsius, which is above the boiling point of water, your proteins are going to unfold and pool and coagulate and be totally useless. So you can't come back to life because all of the processes in the building blocks of

life are useless in your body, and you would have to start from scratch, which is tough to catch up to when you're trying to come back alive from being exposed to high temperatures. Tartar grades do it. All right. So they flash freeze them. They freeze them for years. They boil them. They try and smash them to the tune of 5,800 pounds per square inch of pressure, and the

tartar grade was like, bring it. Yeah. No problem. And we're talking about pressures that are six times greater than the greatest pressures found anywhere on Earth, and they withstand it. They blasted them. They tried to suffocate them. They wrapped tiny little hands around their throat.

They put on tiny black gloves first so they didn't leave any evidence. No, they tried to suffocate them with carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen. They shot them with gamma rays. What about the x-rays? Yeah, there was a French study that found that it took 570,000 rongens, I think that's how you say it, to kill 50% of the tartar grades in a sample. Yeah, but 50% still lived.

Right. And that's 570,000. It takes 500 to kill a human, but it took 570,000 to kill just half of the tartar grades in a sample. Yeah, they shot them up into space, and I think about half of those lived, right? So they've literally, like he said, they're trying to come up with newer and more creative ways to kill these things, and the tartar grades take all comers, basically. And they have a couple of mechanisms.

Again, science is trying to figure out, one, how their cells keep from freezing in a way that they would rupture, or how their proteins keep from unfolding. But that kind of radiation exposure should do all sorts of horrible things. You should go listen to our Radiation Sickness episode, that was a good one. But it should do all sorts of horrible things, like break up DNA. But apparently they have some sort of mechanism to prevent this from happening, right? Well they have a mechanism to stitch it back together. And apparently they also produce a protein called desup that acts as a shield that wraps

itself around DNA, and basically shields the DNA from radiation exposure to begin with, right? Amazing. So they have all these natural processes, but they also have passive processes as well, that include basically like going into a state of suspended animation, depending on the conditions. Yeah, there are two things called anoxybiosis and cryptobiosis. Those are two of the three states where these things live. The other one is just the active state, which is just a regular living normal tardigrade.

Right. That's where they're doing all their daily life, basically. Which I don't think we mentioned, you know, there's not a lot to that part. No, and apparently researchers are like, we have no idea what role they play in an ecosystem. Yeah, that's kind of what I was wondering. Yeah. They're going to be predictable. They're going to be the only thing left maybe after our nuclear annihilation or global warming

has wiped us off the face of the earth. But why? Nobody knows. Who knows? Maybe they're going to grow up and be big boys one day. Well, no, that's a really great question, though, because if you think about it, you're like, why would these things be able to withstand pressure six times greater than what's present on earth or radiation like you would never find on earth or temperatures like you would

never find? What's the reason? What's the difference until you stop and think like there doesn't have to be a reason? It could just be that they have strategies that they use to defend themselves against certain conditions on earth that are just totally unrelated. They also happen to cover these other conditions that we humans try to launch them into that a tardigrade would never evolve to take on, but they can still withstand it. Yeah, like you ask the tardigrade and they're like, we're just trying to survive, dude.

Right. They play a purpose on us. What's with your hangups? So the first one I mentioned, the anoxybiosis, that's when if you like starve them of oxygen, they will puff up in a little ball and stay that way basically. Yeah. I guess they lose their ability to regulate fluid transmission in and out of their cells and fluid brushes in and they puff up and they can stay that way, I think for a few

days and then after that they die. But not bad. A few days of being completely saturated with water? Not bad. Yeah. The one that's really amazing though is the cryptobiosis. So we said that they do need this water. If they, it doesn't mean they have to live in the water, but they need water.

But if this water eventually goes away and you dry them up, they pull in their feet, they pull in their head and they basically stop metabolizing, they go into this weird state of suspended animation where they say, all right, you think I'm dead, by all accounts I look like I would be dead, but I'm not. And it's called a ton state to you in. Yeah. Or tune. I think it might be tune because it was, it's short for tune conform.

It's got a, it's a German word with an umlaut over the O. So wouldn't that be a two? Well, it's like tune, tune, tune form. Tune, tune form. Yeah. But I'm going to call it a ton state. Okay. So this, this ton state or tune state, that's how I'm going to say it, uh, it, their metabolism so it's down to like 0.05% of its normal rate, right?

Yeah. And there was a researcher in the forties in Italy who said that she revived a sample of tardigrades from a sample of dried moss that had been collected like 120 years before. Yeah. That was a little hinky. Well, apparently, yeah, no one's ever recreated that one, but they have found that a tardigrade can survive in this teen state for at least 32 years. Yeah.

Some Japanese researchers took moss that was collected from Antarctica in 1983. And in 2015, they, um, opened up the sample and were, they rehydrated it and they found that some tardigrades came alive. Yeah. It's almost like it freeze dries itself and just needs to have, you know, add water and they're like, all right, what happened over the last 30 years? Right. Exactly.

Who's president? The thing is though, is if something dries out, it loses 97% of its, of its water, its moisture from its body. I think. Okay. If something dries out like that, like your DNA needs water too. Sure. If DNA stays dry, it starts to deteriorate pretty quickly.

So again, nothing is supposed to be able to survive 30 years of that state, right? That's right. Um, so this has just got researchers puzzled as well, like how are they doing this kind of thing? Apparently they have, um, proteins that help stitch DNA back together. Yeah. So I guess they start to come out of the tune state and one of the first things they do is stitch back this, their DNA to get up the little sewing machine.

Yeah. Uh, well, there's this one dude and we'll, we'll take a break and talk about his, uh, seeming obsession, uh, with these little fellows right after this. 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 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, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God.

Seriously, I swear. Then you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step, 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. All right. So if you want to know everything you want, need to know about a tardigrade, you should

sit down and have coffee with UNC Chapel Hill, Gotar Hills, uh, with this, is he a professor? He's a prof. He's a prof. Thomas Boothby. This dude seems like the go to, like every article I read featured him as the main, uh, interviewee. Well, he likes to talk tardigrade. He does.

He has a button that he wears all the time and says, ask me about tardigrades. People are like, what? Uh, so yeah, I don't, I don't, I'm sure it's not an obsession, but he is stricken with them as I am. And um, he's trying to figure out like how and why they're able to do all these amazing things. Sure. Um, probably more on the how than the why.

He's with the why he seems to do a lot of, I don't know. He leaves that to the philosophy professors. Yeah, exactly. So what Thomas Boothby, uh, made his name, not in the way that he would necessarily like when he was leading a team, I think in 2014, maybe, maybe 2015 that, that did a genetic scan of a species of water bears and found some really surprising results. Yeah. Right.

And like 17% in change of genes in the water bears were associated with other things like fungi, bacteria, viruses that they had all these DNA stitched up with theirs. And that the assumption was that that was how the tardigrades were able to do all these amazing things and survive in all these ways because they were borrowing talents and traits and characteristics of unicellular life and non-living life like, uh, viruses. Yeah. And that that's how they were able to, to survive these extreme conditions. Yeah, but it's, uh, the kind of ended up being a watch, like he got really excited

and thought, oh my gosh, they've got all this stuff, but it turns out they were just contaminated through poor experimentation. Right. And they, they assumed that there was lateral gene transfer that was going on. Yeah. Turns out that, yeah, they had a contaminated sample and hats off to Thomas Boothby because he's not like, okay, I'm going to go hide for the next decade. Like he's, he was like, Hey, it happens at science, man.

We've gotten increasingly sophisticated machines and the increasingly sophisticated machines found that our sample was contaminated. Let's get back to work. So this, uh, Japanese researchers that follow up on a different type of tardigrade, one of the hardiest around, um, Rasmutaurus, Rasmutasma, basically, I was hoping that's what it was, but it was like Ramazodius variornatus. Here it comes. This.

Okay. Uh, and that's one of the hardiest of all, it's a land species, um, the land are much more hardier. I think we already said that. Right. One of the reasons why Chuck, that one of the reasons why these, the, the land, um, species have, have evolved is because they have to, they don't have these stable conditions that the marine and aquatic ones do.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, they tested the Ramazodius are variornatus species and they found that they had about 1% of foreign genes involved in them, which is about normal, right? His lateral gene transfer can happen at that rate. It's just sort of average. Right.

All right. So like you said, he held his head high and said, all right, no big deal. We're going to continue to search for the reasons why these little dudes are so hardy. Yeah. One of the things that they found that was pretty unique is, um, ice is a big deal and we talked a little bit a few minutes ago, uh, harkening back to the frostbite where ice crystals form inside a cell tearing apart that DNA. And there are some animals that make an antifreeze, uh, freeze like protein, uh, like fish, some

fish do that to keep it from freezing. And they thought, well, maybe the tardigrade is doing that and they don't think it is. They think it can just handle it basically, right? Like maybe it's just freezing the outside of the cells and not the inside, right? Like some weird mechanism they don't understand, but it's definitely not producing an antifreeze like some of these fish are. Exactly. It's just like bring, bring it on.

A little ice. I can take it. And again, with a radiation exposure, they have, they've been found to have proteins that shield DNA and the ability to stitch DNA back together. Right? Yeah. So you got that covered. Yeah.

And I think you alluded to it earlier, um, it may not be the case of the tardigrade has all these different things to survive these environments, but maybe two or three little tricks that are just, you can apply to different ways of survival. Exactly. So it's not like they're evolving to go fly through space, colonize new plants. That's a question that a lot of people come up with once they learn about tardigrades is like, well, wait a minute, are these things like aliens? Did they come on an asteroid and basically get spread like seed here on earth?

They could survive space. Some of them could conceivably, but they would burn up on reentry. So probably not. So were they on, on the back of an asteroid? They would. Yeah. They'd burn up. Cause fire apparently can kill a tardigrade.

I guess. Yeah. And those space experiments, they were inside the satellite, inside the capsule, protected from reentry. Right. Until they were out in space and then they were exposed to solar radiation. And then they were put back in the capsule and brought back to earth. Right.

Safe and sound. Yeah. So like the thing you found in common was with the heat and the cold, the common link there is an ability to repair DNA. And so maybe that's the sort of common denominator here. Right. They're just good at it. Yeah.

And they're good at it because they have to be or else they wouldn't be around. Yeah. They were forced into it. Yeah. It's a pretty nihilistic view. I like it. There is another thing that stood out to me that I just love. So at the pressures they can withstand, the fatty membranes of their cells should be as

solid as cold butter. And again, should stop functioning at those pressures or should kill them. They bounce back. Solid as cold butter. Yeah. I mean, think about it. Like normally fatty membranes that make up cells, they're basically in a liquid state. Yeah.

Cold butter, that's not good for cellular function. Yeah. It's also not good when they give it to you at a restaurant to put on the bread. You know the key to that. Stick it under your arm. Well, I just hold it in my hands and you're going to want to get greedy and try to do two at once. Don't.

It slows it down longer than it takes to do two separately. But then you've got butter on your hands. No, no. I mean, you get the little foil wrap kind. Oh, I'm talking about like... They serve you a dish with cold butter? You leave. Yeah.

I'm talking about like a real restaurant that just has butter in a dish. That's what I'm saying. You leave that restaurant. Not a restaurant. That's not a real restaurant. If they serve... Somebody's not paying attention to detail. Or even the worst are the little cold butter balls that they've scooped and it's just...

You just tuck that in your cheek and warm it up. It's not spreadable. It's useless. Right. Yeah. It just rolls around when you try to spread it. Put it in a Nerf gun. Never heard.

Hey, have you seen those things lately, by the way? No. I was watching a kid's channel the other day and I try not to get too hysterical about stuff. But the Nerf guns these days, they're like assault weapons. Yeah. I guess I do. I have seen it.

But they're bright old. But they're bright old. So it doesn't count. Yeah, I know, but it's... I don't know. It's clearly made me think like, well, they're clearly indoctrinating young children as young as possible. You like this Nerf gun.

You're gonna love the AR-15. Anyway. Wow, that took a weird turn at the end. Yeah, didn't it? If you want to know more about tardigrades or guns, you can type those words into the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com and since I said whatever, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm gonna call this Aaron Sorkin rebuttal. This is from Mark Frost, hey guys, had a comment or two about Chuck's professed dislike of

Aaron Sorkin. Was that you? I thought that was me. That was me. Okay. Did you gang up? Yeah. Okay.

My wife and I are definitely fans, but I want to put a different perspective out there for you to consider. I don't think anyone is supposed to consider his writing to be conversational. I would kind of liken it to a musical or the place of Shakespeare and he says, I'm not equating Shakespeare with Sorkin. Musicals aren't how people talk. Shakespeare was definitely not representing how people talk back then. For Willie the Shake, it was a poetic language filled with metaphors.

That turns a lot of people off even today, but like with musicals, it's a stylized way of showing what people are feeling and thinking, realizing that yes, people don't talk that way. Actually, it makes me enjoy it more. In some ways, it makes things more compact in that it can express feelings, ideas more quickly, but can often do so with more, do so more entertainingly. As in people are way more quick-witted than you would be in real life, but suspending your disbelief makes it enjoyable for me at least.

I think that's the problem I have with it. It prevents me from suspending disbelief. Yeah, me too. I definitely like the Steve Jobs movie, which we both liked, right? You liked it, right? I haven't seen it. Oh, okay. I did.

I actually liked how clearly artificial the construction of it was. It seemed very much like a play in several acts. I agree with you there, sir. I did not feel like anything that was attempting to show real events or real sequences, but rather to condense a lot of what happened during periods of his life into specific scenes. I agree with all that. Then those scenes packed in the drama emotions from the time they had. We also just finished Newsroom and love that.

Anyway, people are always open in their own opinions, and I tend to agree with most of your film thoughts, just not this one. I love both your show and you guys. We'll continue to do so. That is Mark Frost. Thanks, Mark. That was very well-written, well-thought-out. Thanks.

Yeah, I get it. People love Aaron Sorkin. Yeah. People love all that West Wing and stuff like that. Have you seen The Night Manager? No. What is that? Man, where do they hear about that?

Is it everywhere? It's a John LeCarré adaptation with Dr. House and Tom Hiddleston. I have that. Actually. It's really good. Is it a movie? It's like a six-part mini-series. Oh, yeah.

I like those. Very good. Check it out. You will like it a lot. Promise. All right. It's got Josh's guarantee. Yep.

I didn't say that, did I? No. Okay. Just kidding. You thought you were making me think I was losing my mind? No. If you want to get in touch with Chuck and me, you can tweet to us, SYSK Podcast or Josh Elm Clark, Facebook us at Charles W. Chuck Bryant or Stuff You Should Know.

Send us an email to StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com. Get us up at our home on the web, StuffYouShouldKnow.com. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude 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 HeyDude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.