Stuff You Should Know - The Awe-Inspiring, Absolutely Crucial Amazon

Episode Date: February 28, 2023

If you’ve ever thought, “What’s the Amazon rainforest ever done for me? Nothin, that’s what,” then you’re dead wrong, friend. It covers 1 percent of the Earth’s surface but houses perhaps 30 percent of its species and it’s invaluable to all life on Earth.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. MySpace was the first major social media company. They made the internet feel like a nightclub. And it was the first major social media company to collapse. My name is Joanne McNeil. On my new podcast, Main Accounts, the story of MySpace.

I'm revisiting the early days of social media through the people who lived it. Listen to Main Accounts, the story of MySpace on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry Jerome Rowland. And you put the three of us together, put some super glue between us, hold us together for an hour and a half. You got an episode of Stuff You Should Know. I love, Olivia helped us with this. I love her title of this one. It was titled The All-Inspiring Absolutely Crucial Amazon. Yep. And that's what we're going to talk about, this amazing biome

home, about the size of the continental United States. You want me to keep going? Yeah. That is so big that it has, I mean, how big is it compared to the world, like 1% of the world? Of the Earth's surface, yes. But houses about 30% of the biodiversity? Yeah, the world's terrestrial species. I mean, it's really difficult to overstate just how unique and important the Amazon rainforest is. I want to go now. Yeah. I like looking at pictures of it. It would be cool. I'm sure it would be cool, but it'd be one of those things where I wish I could just teleport there and hang out and then teleport home. That's probably a big trip to get into the Amazon these days, you know?

Yeah. And I'm also curious about what kind of trips are good trips that don't disturb things in such a way like where you're not just some like cruddy American tourist doing the wrong thing. Right, for sure. For sure. But one of the things about the Amazon is that a lot of people take it as this pristine, untouched natural wilderness that we're trying to protect. And for a very long time, that's what that was the consensus, not just among the general public, but among anthropologists, archaeologists, a bunch of differentologists. And that the people who had lived there lived so lightly upon the land that they were almost having about the same impact as some of the other,

like some of the wildlife there, that it just wasn't, they weren't impacting it enough to even consider it a significant amount. And that that Amazon was just this natural gift on Earth that we had as part of our cultural or global heritage, right? Yeah, like a giant international park or something. Exactly. So what we've come to find is that that's absolutely not the case, that the Amazon was actually not entirely, but significant chunks of it were engineered by humans and that probably the best way to preserve it is to hand as much as we can of it over to the humans who have traditionally lived there or the descendants of the people who engineered it

years back. Yeah, which, well, we got some stats on that later, but I thought that was pretty cool. Yeah, for sure. So we should probably start further back than humans even because the Amazon has been around for about the last 15 million years and it started out as a giant lake. Yeah, a big freshwater lake. And over time, like to the tune of millions of years, sea levels fell and eventually, you know, things are going to change geologically speaking around it. And it became a wetlands. And then about 11 millionish years ago, it finally turned into a river system flowing east into the ocean. But that wasn't all right. Things continue to change from there. Yeah. So basically, they carved the rivers flowing from the headwaters and the andes eastward

toward the Atlantic. They carved, well, they made an impression on the continent. And they also brought sediment to the river. So soil started to grow, which is really significant because tropical rainforest soil is typically rather infertile because it's so hot and so humid that stuff decomposes basically too quickly to create nutrients trapped in the soil. So the fact that there were sediments, that there were nutrients being brought into it by the river is what allowed the Amazon basin to become so lush. Yeah, and diverse. So still, this is, you know, like 11 millionish years ago, you had savannas, you had big patches, like Olivia called them islands of forests. And you had all sorts of sort of smaller biomes. And then through different ice

ages, ages, we'll just call them ages. Sure. Things were changing, things were shifting, it became wetter, then it became drier, the river system would change direction like in the its flow. And basically, if you go back about five million years is where you finally get to the point where the Amazon kind of, as we know it, speciologically speaking, I don't know if that's a word, but that's kind of where things started as far as what we know, lives there today. Yeah, if you went back five million years, four million years, you would probably recognize it more than you would have, you know, several million years before that. Yeah. So for the past 13,000 years, at least humans have been shaping the Amazon as well. We've talked a lot about some of the lost

civilizations of the Maya and other Mesoamerican groups, indigenous groups. Well, they were no strangers to the Amazon basin. And so in much the same way that we've discovered ancient Maya cities, we've also discovered other ancient cultures in the Amazon as well. We'll talk a little more about them in a second. But one of the big marks that humans left on the Amazon was something called terra preta, which is black soil in Portuguese. And black soil refers to highly fertile, highly productive soil found in huge swaths of the Amazon basin that were basically created, these soils were created a couple of thousand years ago. They're still fertile today. You can still put a plant in this soil and not fertilize it and it will grow very, very well, which again

is really uncharacteristic for an Amazon rainforest. So they started looking into it and they found that there was a technique that was either purposeful or accidental either way it created this terra preta where they would create landscapes of biochar. They would do these low intensity burns that didn't burn trees all the way down into ash but left huge chunks of charcoal which got subsumed into the soil along with food waste and sometimes broken pottery and that that would hold this organic available carbon in the soil again for thousands of years. And I feel like the consensus is leaning more toward this was a purposeful thing that they did to create this soil because we also know that they used it for agriculture too. Yeah. So the thought that it was

just hunters and gatherers for many, many tens of thousands of years is looking like that's not true and it was more hunters and farmers. They probably did some gathering as well I imagine if there was something to gather they weren't like I'm not gathering anything it's not part of the job description. We know how to plant things we know how to engineer this great soil but there is evidence that they were you know domesticating plants back as far as like 6,000 BCE and on the same note there's just so much we thought we knew about the early indigenous peoples of the Amazon that was completely wrong as it turns out. And one is like how many people were there and how they lived and what they basically kind of come to the conclusion now after you know a couple

of hundred years of thinking otherwise is when Europeans would encounter like a sort of smallish tribe of disparate people it wasn't just that they were roaming around the Amazon it's that they were displaced by those very Europeans and that at one time there were groups in the Amazon that numbered in the you know two or three thousands and that those groups live near enough to each other where they were larger groups of up to like a million people that were like building roads and using sort of rudimentary tools and planting things and building six story high complex structures. Yeah there's one particular complex called the Llanos de Mojos it's about the size of England and it housed about a million people in I believe the beginning of the last millennium

to about the 1400s I think and in particular there was the Casarabe culture and they did what was considered low density urbanism cultivated maize. You put another letter in there by the way. I looked it up that's correct though. Oh really? So Lydia left it out? Yeah I believe so. All right look at you. Casarabe finally my edition of an extra vowel really comes in handy because I would have either way whether it was correct or not you know. Right. So but they did they did what you were talking about where they built these structures they built raised terraces that so that their cropland wasn't affected by regional or seasonal flooding they connected these villages by raised causeways they did all this amazing stuff and then because of probably

climate change like we saw in the you know what happened to the Maya civilization episode we did they abandoned these structures and then once the Europeans showed up and introduced smallpox that was that was it like whatever civilizations were left were wiped out to the tune of potentially 90% of the inhabitants of the Amazon were wiped out by smallpox starting in the 16th century onward and then so yeah when the Spaniards came across these you know wandering bands of hunter-gathers they just assumed that's what it had always been there who had always been there and it turns out that these were essentially refugees from European conquest smallpox and climate change essentially and that they didn't they didn't really resemble the cultures that they had come from at all.

Yeah and not only that but the Spaniards were writing about these big interconnected roadways that were maintained and wide and usable between these different villages and they would write about those and for you know a couple hundred years people were just like scholars and researchers were just like yeah they they clearly mistook it or that just definitely wasn't going on and now they're thinking like oh those probably were roads. Yeah I mean it's one of those amazing reversals of understanding that you rarely find in history where these stories of legendary lost cities actually were true and we're finding them now it's pretty thrilling actually I mean from a historian's point of view. Not like uh I don't know. From a computer programmer's point of

view it's Sosa. So that gets us kind of where we are today which is the Amazon rainforest is in nine countries in South America. Most of it 60 percent of it is in Brazil and then the rest is divided among Bolivia, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Guiana, Suriname, Ecuador and French Guiana. Right. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah I think they just spell it differently because they're La France. Yeah and that's two million square miles not acres my friends square miles. It's so mind-boggling. That like we said has about 10 percent of all known species on planet earth reside there and 30 percent of terrestrial land walking species. There's a really great stat that seems to be accurate I don't think it's just one of those copy paste

stats. The ants one? Yeah that on certain bushes in the Amazon you may find more species of ants on that one bush than you'll find in the entire British Isles. That's how biodiverse this area is. Yeah that's one of the reasons like I do want to go visit because it sounds amazing and life changing but then when I think of and I'm not necessarily afraid of insects or anything but I think it's so buggy and insecty it's even someone who's not too bothered by it can kind of be pushed over the edge. My friend the largest spiders in the world are found in the Amazon in particular tarantulas that are 13 inches or about 33 centimeters across. Can you imagine seeing a tarantula coming at you that's a foot across? I would just be like just kill me now I know you

can't kill me but please figure out a way to kill me tarantula. Oh because you know they're not actually deadly to humans. They're what? They're not deadly to humans they're just terrifying looking. No they're deadly in that you die of a cardiac arrest when one of them sinks their fangs into you and looks at you with their I don't know what they have like 200 eyes. At least yeah. So the life in the Amazon rainforest and in an all rainforest really are divided up vertically like there's basically different ecosystems from the tops of the trees down to the forest floors. They're so radically different that just going up and down a single tree you find all this different kind of life and not only different kinds of life different climates

depending on where you are if you're at the top of the rainforest and the overstory or the canopy that's a much different world than it is down at the shrub level it's pretty interesting. Yeah I guess we should start at what you said was the overstory or that's also known as the emergent layer. Where did Orlando Calrissian live? Sky City or something? Yeah I can't remember. Okay that's basically that. Yeah boy I'm sorry Star Wars people I'm a Star Wars guy but I don't remember all that stuff. I think it was Sky City or Skyville USA something like that. Yeah it's got USA. He's like did you get your t-shirt when you flew in? Yakov Smirnoff is playing tonight. So there are we're talking tall tall trees a couple 100 feet

tall sometimes that limbs spreading out 100 feet wide blowing and dropping seeds all over the place then under that you're gonna have your canopy that is where you have your overlapping tree branches and this remarkably holds 60 to 90% of life in the Amazon lives in the canopy. And that nuts in the canopy. It is crazy. And also I saw that these branches just appear to overlap especially from an airplane overhead but if you actually could walk from tree to tree you would see that they're none of the trees touch there's like a few feet difference between the trees in the canopy and it's a mystery they have no idea exactly why the trees don't grow touching one another. They think that's probably to keep from diseases from spreading or like you know

destructive beetles from being able to climb from one tree to another but they actually don't touch and they stay about a foot or so a couple feet away from one another on all sides. Isn't that fascinating? Oh I figured they overlap meaning they don't touch but they overlapped vertically. Oh yeah yeah yeah they'll do that but they don't actually touch. Oh oh yeah okay. They just go I'm not touching you to one another. Right okay. The canopy like you said is a completely different environment you're going to have all kinds of fun birds and lizards and sloths and monkeys and all kinds of creatures and plants up there a hundred feet up sometimes. It's much hotter you talked about the different climates much hotter and much drier during the day and it's there's a lot of

canopy out there so the visibility is very poor right so there's a lot of noise because they're all chirping at one another. Yeah and a hundred feet up at the canopy and then you know another hundred feet at the overstory there's a lot more wind it's really being blasted by bright sunlight and that's just again a different world from underneath the canopy on the shrub layer the forest floor it's really humid the light is dappled it's very rarely direct in places and for that reason you have like a much steadier kind of climate than you have at the top and yeah that's where that decomposition happens really really fast so that forest soils can't don't hold in nutrients very well. Yeah and I don't think we mentioned that there is a lot of

life in the overstory as well you're gonna find monkeys up there too there can be a snake in a tree just live in his life 180 feet up in the air and bats insects eagles all kinds of birds. Something else I found Chuck that I thought was fascinating is that the study of rainforest life is still kind of in its infancy because it's so hard to consistently get to these places to study this life yeah isn't that fascinating it is apparently like good in a way I saw that now that drones are here especially little handheld drones it's making it much much easier and less destructive to be honest yeah that's true so they'll probably advance but there's still a lot more to be learned in that that field yeah I guess we should talk about rain yeah because it's a rainforest and it does rain a

lot compared to the most rainy state in the United States do you know what that is? Texas it is Mississippi. Mississippi. Atlanta is pretty high up there too I think Atlanta is top five or six. I believe it I call it the Seattle of the south man well this is talking about total rainfall I think that's the you know if you live in the Pacific Northwest you understand this but if you just think like you know Atlanta it rains a lot more than in Seattle and Portland but they have more days of rain more of those drizzly sort of dark days whereas in Mississippi and Atlanta and the southeast it's just pouring hard rain to the tune of in Mississippi about five and a half feet a year in Atlanta we get about 4.3 feet per year in the Amazon they get between six and 10 feet of

rainfall a year so up to double what the rainiest state here gets and most of it from from December to May alone during the rainy season yeah I mean that's what packed in four or five months yeah it's rainy pretty impressive but I don't know if it's the time to visit or not but it does not rain much in August that's the driest month and they only get a couple of inches in August yeah yeah so I say we take a break and then come back and talk some more about the Amazon rainforest what do you think let's do it what would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you hey let's start a coup back in the 1930s a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the

U.S. and fascism I'm Ben Bullock and I'm Alex French in our newest show we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century we've tracked down exclusive historical records we've interviewed the world's foremost experts we're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say for one my personal history is raw inspiring and mind-blowing and for another do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads from my heart podcast and school of humans this is let's start a coup listen to let's start a coup on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows

my space was the first major social media company they made the internet which up until then had been kind of like a nerdy space feel like a nightclub and also slightly dangerous and it was the first major social media company to collapse Rupert Murdoch lost lots and lots of money on my space because it turned out it was actually not a good business my name is Joanne McNeil on my new podcast main accounts the story of my space I'm revisiting the early days of social media through the people who lived it the users because what happened in the my space era would have sweeping implications for all the platforms to follow listen to main accounts the story of my space on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows I'm dr. Romany and I am back with

season two of my podcast navigating narcissism narcissists are everywhere and their toxic behavior in words can cause serious harm to your mental health in our first season we heard from Eileen charlotte who was loved bombed by the tinder swindler the worst part is that he can only be guilty for stealing the money from me but he cannot be guilty for the mental part he did and that's even way worse than the money you took but I am here to help as a licensed psychologist and survivor of narcissistic abuse myself I know how to identify the narcissist in your life each week you will hear stories from survivors who have navigated through toxic relationships gaslighting love bombing and the process of their healing from these relationships listen to navigating narcissism

on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts all right we're back we've talked a lot about animals we're gonna talk more about animals and birds and insects and all that stuff but there's a lot of people in the amazon rainforest and again like you I think I sort of pictured it as you know these largely undisturbed tribes that are still just hunting and gathering and that's all but that's not true about 34 million people live within the the ring of the amazon rainforest yeah that's nuts there's a whole city manos brazil has a population of two million in the amazon and then I think out of those how many people did you say live there 34 30 34 total between one and a half and three are indigenous people who have

lived there these are like their ancestral lands um and a good hundred of the I think 350 to 500 distinct indigenous societies in the amazon are uncontacted which if you'll remember our man in the whole episodes that both of them I believe I think we did two episodes on them uh they uncontacted doesn't mean like they're not aware people exist they don't want what they don't want to have anything to do with outsiders usually because of a terrible thing that befell them and or their families yeah it's their thanks but no thanks tribes exactly so I think like 35 percent of the amazon right now make up indigenous territories which is good for the amazon because as we mentioned at the outset one of the things they figured out is the best way to preserve

the rainforest is to hand control of it over to the indigenous groups so you can chuck up about 35 percent of the amazon is safe right now right um if animals are something you like to talk about then the amazon is a pretty great place to be because there are a lot of fauna and mega fauna in the rainforest and one of the stars of the show is certainly the jaguar yeah no for real the jaguar the jaguar yeah if you're buying a car it's a jaguar yeah the jaguar I don't know I don't know where we got the wire from but that's what we say right yeah that's how we say it and this is just a beautiful beautiful beast that used to be much more common sadly in the southwestern us even all the way down to south america and places like

argentina but about 40 percent of their range has been lost yeah in central and south america and and not over hundreds and hundreds of years this is in in the last like 30 or 40 years yeah uh and now they are considered near threatened and these these animals like to move a lot so they have huge extensive ranges of hundreds of kilometers but they just don't have them in this area anymore yeah no um there's about 10 000 of them in the amazon which is now their largest contiguous area of habitat but because the jaguars get so much um attention uh some of the other ones get ignored unless you start to dig beneath the surface and when you do you'll find there's the jaguar undie the ocelot yeah the margay the oncilla and that last one the oncilla is a little

like five pound cat with a leopard coat that is just adorable standing on a little tree branch they're all very beautiful for sure animals but they vary in different sizes shapes coats but a lot of them look like like they have a house cat head on like a mini leopard body or something like that it's kind of cool i'm saving my dad jokes from now on after the b incident by the way oh no i think everybody's been been pretty much in favor that it was definitely worthwhile oh i've had a couple of yeas and a couple of nays so far i didn't see the nays uh my point that i made to one of them was like if i wrote that joke down and told it it's probably pretty terrible but it was off the dome yeah i thought it was great i still like i wake up laughing thinking about it almost every

morning so i won't make jokes about ocelots and ocelotals i'm not gonna do it anymore i think that's a good good choice in this case there's also monkeys oh lots of monkeys 150 plus species of monkey everything you could imagine i love how livia put this one the nightmarish looking uh bald uh i guess that's uokari monkey yeah you need to look that one up it's oh i did neat it looks like the the uh it looks like this sounds awful to say it looks like a monkey who had his face peeled off wow yeah it does look like that a lot it's just a very bright red it looks like it a wound almost yeah or like it has an angry angry sunburn on its face only yeah it's really neat looking it's a cool monkey um there's also squirrel monkeys which are basically what you would think

they're very tiny but they're considered large brained if you put any stock in brain to body ratio because they have large brains considering how small they are and they live in massive groups of up to 300 and i looked up i was looking at them and somebody asked on google or are squirrel monkeys good pets and the answer to that is a thousand times no oh really yeah because they have to have constant stimulation so you have to pay attention to them basically constantly and if you don't pay attention to them they will just start messing stuff up all over the place and making your life miserable so my my advice to you is no you don't want to squirrel monkey as a pet i had not looked that up until just now and i get why people want them as pets they are cute they're very cute and

they're i'm sure a lot of fun to hang out with but maybe just in the jungle you know if you don't pay them enough attention they'll peel their face off and become bald uakari monkeys so um these monkeys are very valuable to the ecosystem though they uh are not just for looks and being cute and making fun noises and like being cheeky and stealing food off your plate they play very key roles they uh they're up there uh chowing down on leaves and they're gonna be pooping that stuff out and be spreading seed that's gonna um you know the trees are gonna be more productive because they're gonna be like something's eating me i need to grow more and that's gonna you know we always talk about the domino effect in these ecosystems then there are more insects that are feeding on

these little leaves that means more birds are going to be eating the insects and it just goes down the chain and it's good for everybody yep they also eat seeds or fruits and then poop the seeds out which plants more trees and they benefit humans by sampling dates to find out if they're bad and poisonous first i told you we just watched that recently and that that scene was uh tough the only saw us and was that it was a nazi monkey yeah and uh even my daughter at seven and a half was like yeah that monkey was no good speaking of moves i saw i saw that on the plane on the way out and then on the way back you saw raiders you watched it yeah i watched like the first third or half or something like that yeah that's good comfort food um and then on the way

back i watched everything everywhere all at once for the first time yeah that's great one of the most magnificent movies i've ever seen in my life man oh i hate that you had to see it on an airplane it was fine i was you know like i had something in my eye for like the last third of it and like it was that was gosh anybody who has not seen that movie see that movie and just make sure you're wide open for it oh boy it was great i saw in the theater the um yeah i never got used to the hot dog fingers i thought that was so great spoiler alert there are hot dog fingers uh what else do they have out there they have the pink river dolphin uh the boat toast which is pretty amazing they swim up in those flooded forests and tributaries yeah i just thought that was so cool chuck that they had um

that they swam in the forests yeah that's just amazingly cool yeah you got your eyes out for the jaguar and you're like look out for that dolphin right the pink one's coming at you yeah and they're pinkish like uh i was expecting a more pink than i got when i looked them up but uh yeah they're pinkish and it looks like they're they're little snouts are way way longer right uh yeah they do look a little like they needed to burrow past all the the stumps in the flooded forest and if you want color my friend forget the pink river dolphins and focus your attention on poison dart frogs there yeah and stay away dozens yeah don't get close just look at pictures there's dozens and dozens of species of them and they are so beautiful they're just like the different

colors and how vibrant they are and like yeah how is that not glowing the dark paint it just it's just mind boggling but ironically the um so they're called poison dart frogs because tribes have used their their toxins that they naturally secrete for blow dart hunting right that's where they get their name but ironically the the least colorful of them all the golden poison dart frog is the deadliest they have enough toxin in them to kill 10 people this tiny little frog does so steer clear of the golden poison dart frog if there's one lesson in this episode it's that uh we won't get too detailed but there are all kinds of rodents there are all kinds of terrestrial mammals roaming the ground uh the birds just forget about it i mean you want

to go see a toucan up in a tree or a macaw that's where you're gonna find them and that's i think would be one of the kind of coolest parts for me is looking up and seeing those birds that you've seen in like cartoons and they're real and they're just flying wild yeah flying past you going just follow my nose uh you got electric eels you got tarantulas you got piranhas and snakes all kinds of things also want to kill you in the amazon yeah the bullet ant which is the insect with the most most painful sting of any living thing in the world lives in the amazon yeah no thank you and i came across one more thing about animals i came across another word that is kind of like mast that i love um browse just like just like you browse through a book browse is a word for

the leaves and twigs of trees and shrubs the animals eat i like that you got brows you got a mast put it together you got a dinner for a tapir what's a tapir yes we'll go ahead and say so it looks like it's um it looks like a pig with a short elephant trunk but it's more related to horses and rhinoceri yeah i think we should do something on piranha at some point maybe it's shorty the movie well we'd have to mention it sure but uh yeah because i think piranha misunderstood and um you know we're growing up in the 70s and 80s probably because of that movie like i think there was the notion that it's like playground stuff that you hear like if you fall in a pool of piranhas then you know you'll be bones in five minutes and that kind of thing

and i don't think that's true because i always kind of had that notion and then when you would see people in the rivers of the amazon where there are piranha i would just be like what are you doing you're about to be bones from the waist down and uh that's just not the case i think the coolest creepiest thing about the piranha is when you go to an aquarium and you see them and they're not moving uh because you're used to fish swimming around and those piranha are just motionless in water i've never noticed that before wow yeah it's very unless those weren't real piranha they're just wax piranha are they on a string yep no i think i think they're we'll have to get into that but i know i've seen motionless piranha uh there's one other thing to steer clear of and

that's the candiru which is a parasitic catfish that is found in the amazon river and if you're not careful it will swim up your urethra oh we talked about that in something we should talk about that in every episode just to make sure that never happens to stuff you should know listener yeah wow okay yeah piranican room in motionless for hours i just i had to confirm that it wasn't crazy very nice you're not crazy i could have told you that you want to take a break yeah let's take our last break and we'll talk about um well other great things you can find there and how humans are destroying those things what would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the united states told you hey

let's start a coup back in the 1930s a marine named smedley butler was all that stood between the u.s and fascism i'm ben bullet and i'm alex french in our newest show we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century we've tracked down exclusive historical records we've interviewed the world's foremost experts we're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books i'm smedley butler and i got a lot to say for one my personal history is raw inspiring and mind blowing and for another do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads from i heart podcast and school of humans this is let's start a coup listen to let's start a coup

on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows my space was the first major social media company they made the internet which up until then had been kind of like a nerdy space feel like a nightclub and also slightly dangerous and it was the first major social media company to collapse rupert burdock lost lots and lots of money on my space because it turned out it was actually not a good business my name is joanne mcneill on my new podcast main accounts the story of my space i'm revisiting the early days of social media through the people who lived it the users because what happened in the myspace era would have sweeping implications for all the platforms to follow listen to main accounts

the story of my space on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows i'm dr romany and i am back with season two of my podcast navigating narcissism narcissists are everywhere and their toxic behavior and words can cause serious harm to your mental health in our first season we heard from eileen charlotte who was loved bombed by the tinder swindler the worst part is that he can only be guilty for stealing the money from me but he cannot be guilty for the mental part he did and that's even way worse than the money you took but i am here to help as a licensed psychologist and survivor of narcissistic abuse myself i know how to identify the narcissist in your life each week you will hear stories from survivors who have navigated

through toxic relationships gaslighting love bombing and the process of their healing from these relationships listen to navigating narcissism on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts so chuck we talked about how biodiverse the amazon is and that in and of itself is worth preserving just the fact that there's that many animals and that many different animals and i think what 400 billion trees was the estimate just that there's all that life that lives there it makes it automatically worth protecting but just within biodiversity there's there's even more reason to protect that life because when you take all those different animals and all those different

trees and you put them together on this one type of geography and topography with this these different types of climate climate you put it all together you have a very unique biome that produces all sorts of ecological services that humans benefit from like drinking water purification decomposition of waste getting rid of parasites and disease all these different amazing things that the amazon does comes from the biodiversity all the interactions of all these different types of animals that have evolved to fill this these different ecological niches in this in these ecosystems and it produces all these benefits from us so there's number two and the list just keeps going from there yeah i mean medicines that we use a lot of these have come from the amazon and

that's what that sean connery movie was about is you know is the cure for cancer just somewhere in some jungle waiting to be discovered you know you've heard of ace inhibitors a c e inhibitors which can help control hypertension that comes from studies of the venom of the fair de lance snake led to the development of that so that's just one example of the many medicines that we've derived and synthesized from the region did i say region i'm getting very fancy and other things we can learn livia pointed out another cool example of something that we haven't figured out yet but the leaf cutting ant which i think we talked about in the ants episode they avoid leaves with that are naturally antifungal and so when they're harvesting this vegetation for their

fungus farms they know to stay away from those we don't quite get how they do it but we might could study them and learn that and maybe then learn how to control fungal growth where we need it yeah it's going to be a future treatment for athletes foot just around the corner maybe and you'll notice everybody like you might be waiting for us to be like and it's the reason we can all breathe thanks to all the oxygen that actually is not true yes the amazon puts out a lot of oxygen for us that's great but the the reason we are all here on earth breathing is because of ocean algae yeah that's really who we have to thank that's not to downplay the role of the of the rain amazon rainforest one of the things that definitely has a huge impact on

is the water cycle and that the amazon actually produces its own weather and then recycles it five six times and then sends it along off to different parts of the world and every single day through transpiration of all the plants in the amazon rainforest 20 billion tons of water vapor are released every single day that's definitely significant yeah it affects rain as far as the midwest of the united states and all the way down is south is argentina apparently yeah the big sort of benefit and now concern of the amazon though which is what has been on the radar of humans for a while and there's been a lot of awareness in the past few decades around it is that it's a carbon sink really really important carbon sink for planet earth to the tune of about 123 billion tons

of carbon uh and and just buried in the ground there yeah which is great and valuable but the problem is is what's been going on since the late 1970s which is burning hundreds of thousands of square miles of the rainforest and releasing all of that carbon into the air yeah because not only is it in the ground it's um so it's locked into the wood of living trees but when those trees aren't living anymore and in particular when they burn all that carbon gets released all at once where like if a tree falls over in the woods whether there's somebody there to hear it or not doesn't matter as it decomposes it slowly releases carbon if you burn a tree it releases a ton of carbon all at once and if you burn a huge swath of trees that's a big carbon release

and yes the amazon has been burning burning burning since the 70s um largely to make way for agriculture in the most for the most part cattle grazing they're burning down the amazon to make pastures for cattle uh for the most part and um as a result they're actually concerned that if it hasn't happened already that in the not too distant future the amazon will transfer from being a net absorber of carbon a carbon sink to a um carbon emitter a net emitter of carbon where it will put out more carbon than it holds in which is terrible you you don't want your the world's largest carbon sink aside from the ocean the world's largest land-based carbon sink how about that um to turn into a a net emitter that would be a bad thing and it all is basically

driven by fire in one way or another yeah but you know it's because of uh climate change even where there haven't been these fires uh i think like the southeastern part of the forest hasn't been as is burned down yet but they have also become a net emitter because trees there are are dying they're dying too fast they're dying faster than they can grow um and a lot of it is because of the warming climate hotter drier conditions on average um and then the level of rising carbon dioxide in the air so more co2 is going to make a tree grow faster which is good in a way but faster growing trees die younger and like you said they die they decompose and then release that carbon again so it's this cycle where it's sort of feeding itself almost

right in the wrong direction yeah it's definitely the wrong direction um another part of the problem too is that will affect that um that water vapor and all of the uh weather that it impacts um and it will also make the amazon less rainy because as more and more portions of the forest become deforested that rain that is hit that hits the canopy and the overstory and then trickles down slowly to the understory and the shrub layer and then the forest floor and gets like basically trapped in the forest floor and becomes that nice humidity that keeps the whole thing going and keeps the plants flourishing that rain just runs off into the river and it doesn't get locked into the soil so that just leads to further and further deforestation and then the up the i guess the

the result of it no i'm not gonna say it the result of all of this is that these forest lands turn into grasslands um savannas and that's just not nearly as big of a carbon sink um that's not again that's not what we want the amazon rainforest to be even just the just for the fact that you don't want to lose the amazon rainforest that's enough to do something about this let alone all of the sub details that make the amazon what it is and make it valuable for all these different reasons yeah so if you're out there and you're saying so that's what don henley's been going on about that's what don henley's been going on about for all these years and a lot of other people uh and when it comes to taking action like that um i'm glad people like

don henley are raising awareness and literally doing like uh feed on the ground work and raising money when he's not suing people but the the government is where it really comes into play and wealthy nations uh chipping in is where it comes into play because for about the last 20 years or so governments in south america have tried to curb deforestation here and there and have done a decent job uh some people say it's too little too late it's obviously never too late to try um but again if we've passed that tipping point then it literally may be too late in the long run um but brazil where like we said 60 of the forest is they're going to be a big contributor one way or the other and it's sadly driven by politics so uh it hit a six-year high

deforestation uh just last year in 2022 and that was the end of a three-year uh period where uh the conservative president uh how do you pronounce his first name is that jire oh jire uh bolson arrow was saying yeah we need money and the way to do that is to cut down then burn these forests and before that uh we had a drop in deforestation uh in a pretty big way under the leftist president louise in a great name in asio lula da silva and this is from 2003 to 2011 and he's back in power now i think he's the only brazilian president to be elected three times is what i read oh is that right i thought this was just a second but yeah i guess he was two term and now this is his third term huh yeah so he's back and he's saying hey we got to reverse these policies

and protect these lands if you look at uh charts of um deforestation under different presidents when when lula came in that's what he's affectionately called in brazil it just drops deforestation just drops off precipitously i saw it was down by like two thirds i believe during his administration and so not only did he institute protection for the rainforest brazil's long had plenty of laws against things like illegal mining um illegal agriculture um protections for indigenous land that they just weren't enforcing and they definitely stopped enforcing when bolson arrow came into power and that that that all they have to do is start enforcing some of these and that will just have enormous effects but in addition to that they're also like okay like there are reasons people

engage in illegal mining there are reasons people um use like like uh forest fires to drive indigenous people off their land because this land is valuable for people who are in some places in times desperate for money to feed themselves and their family it's not totally not ununderstandable especially on a more local level when you get into like large politics it's all just discussed in greed it's the definition of greed of demolishing a global good for personal gain i don't believe that that also translates to the local level where you're trying to feed your family right sure but what you can't do as a wealthy nation is just say you guys need to change what you're doing right without chipping in and helping some right right so there's a couple of ways to do this and one

that i believe brazil is um really interested in internally um is figuring out how to exploit the amazon without um harming it right without doing exploiting it in a sustainable way now you're exploiting like taking its the wealth of nature from it like oils and um nuts and fruits and getting into ecotourism that isn't actually harmful that's a big that's a big way to kind of say hey you don't have to do this illegal mining anymore here's some other stuff we can do and you're gonna make even more money to be able to sustain your family and the forest will continue to thrive the other way is like you said going to wealthy nations being like hey this is a global common good uh you guys think that it should be around that the biodiversity alone means that it should

be protected well then chip in if this is like belongs to all of humanity why should we be the only ones who have to suffer to preserve it because there's a lot of stuff they could extract like oil in the amazon that they're saying pay us not to do that like we could use that and to keep up and pay off the debts that we owe you guys so pay us to to leave it there and then the amazon gets preserved and then we don't have to um we don't have to extract this oil to support ourselves yeah and oftentimes that payment you you know kind of mentioned it is in the form of debt forgiveness and there's been a big push in the past uh I feel like 15 to 20 years for wealthier countries to forgive the debt of poorer countries and I think bono is big into this cause but I

think more in Africa yeah if I'm not mistaken I don't remember but I feel like he's tried to raise awareness for that and kind of pushed for debt forgiveness and if some of these you know people like brazil and ecuador and colombia had debt forgiveness they may not be doing the mining and the oil drilling although the cynic in me says that someone would come along and try and just exploit it for the riches of it uh not necessarily to pay the debts uh but one thing we have found that works like we mentioned at the very beginning and we're coming full circle here is that what they have squarely found is that returning control of this land to the uh indigenous cultures there has seen a massive I think a two-thirds decrease in deforestation in areas where

indigenous people have full ownership rights so there's your answer right there is give it back to them and say how would you like to treat this land probably how you always wanted it treated right but also that means so that that's that's saying you're protecting that by giving it back by saying like this is protected area this is indigenous territory you can exploit it but that still leaves the problem of the non-indigenous people who are trying to make a living out of it and again you come into the wealthier countries and say why don't you guys chip in and actually chuck there's been studies of people um like households in north america norway is really big on it um and I believe the UK of what's called willingness to pay WTP among distant beneficiaries

that's people like you and me who are probably never going to set foot in the amazon but we still want the amazon to be around and I've seen as much as um norway households are willing to pay as much as 100 euros per year to keep the amazon um intact as it is now in the united states we've been shown to be willing to pay as much as five dollars for every percentage of forest lost avoided so if they can predict how much would be lost and you say well this is going to save 15 percent the average american household be willing to pay five dollars per percent for that 15 percent and that the most agreed upon way of doing this is to say how about let's let's let's make this happen and then we're just going to make it a special tax that you pay when you pay your

income tax every year and each household pays 50 60 bucks and when you start to put that together among all households in america and then households in other western nations you suddenly have a really giant fund to preserve the amazon yeah pretty neat and you know if you're looking for charities uh i have not vetted all of these uh but just a cursory search and i do recommend anytime you're giving to charities vet them and do your do diligence and check them out and all that good stuff uh but just cursory search uh there are lists of you know best charities for protecting the rainforest uh like the rainforest trust amazon conservation cool earth rainforest foundation rainforest action network amazon watch there are all kinds of them out there i

don't know which one uh don henley's oh here it is the hotel california fund no no i'm kidding oh okay i got you yeah i'm surprised all right what is the name of his i don't know okay can we look it up no as long as it's not that that's fine i'm sure you can search don henley amazon fund yeah uh you got anything else uh i got nothing else well um i thought this is a pretty good episode i would say it's a throwback episode to like the 80s like save the amazon but it's pretty much been ongoing ever since then huh yeah uh well if you want to know more about preserving the amazon just start looking around to find out how you can help and i'm sure you'll find all sorts of cool ways and godspeed to you for doing that and since i said that it's time for listener mail

i'm gonna call this hot off the presses another delorean and by the way you know i asked for i'm sure you'd notice in the emails i asked for calls for people to let me take a ride in one or drive one and it turns out we have a lot of stuff you should know listeners that own deloreans yeah who knew yeah i mean i don't know about a lot but i feel like we got a dozen or so emails at least from people in different places saying chuck you're on when you want to do it i know that's pretty cool so i mean i'm gonna save all those and then i know there's one in boston a couple in canada are you gonna do them all yeah that should do them all drive all the deloreans yeah just do a big road trip no i'm gonna figure it out though and meet up with somebody okay uh

but i'm gonna call this another delorean email um love the delorean app i actually owned one learned a few fun things about it that i thought you might be interested in and when i was younger my grandmother left my siblings and me money specifically for our first cars uh a serendipitous amount of time later i saw one for sale on the side of the road um a collector of world war two cars was thinning out his car collection uh and of course i wanted it as a sound financial investment for a pre driver's license team i was 14 i can't believe this person bought a delorean at 14 i bought a moped at 12 once but this pales in compares into that uh the kind that you uh was a bicycle as well mm-hmm like a true moped yeah it also didn't work yeah they never do

do uh as a sound financial investment for a pre driver's license team my mother agreed to spot the rest of the 16 500 as soon as we could we got a mcfly vanity plate for it my sister drove us around town for a joy ride i love this person pre-bought a car before they could even drive yeah a delorean no less yeah uh we went through a chick filet drive through and ultimately couldn't get our order through the very tiny window so we had to back up and drive back in with enough allowance to fully open the gull wings as the whole staff looked through the window at us nice um i would just sit in this lazy boy level comfortable almost horizontal seat of my stainless steel paper weight wow and here's a few fun facts there's a sign behind the

seats that says this vehicle is negative earth hates earth still have no idea what that means is what cat says there's a one by a one foot by one foot by one foot ish safe that the delorean key opens and directly behind the driver's seat oh wow man i had no idea about any of this didn't know this either and there was a red button on the center console i don't remember what it was supposed to do because it didn't work it was just an unlabeled red round push button wow it's just daring you to oh man i always wanted to put a little acme co sticker i'm sorry a glass case and a tiny a tiny hammer around it you know for emergencies so that is from cat uh chaffin wow and that's a great email cat this may be the best delorean email we got hands down i mean everybody

else's delorean email was pretty great but this was none of them topped this way to go cat that's an amazing story thanks for all the extra info about the delorean too didn't know about that safe i'm sure there were was never cocaine in those saves never uh if you want to get in touch with us like cat did you can write us an email too send it to stuffpodcast.ihartradio.com stuff you should know is a production of i heart radio for more podcasts my heart radio visit the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows what would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the united states told you hey let's start a coup back in the 1930s a marine named smeadly butler was all that stood between the

us and fascism i'm ben boland i'm alex french and i'm smeadly butler join us for this sordid tale of ambition treason and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands listen to let's start a coup on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows i'm dr romany and i am back with season two of my podcast navigating narcissism this season we dive deeper into highlighting red flags and spotting a narcissist before they spot you each week you'll hear stories from survivors who have navigated through toxic relationships gaslighting love bombing and their process of healing listen to navigating narcissism on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts my space was the first major social media company

they made the internet feel like a nightclub and it was the first major social media company to collapse my name is joanne mcneill on my new podcast main accounts the story of my space i'm revisiting the early days of social media through the people who lived it listen to main accounts the story of my space on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows