Stuff You Should Know - The Great Stink: The Stench So Bad They Gave It A Name

Episode Date: March 14, 2019

In the summer of 1858, a heatwave dried up the Thames River to a trickle in London. As centuries’ worth of human waste, animal carcasses and other nasty things cooked in the sun, a stench arose that was so horrific it got its own name: The Great Stink. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant over there. And today we have guest producer Josh sitting in. Not me, another Josh.

Another Josh. Another Josh. You know what his nickname is? Little Josh. The Great Stink. That is a terrible nickname, Chuck. We're just kidding. Of course.

Sorry, Josh. I'm sorry for Chuck. Everyone knows I'm the Great Stink. I don't know about that either. I've never once smelled you in the, like, more than decade that we've worked together. Oh, yeah? I've never known you to smell foully.

Wow. All right. That means I'm doing my, I'm keeping my distance. We've been close, buddy. I know. You still don't stink. Sure. Certainly not a Great Stink, but that's neither here nor there.

We're not talking about a Great Stink yet, are we? No, I don't even know what you're talking about. Right, exactly. You don't even know what it is that you brought up. Nope. We are talking to start, Chuck, by the little city called London Town. Yeah.

Across the pond in Great Britain, the United Kingdom, England, that whole area over there. And London's been around a very long time. It's been around since at least the Romans kind of came and set up shop, right? Yeah. Oh, by the way, since you brought that up, I hate to get sidetracked already, but my good friend

Rob from college, Rob Elsie, my roommate and one of the smartest guys I know, texted me the other day and said, by the way, Alexander the Great was neither Greek nor Roman. He was Macedonian. I saw somebody else email that in. I was like, Greek's still closer. Yeah.

So anyway, shout out to Rob. Way to go, Rob. Real-time corrections. Yes, way to go, Rob. All right, so London's been around for a couple of years, what you were saying. It is. And it's kind of slowly grew and more and more people were

like, hey, I like this town. There's a lot going on here. The fish and chips are great. Eventually, it will produce some pretty neat people. I'm going to settle down here. I couldn't think of a single Londoner as an example. But Mary Popp is going to show up eventually. Thanks, Chuck.

So people started settling and accumulating. And it became like a pretty substantial city by the 1600s. Yeah, big time. But then the 19th century came. And all of a sudden, this is at the peak of the British Empire. The early 19th century came along. And London just exploded in population and industry right before and then during and then right after the beginning

of the Industrial Revolution. London really just grew as a result of that. And all of a sudden, there was something like 3 million people living in London by the 1850s, which made it the most densely populated city on the planet, from what I understand. At least it had the largest population from what I understand. Yeah, and you know what that means?

Yes, I do. That means if there's how many millions, you said, 3 million? 3 in 1850. That's 3 million buttholes. Yep. Amals. Human buttholes that are just expelling things. No, just 3 million humans.

And then you've got horse buttholes and all sorts of other animal buttholes. Pig buttholes. And they're just all, they're all pooping all the time. Right. Pooping. Every once in a while, they catch a foodborne illness and they'd start throwing up to.

Sure. There is a lot of tinkle coming out of other holes. There's a lot of excrement that was being generated in London all of a sudden. And there had been for a very long time, but all of a sudden it reached like a critical mass. And up to this point, London enjoyed what were called Roman sewers, which were basically just a ditch in the ground

that were meant to collect rainwater, right? And if you had to poop or pee or vomit or something like that and you were a human, in your house, you probably had a cesspool, which was basically a pit in the basement. Sometimes if you were fancy, you might have like a cistern or a canister or something like that. And you would go poop or vomit or pee into this hole.

And then the hope was that the hole was big enough and your family was small enough in number that the poop or pee or vomit would decay and get absorbed into the surrounding ground faster than you could fill it up. That was how they dealt with surface water and sewage then. You had a hole that you pooped and puked and peed in. And then you had ditches conveying rainwater to the Thames

is where the rainwater was supposed to end up. But it wasn't just rainwater, was it? That ended up in the Thames. No, I mean, I don't think we can just breeze past these cesspools. They were purposely designed to overflow into the streets. Eventually, yes. They figured out that, yeah, we're

getting to the point where we have enough people that our cesspools are not decaying fast enough that they're starting to overflow. Yeah, and if you lived, if you were poor and lived in the basement or the ground floor of an apartment building or something, you might very well see the stuff seeping into your household. Sometimes if that's if someone's gone

or if it's an empty building, that stuff would build up and methane would become trapped in there and there would be literal explosions from the trap methane of people's poo. A poop explosion. Yeah, it was really, really bad. And then when you talk about the Thames River, the Thames is a tideway.

So that means that the tides affect the water flow. And so it's not like sewage. They thought, let's just send it out to the sea and it's all good. But what would happen is stuff would just slosh back and forth because of the tides. And the end result was the Thames River was, and when I say disgusting, I mean capital D, disgusting.

Yes. Dangerously disgusting. Capital D, dangerously too. Yeah. So Chuck, it was, I don't know how they didn't realize that where London was on the Thames was what's called the Tideway. So it is affected by the tide.

And not only is it affected by the tide, meaning when the tide rises, the estuary and the sea basically comes up into London. But there's also still water coming from the headwaters of the Thames. So at high tide, sometimes the Thames would overflow its banks, it would get so high, right? So not only did you have the Thames itself

just basically turning into like a washing machine on the agitation cycle, stewing and mixing up garbage and remains, because there are a lot of dead human and animal bodies in the Thames. Much more than poop and pee. Yeah, all that sewage, everything that people didn't want anymore, they just put into the Thames. But unfortunately, it wasn't carried out to the sea,

it was just kind of mixed together. And it would be mixed together and kind of turned into a solution that was suspended in the water. And then eventually some of it would settle to the bottom. But you have hundreds and hundreds of years of waste just cycling right outside of London. And like you said, eventually by the 19th century, apparently it really turned starting in about 1830.

They found records that as late as 1800, people were still catching and eating salmon out of the Thames. Oh, God. By 1830, well, it was okay back then, it was fine. I don't know about that. By 1830, something had changed that it had just, again, reached that critical mass,

kind of like, did you ever see that South Park where they go to the water park? No. And like there's like some scientists who realizes that the pee to water ratio is about to hit a tipping point. And once it tips past that point, everything's gonna turn into pee and it happens and it's disgusting.

That's kind of what happened to the 1830s to the Thames. It reached a critical point and tipped into just like that dangerously disgusting vat of water that was just hanging around in London at the time. Yeah, so there's a very famous scientist named Michael Faraday who made his name in other realms of science, but he actually worked for the Royal Institution in 1855 when he basically started doing an investigation.

He went down to that river, like got in it in a boat, I would imagine. Yeah, yeah. And did various tests and recorded a bunch of stuff and then one of his tests was like he would drop white paper in there and he said, after this paper gets in like an inch below the surface, you can't even see it.

And like poop is basically like bubbling up to the surface. Like you can see human excrement on the surface down here. Yeah, like where the Thames was flowing past like the structure of a bridge that is jutting out of the water and it's being cut up by that bridge the flow is, it's roiling up this muck and disgusting stuff is just roiling up in clouds that he said were visible

even in this opaque of a water. And he wrote all this stuff up into an article letter, I guess that he sent to the Times newspaper that he called observations on the filth of the Thames. And this was in 1855, I think it was published. And he basically says, if we just keep going this way, we should not be surprised if something really bad happens like a hot spell comes along and reminds us

that we really missed a chance to do something about this and it's now too late. So that's 1855 and that's Faraday. At the same time, there's another thing going on kind of off to the side where a scientist named John Snow who actually knew a lot, it turns out. He was one of the- No Game of Thrones jokes?

That was a Game of Thrones joke. It was? Yeah, didn't somebody say like, you know nothing John Snow. Oh, I don't know. I quit watching the show a while ago. But I think that might have been first season. Oh, I did watch that but it did make an impact. I think somebody said, you know nothing John Snow.

I don't know, I just saw it on Twitter years back. They said, winter is coming. Right. They said, red wedding. I don't know, those are the only things I remember. There you go, just say red wedding, that's it. So this John Snow guy, I think he had an H in his name, which was his parents put in to differentiate him

from the Game of Thrones cat. That's right. He was basically one of the world's first epidemiologists and he's working feverishly at the time because there was something called the Victorian plague, which is cholera. And cholera was a waterborne illness that you did not want.

You could literally vomit and poop yourself to death in a matter of hours. You would lose so much, you would dehydrate that quickly. And so John Snow was like, there's a cholera outbreak and I suspect it's in the water, but he went against the grain at the time because during the 1850s, Chuck, everyone thought that you caught diseases

from the smell of things. It was called the miasma theory. That's right. People thought that and they thought that possibly that's where even cholera was coming from. And cholera was nothing new. There was an epidemic in the 1830s that killed more than 6,000 people.

There was a second outbreak kind of shortly before this in the late 40s that killed 14,000. So that's 20. And then between 53 and 54, another 10. So that's 30,000 Londoners killed by cholera and there are miasmus that think, yeah, it's from smelling this stuff in the air. Right, so people are trying to like treat the air.

They poured something called calcium of, or chloride of lime, which amounts to basically pool chlorine today into the Thames, like $150,000 worth of this stuff to try to cover up the stench that didn't work and actually has made the Thames more toxic. But John Snow was running around. He's like, no, no, there's some other method

of transmission. It has nothing to do with the smell. The smell is just a byproduct. And he actually did an outbreak map of cholera and traced it back to a particular well, a public well that had been dug unbeknownst to the well diggers within about three or four feet of an abandoned cesspool that had been built over and forgotten.

And the cesspool that contained cholera-laden fecal bacteria into the public well was making people sick. And John Snow figured it out and he's considered one of the earliest epidemiologists as a result. All right, let's take a break. And I need to go wash my hands. And then we'll come back and talk about what happened

in the summer of 1858, right after this. ["Lance Bass Theme Song"] Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Hard 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.

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Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass

on the I Hard Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so the Timbs is in bad shape. A few very smart people realize this. They're trying to raise a little hay about it. Nothing much is happening. People are getting cholera, poor people are dying. But because, you know, I was about to say because

it's Britain, but a lot of countries back then may have handled this the same way. It really, until it hit kind of the politicians and the rich and the famous is when things really are gonna change. And in the summer of 1858, a heat wave is what really, really changed things. Because the heat combined with what was going on

in that river really made what was called the Great Stink, capital G, capital S in London. And it was happening all up and down the Timbs, but it was happening very close to where, what was it? Westminster, where the politicians huddled and made their little rules. And they basically couldn't go to work.

They were like, you know what? This is starting to affect our government. We're using scented handkerchiefs. None of this is working. So like we finally, it took that to be able to, it'd be like in America if there was something going on and no one reacted until like poop was flowing up the steps of the White House basically.

Right, basically. And the irony of the whole thing is that had it not been for the persistence of the miasma theory of disease, parliament might have not actually ended up acting. Because so you have to put yourself in this. So this stink is so bad that we're talking about it 150 or 60 years later, right?

That's how bad it was. It was a legendarily bad offensive stench. And not only was it a terrible retching smell, supposedly people miles away would catch scent of it and throw up, like just throw up where they were standing. It was that bad. Because again, we're talking hundreds of years of human waste and animal waste

and decaying bodies and just all sorts of nastiness. Oh, intestines like, you know what they did with this? You know, when they were like preparing animals for slaughter, it went to the same place. Exactly. And again, this is hundreds of years of this stuff. And the Thames has slowed to a trickle because it's a dry spell.

And now because of this heat wave, it's cooking. The Thames is cooking, all this nasty stuff is cooking and this stench is coming off. So on top of it being that bad of a smell, you also have to put yourself in the position of the people who are living at the time who believe that smells cause disease, that cholera and typhus and malaria are caused,

like if you smell it, you may have just caught it. So they are terrified of this. But had John Snow, had people listened to him and realized that, no, you get it from actually drinking the water. Which was what they're doing. Right, but parliament may not have acted because parliament and some of the wealthier people

in London, they got their water from like north of the city, piped in through aqueduct. So they had clean drinking water. It was the lower classes that were drinking the water drawn straight from the Thames. So they were drinking the same water that they were throwing their waste into because they didn't realize that there was such thing

as the oral, fecal oral transmission of waterborne illnesses. Everybody thought it was just the stench. Yeah, so parliament's notoriously very slow to get anything done, like a lot of governments. And then it took about what, 18 days, which was super fast. I think it was a record.

Yeah, I think so too. And they created a bill, passed this bill and signed it into law that basically said, we need to basically redo the river here. I don't know what it's gonna take. I don't even think they knew how much it was gonna cost at the time, but they knew that the great stench had to stop.

Right, so again, this was after it kind of, like you said, the poop just piled up at their doorstep, right? Yeah. But they had fortunately just, like a couple of years before, I think maybe 1855, they created a new department up to this time, like the water works and the,

I think the sewage works were privately held, but parliament had just recently created a new department called the Metropolitan Board of Works. And they had designated a chief engineer by the name of Joseph Bazalgette. Isn't that how you would say it? Sure. We're going with Bazalgette then, Chuck,

if you're on board with that. Yes. So Joseph Bazalgette would turn out to be one of the most celebrated engineers in Western history. And he just so happened to have kind of gotten on the Michael Faraday trolley and been like, yes, we need to do something about the Thames and the solution is a sewer, it's a modernized sewer.

So he had spent years already drawing up plans and trying to get them implemented to no avail. And now all of a sudden, out of nowhere, within 18 days of the great stink developing, the parliament says, hey, Bazalgette, go get your plans. We're going to put them into use. Go raise some money, say about $3 million, which is like, I think, $430 million today,

3 million pounds, and get to work as fast as you can. Yeah, before this, they didn't even have, like before the Metropolitan Board of Works, they didn't even have a group that was even funded to tackle anything like this. And then once they even had the Metropolitan Board, it wasn't really funded yet. So that's why they had to go out and raise money.

So the hiring of Bazalgette was Bazalgette, Bazalgette. Is he Italian? No, I think his family originated in revolutionary France. So let's say Bazalgette. Yeah, so the hiring of him was fortuitous because he knew what he was doing. He was definitely the guy to come in and take care of this. And his plan, like, it was so revolutionary

that it's still, in its simplicity, though, that it's still sort of the basis for how things work today all these years later. Yeah, I mean, not only was it revolutionary, it was that well-built as well. Like, it's that sewer built in from, like, 1858 to, I think, the 1870s, forms the backbone of London's metropolitan sewer system still to this day.

It was that well-made. Oh, yeah, so he's like, here's what we'll do. He says, we're going to catch this water and the waste, like, you know, rainwater and stuff, surface water. Before it gets to the river, and everyone said, good start. And he said, and then we're going to just reroute it, basically, we're going to run it parallel to the river and combine these sewers together

and divert this stuff downstream. And again, the plan, sadly, is still to divert it out to the sea, but just not to the sea such that it would wash right back in with the tides. Exactly, and most importantly, where it dumped out into the Thames was way below the populated area. So it was out of sight, out of mind. But it was still, I mean, that is definitely a mark against it.

But with considering what he had to work with, it was quite revolutionary, the idea of catching all this stuff and moving it away from the city to keep the Thames clean, right? All right, so let's take another break, and we'll come back and talk more about Bazel Getz Plan that actually worked right after this.

["Bazel Getz Plan"] Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart 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. And you won't have to send an SOS

because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one.

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or wherever you listen to podcasts. So, Chuck, um, you said like the main part of Basil gets plan was, um, to basically build a subterranean sewer that ran parallel to the Thames that was big. 82 miles worth. I saw somewhere else, 1,100 miles. I don't know where they got that. Let's go with 82 miles because it sounds

much, much more realistic. Yeah. But, um, that, that in parts were big enough to build it, to run a train through. And in fact, some of these underground sewer tunnels, they're like, well, it's also build the underground subway system at the same time. So it was a massive project.

And those use gravity. They had like a two foot drop per mile, which is a pretty good drop. So they would conduct the sewage and rainwater down, down toward the Thames, but not at the Thames using gravity. And then smaller ones were egg shaped so that the, they were narrower at the bottom.

So that would kind of get the flow going even faster too. So, um, that's like the, the main part, that's the bulk of, of this project, but it's certainly not the whole thing by a long shot. No, not at all. So they, uh, realized that there were like, you know, even if you build a house that runs on gravity, there might be low lying areas of your sewage pipe

that eventually cause you problems. I've been through this myself. It's no fun. No one wants to deal with poop, whether it's Victorian London or modern day Atlanta. And so like today, you have to pump that stuff out. So they built these giant pumping stations, a few different ones, Crossness, Abbey Mills,

Chelsea and Deppford. And they made these things really nice looking, which was probably a pretty good move, especially Abbey Mills and Crossness, really, really lovely buildings. They kind of look like cathedrals, which is ironic, because they were pumping out poop the whole time. And it was, this was really key there.

Cause like I said, this low lying, you've got to take care of all of the problem or else it's just going to like magnify, you know? So it wasn't good enough just to be like, let's get 80% of it out, not worry about the low levels or the low lying areas. So they really had to pump it all out. Yeah.

So they built these beautiful pumping stations. One of the other things that they did was they reclaimed a tremendous amount of land from the Thames. At the time that the Thames just had natural banks, right? Sure. Like the river just kind of came up to the city and that was where you stop

or that's where the building started. What they did was they built massive embankments that were, that started with seawalls and then were filled in that contain the sewers, contain the subway tunnels. That was just basically extending the city out into the Thames. And it did one thing.

It gave you a lot more space. It also covered up the tunnels, but it also very wisely brought the banks of the Thames closer together in those stretches through the city. So the Thames went from wider to narrower, which had the effect of increasing its flow through London. It used to flow much more slowly than it does now,

but one of the ways that they kind of make sure that all that stuff washes through London and gets out to the sea is by bringing the banks closer together to narrow it to push the same amount of volume of water through a narrower spot, which speeds the whole thing up. Yeah. So if you go to the Victoria embankment today,

Basil Get actually was knighted in 1875 because of these achievements that he made as an engineer. And that's where you're going to find the monument to him. And he was very funny. Like if you ever read any interviews with him, he just kind of talks about what a drag it was to do that job and how hard it was, just sort of in a very understated English way.

But that's where the monument is. And by 1866, it was evident that this plan was working because there was another cholera outbreak and the only part of London that was really hit hard was the East End, which was the only section of London that wasn't connected to the sewer system. So they realized this is obviously working. It's going to stop this disease.

It's clearly not just airborne, so that proved that correct too. Yeah, it definitely supported. I think Louis Pasteur by that time had formed his germ theory than Joseph Lister was really starting to demonstrate it in the 1870s. So yeah, it was pretty evident that that,

that and I think the microscope really kind of showed like, yeah, there are such things as germs that hold my asthma theories out the window. Yeah, but Basil Get was really smart because he was like, he had foresight. He wasn't like, let me just solve this problem. Like London has this many people. And so just let me, let me build this thing

to handle this many people. He built it on the future and said, let's build it to accommodate a population growth of 50%. And that happened within 30 years. London's population doubled again, but because of the foresight of Basil Get, that thing still remained pretty strong at the time. It did.

I mean, think about that, right? So he was like, okay, we'll make it so that four and a half million people can use this thing and it'll do just fine. He must have thought it would take forever to get to that number and they reached 6 million in 30 years. That's crazy. That's a crazy amount of population growth.

And yet still Basil Get's design worked. And one of the reasons it worked was because he had a fail safe. And I guess it was a, I guess you would call it a fail safe, but so if there were a lot of water that suddenly hit in the form of like rain or something like that, like a flash flood.

Remember, the sewers connected sewage and rainwater. So you didn't want the sewers overflowing into the streets because that would mean sewage was overflowing in the streets, right? What he designed were basically outfalls or overflows so that if there were a sudden large amount of rainwater entered the sewers, it would be directed to spew into the Thames,

which is not the greatest thing you wanted to happen. But it would happen infrequently enough because the sewers were so big that it was an acceptable fail safe, right? And it worked. And that's why we added more and more and more Londoners using the same sewer system because it had those outflows. Well, unfortunately, now I've reached the point

thanks to things like climate change and the fact that it's creeping up on 10 million Londoners, that the sewer system is now fairly routinely discharging raw sewage and stormwater anytime a heavy rain comes along. And don't get anybody started on the fat birds either because those are just making the problems even worse. So now there has to be another update and they're working on that right now too.

Yeah, but London still, I mean, the Thames is known as the cleanest river that runs through a major city despite this. Really? Yeah, much because of the work of Basil Get. But this is a problem. There's these 50 overflows happening every year. No one's happy about.

So they've, they're underway, I think started a couple of years ago in 2016, the Tideway Tunnel Scheme, also known as the Super Sewer, should be completed in 2023. And what their goal basically is are these overflows that are, like I said, around 50 times a year to get those down to no more than four every year. Oh, gotcha.

Which is good. Quarterly dump, quarterly overflow, not bad. That beats almost once a week. Yeah, you could just make it like a national holiday and everybody can leave town if you could schedule it. Yeah, so they've been working on this for a while. And it's, I mean, it's one of the biggest civil engineering projects in the world probably.

Yeah. Or in which history maybe. And what's funny about it is that like, so Basil get created the sewer to catch the sewage before it reached the Thames. They're creating this Super Sewer, the Tideway Tunnel, to catch the overflow from Basil get sewers before it reaches the Thames. Yeah, so his system is still the foundation.

Yeah, I mean, they've definitely added to it and improved on it. They, I guess sometime in the 20th century, stopped just pumping raw sewage into the Thames and started treating it instead. And then they still discharged the treated water into the Thames, but it's now going through a treatment process

that wasn't there before. But yeah, but that thing designed by Basil get this made of bricks, like 300 something million bricks is still the foundation of this sewer system in London. Pretty amazing. I think so too, man, all because of the great stink of 1858, because of a heat wave that came through

and cooked several hundred years of poop and pee environment in dead bodies. This makes me want to do maybe a short stuff on the, when the Cuyoga River in Akron, or in Ohio burned. Rivers on fire, that's not a good sign. No, it's not. Poor Cleveland. Everybody just kind of hung their head like,

nah, totally. Yeah, that'd be a good short stuff, I think. I agree, Chuck. In the meantime, while we're whipping up that short stuff for you, if you want to know more about the great stink, head on over to the internet and read up on it, because there's plenty of great articles, including some of the ones we used today.

And since I said that, everybody, it's time for Listener Mail. Hey guys, started listening to stuff you should know sometime last summer, have been hooked ever since. I've been working my way back through the catalog and probably listened to a couple of hundred. I listened to some of the other shows you guys talk about, but they feel too scripted.

Your show is really well done, educational and entertaining. Thank you. Love, Andrew. No, getting, there's more. In a few different episodes, you guys use the word Yankee a lot. New England vampires for one, monument removal, come to mind.

And by the way, if we use Yankee, we're either quoting, or our tongue is in our cheek. We're not really saying Yankee. No, it's not loving, if any. Yeah, no one really says that. I mean, there are people that still say that. Not in anger. Yeah, but they're rednecks.

I'm from New England and have lived all over New England, and I'm still in New England. I wanted to share with you all my favorite definition of Yankee. If you're from the South, and by the way, I should preface this by saying I don't get it. If you're from the South, a Yankee is someone from the North.

If you're from the North, a Yankee is someone from New England. If you're from New England, a Yankee is someone from Vermont who eats pie for breakfast with a knife. Do you get that? No, I think what Andrew doesn't realize is that the person who told him that is insane.

And that the only person who gets it is the person who told him that. Well, he said this comes from an old-timey farmer in Vermont that I used to work for. So. Yep, great pie with a knife and left to himself a lot. Glad you got out of there alive, Andrew. Yep. That's all I'll say.

Thanks, Andrew. If anyone out there can shed some light on Andrew's farmer's friend's joke, we'd love to know. You can get in touch with us. Go to StuffYouShouldKnow.com and check out our social links there. And you can also just send us a good old-fashioned email

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