Stuff You Should Know - The Smiley, Stubborn Llama

Episode Date: March 7, 2024

Llamas are pretty great. They smile! They also spit and if they feel overworked will just lay down. There's a lot to admire there.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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it means to be human. Listen to the Psychology podcast on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Ben's here too sitting in for Jerry, the illustrious Ben who's doing his thing really well. That makes the stuff you should know. Hey, just so the listeners know, I finally met Ben in person. Oh yeah, was there a handoff?

In Athens, Georgia. Oh yeah. No, there wasn't a handoff, but I went to that R.E.M. tribute show in Athens and Ben lives in Athens. Yeah. So tell me about that show. Didn't Michael Shannon reunite R somehow? Well, Michael Shannon and Jason Narducci got together a band to play some REM tribute shows,

basically playing all of Murmur in Chronic Town and then like another 15 early deepish cuts. And in Athens, as happens at the 40 Watt in Athens when there's REM thingsum, things like that. The boys tend to come out and that night, all of them came out and shared a stage for the first time and like, they said 17 years, but it feels like more than that, but yeah, it was great.

That was something, huh? Cause 40 Watt is not a big venue. It's a tiny black box for everybody who's never been there. Yeah, a couple hundred people maybe,, but it was, you know, all of them perform. Like, you know, Peter Buck shows up a lot and performs. Bill Berry is starting to come out to perform a little bit every now and then. Mike Mills, if you start singing an aureum song in your backyard, he'll probably pop out from behind a tree and ask if you want to.

It's a backup. Right. But Stipe never performed. So when he jumped up, the place was just vibrating and I was like, it's happening. It's happening. But he didn't perform. He just was very sweet and said thank you and they all kind of congregated for a minute and that was it.

Oh, but he didn't perform? That's crazy. No, he didn't sing. I think everyone was just like, it's finally gonna happen. And he said, nope. No, but I get it. But it was a great night and met old Ben.

That's awesome, man. That's a heck of a story. Yeah. And it's a great way to kick off our llama episode, frankly, if you ask me. And I agree, I think. And you know what? I will agree because when I was very, very briefly in a band in college,

I don't know who had it, but someone in the band knew a friend with a llama farm. Wow. Who knew that was coming? So when we would go out to play in this big barn, we would drive through the llamas. That makes sense because somebody out in Georgia having a llama farm is so 90s.

That is such a 90s thing to do, you know? Totally, yeah. And it's funny because there was an attempt to introduce llamas to the United States well before the 90s and even the 80s when they kind of became a thing for the first time in the U.S. All the way back in 1914, the Mayor Buenos Aires tried to give Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan the gift of a llama. And that's when they would have entered the US the first time, but it turned out that that particular llama had foot and mouth disease, so it wasn't allowed in. Well, and it's also interesting because llamas, they're back in Fortness with North America

is interesting because they originated in North Americaness with North America is interesting, because they originated in North America on the Central Plains, like 40 million years ago, and then about three million years ago, they dispersed to South America. They were like, we're heading south, not for the winter, but perhaps forever. Permanent vacation like Aerosmith.

Exactly, the boy music reps are just flying all over the blades. And at the end of the last Ice Age, the Camelids, which we'll see they're part of the Camelid family, they went extinct in North America, even though that's where they started. Yeah. So you just kind of touched on something that I think is maybe the fact of the podcast. Lamas are members of the Camelid family. They share a common ancestor with camels themselves.

Hence camels originated in North America. Just mind blowing to me. Like take that central Eurasian steps. Now were there actual camels here? Yeah. I believe, yes, I looked it up and I can't remember exactly. So I'm sure I'm getting it dead wrong,

but I believe camels themselves did evolve here in North America and crossed over into Eurasia through the Bering Land Strait, same with horses. Wow. Yeah, I know, so USA, right? But also Mexico and Canada. Yeah, sure, we were USA back then, right? Exactly. They were domesticated. They're actually one of the oldest domesticated animals in history,

in the history of animals. They're in the Andean Highlands of Peru. Between four and five thousand years ago, they were domesticated and then back in the United States, they were redimesticated and that's obviously the only way they exist in the US now. Yeah. So, it was a little confusing to me and I went and hashed it out. Lamas have never existed in the wild. Lama-like animals and species that are related to llamas like the guanacos, guanacos.

They're wild and if you look up a guanaco, it looks like a wild llama, but llamas were domesticated from the outset. They were bred from guanacos, so they never existed in the wild and they still don't, which I find fascinating. They were bred out of whole cloth as a domesticated animal. It was never not domesticated, isn't that cool? Yeah, it's super cool. And they're specifically bred because they're a beast of burden. You know, like the Rolling Stones. Yeah, man, another music rap.

I'm gonna keep them coming, okay? You totally should. And we'll talk about their, you know, their beast of burdenness and how it's okay as far as that goes. But they also provided meat, obviously, to herdsmen. They could make candles out of their tallow, their clothing, although it's not quite like alp- it's not as effective, I guess, as alpaca wool.

They're still shorn, and we'll talk about that as well. And you know, they're hides and things like that. They're poo-poo they could use for fuel. They were a very useful animal. Yeah, super useful. The only large animal domesticated in the ancient Americas, and they definitely came in handy. They were put to good use and they were, like we said, they were never a wild animal. They were always bred. So humans always had a hand in how llamas were. And the llamas that are around today, again, they were bred from guanacos.

Yeah, guanacos, right? That's how you'd say that, right? It's gotta be, or guanaco, I'm not sure. Right, but they are, some people say that these are separate. Guanacos and llamas are separate. Other people say, no are separate. Guanacos and llamas are separate. Other people say, no, they're both members of the subspecies llama glama. Isn't that great?

Right. And then collectively, llamas, guanacos, vacunas, and alpacas are collectively known as lamoids, not to be confused with gradoids and that they're still related to camels because they're all originally camelids There's a lot of differences between them especially with body shape or body morphology But as we'll see they also share a lot of characteristics with camels still camels from the the Americas by the way Totally, but they don't have that hump That's one. They're much smaller Those are from the Americas, by the way. Totally, but they don't have that hump. That's one.

They're much smaller. Yeah, they're smaller. They're a little more slender. They do have long legs. They got the long necks. They got those cute little short waggy tails. Yes. Smaller heads, if you look at their face,

they have a split upper lip and big pointy ears. And they smile. I feel like we do, maybe we're, you know, have a predisposition to highlight animals who smile at us. Sure. I feel like we've done that a lot. They're really hijacks or brainwiring. Oh, totally.

But you look up, llama smile, and you're going to see some pretty cute stuff. Yes. They also have panoramic vision because their eyes are on the sides of their head, so they can see predators from coming a mile away. And what's something interesting about llamas that I didn't know about is they are naturally aggressive toward predators. They don't shy away. If they see like a fox or a coyote or something, they go after it and they chase it off, which

is pretty cool. As we'll see see it's very useful Yeah, nice defense. Although I Took that their main defense is like To charge it something like that But it's sort of a lot of bluster because they don't have a lot of defense. No it is bluster But they also have a lot of size on like any coyote or any flock certainly I didn't realize how big they can get they They also have a lot of size on like any coyote or any flock, certainly.

I didn't realize how big they can get. They, a llama gets about four feet at the shoulder, pretty tall, it's 1.2 meters. And males can weigh between 300 and 400 pounds, which is 135 to 180 kilograms. That's a hefty, hefty husky little boy there. Yeah, females can weigh between 230 and 350. And I saw a video of a guy whose llama busted out on his farm and went after the dog. And it was funny, he wasn't harming the dog, but he was chasing this dog and they're pretty fast.

They're way faster than I thought. They can hit a max speed of 40 miles an hour. That's insane. Which is just, yeah, I mean, I've seen them run, but I didn't think it was that fast. It's kind of like when a camel runs. I think it's a little deceiving how fast they are because of their big, low-pillow legs.

Right, right. It doesn't have that like intensity of a horse gallop. Right. But it helps them run at a predator or most importantly run away from a predator. I mean 40 miles an hour is really, really fast. That's like road runner fast. Yeah.

But imagine the road runner with a furry coat and a big old smile while he's running 40 miles an hour. What's going on with those feet too? So I say we talk about the feet and use it as a cliffhanger to take a break and then come back and talk about how those feet come in handy. How about that? Wowie Wow. So remember I said that they share a lot in common still with camels. Both of them, neither one of them are hooved animals. Camels have two toes and so do llamas. Camels have toenails in the front, but they don't use those for walking. On the bottom of the feet of llamas and camels are soft pads, very leathery and soft, that are not hooves,

which means that when they're walking on like rocks and mountains and stuff like that, they can actually kind of grip those rocks with their feet and their split-two toes, which makes them very sure-footed, which again made them very useful in the Andes, which again leads us to a message break. All right, we'll be right back. The End Don't drive distracted, brought to you by NHTSA and the ad council. Hi, I'm Martha Stewart, and we're back with a new season of my podcast. This season will be even more revealing and more personal, with more entrepreneurs, more trailblazers, more live events, more Martha, and more questions from you. I'm talking to my cosmetic dermatologist, Dr. Dan Belkin, about the secrets behind my

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Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Chuck, I think we kind of started to set it up pretty nicely. Lamas are sure-footed to say the least. That's right. One of the benefits of being unhooveed or maybe even anti-hoof. I've never talked to a llama. They've got no problem with hoofed animals. They're fine with it. All right.

So they're not antihooked. No. But that, like you said, that makes them very sure-footed, but it also, it doesn't tear up the side of a mountain like a hoofed does because they got a little give there. Yeah. So if you want to walk around and not accidentally start off a rock slide, bring a llama instead of like a cow. That's a good point.

I mentioned we would talk about there, whether or not they were good beasts of burden. They're okay. A llama that's about 250 can carry a load that's 100 to 135 pounds, maybe 15 miles, maybe 20 miles in a day. That's not bad at all. It's no ox or horse, but if you've got a lightish load

and you're going, you know, not the furthest distance, then you can do a lot worse than a llama. It's true. They couldn't pull, they couldn't carry human, they couldn't pull a machine. And I saw it spelled out that even if the Inca who really put the llama to good use spelled out that even if the Inca who really put the llama to good use had discovered the wheel, the llama still wouldn't have been able to be attached to anything bigger than probably like a wheelbarrow-sized type thing. They just don't have that strength, but they are good pack animals and that they can carry a lot of weight, just not like human weight. So if you have a ton of stuff, say you're mining silver pre-Columbian contact, you got a silver mine set up a Potosi, you need a

lot of llamas. And apparently there was a Spanish observer, didn't catch their name, who visited Potosi, which is a really important silver mine in what's now Bolivia, and found that the Inca were employing what they guessed to be about 300,000 llamas, transporting the silver ore from the mine to be refined. Yeah, I mean, that's a lot of llamas. And again, if each one of those can carry over, you know, 100 pounds, then they're moving some silver for sure. Sure. And it probably goes without saying, but you could also delight your child, as long as your child's under 100 pounds and let them ride the llama too.

They could have done that. Sure. I'm sure there was an Incan birthday party at some point where a kid rode a llama. That's right. They're also, you know, as far as being up there in the high dryness, they have a very high thirst tolerance, which is super handy, obviously, has a lot to do with their camel – camel-ness. They have a lot of endurance.

They can eat a lot of different kinds of shrubbery, which is great. And their blood has a really unusually high amount of hemoglobin. And as we all know, that protein is gonna carry oxygen from the lungs throughout your body. So that's an animal that's basically built to survive a high elevation where it's dry and where there's lots of dry grasses and shrubs to eat. So as animals themselves,

like without the human touch of Being used as pack animals just if you have some llamas hanging out with one another can't believe how I just put that They are gregarious, which means they need social Like social groups like you don't really want to have just a single llama or I even saw just a couple llamas You want to have a handful because they have specific ways of living and typically llama family group will have a single male and a handful of females and then whatever offspring were born from those by those females that year Yeah, exactly, and you'll see why in a minute

If you are the head of a family, if you're the male leading that group, you're going to be pretty territorial. You're going to defend your family. If a competing male comes in there that doesn't have a family that's like, hey, I might like to take yours, they will be pretty aggressive toward that, even though they're not super aggressive animals. Drive them out of there and say, go back to your bachelor pad. And by bachelor pad, we mean the group of males that don't have families

that all just seemingly hang out together and play cards. Yeah. There's another thing too that is really just loving about llamas. They actually will adopt and protect other species of animals. Remember how I said they're naturally aggressive toward predators? They'll actually defend other kinds of animals that they consider part of their group on say like a farm or a ranch from predators.

Yeah, I saw that they would adopt sheep and I wonder, I mean, they'll probably do this with all the animals, but I wonder if it's because the sheep, you know, in the face at least, and there are some similarities there, I think. That or the llamas are familiar with the whole Bahram you message that allows you to the sheep family. Or maybe it was a particularly, you know, interested male llama who saw that sheep and

was like, Hey, Shadidy, you wanna join our family? Yeah, for some reason I'm disturbed by that. You probably should be. They communicate with each other, mainly through body language, their posture, can kind of tell you a lot. Their ears apparently are gonna indicate their mood. They don't make a lot of noise. Lamas are pretty quiet if you have a llama farm.

But they will vocalize if they're predators around. And little mummies and babies can hum at one another. Like back and forth kind of sing to each other. And it's very sweet. Did you watch that YouTube I sent you? Oh, you know I did. So there's a YouTube, I can't remember the exact name, but just look up Lama hum. I think it's it'll come up, but there's a baby llama

Drinking from a bottle and the mom's standing by watching and the baby's just humming while it's drinking the mom hums back a little bit It's really really sweet It's pretty great and they are gentle for the most part But they are a little bit stubborn too because if you put too much weight on them if you're not treating them right then they're they're just like I'm just gonna have a sit-in basically. They won't budge. They won't move. They'll will spit at you They might hiss or kick at you. Yeah, and they're just like no no no That's not llamas don't play that game homie. All that behavior is shared in common with camels too. Camels are just like that.

Yeah, for sure. Also one other thing about the vocalizations, when they, when you said when they warn of predators, I looked that up too, and it sounds like a fork being scraped across a metal plate. Yeah, it's pretty aggressively annoying. Yeah, that's what it is.

It doesn't scare them off, It just annoys them away. Yeah, they're like fine. Yeah. So we said that the family groups consist of the offspring that were born that year. That's because the young, the little babies get to hang out with the moms who are very attentive of them for that first year. And then after that, the dominant male chases the baby off after its first birthday. For a couple of reasons, it makes sense. So number one, if it's a boy, it doesn't wanna have to fight over the females with the boy.

But if it's a girl, it doesn't wanna have a girl around that it might mate with and Kind of taper the gene pool a little bit. So it makes sense biologically and genetically for the dominant male just chase off female and male young. Yeah, totally They have a gestation period about 11 months. They only have one little BB at a time. And the male has, you know, those, they have a little harem around them because they're a polygenus. They will mate with all the females in their family that will accept that.

And they release, it's an induced ovulation. So once they do that thing, they're gonna release an egg within about a day or a day and a half after mating. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, I'm just withholding any jokes So did you say that they just ate for 11 months? Yeah, okay, and their offspring are called Cria Yeah, and they're they're like any Smallish long-legged mammal a little 18 to 20 pound llama

Standing for the first time within that first hour is just something that everyone just needs to make part of their life. Yep, for sure. And after that first hour that they stand, they can expect to live about 15 years from that moment on average as far as lifespan is concerned. Yeah, not bad. Speaking of little baby llamas being born, there's a movie I watched recently, another A24 knock it out of the park movie called Lamb.

Have you seen it? Hmm, I haven't seen it. I think I know the one with the, what's her name? Rumi. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's her last name? I wanna say Mopis, but it's my- I think it's Rapis. Rapis, what's her name? Rumi. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's her last name? I wanna say Mephys, but it's my- I think it's Raphees.

Raphees, that's right. I'm not sure that's how you pronounce it, but I haven't seen it, but there's almost no way to talk about it without spoiling it, right? I'm not going to, but I'm just gonna say, I'm gonna encourage you to please see it as soon as possible, it's so good.

And I started to watch it in subtitles, and then I realized they weren't talking that much. And when they were talking, it was kind of distracting from the visuals, which are just lovely. So I actually watched most of the movie in Icelandic. And you can just tell from, you can tell from the conversations in the context, generally what they're talking about.

Oh, that's funny. Enough that I don't feel like I missed anything from the movie. I probably missed some very subtle things here or there, but I got the broad strokes for sure. But I think I'll probably go back and watch it with the subtitles to see what I missed. But however you watch it, just watch it, it's so good. Yeah, it was on my list and I kind of forgot about it.

I know what the deal is. I just hope it's not a case where I'm talking about a part and you're like, yeah, that's when blank happens. And I'm like, no, no, no, that's not at all what happens. You weren't reading the subtitles. Right, exactly. It's actually far more disturbing and sad. It's possible.

It is an A24 movie. Yeah. So I just wanted to shout out to him, because it was good. Yeah, I can't wait. Should we take a second break here now and then come back and talk about how valuable llama fleece has been? Yeah, let's do that.

We'll talk about that llama fleece right after this. I'm Martha Stewart, and we're back with forward, don't drive distracted. Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council. Hi, I'm Martha Stewart and we're back with a new season of my podcast. This season will be even more revealing and more personal with more entrepreneurs, more trailblazers, more live events, more Martha and more questions from you. I'm talking to my cosmetic dermatologist, Dr. Dan Belkin, about the secrets behind my skincare. Walter Isaacson about the geniuses who changed the world. Angkor Jane about creating a billion-dollar startup. Dr. Elisa Pressman about the five basic strategies to help parents raise good humans. Florence Fabrikant about the authenticity in the world of food writing.

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Listen to Rachel Goes Rogue on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right. Well, quickly before we talk about Lambathlyse, I kind of forgot until I started researching this that there was a book series for kids called Lama Lama. Okay. And boy, oh boy, did I have to read a lot of Lama Lama for those first few years. Yeah. I totally forgot about it, but now I'm like, oh my God,

Ruby had like, I feel like 20 of those Lama Lama books. Is it like about a Lama that solves mysteries? No, it didn't solve mysteries. And I'm trying to remember the thrust of it. I think it was just about a llama that's like always getting in trouble and stuff. Oh yeah, that kind of llama. Like every children's book.

Sure. But we were gonna talk about fleece. Their fleece is pretty good. It's, they get shared about every two years. They don't produce the most fleece in the world. You get about six and a half to seven and a half pounds of fiber every two years, they don't produce the most fleece in the world. You get about six and a half to seven and a half pounds of fiber every two years. And like I said, it's not like that, like that wool of the alpaca that makes for such a wonderful, warm experience.

Yeah, it's also not like cashmere, which everybody knows it's the gold standard for soft wool and fleece, right? But I was reading an article by a historian named Emily Wachlid, W-A-K-L-I-D from Boise State who wrote a piece on the conversation about llamas and the natural history of llamas. And apparently one of the things that the Inca used to do was bury llamas sacrificially and ritually on land that they were claiming as their own. They're like, we're the ones with the llamas? Cause I don't know if we said this or not.

They were never exported outside of the Incan empire until after the Spanish came. So the Inca had like a lock on the llama. So they would bury llamas, mummify them and bury them on land that they were claiming as part of their territory. And so like a thousand years later, archeologists and anthropologists came along and dug these llama up.

And what they found is that these incredibly well-preserved llamas actually used to have fleece that was like on par with cashmere and that it just got lost over time as the Spanish came along and were like we have cashmere we're just gonna eat these llama instead. Yeah and it's crazy and I guess just the reason they didn't remain that way is because they left the area and went somewhere else? No, they were no longer bred so selectively

for their fleece, they were more bred to be meat-bearing. I gotcha. Well, I know that while they were meat-bearing for the Incas that they were highly revered, it wasn't just like, hey, we're gonna raise and kill this animal. They were very much revered in their sort of cultural and spiritual beliefs. And while they did sacrifice them along with Alpacas, they ate the meat at big, like important

community celebrations. They would do it to honor the gods, specifically the rain gods, I think. And yeah, and they would sacrifice and bury them along with like jewelry and stuff like that. Yeah. So they also today, you can see llamas dressed up in like pretty ribbons and hats, little cute little hats in like parades in areas like Bolivia. And they still, it's just been carried down over the generations. They're still very traditionally revered, right? There's an explanation that apparently some kinds of llama herders or llama farmers in the Andes

still consider llamas basically a conduit to the spirits of the mountains, the Waamani is what they're called. And that the Lama don't actually belong to these humans, they're just kind of tending the Lama. They're taking care of the Lama. And so they engage in all these rituals, which on their face sound really bizarre, like marrying Lama's, right? Oh man. It's so cute. It is cute. So they will take Lama's and they'll be like, you're gonna marry Esther over here. Right.

Fred. And so Fred and Esther are made to get married and I guess they lay down in a marriage bed or something like that. And all of this sounds like so weird. And like, of course it's just spiritual and mystical. So this kind of has this just bizarre cast to it, but I love it when this happens,

when like a custom turns out to have like a practical reason behind it, the llamas that go along with this are like, yeah, I'm gonna lay down in this marriage bed with Esther. This is fun. They prove themselves to be more docile. So those are the ones who are less likely to be slaughtered for meat or oil or tallow for candles. They're gonna be kept around and they're gonna breed

more and more so that the llamas in this flock become more and more docile generation to generation. Yeah, amazing. And I guess that's why we have the sort of sweet, smiley, gregarious friends that we have now, right? Exactly. You would not have wanted to meet a llama from 5,000 years ago.

No. You'd black your eye. Big trouble. One more thing about the wool and the fleece though, Chuck, is like while it is much coarser, although surprisingly light, apparently, the hairs themselves are hollow, they're working on getting it back

to something akin to cashmere. It's just gonna take a very long time. But they've kind of gone back to the traditional caregiving that they had pre-Spanish. Awesome. What is cashmere even? Isn't it some kind of goat? It's a goat. Okay.

Yeah. But like a special goat, right? Well, yeah, if it has cashmere, it's pretty special and expensive. That's an expensive goat. But what I meant is, there's not just any old goat has cashmere, right? No, I don't know the kind of goat. It might be a cashmere goat.

It probably isn't. I will look it up while you talk about that. Okay, sure. Because most of the goats I pet, I love them, but their hair feels like it's a horse brush or something. Right, and their eyes make them look like emissaries of Satan himself. Oh, it's true that sideways slit eye is very, very evil looking. Did you change or did you did you think that before the The Vich movie?

Or did you even see that? The what movie? Oh, the witch. The witch. God, I love it. Yeah. Yeah I've always thought that okay for sure. That's certainly reinforced it. Oh, yeah It didn't do the goat the goat population any favors with me. No, what was the name of that guy? He had a great name in the movie. I can't remember the dad No, the goat. Oh Like it was like something something like ugly sand, but it wasn't ugly sand.

It was like blackbilly or something. Evil black, evil Bart. Bluebeard. No, that's not it. And I know people are screaming at their black filler. Black Phillip, was that it? Black Phillip was it.

And in a double whammy of quick research, the cashmere goat is called the cashmere goat Yeah, of course, and it just so turns out that black Phillip was a cashmere goat Well, look at this. It's all coming full circle. That last part was a lie. Oh Black Phillip isn't he was not a cashmere goat. No. Oh jeez man Weird thing to trick me over you just got pummeled all over the place, huh? I did. All right, so let's move on then, because this to me, we kind of saved the best for last

as far as, you know, llamas are great. We love them. They smile, they spit. They'll carry some stuff for you. You can go visit them at a, and pet those long necks. For sure. And they're wonderful, but they are some of the most valuable research animals around and research animals that you can take very good care of and because all

they need are just like small samples of their blood for this stuff. Yeah. And the reason why is because they're after llama antibodies. Just like we have antibodies that attack or they tag, they destroy, they say, hey, go get this virus or this bacteria cell over here. Antibodies fight foreign invaders in your body. Well, being mammals and being alive, llamas have the same thing. They have antibodies too, but there's a very specific, apparently llamas and sharks. And I can't remember, there might have been something else that has These very specific antibodies that are way tinier way simpler and way more stable than the super

fruity highfalutin complex antibodies that we produce and that makes them extraordinarily valuable because they can target viruses and diseases that human antibodies can't Yeah, the camels was the other one no surprise, but sharks that just kind of came out of nowhere Yeah, but you know what? I'm pretty sure we'd mentioned that at some point in an episode. I Remember the horseshoe crab blood used to detect some like in using some medical tests, but I don't know Yeah, maybe one of our ill-advised videos from the old days, I'm not sure.

But yeah, the llamas, they have the antibodies that are formed in only two long chains, as opposed to the four chain antibodies that most mammals have. And this structure has really paid dividends in a lot of ways. And one of the biggest ones has been to neutralize specifically HIV and specifically all 60 HIV strains that they've tested.

Those llamas have antibodies that can work together and just neutralize that stuff. Yeah. And here's why. The antibodies are smaller. They're called... Well, actually, I've seen it both ways, but I think the antibodies that scientists create based on llama antibodies are called nanobodies because they're very, very small. Well, being small, they can connect to receptor sites on viruses that have very, very small receptors. And humans have these large, clumsy antibodies that just kind of slap around on the outside of the virus cell

and don't do anything. They can't attach to it. They can't attack it. They can't keep it from connecting with the cell. The Lama antibodies can. And HIV happens to be one of those viruses with the very tiny receptor sites that a Lama antibody just goes up to and says, you're with me now. Yeah, for sure. Also with potentially COVID-19, it is similar to HIV and the way that the nanobodies from the Lama combine super tightly to that COV-2 virus. And you may be able to think a Lama one day for COVID progress. Yeah, for sure.

I think they've already found, because COVID is like SARS, that's right. It's also closely related to MERS. I think they found that that can be used for that as well. They also, it's so weird. They've also figured out how to use these llama antibodies as biological warfare detectors too, because they don't just working on devices, they're biosensors. So they're, you know, obviously part biological that can detect like the very first hints of something bad going down biologically, which is what you want. You want super early detection and the sensors are made up of antibodies. And in the past, they were human cloned antibodies

called immunoglobin G, so I little G, big G. And that's what they use. So the idea is that somebody would launch like a cholera bomb or a smallpox bomb or something like that. That'd be so bad. It would be really, really bad. and all of a sudden you have this biosensor that can immediately detect that and the llama

Biosensors work way better than the other ones. Yeah, the the human ones work in Concept and I believe like in in actuality too, but they're so fragile Because human antibodies are fragile because they're complex Because they have like heavy chains connected to light chains They're just really fragile. They don't hold up well in harsh environments. They just totally fall apart at 150 degrees 65 degrees Celsius or more They're expensive. They are very expensive to reproduce because again, they're super complicated. And all of the stuff that llama antibodies are not

compared to human antibodies make it that much more valuable and precious in applications like this because they're simpler, they are sturdier and they are heartier too. They can survive in much harsher environments. So it's like we figured out this concept of using antibodies to detect biological warfare in the air the moment it's launched.

But we've replaced these kind of shoddy antibodies, the human antibodies with much sturdier, more reliable antibodies. So we actually can do this now. Yeah. I mean, it's amazing. And it's, you know, you and I have, uh, are not big fans of animal research or using animals in, in research like this. But from everything I saw, this was like a pretty decent scenario where these llamas are treated very well. They are, are in captivity anyway, as a species. And they're drawing, you know, just small amounts of blood from these llamas to well, there are in captivity anyway, as a species.

And they're drawing just small amounts of blood from these llamas to build this huge library. I think they have more than a billion different, they're called, I wouldn't even know how to say that, SD abs, single domain antibodies basically. And it seems like a win-win. For sure, because they're so good at drawing blood that the llamas don't even stop smiling. Right, aw.

One other thing I saw, if you ever see a llama with its ears turned forward and maybe even leaning forward a little bit, that llama is curious. It wants to know what's going on, it wants to meet you, it wants to hang out. You know, if I'm not mistaken, Ruby went to a kid's birthday party where you can like have farm animals on site and I'm pretty sure there was a llama there.

Yeah, yeah, I'm sure there was. Ever since the 80s, like they became like a common thing in the United States. Yeah. For my 35th birthday party, Yumi had a petting zoo, including a llama there. I was there, my friend. Did you ride the horse? I didn't ride the horse, but I ate some. I mean, if I may reveal your catered food. Sure. Is that okay?

Yeah. You guys had McDonald's, and I just remember humongous trays of stacked cheeseburgers and trays of french fries and it was a great great party. You forgot the Taco Bell tacos on another tray. Oh, I don't know. I don't even know if I saw this. Yep, there was McDonald's cheeseburgers and Taco Bell tacos and we even borrowed the trays. We asked him if we could borrow some trays and we actually took them back after the party. We even borrowed the trays. We asked him if we could borrow some trays and we actually took them back after the party. That seemed like a hundred years ago.

It was. Maybe a hundred and fifty, man. So long ago. It was good times, though. Yep. Good times. Had by all. We just had one all together talking about llamas.

And if you want to know more about llamas, go out and meet one. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. Instead of Listener Mail, we're gonna take this opportunity to reinforce that we are going out on tour this year. Oh boy. And this is it. These are all the cities we're doing for the year. We rarely have them all locked in this early, so we're pretty excited.

But May 29th and 31st will be in Medford, Mass outside of Boston then down to DC and then back up to New York City finally at Town Hall there. Right and then what about August? August 7th, 8th and 9th will be in Chicago then Minneapolis once again we're so happy to be back there and we're super excited to add Indianapolis to our list of cities that we've never been to. Yep. And then what? And then we're going to wind it all down in September, back in Durham, North Carolina, at the Carolina Theater there on September 5th. Such a lovely place. It was great. And then closing it out in Atlanta once again on September 7th.

And you can go to our website, go to these venue websites, to get tickets and as a reminder, please make sure you are only at venue websites, because a lot of times it'll just say, stuff you should know tickets. Oh, here they are, $180, that sounds expensive. If you ever see tickets that are more than like, I think the highest error is like 60 bucks or something,

maybe 65 some places for like front row? For face value. Like the, they'll add like some of those ticket vendors add a bunch of stuff, but like the face value shouldn't be more than that, right? Yeah. So if you see a ticket for more than that, then that means you're, you're not on the right website. Or if you're required to pay only in cryptocurrency, you might want to go to a different website

too. But we're super excited. It's a great show and we just we can't wait to see everybody. Yeah, come on out everybody. If we made two to our own horns, it is loads of fun for us and it seems based on how people respond for the audience as well. Yeah. Oh yes, you can go to linktree.ly.sk or you can go to stuffyoushouldknow.com and there's all of the links and stuff like that too. All the ticket sites in there on sale now. So we'll see everybody for the rest of the year, huh?

Yeah. And now how do we end the show? I don't even remember. Oh yeah. If you want to get in touch with us in the meantime, not to ask about parking or anything like that at any of the venues, you can email us at stuffpodcasts.ihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Hi, I'm Laura VanderKam. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker. And I'm Sarah Hart Unger, a mother of three, practicing physician, writer, and course creator. We are two working parents who love our careers and our families. On the best of both worlds podcast each week, we share stories of how real women manage work, family and time for fun. From figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals, we want you to get the most out of life. Listen to Best of Both Worlds every Tuesday on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts

or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast. I'm a cognitive scientist and I've written 10 books and hundreds of articles on topics such as intelligence, introversion, and education. The Psychology Podcast is a place where we investigate the different ways in which we can unlock human potential. And where I get to interview some of the most extraordinary and fascinating people. And we have real conversations about what it means to achieve success and what it means

to be human. Listen to the Psychology podcast on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's your favorite throwback podcast hosts, Jessica Bennett and Susie Bannacarum here to announce a new season of our show in retrospect, which means a whole new batch of episodes diving into the pop culture moments we love and love to pick apart. From the dethroning of the first black Miss America

to the legacy of a lesbian joke from four calf-down loving golden girls. Listen to In Retrospect on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.