Stuff You Should Know - What is a hangover, really?

Episode Date: October 15, 2009

After a night of heavy boozing, many partygoers find themselves the victim of a hangover. But what exactly is a hangover, and what causes it? Join Chuck and Josh as they break down the science behind hangovers -- and how to avoid them -- in this podcast. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me is Charles Chuckers Bryant and that means this is Stuff You Should Know right? Yes the over 21 years old Chuck Bryant. Yeah that's a big deal for this one Chuck. We're just going to go ahead and COA right now. Say that this is about drinking and if you're under 21 you should not drink. Chuck have you ever consumed an alcoholic beverage?

I have and if you're still COA, if you're over 21 you should drink responsibly. Yes don't drink and drive if you have a problem. Yeah heavy machinery is a big one. If you have a problem you can contact Alcoholics Anonymous. Right I've always wanted to test that one get really plowed and just sit down behind a bulldozer. I always imagine forklifts with heavy machinery. I go straight to the dozer. Well so yes I have had an alcoholic beverage before. What was your experience with it like? Did you feel a little lightheaded, a little crazy,

a little uninhibited? I wanted to kiss somebody. Did you end up kissing anybody? I did, I kissed my dog. Didn't you make out with a friend's sister at a YouTube concert once? I did. Were you under the effects of alcohol during that time? I was.

Okay. This was in 1992 give me a break. Chuck did you end up with a hangover? That day? Yes I did. The same day? It'll be the next day. Yeah sure.

So how did you feel? I felt I had a headache, I had a poor sense of well-being, I had sensitivity to light and sound, diarrhea, loss of appetite, trembling nausea. Fatigue. You had the whole list. Dehydration, anxiety, trouble sleeping, weakness. Wow. Yeah.

That's a bad hangover right there. That's all the symptoms. You know the one that always gets me the worst whenever I have a hangover is the loss of the sense of well-being. I feel like I am right there on the edge of danger. Everybody's gunning for me. I feel horrible the next day. Really?

Yeah. It's really bad. It really, I've always assumed it affects my serotonin level. Sure. But I didn't see anything in this article about that. Right. I thought I was going to have to get taken to the hospital in Portland, Oregon one time. Did you?

Yeah. The next day, Emily asked me, it was her friend's wedding. She said, you okay? Do you need to go to the hospital? And I went, maybe. That was serious. Wow. So let's talk about this, Chuck.

Yes. What are the mechanisms that lie behind the cursed and dreaded hangover? Vysalgia. Yeah. Is that the correct pronunciation? That's how I took it. That's the medical. Menarche.

Medical name for hangover is Vysalgia. Yeah. And it comes from a Norwegian word for uneasiness following debauchery, travis, and a Greek word for pain, algia, which is weird. I've never seen a Norwegian and Greek put together. I haven't either. But yeah, you come up with Vysalgia. Can I say the Bible verse too?

Yeah. Yeah, there's a Bible verse that talks about hangovers. It's Isaiah 511. Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning, that they may follow strong drink. In other words, I feel real sorry for you that you had to get up early if you got hammered last night. Yeah. True words have never been written in the Bible. At least translation there.

Yeah. So okay, so we've got that down. We have the word origin and a Bible quote as this pretty much represents whenever you talk about a hangover, right? So what's going on there, Chuck? Well, there's a bunch of things. Let's go ahead and start with vasopressin. Yeah, here is, by the way, everyone, a cocktail party conversation tidbit.

So at your next cocktail party, you might want to just bring this up? Uh-huh. Okay. It might be kind of depressing to bring this up actually at a cocktail party. Well, this is how you explain breaking the seal, which I know that you have experienced. Sure. It's crazy. Once you urinate and we're going to stick to the clinical terms here, Chuck.

All right, let's keep it above the board. Breaking the seal, that's clinical. Once you urinate that first time after you've started drinking, it seems like you just keep going and going and going and you can't stop and you actually can't, right? Right. So vasopressin. Vasopressin, yes. When you drink booze, it enters your bloodstream and the pituitary gland blocks the creation of

vasopressin and without this, your kidney starts sending water straight to your bladder basically. Right, to the tune of four times more than you actually drink. So you drink 250 milliliters of alcohol. You can shoot out up to a thousand milliliters or a liter. Is that the clinical term too? Shoot out. Yeah, so that's no mistake. If you've ever had a few beers and you're thinking, wow, this is so weird.

I use a bathroom and now I can't stop, that's vasopressin right there. Right, and that's called the diuretic effect. As the presence of alcohol increases in the bloodstream, you expel a lot more water, right? But you're not just expelling water. Also, we should say this leads directly to dehydration. If you're expelling four times more liquid than you're consuming, brother, you're getting dehydrated. Yeah, which is one of the signature results of the hangover.

And you get the headache because of that and other things too. You do. In the headache, we've talked about this before. I don't remember where. So we probably shouldn't try to come up with a timestamp. But when you have a hangover, your brain actually shrinks. The next day, the other organs in your body are like, you brain, you've got a bunch of water. I'm thirsty.

Exactly. So a lot of the water is shuffled from your brain to other organs, causing your brain to actually shrink in size, which pulls on the membranes that connected to the skull, the meninges. Right. And you know what? When you have a really bad hangover, you wake up and you feel like the membranes of your skull are being pulled in different directions.

It definitely feels like that. Yeah. So when I read this, I was like, oh, so that's what that is. Or like there's a 400-pound ham-fisted man with hair on his knuckles, like doing little twirls in your head. Right. Yeah. Have you ever, speaking of breaking the seal, I don't think they did this in Athens at Georgia,

but I know some friends at Georgia Southern, there were bars there that had the drink till you pee for free promotion. Have you ever heard of those? No, but it sounds awesome. Basically, like starting at six o'clock, they monitor the bathrooms, and everyone in the bar gets to drink for free until the first person in the bar goes to the bathroom. And I don't think they had that in Athens. Yeah.

They didn't when I was there. And of course, because it's a college, there's dudes peeing in beer pitchers in the corner. Sure. You know, just to keep, to not have to pay the two dollars. Or whether or not there's that, you know, contest or promotion. So it's science. Science. So, OK, that's vasopressin, right?

Yes. Resulting in dehydration. But when you're urinating everywhere, every which way, whether it's in a beer pitcher or otherwise, you're also expelling a lot of other needed stuff. Yes. Like electrolytes, say, potassium. Salt, potassium, magnesium. And these all affect how your cells function, how your muscles function.

Right. And you're getting rid of it without putting it back in. So you're going to feel lousy. Yes, indeed. You are going to feel lousy. So you're dehydrated. You've lost electrolytes, right? And the electrolyte imbalance is really important.

If you have too much salt and your electrolyte imbalance is too high, you die. Sure. If you have too little, you get the shakes. Right. The tremors, which I understand is the most uncommon symptom of hangovers, which makes me nervous because I get the shakes just about every time the next day. I've never gotten the shakes. What?

I've never gotten the shakes. Wow. It also points out in this article that hangovers are subjective. So for each person, you know, they might experience different like, oh, I've never had a hangover or all I get is thirsty. When you get the shakes and you have a loss of a sense of well-being. Yeah, that's like Nick Cage and leaving Las Vegas. Kind of.

Wow. Yeah. I've always been like, wow, that'd be great to have a grocery cart in a liquor store. What a great scene. Should we talk about glycogen real quick too? Yeah, that's another thing you lose. Yes. The glycogen is a key energy source and it goes to the liver and turns into glucose.

Is that correct? Right. Well, the liver turns it into glucose. Oh, and then sends it out once again via the urine. Once again, your liver's like, what the heck is going on and just does something. And all of a sudden, you've just lost all of your energy. Right. I'll just pee everything out just to be sure.

Exactly. Basically, it's what's going on. Yeah. And that actually accounts for the weakness the next day of fatigue. And actually, that's not the only thing that accounts for fatigue. You don't sleep very well after a night of heavy drinking. Glutamine. Yes.

You have glutamine, which is another, it's actually a stimulant. Natural stimulant. Yes, which is the only good kind of stimulant. Right. And when you drink alcohol, the production of this natural stimulant is actually blocked. Right. So when you stop drinking, e.g., go to sleep, your body tries to make up for lost time and overproduces glutamine.

So it means you're not getting as good a sleep. Exactly. And the next day, you also feel restless and anxious. Right. Maybe you get the shakes. Sure. That's another cocktail party tip. If you start saying all these things at your next cocktail party,

you probably won't be invited back to the next cocktail party, though. I don't know. I think you could wow some people. It depends on how cool your cocktail party is. I guess I could see them all saying, like, why are you telling us all these awful things about drinking? Unless it's my kind of cocktail party, everyone would be like, this is great.

For me, another one. Right. Screw glycogen. Screw vasopressin. So what else, Josh? Well, we could talk about the impurities of liquor. Okay, well, the different alcohols. Yeah, pretty much the rule of thumb is the darker the alcohol,

the more impure it is. And therefore, the heavier the hangover. Yes. Which is why I think everyone pretty much knows that your worst alcoholics that start drinking every morning when they wake up, they're probably drinking vodka. Yes. It's actually a good thing to drink if you are an alcoholic,

because you're going to be able to be as close to a functional alcoholic as possible. Right. How about that study with the bourbon? Yeah. 30, they did study between bourbon and vodka. And 33% of the people who drank amount of bourbon relative to their body weight had a severe hangover and only 3% had a hangover when they drank vodka. That's a big drop.

Vodka, white wine, that kind of thing. Light rum. Yeah, gin. Yeah. Conversely, dark rum is bad. Red wine. Light tequila is good. Basically, if it's dark, it's going to kill you.

I'm in bad shape then, because you know me, I'm a bourbon, red wine, beer guy. That's funny. I'm like the whatever's in the glass guy. Right. That's good. You're fun to have at the cocktail party, because you're not picky. No.

Long as you don't run on ice. Totally not. As long as there's not a cigarette butt floating in it, I'll drink it. And then sometimes even then. Don't think that hasn't happened before, Chuck. Oh yeah. Basically, what I took from this article is when you drink, you are poisoning your body through conongers, through impurities in the alcohol,

but also through the body's natural processes of breaking down alcohol too. Right. It actually, there's a byproduct produced when the liver metabolizes alcohol, called acid aldehyde. Yeah. Take this one, because this kind of, I read it like three times, and I was still a little lost. Okay, Chuck.

Allow me. Please. So basically, when the liver metabolizes alcohol, it produces a byproduct that's a toxin called acid aldehyde. And acid aldehyde is actually more toxic to the body than alcohol itself, which is crazy. Right. But we have a natural mechanism for neutralizing acid aldehyde,

called appropriately enough acid aldehyde dehydrogenase. Appropriately. So that stuff goes and attacks the acid aldehyde, right? Then we have this other stuff that is called glutathione. Right. Right. And it contains high levels of a substance called cysteine. Mm-hmm. And cysteine actually is attracted to acid aldehyde.

So the two things combined, acid aldehyde, dehydrogenase, and the cysteine in the glutathione, combine to neutralize the acid aldehyde, right? Right. And it does it pretty quickly. You are going to feel some ill effects, but the less you drink, the easier it is for these two substances to neutralize this byproduct as the alcohol metabolizes.

Okay, you with me so far? Yeah, yeah, makes sense. Here's the problem. You have a limited store of glutathione in your liver. Right. So you use it up pretty quick. And women have even less than men, correct? Exactly, which accounts for why women tend to have

more harsh hangovers than men. Sure. Not just body weight, although that does matter. Right. So you use up your glutathione stores, and once you do that, your blood is just basically circulating this toxin acid aldehyde while the liver generates more glutathione. Hence, you've got this horrible hangover,

and why, ultimately, time is the only remedy for it. Yeah, well, let's get to that in a second. Let's get to the remedies. Let's talk about liquor before beer, never fear, or is it the other way around? Beer before liquor, never sicker. Never sicker. Yeah, you're right.

A little bit of truth to that, turns out. I love it when folk sayings turn out to be true. Totally. It turns out that the carbonation in beer speeds up the absorption of alcohol. So if you start with beer, your body's going to have, and then move on to liquor, your body is, in fact, going to have a harder time processing those toxins, even though there's a certain age. My friend Justin and I, you know Justin,

we were talking about this a few years ago. Someone was remarking about, we had a big night out and like, well, was it liquor before beer or beer before liquor? I can't remember. And I just said, you know what, it doesn't matter anymore. No, you're going to be hurting. You reach a certain age, and it either doesn't affect you, or it's going to affect you no matter what.

Those are college rules. I've noted through my own personal observations that at about age 24, you start getting really severe hangovers. I haven't figured out exactly why yet, but that seems to be about the age when you switch over from, I can do this constantly to, oh God, why? Why? I've got the shakes.

I have a loss of sense of well-being. Right. Yeah. I'm vomiting, I have diarrhea. I don't know why. Maybe that's when puberty ends, there's something to do with hormones still floating around in the body. If your puberty ended at 24, then no.

Puberty does end in your 20s. Really? Uh-huh. Yeah. My puberty ended when I was like 14. I know. Five, I'm Chuck. Could have started when I was seven, so.

Hi, I'm Chuck, age seven. Where are we now? Are we talking about vomiting? Yeah. Turns out that actually does help. And also, Chuck, since we have a drinking game based on this, and we're talking about hangovers, allow me. Okay.

Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck. That should keep him for a little while. Go ahead, Chuck. Alcohol, what's going on there is it is indeed better to vomit, because when alcohol is absorbed directly through the stomach, and when that happens, the lining of your stomach is going to become irritated and say, hey, thanks for putting all this poison in me. Yeah.

And it's going to start secreting hydrochloric acid. Right, and the hydrochloric acid is actually what makes you vomit. Right, it sends messages to the brain that says expel. Yeah, the stomach is really connected to the brain via hormonal signals. Big time. Which don't necessarily end after puberty. Right. And yeah, your stomach says, you've got to get rid of this stuff.

And, yeah, and it turns out that you probably shouldn't make yourself throw up, because it's dangerous. It could become a problem. If you're drinking so much and you're making yourself throw up, then... You probably do have a problem. You should check into a clinic or something. Sure. Check into promises in Malibu.

If you got the cash. But it will make you feel a little better, because obviously your body is not going to have to process whatever alcohol is still in your stomach. So there you have it. What are we on to now, buddy? I think we're, we kind of nailed what it is. So should we talk about some of the cures that people spout? Yeah, there are plenty of hangover cures.

Everybody's got one. Yeah, and actually, I'm surprised to find that some of them actually are real. Now that you understand what causes a hangover, you can actually identify what will help cure a hangover. Sure. Because really what's going on is you've expelled electrolytes. Yeah, it's biology. You've expelled, exactly.

You've expelled your natural energy stores. Uh-huh. You are dehydrated. Right. And your brain is shrunk. It's shrunk. Yeah, so what do you do to make yourself feel better? Chuck, my personal favorite is hair of the dog.

Will that help me or no? Uh, it will not. You know where that comes from? Uh, it's the Bible again, isn't it? No. Nazareth? Medieval times, though. The hair of the dog that bit you, supposedly, if you got bit by a rabid dog,

you would take some of that dog's hair and apply it to your wound and that would cure you. This is the same culture that buried a cat at midnight to cure warts. Exactly. Yeah. So just like that is false, hair of the dog, it's false as well. Having a drink the next day to make yourself feel a little bit better will not work. It might make you feel a little bit better in the short term, but ultimately you're just adding more toxins that your body's going to have to process and you're kind of just

staving off the inevitable hangover. Unless you just drink all day again. Sure. And then you'll have the hangover the following day. Double hangover. Yeah, exactly. Unless you just keep going until you die. Yeah.

And then you never catch us up with you. You won the game. I was taking a walk with Emily yesterday with the dogs. This shows how twisted I am. And I saw it was eight o'clock in the morning, seven thirty in the morning, something like that. And there was a guy down the street from us in the parking lot, you know, cracking his first King Cobra.

And I said, you know what I'm, I said, 99 times out of a hundred, I see those people and I think, God, how could you live your life like just getting bombed the moment you wake up every day? I said, but every once in a while. I think what a way to live. Right. She said, uh-huh. She said, what is wrong with you?

We kept walking. She keeps you in line, doesn't she? Well, she doesn't let me get up and get drunk every day if that's what you mean. Yeah, that's keeping you in line. Okay, she does. Um, Chuck, one of the things that kills me is drinking coffee. I learned a long time ago that if I ever have a hangover, I stay away from coffee. So I was surprised to find in this article that actually it does have some benefits.

Agreed. Which are? Uh, it will actually, um, alleviate your headache a little bit because it's caffeine and that's a vasoconstrictor. So it reduces the, uh, your blood vessels. It reduces the swelling. Uh-huh. So that'll help a little bit.

It'll help cure the headache some. But it'll dehydrate you. Because it's a diuretic. Because it's a diuretic. Which is how you really got into this trouble in the first place. So stop being stupid. I would say coffee along with a lot of water might be a good idea. Yeah, possibly.

That's just me. Right. Okay. So what else? Fried food. Fried food the next day. Yeah, which is odd because I know I crave fried food the next day. Cheeseburger.

Me too. Bacon, chili, cheeseburger. Dude, Emily eats. Two bacon, chili, cheeseburgers. Emily eats like two hamburgers a year and they're on hangover days. Yeah. She doesn't eat meat, beef at all. But when she wakes up with a really bad hanger, she's like quarter pounder.

It's very, it's strange because obviously she's not the only person who experiences that craving, but that doesn't necessarily help and could actually make you vomit. It could tip the scales when you've got a bunch of hydrochloric acid in your stomach. Right. But it could help if you ate a bacon, chili, cheeseburger or two bacon, chili, cheeseburgers before you started drinking it. Why? Because it contains oil and the fat in the grease will line your stomach and it takes

longer to digest. Absolutely. And in fact, in the Mediterranean, they have long drank a little bit of olive oil before imbibing. Yeah. It's an old thing they do. Yeah. I'm not either.

I like olive oil, but I'm not going to drink a tablespoon of it. No. Me neither. Okay. How about a banana? I'm just going to pull that one out of my head. Out of your banana tree. Bing!

Remedy. Yes. Okay. Loaded with potassium, electrolytes and. Yes. Because remember, you lose potassium, which is an electrolyte, so if you can restore the balance. So banana will help your hangover as well as eggs.

Yes. Since we're on breakfast. Because they contain cysteine, right, which is something that's attracted to acid aldehyde. Right. So eggs in a banana and water would be a great way to start your morning if you had a hangover. Not just water, but water loaded with sugar and salt actually. Right.

Because the carbonation would do the same thing as it did with the beer. Right. Beer before liquor. So you want uncarbonated water, loaded with salt, sugar. Not a red bull. No. Because it has caffeine. So you want.

Not an energy drink. Uncarbonated non-caffeine water with salt and sugar, which I think I just described as a sports drink. Right. Right. A banana and some eggs. Or you know what else you can do instead of water, put some fruit juice in there. Nice.

Fruit juice. Fruit juice is the kind of sugar you want. Fruit toast and studies have shown that it increases the rate at which your body gets rid of the toxins and that's a good idea. It also gives you vitamins of course. Okay. What about say, et cetera, acetaminophen? Acetaminophen is, well you want to avoid et cetera because it has caffeine.

Right. Which can help, but ultimately not. Right. And acetaminophen, I believe you don't want to take because that can mess with your liver. Ultimately, yeah. If you have alcohol in your system. If you take acetaminophen for a hangover, you are probably going to feel a little better. Actually, you'll probably feel a lot better.

But in the long run, your liver is going to fall apart. Yeah. You're doing your body damage. You're going to expel that through your urine. So what you want to do is get a non-caffeinated anti-inflammatory prostaglandin inhibitor. Which is also known as aspirin. Yeah. Which is good.

So aspirin will help. It's shown that prostaglandin actually wreaks havoc on your body during hangover. So if you take a prostaglandin inhibitor, you're going to feel a lot better. And apparently there have been studies that show, yes, aspirin helps. Especially if you take one before you go to bed and you take two when you wake up. But beware, people with tender stomachs often vomit from aspirin. Right. You know what my cure is?

What? Let's talk about each other's cures. Have you got one? Surely you do. What do I do? You want to hear mine? Yeah. Mine is, my deal is I can't sleep in anymore.

It doesn't matter if I was out till three in the morning, I'm still going to wake up at seven. It's just the way it is when you're old. You'll experience this one day. I get up at seven like I normally do and I drink a pound, like three or four glasses of water, take a couple of aspirin, and then I get right back in bed and see if I can get like another hour to sleep. And then I wake up and it feels great.

That works crazy well. Especially works with Advil if you take a couple of Advil and you have even like a half hour, preferably an hour extra to sleep. For some reason, Advil always makes me sleepy. It makes me fall asleep very easily. Never figured out why. But yeah, you wake up an hour later and you are set. Yeah.

It's a great one. Because sleep is only real, real key to curing a hangover, they say. Yeah. Well, time. Well, that's usually what I rely on is time. And I pound a few Coca-Cola's in the morning, which is not good for me, but it works, right? Black aspirin, is that what they say? Yeah.

And then I don't make eye contact with anybody because they're all out to get me. That's how I make it through the day when I have a hangover. Sure. And again, we should say please don't find any of this funny, entertaining, or amusing if you're 21 years or older. And if you are 21 years or older, please find it amusing responsibly. Right. We should talk about some of these over-the-counter like anti-hangover pills that you can buy.

You heard of these? Yeah. Like chasers? Yeah. They're basically multivitamins, and here's the deal. Well, some are activated carbon, which can work. True. But here's the deal.

If you read on the package, it'll say something like this. Drink a full 12-ounce glass of water before you start drinking and take a pill. And then after your second or third drink, drink another glass of water and take another pill, and then do that again. Then before you go to bed, drink a glass of water with a pill, and then wake up and drink a glass of water with a pill. So you're basically taking a vitamin, downing tons of water, which is... And that's the key is the water, right?

The key, yeah. You're hydrating yourself. So it's a bit of a rip-off. Right. But not necessarily, because it is recommended that you do take a multivitamin the next morning. But just take a multivitamin. Don't pay for some hangover cure.

You know what else helps is to actually be cognizant and not a total drunk while you're drinking. Yes. If you drink glass-for-glass water for alcohol, number one, it keeps you hydrated, but number two, it also paces your drinking so that your body has more time to process its alcohol. It's not just like, boom, boom, boom, you know. I've gotten better at that. Have you?

Oh, yeah, sure. I try to be... If I have a big night out, I try to be pretty aware of drinking a couple glasses of water here and there, and I always will pound two or three glasses before I go to bed. Good for you, Chuck. It's the way to do it. All right. So there you have it.

That's the hangover, right? Yeah. So a couple other things you can do beforehand is eat, obviously, alcohol in an empty stomach. It's going to get you there quicker, but it will get you sicker and make you feel worse. You love rhyming. So water, what else do you say, multivitamins, drinking moderation, of course, is the key with everything. Watch what you're drinking, red wine, bourbon, it's going to make you feel bad.

It tastes sugary sweet on your tongue, but it'll make you feel worse. I'm in trouble, though. I wish I could learn to drink vodka. I just don't dig it. Oh, fuck, it's so wonderful. It's a nice... Yeah. I drink gin and tonics occasionally during the summertime months, but...

I can't drink those. Gin actually makes me crazy. I have a self-imposed ban on gin. I won't drink it. I don't allow myself to drink it because it makes me nuts, and apparently I'm not the only one. That makes you smart. In the 17th century, the UK actually banned, or I should say England, banned gin because

it was making everybody so nuts. Yeah. Gin was banned in England for a little while because people went like I did. Sure. Different alcohols do that. Tequila is notorious for making people violent and act out of sorts. I've never had a problem with tequila. My buddy, Scotty, has a red wine thing, completely personality shift when he drinks it.

Really? Yeah, he becomes a completely different person. That's so odd. You know Alexander the Great died from a red wine drinking competition. Really? Yeah, one of his soldiers challenged him to it, and they apparently drank like 5 million gallons a piece, and Alexander the Great went off and died. Boy, I bet the alcohol back then was rough too, man.

Yeah. You know? Yeah. They love their wine. Those are the good old days. Well, if you want to learn absolutely every last detail there is to know about a hangover, you should read this fine, fine article by freelancer Lacey Perry called How Hangovers Work.

They've been hangover in the handy search bar at HowStuffWorks.com. Also check out our Kiva.org page. $2,500 bucks and growing. So far, yeah. I'm very proud of you guys. You can help fund a loan for an entrepreneur in a developing country for as little as $25 bucks, and best part, you get it back. We have a team that's to be found at www.kiva.org slash team slash stuff you should know.

If that's too hard, you can click on community and then search stuff you should know. And we've been posting a link at the bottom of every one of our blog posts too. Yes. We've got close to 100 members and about $2,500 bucks raised, and it's pretty cool. Let's do Listener Mail. Let's do Listener Mail. Okay, Josh, I'm going to call this Don't Kill Me. I'm just the enumerator.

This is a good one. Hi, guys. Hope this finds you well. My name is Mark, and I live in Fishkill, New York, which is an interesting town. I was listening to the Gross National Happiness podcast, and you mentioned the census worker being killed. I thought I'd send an email. I was a census bureau worker in 2000.

I was a carefree 19-year-old on summer break. My friends and I saw the ad in the paper and took the exam and became official enumerators, including a shiny plastic badge from the Treasury Department to boot, he says. Our task was to travel door to door and talk to the people who didn't return their survey. Some people got the short form, some got the long form, and I remember the forms were assigned at random. Usually the long formers didn't mail them back in, and that's who they usually had to confront.

Did it go shake down? It's shaking down. People were downright mean when I knocked on their door. One man asked me to hold on for a second. He closed the door, and within a few minutes I heard the garage door open, and he drove out and waved, goodbye. One woman answered the door with a baby in her arms, shouting something at me. I heard dogs barking, and the next thing I knew she had let the dogs loose on us, and

I was running safely back to the safety of my Buick Regal. I quickly learned my lesson, and when someone would open the door and give me the skinny on their neighbors who didn't mail their forms back in, I was happy, and I was even happier when it was a grandma who would offer me a cold drink, because you know, the old folks there are just like, come on in, let's talk for a while. I'm so lonely. Exactly. I did not know, however, that enumerators were killed.

I must have missed that part of the training. Most of the rants would be anti-government. They would say I was the man, told to get off their property, and all the expletives that go with it. It's not easy being an enumerator, so give them a shout out. So shout out to all you enumerators out there. Hey, hey. And that's pretty much it.

He said, I thought I'd chime in. Actually, I was chiming in this morning in the car, and then realized that I was alone. So Mark. I'm so lonely. Mark, the former enumerator, is a funny guy, and he says, by the way, podcast suggestion, how hippy rob works. Ooh, that's a good one. That would be a great one.

Yeah. That would be audiobook. I'm still trying to track them down. Sure. Yeah. So thanks, Mark, and good luck if you enumerate in the future, and all you enumerators out there counting heads. I'm sorry, I didn't know it was so rough on you.

And let's see if you're an enumerator or a denominator, or you know the current whereabouts of hippy rob, put it in an email to StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. Want more HowStuffWorks? Check out our blogs on the HowStuffWorks.com homepage. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you?

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