Stuff You Should Know - Why's that dude in that dumpster?

Episode Date: March 17, 2011

Freegans prefer scavenging, volunteering and squatting to the more mainstream consumer practices of buying, working and renting a home. But how does this actually work, and why are these people sometimes called 'Dumpster divers?' Tune in to find out. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Flooring contractors agree. When looking for the best to care for hardwood floors, use Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner. The residue-free, fast drying solution is specially designed for hardwood floors, delivering the safe and effective clean you trust. Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner is available at most retailers where floor cleaning products are sold and on Amazon. Also available for your other hard surface floors like Stone, Tile, Laminate, Vinyl, and LVT. For cleaning tips and exclusive offers, visit Bona.com slash Bona Clean. The War on Drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call,

like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid work. Be sure to listen to the War on Drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me as always is Charles W. Chuck Bryant. We are the Koch Brothers, and we own you. How you doing? Good, sir. Top of the morning. I saw you give me a tip of the hat and everything. Dothiel Cab? Yeah. Wow, we're suddenly like

Will Ferrell and Anchorman. You're a London gentleman, but in Rome. Chuck, I think before we go any further, we should plug our Kiva team. Big time, awesome Kiva team. That's kiva.org slash team slash Stuff You Should Know. Nice, yeah. So we can find us. Yeah. We founded that team in October 2009, right? Chuck had the brilliant idea. By October 2010, last October, we'd already hit the quarter of a million dollars in loans mark, right? That's right. We are on track to hit half a million dollars in loans made to entrepreneurs in developing countries by May. We just hit 400,000, our team did, and we just wanted to let everybody know who's not a member. The team is open. Just go on and make a loan. 25 bucks is the lowest increment you can make, but it's a loan.

This is not just an outright donation because it's repaid. You can re-loan again or you can take it and go on your merry way. Yeah. But it's pretty cool. It's a good feeling. Everybody on the Kiva message board is a happy, chipper person. I don't know that they are all the time, but I think when they come to Kiva and hang out there for a little while, they get happy. Feel better about yourself. I know I do. But yes, half a million. That was nice. That's crazy. Who knew? That's Kiva. Also, we're on Facebook, Stuff You Should Know, and Twitter, the Twitter, S-Y-S-K podcast. Yes. All right. Let's go to sleep. All right. Let's get started. Chuck. Yes. Did you know that Xerox in I think the 21st century, maybe a little before that, took out ads

in all sorts of publications. I saw it in some sort of Bar Association magazine. I can't remember which one. Saying, hey, Mr. and Mrs. Consumer or Mr. and Mrs. Lawyer, don't use the word Xerox. Use the word photocopy instead. Yeah. Xerox is like Kleenex or Qtip or Aspirin was once a brand name. Right. Heroin once a brand name. Sure. And the reason that Xerox is so up in arms about this is because if enough people start using your term generically, especially as a verb like Xeroxing or Facebooking, you can lose your trademark status. It can become a part of the vernacular. And it has happened to some other brands before. Heroin, evidently. Alan Wrench, like I said, Aspirin, Escalator, the Jungle Gym, Tarmac, Yo-Yo, Zipper,

all of these were once brand names. Shattering my everything, the illusion of everything I know. But isn't that weird? And then there's a whole, this is pretty cool. There's a whole list of stuff that's become, that's in danger. It's in that realm where Xerox is right now, where it's very commonly used, but these people still manage to keep their trademark. Jaws of life. Yeah. Nilla wafers. Yeah. Bing Pong. Yeah. Is table tennis. Yeah. And let's see. Skivvies is underwear. Crocpot. Rolodex is technically supposed to be called a rotary card file. We should just read each one of these with a question mark at the end after everyone. Formica? Go card?

Mm-hmm. And my voice will go higher and higher until you can't even hear it anymore. Until only dogs start howling. Jacuzzi? This is one that I knew too. Realtor is a real estate agent. That is not any real estate agent. A Realtor is a specific company's real estate agent. Who? Century 21? No, Realtor. Oh, okay. Got you. But you have all of these bands, or all of these brands, Band-Aid, by the way, that's why I said that. Originally, their tune was I am stuck on Band-Aids because Band-Aids stuck on me. They changed it to I am stuck on Band-Aid brand because Band-Aids stuck on me.

They stuck in the brand. Yep. Because the adhesive. They don't want to genericize their own name. Yeah. There's one in this list that I didn't see that should be, and that, my friend, is Dumpster. Did you know Dumpster is a trademark name? I did. You told me like 10 minutes ago. Okay. Well, the Dumpster, the big trash bin, usually on wheels, that can be lifted by a garbage truck. That whole process. Did you know garbage truck is actually a brand name? This whole process was originally called the Dumpster Dumpster, and it was invented in 1935

by George Dumpster, who is later the mayor of Knoxville, Tennessee. Apparently, up to that point, if you were making something or you had a construction job going on, you'd just park a dump truck nearby and everybody would throw their waste in or take piles and move it into the dump truck. It was somebody's job. Right. So, Dumpster was like, why don't we just create this receptacle that we can eventually start by hoisting with the chain and just dump into the back of the dump truck, or we'll eventually create these hydraulic arms that can go into the slots on the side of this dumpster with a capital D, and that can just lift itself up into the back. I bet you he said, I'll call it the Dumpster, and his wife said, you're not calling

that thing the Dumpster. Yeah. I'm not being associated with trash, and he went, how about Dumpster? She was like, genius. Copyright at trade market. Poor Mia Martini. So, and I've always noticed, have you ever noticed, it seems like a lot of waste management companies, especially locally owned ones, tend to have a person's first and last name, like Jackie Curtis Portapotties. Oh, really? Have you ever looked around? You'll start to see it. It's really weird. Interesting. It's a lot of pride. But, Chuck, the point is, the whole reason I say this, is because we had to fatten up Freigans. Now, anytime we use the word dumpster, we're using it with a capital D. I just want to say, so we don't have to say TM every time. The dumpster is

with a capital D every time we use it, and we're going to use it a lot because we are talking about Freigans who are, in other words, dumpster divers. Yes, Josh, the word Freigans is a combination of word free and vegan. Doesn't necessarily mean they're vegan. I think they just thought it had a nice ring, probably. I'm sure a lot of them were vegans when they started. Yeah, of course. There's a lot of overlap. Or maybe the guy was named Frogan who started the movement. That's not true. No, actually, his name is Keith McHenry. Well, Freigans, Josh, are, I know you know this, are people who are, it's also called post-consumerism or reclaimism. They are anti-consumerism. Yeah. They say we don't like this whole cycle of working and spending and buying and wasting

and trashing and then buying it again. And we are going to try and reclaim and scavenge. We're going to try and not buy things. We're going to try and not work. Maybe just volunteer. We don't want to pay rent. We're going to squat when we can. Yeah. And that's what we are. We're Freigans. And a very big distinction between Freigans and Tramps, Hobos, the homeless is that Freigans are doing this by choice. And if they don't actually have the money to buy food, they usually have the skills or education to go out and make the money needed to buy food. This is all very much a lifestyle choice. And it is also, their very presence, their very existence is a thumb in the nose to the consumer economy that America has, which is in many ways a very wasteful one,

right? Stat time, I guess. Yeah. The United States of America, Josh, wastes 96 billion pounds of food each year. That's if you go by the stat that we waste a quarter of our food. It's between a quarter and a half, I've seen a half. So it's entirely possible that 196 billion pounds of food are wasted every year. And we'll get into more specifics on what kind of food is being thrown out. But a lot of times, it's not this big box of completely rotted apples. It's these apples are pretty bruised. This container is mashed. So we're gonna throw this stuff out. Exactly. And I guess it's not just food, you know, food makes a lot of sense. We need food to live, work, play, and do whatever. Everybody needs food. But food has a lot of other inputs wrapped up

into it, right? Like I think we talked before about virtual water, like the movement of crops from a place that has an abundance of water and can grow these crops to a place that doesn't have it is technically the movement of water needed to grow those crops. Here's moving the crops. So there's a loss of water when that's thrown away. There's a loss of energy to produce and transport these things. There's just all of these losses represented by just throwing away of food. And Freigans are like, okay, two things. Number one, I'm going to eat that food for free because I'm not grossed out by jumping in your dumpster. Right. And technically, it's perfectly fine food. And number two, I'm also going to do it to make you feel like a jerk for throwing it out.

Yeah. Critics will fire right back at Freigans. Oh, yeah, well, you're putting gas in your car and you're using electricity to cook that food. So you're on the grid. So you're a big hypocrite. Yeah. Freigans say, oh, yeah. Well, every little bit counts jerk. Everybody's calling one another jerk. Yeah. Point fingers. It just goes downhill from there. Throwing food at each other. Well, I do take issue with that a little bit. Like I do. It's true. Every little bit counts. Yeah. And obviously you do need electricity or heat or something to live to Freigans another day. The thing that gets me is the idea that you should hitchhike or hop boxcars or whatever, because in that sense, you're just freeloading on somebody else who's using that gas and you're

still using it too. You're just freeloading it. That's the one that I do have an issue with, is hitchhiking. Yeah. But I guess they would fire back, hey, dude, that train is going from here to Topeka anyway. I can totally understand the train. And technically, if somebody, if you only catch a ride with somebody in a distance or to the place that they're going anyway. Well, isn't that what hitchhiking is? Yeah, I know. We go out of their way here. Really? Yeah. And plus, where do you give them the person in return? I can understand a train. It's a company. Yeah. Well, yeah. Oh, yeah. So Freigans, we should point out that Freigans, there's not an official organization. There is a website, fregan, F-R-E-E-G-A-N dot info.

Yeah, which is still very robust and up and running. Yeah, that's kind of the central home where you can learn how to forage urban forage. They also forage in the woods. We'll talk about that in a minute. They have classes. Yeah. They talk about scavenging sites like, hey, do the dumpster on 42nd Street is loaded with baked goods this morning. Get over there. And I guess the other, and I want to say also, I have nothing against Freganism. It's just freeloading drives me crazy. But for the most part, Freigans don't, you know, hippy rob. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Here he is again. But if for the most part, Freigans don't freeload and they squat, but they squat in abandoned buildings. It's not being used anymore. They eat free food,

but it's food that other people threw out. But I think the key here that really differentiates Freigans from other people who eat out of dumpsters, aside from being able to buy food, is that they actually do work or they do activities. They're just not doing it for money. So for example, they volunteer. Yeah. Right. Because how much money do you need if you eat out of a dumpster on purpose and you don't have any, you know, house payment or anything. So you have all this extra free time aside from foraging and most of them tend to volunteer or work on activist causes. Like there's a freaking colony in Old Growth Forests around North America, where basically they just built tree houses in these huge old trees and said,

now you can't cut them down. It's called a resistance community. Right. Yeah. Which is pretty cool. It's a cool thing to do with your time. So let's talk for a second about Freigans. The key to their philosophy to me is they think that consumerism is bad because it destroys the environment through things like deforestation, factory farming, labor practices that stink. And it's all profit centered. So they think, you know, that's implicit approval. If you're working, yeah, living in what most people consider a normal life, working and buying, you're saying that all this, all this is okay with you because you're taking part in it. We don't want any part of it. So we're going to do our thing. We're going to not upgrade our iPhone. We probably want to

get an iPhone. We have an old flip phone, or maybe we don't even have a phone like that. We have cans on a string. I'm not going to update my fashion because the sweater is perfectly nice just because Bill Cosby might have worn it in 1987. It's still a great sweater. Your mom liked it. And fashion is like, how important is that really? Is there, you know, their philosophy? We're going to repair things that we have. We're going to trade things too. That's another big point with volunteering and donating time and all that. Like if you can do something like repair somebody's camp stove, that's a valuable activity. And in the end, Josh, what they end up with is a lifestyle that is very much not financially

dependent on things like some stinky job that you have to do that you hate doing. So that frees them up. They're like, hey, I need a couple hundred bucks a month to live. So I'm going to make that by doing some odd jobs. And then I'm going to volunteer and give back. Right. And also you can get back when you give and you volunteer through things like time banks. There's a website called timebank.org that I found on the friggin website. And basically, it's like, let's say that I know how to repair your bike and you know how to teach people how to play the guitar. Yeah. So I'll go, you know, repair your bike and you teach me how to play the guitar. And it's equitable. We don't remember in the bartering podcast, that doesn't always

happen. You sometimes have to engage in multilateral barters, all that kind of thing. Time banks get around that by saying like, okay, well, you went and volunteered at the animal shelter for a couple of hours, you earned two time dollars that you can turn around and use for anything. That's awesome. You know, from a member of this time bank. So that's pretty cool too. Although again, it's pretty much impossible to get away from currency in one form or fashion, huh? Yeah. I mean, most friggins have a very limited budget to endorse her lifestyle. They're probably not completely free. Although there might be some that don't use money at all, but most of them like limited as much as possible. Yeah. So where's this going on,

Josh? It's going on all over the world. But if I was a friggin, I would move to New York City. New York City. New York City. Yeah. Because New York City has got a lot of rich folks. That means there's going to be a lot of great trash. I know Woody Allen's trash. Yeah. And in Trash Day in New York, I imagine it's a field day and no, the night before trash night, which is called the stinkiest night in New York. It's pretty bad. You know, the worst in New York is in the summertime and it's hot and it's rainy and it's Trash Day. And the sidewalks are just full of garbage. Or in the middle of a garbage strike. I mean, hats off to whoever makes that city run. They're doing a good job, I think. Michael Bloomberg. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's off to you

then, sir. The war on drugs impacts everyone. Whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs. Of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm the prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we

would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Standing at eight feet two inches tall, Charles Byrne was the tallest man in the world. In fact, it earned him the nickname the Irish giant. And when Charles arrived in London in 1782, he caused quite a stir. But by May the following year, death came calling for Charles in the form of tuberculosis. And while most people were ready to mourn his passing, one man was plotting with gleeful excitement for a chance to dissect the Irish Giants remains. This January Grim and

Mild Presents will shift focus from the great wide world around us to the universe inside us all. In a journey that will span thousands of years and countless borders, we plan to unpack the dark and twisted history of healing medicine. So wash your hands, set out your tools and prep for surgery. Grim and Mild Presents Bedside Manners is available now. Find Grim and Mild Presents wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more at GrimandMild.com. They forage in New York for things like furniture, bags of clothes, electronics, like they'll camp out behind an office that's moving. All of what you just said is called urban foraging, right? It all falls under that umbrella,

which is just like foraging, except rather than looking for routes to drink water from, you're getting office chairs for your squad. Or a bottle of water. Yeah. Oh, that's another thing you want to. Yeah. But the point is, is that the city is the forest with everything you need. And then some, if you know where to look, and you can hold your nose. Is it legal? It depends. So, you know, every everyone who has ever once a bad kid knows that the cops can go through your trash once it comes out to the curb. So, there is actually a Supreme Court case from 1988, California v. Greenwood, wherein the Supreme Court ruled that cops could, once you put your trash out, it was public property. You expected someone else to come along

and take it eventually. And that means that anybody wants, you can go through your trash, including cops looking for evidence that you're a drug dealer, or Freegans looking for bananas that still look pretty good. Yeah. Freegans thought, hey, this should apply to us too, right? Well, that's what they use. And I think they use it to great success. Although there are a lot of laws like local, state, regional, municipal laws that are anti scavenging laws. Basically, because most people think of people who go dumpster diving as strictly hobos who you don't necessarily want around. Right. I'm not true to that. There's plenty of cities out there, you know. Well, a lot of stores, grocery stores and the like will lock up and cage up their dumpsters to discourage this

kind of thing. Some will put sharks in their dumpsters. Yeah, land sharks, very dangerous if you come across one of those. And the deal is they think that they can get a lawsuit if someone dumpster dives on your property, get some food and get sick by it. And that's not exactly true, though, is it? Didn't the USDA have a ruling on that? No, the USDA encouraged this. It's called the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Act. And I could just barely find who he was. He was a congressman who encouraged this act, died before it could get passed, when they passed it, they named it after him. But basically it said, if you are a good person and you are giving away food, you're picking up food, you have anything to do in the chain of taking food, rescuing it from the landfill,

to feed the poor, and you are not purposefully poisoning the poor or doing it for your own benefit and someone gets harmed, you can't be held liable for anything that happens. Yeah, we're going to protect you. But that prevents that. The whole point was to encourage people, like you said, grocery stores and other groups to donate their leftover food rather than just let it go to waste. Yeah, and a lot of places do that. We're not saying everyone just trashes their food. A lot of restaurants donate their food. It's great. Speaking of food, though, I did mention bruised fruit. A lot of times they're just crushed packaging boxes. Sometimes the sell-by date, the sell-by date is cruised on by, and that doesn't necessarily mean that it's rotten.

No, the feds don't have any kind of mandatory dating law except for baby formula and baby food. Yeah. The sell-by date is all voluntary. The use-by date is the one you want to stick to. Right. That's actually kind of rare. The sell-by date is just saying it's past its prime, but it's still got tons of life in it. For example, if you can keep eggs at 40 degrees Fahrenheit, which is standard for a refrigerator, they'll last for three to five weeks past the sell-by date. Did you know that? Yeah. If you talk to my mom, you can drink milk for up to two months after the date. I don't know about that one. The USDA does say, though, that factory-sealed bacon, not fresh bacon, but stuff that was in the factory, that can last two weeks beyond its

sell-by date. You mentioned New York being the center of veganism. Well, it stays fairly cold in New York throughout the year, right, which prevents bacteria from growing because bacteria thrives between 40 and 140 degrees Fahrenheit. So I imagine that you're safest in below 40-degree weather. That's a good point. You know what I say? What? The nose knows. Yeah. I don't even look at the dates. I give it a good sniff. That'll tell me all I need to know about whether it's going to go in my body. Yeah. I usually don't have time to sniff. I'm too hungry. You're just wolfing it down. Yeah. And then if I'm still standing afterward, so much the better. So that is urban foraging. We should also point out, too, that sometimes stores

actually bag discarded food separately from the other trash. So it's not like you're picking an eclair off of a lot of toilet paper and saying, well, this looks fine. And then there's wild foraging. If you live near the forest and you're freegan, you can collect plants. The website, friggan.info, will actually tell you how to do this, tell you what's safe to eat. Sometimes they practice gorilla gardening. They'll go find a little unused plot of land. We've talked about this. Have you noticed that in the last couple podcasts we've recorded, five other podcasts have been touched on? You know what this means. We're growing a body of work. Well, our quest to explain the world, it's all coming together. Oh, it is, isn't it? Yeah,

it's all tying. And at some point, we're going to say, that's the last one. It'll be the time when we use the word is and realize we did a podcast on is. It depends on what your definition of is is. It's going to be a long podcast, but we'll do it. A lot of them barter. Like we said, they call it free sharing, though. But what it is is bartering. They'll have a little market, friggan marketplace that's set up like every Saturday morning in this, this part of New York will all go meet. And hey, I see you've got a laptop that you fixed. I've always wanted it a toaster oven. Let's make a deal. Throw in some rotten eggs and we're all good. Just sell by man. What about health care? That's a big one. And I looked all over the

friggan info site for this. Basically, they don't have health care licked yet. They've got it close, though. There are health care collectives, which have been successful here there. Say, if you get enough people, you can get it down to about 100 bucks a year per person. And those go to fund free clinics. It relies heavily on volunteers. But the state operates all sorts of free clinics as well, which I imagine if you just go in and say, I dumpster dive every day, they'll be like, we'll take care of you. So that one is not kind of licked because you can also make the case that, well, that's freeloading again. And that completely undermines everything that frigans are about. Reloading. Because it's not waste health. Health care is

not wasteful. The hours of a volunteering doctor or RN are not wasted. No, of course not. Somebody would use those, right? Well, but a lot of times they're avoiding the health care because of we don't want to support the pharmaceutical industry. That's a big one. We don't want to support these HMOs. Yeah, I have a feeling if it was the, you know, doctor down the street from with a white picket fence that gives you a coke and tells you that everything will be better, they might be a little more apt to support something like the health care system. Right. And I saw that stated somewhere that they were saying, like, if you just cut out the profits, right, that it's much cheaper than we think. Interesting. So Josh, this food recovery is what they're into as a

friggin, but that's not a new thing because we have a long history in this country and other places as far back as biblical days of gleaning. And that's when you have a crop. You, especially nowadays with the big mechanized systems, they'll leave behind a lot of waste that they're not going to go back and pick it all up. So they'll allow people and they did this in biblical days after they've reaped the harvest. So if you're poor, you can come into the field after us and pick up what we've left behind. Yes. It's called gleaning, not gleaming the cube. You know, gleaning, gleaning. There's a group called the Society of St. Andrew. There's a lot of gleaning organizations, but one of the more famous ones is the Society of St. Andrew,

or basically they just have a central hub and they say volunteers, go pick up, you know, discarded food anywhere you can and bring it here and then we'll distribute it. Right. Pretty simple model, but it works very well. And if you are a Freigun, I would imagine you get some sort of halo for volunteering at the Society of St. Andrew. Yeah, you're the ultimate. The circle is complete. You have a nice spot in Freigun heaven if you do that. The whole idea, the anti-consumer culture idea that forms Freigunism apparently finds its roots back in the 1640s in England, Chuck. There's a guy named Gerard Winstanley who lost his shirt in business, moved to the countryside and founded a colony that he called the Diggers and the Diggers basically lived without money

for as long as they could. Not that long, but Winstanley and the Diggers inspired the 60s counter culture diggers who created their own kind of utopian colony or movement. And they inspired Keith McHenry who is basically thought of as the father of Freigunism, which popped up in the early 21st century as far as I know. And now he lives a lush, rich life collecting on that word Freigun. And then food, not true. He's a fat cat. Right. And then food not bombs is another good example of the Freigun movement incarnate, right, which is basically like they're a cleaner society. And then they go feed the homeless, feed the poor, feed Freiguns. And one of my friends, Justin, who's living on tour for a while out in California, he told me they used to call

them soup not food instead of food not bombs. I was like, that's kind of jerky, don't you think? And he said yes. And it's a sister group to food not bombs as homes not jails, which is pretty self-explanatory. Oh yeah. The war on drugs impacts everyone whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2,200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs, of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm a prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that will piss you off. The property is

guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Standing at eight feet two inches tall, Charles Byrne was the tallest man in the world. In fact, it earned him the nickname the Irish Giant. And when Charles arrived in London in 1782, he caused quite a stir. But by May the following year, death came calling for Charles in the form

of tuberculosis. And while most people were ready to mourn his passing, one man was plotting with gleeful excitement for a chance to dissect the Irish Giant's remains. This January, Grim and mild presents will shift focus from the great wide world around us to the universe inside us all in a journey that will span thousands of years and countless borders. We plan to unpack the dark and twisted history of healing medicine. So wash your hands, set out your tools and prep for surgery. Grim and mild presents bedside manners is available now. Find Grim and mild presents wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more at grimandmild.com slash presents. That's it. Well, let me give you a quick example. If you're wondering and thinking these people

are really weird. Let me tell you about Daniel Zeta. He's an American who moved to Tasmania, which you might think is weird in and of itself. Not necessarily. About a decade ago, he's 35, and he gradually became a freegan. As he became a little more conscious of the world around him, the environment, wanting to help out the environment. Okay, he had a great job, government job, pretty good money from what I understand. And he eventually quit the job. And now he is a freegan pretty much full time. He doesn't dumpster dive though. He works for a food market, basically trades his work for food, whatever they're going to discard, he'll take. He travels around the state. He builds environmentally friendly houses in return for lodging. And then in his off hours,

he services the community. So he says he needs about 200 bucks a month to live. And for a while, he lived on a boat that had solar panels. And the whole bed of the boat was a garden, a vegetable garden. And he bought, you know, sandals off the internet that were returned because the dude didn't like them. He got his computer from his friend, he was throwing it out because a hard drive was busted, replaced a hard drive, he's been using it for like five years. And that's just one story. He's not some weirdo. He's not a freeloader. He's not some crazed hippy hobo freak. He's just the guy that was like, you know, I'm kind of tired of buying into this whole system. Yeah. So this is my life now. Chumps. If you ever meet a freaking, assume they think you're a chump.

Oh, they do. Chuck, if anybody wants to learn more about Freegans, they can check out F-R-E-E-G-A-N in the handy search bar at howstuffworks.com. And if this piqued your interest, you should check out our another podcast of ours on how much money do I really need to live? Remember that one? Yeah, that was good. You can find both of those on howstuffworks, right? And I said handy search bar. So that handy failed search bar, I failed in my attempt to find a replacement. It is handy, though. It's time for listener mail. Okay, Josh, I'm going to call this Zebra Fish email. Of course, from Alex, dear Chuck and Josh and Jerry. I'm a research technician in a neuroscience science lab,

studying sleep and circadian rhythms with Zebra Fish. I first discovered your scintillating podcast several months ago, and they had quickly become part of my daily routine. Each morning when I come in to feed the fish, I turn up the speakers blasting the show and there are suddenly over 10,000 fans listening to your podcasts in a 15 by 15 foot room. They eagerly swim to the left sides of their tanks, the position of the speakers as soon as the podcast begins. So these Zebra Fish are reacting to the dulcet tones of us. I consider myself a parent to these fish and that I feed them, clean their tanks, and educate them through your podcast. One of the first errors I made as a parent was to make

a false promise to these fish that if they continue to work hard in our experiments, which is administering cocaine to sleep deprived fish, that's what he's studying. Wow. Chuck and Josh would acknowledge their hard work on the podcast. Please help me out. Don't let down my fish for a false promise I made long ago. Godspeed, keep your ear to the grindstone. Alex, I wonder if that tiny room that they keep them in is a bathroom. I don't wonder if Alex is really a scientist. Yeah, right. He's just into getting fish high. Well, we'll see. Well, thank you, Alex. Thank you to our 10,000 Zebra Fish fans. Hello, Fish. You guys get some sleep. Okay. They can't. They're dying too,

or they're just dying. If you are conducting some sort of odd experiments, we want to hear about it. Wrap it up in an email, will you? Spank it on the buttocks and send it to Stuff Podcast 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? The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff, stuff that'll piss you off. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being

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