The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Fallout Shelter Fads, The Library of Cocaine, Mosquito Nepobaby

Episode Date: July 1, 2026

Ben Bradford, host of the podcast Are We Doomed?, joins the show to talk about when buying fallout shelter goods was all the rage. Plus, Laura tells us how she's related to mosquito royalty, and Rachel explains why the Library of Congress is holding onto Freud's "friend's" cocaine. Check out Ben's show: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/are-we-doomed/id1893359212 The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook group⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ or ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠tweet at us⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Click here to learn more about all of our stories! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Links to Rachel's TikTok, Newsletter, Merch Store and More: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://linktr.ee/RachelFeltman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Rachel now has a Patreon, too! Follow her for exclusive bonus content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/RachelFeltman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Link to Jess' Twitch: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.twitch.tv/jesscapricorn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Link to all of Jess' content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.jesscapricorn.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ -- Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Produced by Jess Boddy: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Popular Science: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.twitter.com/PopSci⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Theme music by Billy Cadden: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's the real science behind all the popular UFO claims on television? What's the true history behind today's growing beliefs in Atlantis, the flat earth theory, and ancient aliens? And when you take away the media hype, what do scientists really say about COVID-19 and global warming? Since 2006, the Skeptoid podcast has been revealing the true science, true history, and true facts behind nearly a thousand of our most popular urban legends and mysteries. Each episode of Skeptoid looks at a famous story you know and reveals the part of it you haven't heard. Check out episodes covering mysteries such as popular ghost stories, famous UFO cases, alternative science claims, cryptids and urban legends, or conspiracy theories. Find out why the truth behind these popular legends is even more interesting. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Just search for Skeptoid. That's S-K-E-P-T-O-I-D. Or visit Skeptoid.com for full transcripts of the entire catalog. Skeptoid, critical analysis of pop phenomena. At popular science, we report and write dozens of science and text stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you?

Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editor. of popular science. I'm Rachel Fultman. I'm Laura Bysis. And I'm Ben Bradford. Ben, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So would you tell our listeners a little bit about what you do and about your own show that they might want to check out?

I'm the creator and host of the new cheerily titled podcast called Are We Doomed? Nice. Nice. Yeah. It's a show about the end of the world, both sort of real practical threats that we face, but also, you know, how much is in our imagination? Are we doomed? Or do we just feel doomed?

What are the things we need to take seriously? What can we do about them? Nice. It's a great premise because, you know, we, one simply can't ignore the signs that we may be doomed in certain ways. And good to, like, you know, keep your head about it and talk about keeping things in perspective and maybe getting some solutions. Not to plug the show too early, but I will say one of the things that actually has been sort of lovely and unexpected is that I think I actually feel more optimistic about our chances as I do it. And I don't think that's because the threats that we face are any less real, but just because literally when you look at any challenge and you start thinking about what are solutions to it, it gives you a feeling that you can take action in a new kind of way. So that has been sort of unexpectedly nice.

That's awesome. Yeah. I feel like that that theme has come up a lot in when I talk to people who, you know, research or write about catastrophe. That like actually when you, when you sort of look at how people react and sort of like once you actually start to think about problems and solutions, it's, it feels much more optimistic than you might expect in talking about disaster. You know, it's like. And you guys will understand this as as people who write. it's like when you start writing a story and the page is blank and it feels impossible and you're like this thing is impossible and then you actually start writing and it just feels less impossible

as you start writing and it's sort of the same thing but with you know nuclear war yeah well let's jump right into it uh so on the weirdest thing I learn this week we start by each offering up a tease about some kind of fact or story that we found in the course of reading writing reporting etc. And decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Laura, what's your tease? My great-grandfather discovered 2% of all known mosquito species. Only 2%? Only 2%. Lacker, right? Right? That's exciting. I'd love to, can't wait to hear about how you're, you know, an entomology. Nepo baby.

Definitely a real thing. Yeah. Ben, what's your teas? Fallout shelters. So big in the popular imagination. You can picture it as soon as I say it. Vault hatch. In reality, like, no one built them. Almost no one built them.

The whole thing was a big bust. Think.com bust of the 2000s podcast bust of the early 2020s, unfortunately for us. Like, your whole entire conception of fallout shelters comes from this one few month period in 1961. Wow. I'm excited for this one. My tease is, is there actually cocaine at the Library of Congress?

Ooh. More on that later. Got a fun image in my head of some librarians. Yeah, exactly. Laura, why don't you kick us off with mosquitoes? Great. Well, so technically, this is not something I learned exactly. this week.

They never are. They never are. You know, I'm a stickler for accuracy. My now husband, Francis, gave me the inclination that he is some sort of mosquito prints on our first date. The topic of our biggest fears came up in the conversation, and I said that mine are global pandemics and the rise of mosquito-borne illnesses since I'm a mosquito magnet, you know, and a hopeless romantic, obviously.

As soon as he said mosquito prints, you were in. I was in. I was like, oh, I'm done. That's it. That's it. Well, he very smoothly responded with, you know, a fun, did you know, that there are mosquitoes named after my great-grandfather. And I was like, you know, 22 and like, no, I did not.

I didn't know mosquitoes were named after people. But yeah, in all seriousness, my husband's great-grandfather, Francisco Edelagan Bysis, really was an accomplished entomologist in the Philippines. He lived there for most of his life where he had a really prolific career studying mosquitoes and malaria. Thanks to the, I'm going to underscore this incredible team at the Smithsonian and a shout out to Ben and Ryan for arranging all of this. We took a trip down to D.C. to meet with their mosquito collections curator, Dr. Yvonne Linton. She showed us actual specimens of the many species he discovered that are now named after him, a lot of his papers and the books that he wrote. and they're all stored at the Smithsonian's archives

because he did a lot of work with the United States Army back in the early to mid-20th century. And also, well, I don't condone trophy hunting. We did kind of stumble upon an elephant skull that Teddy Roosevelt had procured, is the word I guess I'll use. He did that, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Like we were strolling by and I see the tag

and I see like the big loopy handwriting and I see TR. And I was like, is that Teddy Roosevelt? and she was like, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. There would be like no animal specimens in American history, without natural history museums without Teddy Roosevelt. 100%. Yeah.

Specifically, the one team got that right. So basically, yeah, it was kind of, this whole experience was sort of like an episode of finding your roots with, you know, all creatures great and small, you know, between the mosquitoes and that elephant skull and a scientific paper trail rather than an immigration one. And, you know, so beyond that tangible excitement of seeing. these tiny mosquitoes named after him and mounted on those little slides or flipping through books, we got to finally learn about what set Francisco apart as a scientist, which we had didn't

really quite understand until this. He was born on a farm in Luzon in 1896 and enrolled in the Arts and Sciences Department at the University of the Philippines in 1922. He did not enroll to study mosquitoes. He actually wanted to be a journalist first, which obviously made me me kind of happy. Not quite sure where the turn exactly came, but while he was in college, an American engineer with the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation was looking for an, quote, able-bodied man with ideas, imagination, and courage to be trained as a malaria technician. At this time, historically, the U.S. Army had a growing military presence in Southeast Asia and saw that it was in their best interest to learn about these hungry insects that were sickening and killing soldiers and locals alike.

And it turns out that Francisco was that able-bodied man with ideas, imagination, and courage. And he ended up becoming the first Filipino trained as a malaria tech and eventually was promoted to an entomologist supervisor after only four years. As an entomologist herself, Dr. Linton told us she was impressed with how Francisco was able to see the bigger picture of how mosquitoes fit into the ecosystem without a lot of the training that's available today, you know, with only like four years worth of work. He had this real knack for understanding how all of these organisms, big and small, were related and fit together. Yeah, the Philippines, we've not been yet, but it's home to an incredible, you know, a lot of incredibly diverse, incredibly biodiverse ecosystems, you know, with hundreds of thousands

of different plants and animal species. So when you're researching that, there's a lot of variables. And he had this really keen eye for pruning and kind of weeding out what some of the noise in that data to sort of understand the bigger picture. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. It's something that, you know, my husband is incredibly detail-oriented.

So in that weird genetic way, I was like, all of this tracks. I could see, you know, I could see him doing this exact same kind of very, very detailed work. And we got to where we really saw this was he wrote a textbook called Notes on Philippine Mosquitoes, still in print today. There are a couple of different editions. And he was able to differentiate between the species based on tiny differences in their hair and wing patterns. In their hair? In the little hairs on their legs.

Just like how they style it? Yes, yes. You know, mullet versus mohawk versus bays. Literally splitting hairs. Like, that was just unbelievable. And he worked very closely with scientific illustrators to capture those subtle differences. And he basically compiled all of this into this book that's kind of considered a Bible of Filipino mosquitoes. Originally, I thought he was the one that drew all of this, which also tracks with, you know, my husband's wonderful attention to detail.

But he did work with illustrators on that. But he still had to be the person to say, hey, put that hair over here, not there. So he still kind of had to have that vision as well. It's like describing it to the police sketch artist. Could you, exactly, exactly. But a mosquito. But a mosquito, not a person. And while like, it's funny and while those minuscule details must have been painstaking

to see, it ends up being really important because understanding that the differences between mosquito species can help control deadly diseases, namely malaria. So if you can tell that one species is more prevalent than another or not living in a particular area, it can save some precious time or resources on mosquito mitigation techniques. That way, you're not wasting time worrying about West Nile if West Nile isn't there when you should be focusing on dengue or malaria or something else. You know, I just, just to interject, we did an episode related to mosquitoes on our show, really specifically to the question of like, should we take them out? I didn't know, but now I know, now I know. But when you talk about your

grandfather, you know, being able to sort of like sift through the noise in the environment. One of the things that we heard that was really interesting from this not only biotechnologist, but also ethicist who works on this program is the sort of the value of people from the area being involved in the work because, of course, they're going to know the environment better. And so you talk about your grandfather being, you know, the first technician trained and he's from this region. Yeah. And I just wonder to what extent, you know, that shows sort of the power.

of that. The power of that local knowledge that you really can't gain unless you are in the ground, which we'll talk a little bit about like kind of his process, but exactly. And that's, that still holds true today. That was true in the 20s and 30s. And that's true, you know, now as well. Yeah, that's fascinating. Yeah. He spent most of his time on Anophiles mosquitoes. They are the ones that carry malaria. It's the female Anopheles Lady Power who spread it at the dear, right, girl power. At the time that he was doing this, there were an estimated two million cases of malaria per year. And while it hasn't been completely eradicated in the Philippines, the annual cases are way down in like the 6,000 per year range, largely concentrated in specific areas. And of course, we have the vaccines.

I remember the morning that that news broke. I looked at my husband and I was like, well, he's definitely happy right now. This is, this is definitely a big deal. And, you know, Francisco himself very likely, much to your point, probably caught malaria at least once, probably multiple times throughout the course of his work just based on the very nature of it. Sure. You know, like if you want to study mosquitoes, you need to be among them. And he would do things. High risk work.

High risk. And he would sit outside and note what time the malarial mosquitoes were actually starting to bite. This way, you know, you could actually tell people when to take proper precautions. So like if they're not biting at 6 p.m., you know, you could. You don't need to tell people to hang out under a mosquito net on their bed. That doesn't make a lot of sense. But if they're biting at midnight 2 a.m., promoting mosquito nets, actually much more realistic.

And kind of with all of that, Dr. Linton said that he was one of the first people that made a massive impact on the number of malaria cases in the Philippines largely due to that local knowledge, that hands-on critical eye for detail, and also timing. he was right he was already on the front lines other scientists as well were also kind of starting to see the forest for the trees no pun intended you know and that there were several several of these mosquito species in the area that looked identical but behaved completely differently and he was also a pioneer in studying the mosquito as a whole so not just adult mosquitoes but what mosquitoes at the larval stage were feeding on looked like and importantly their

connection to water. Philippines, archipelago, a lot of water. Water everywhere. And mosquitoes lay their eggs in water. So kind of studying that connection between water and the mosquitoes where it is very important. Looking at

were they in freshwater, brackish water, salty, fast water, slow water, and then being able to trace that to which types of mosquitoes were laying eggs there. Now, the malarial mosquitoes, they kind of break the mold here in a weird way. If you look at the Kulex mosquitoes

that spread West Nile virus and some types of encephalitis, they lay their eggs in that muddy, stagnant water that we mostly associate with mosquitoes. Malarial mosquitoes, a little different. They use clean, they actually breed in clean water. So what are you to, they are? They are. They care. Exactly. So when he was studying those incredibly robust slash snobby, malarial mosquitoes, he noticed that they were laying their eggs in rural areas, first of all, where the streams were actually moving really fast, which is another sort of a misnomer. Usually it's sitting water or it's stagnant. When he took a closer look, he noticed that the mosquitoes were actually laying their

eggs on the reeds, on the sides of a fast flowing stream. So not necessarily in the flow, but right on the side and in the reeds. Fortunately, this presented an easy way to actually get rid of the larvae. remove the reeds, take them out. And he did this by starting programs with local schools, like local elementary and middle and high schools, where he showed, perfect, you know, get, those kids involved, where he showed kids where these mosquitoes were laying their eggs and taught them how to take out the reeds to destroy the larva, which Dr. Linton said this was at the time, a very forward-facing form of integrated pest management that just kind of wasn't happening.

And highlights how important spreading this type of knowledge was to him because, you know, it was probably like, I mean, he probably knew people who had either gotten very sick or died from malaria. So he definitely saw the value in passing it on. And she says that today in the Philippines, there are kids who are still ace mosquito identifiers. And she credited a lot of that to his status as a teaching scientist, even, you know, several generations removed. And importantly, you know, he did all of this without really powerful microsystemers. telescopes, DNA analysis, PubMed, databases, things like that. So I'm going to wrap up with some back of the baseball card stats about Francisco that I've been compiling.

I really want like scientist baseball cards. I think that that would be something. I think there's a niche market for that, but I think it could do well. So, you know, sharks, I'm here. Yeah. I'm ready. In 1955, he was named among the country's 10 outstanding scientists by the Philippine government. They awarded him a gold medal and a diploma of honor for his.

contributions to the study of malaria and mosquitoes. He and his wife, Crispina, had eight children, 36 grandchildren, 79 great-grandchildren, and at least 61 great-great-grandchildren, and six great-great-great-grandchildren. There is actually a family spreadsheet that tracks this. It might be a little bit outdated. But again, that attention to detail, that gene is strong. When I asked, when I asked Frances, I was like, what's the current cousin count? Do you know? He was like, oh, I have a spreadsheet, Laura, and I was like... Let me look that up. Of course, he...

Literally, he actually... And I was very excited. I was like, ooh, I'm on there. I'm in. Yes. And yes, he has a total... Francisco has a total of seven mosquito species named after him. And they were actually even running out of ways to incorporate the last name BISIS

into the scientific names. And in total, he identified 71 out of 3,800 known mosquito species. So that's that roughly 2% of all known mosquito species that were developed... discovered by this one very ordinary man. And yeah, from an emotional standpoint, it was, you know, obviously really moving to learn about my husband's not so distant ancestor. And it was just that great reminder of how science is people. You know, we need people doing things like sitting out and seeing when mosquitoes start

to bite in order to make discoveries. And I kind of started thinking like, oh, who is the Francisco Bysis of snake venom? Or which teams right now are doing some of that really detailed work to keep NASA's Artemis team safe by looking at things that we might not even be thinking about right now. So it's just kind of that really nice reminder that like behind every paper, behind every launch, behind everything, there's there are a ton of people that, you know, you might never know their names, but they're doing something. But last, I do just want to thank the Smithsonian team again. They were incredibly generous with their time. And, you know, it was just really, really cool to get to learn so much and now get to incorporate it into, you know, into some of my work. That's really cool.

Yeah. Yeah, that's amazing. It was fun. It was cool. Yeah. You know, if I just, one thing that I learned when we did mosquitoes. Yeah. It's just like, I mean, when you're talking about it, like, your grandfather, you mentioned this a little bit.

But, I mean, he definitely saved lives. And, like, who knows how many lives he saved? Because the mosquito is the greatest killer. of people of any animal in history. You guys talked about hippos a couple episodes ago. Yeah, that's why they clarify

large land animal. Right. Yeah, because of the hippo because of the mosquito, yeah. Right. You don't need to fear sharks at the beach. You need to be afraid of, more afraid of mosquito.

You don't need to be. Of the mosquito. Yeah. Of the mosquito. You have more chance of a mosquito hurting you than a shark. Yeah, they're real jerks. They are.

They are. All right. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts. Okay, we're back. And I also have a sort of, you know, bowels of a museum story. So I'm going to jump in. The best kind. Yeah.

Is there actually cocaine in the Library of Congress? The people demand to know. So I was looking at some articles on the Library of Congress website, as you do. And one in particular that delves into some of the more surprising items in the library's collection, which is, FYI, in no way limited to books. or even to media and includes more than 170 million items. Wow. So you can learn about some wild stuff in there.

I'm going to share some examples before we get into the cocaine of it all. So there's an extremely detailed 3D topographical map of the Grand Canyon made entirely of chocolate. White chocolate, dark chocolate. It looks like milk chocolate, honestly. Definitely not white chocolate. The worst time. That's why it's still there. Nobody wanted to eat.

Yeah, right. The Library of Congress website says they don't know much about the map or the company that made it, the chocolate topographic company in 1991. I did some, you know, some real, you know, gum shoe detective work. Yes. And this Denver-based company changed its name at some point to the Art Coco chocolate company. And for at least a few years, you could order from them by phone. I found conflicting info on whether or not they still exist. Maybe they changed their name back again.

unclear, hit a dead end. If you know, call, please. Yeah, please. Also, the kind of products that they do, do they just do topography or, you know, do they do faces? I would like some other information about, like, what kinds of things we can order from the- Well, apparently they were called the topographic company, the chocolate topographic company. So it does seem that their thing was maps, chocolate maps. Yeah. And you might be wondering, like, how is it possible that the Library of Congress is just, like, stuck with this chocolate map they know nothing about and how is it not melting like I know what's the temperature control yeah like yeah so no it's a good question and the answer is that basically items will come in as part of large parcels that are mostly made up of the library's actually

like mandated preservation material which is like the papers of politicians and impactful individuals and then also just like everyday folks who managed to capture part of the narrative of the time and place. So, you know, they're really just like collecting narratives, right? But they sort of accept, you know, a person's papers, quote unquote, which sometimes include a chocolate map of the Grand Canyon. And once they have items and they accept them, you know, they do take the preservation of those items pretty seriously. You know, I doubt. people have lost sleep over the preservation of this chocolate map. I might tonight.

I'm just saying. But they certainly like climate control is is easy for them. Like they definitely already have spaces that are designed for things that need to be kept cool. So I'm sure there were plenty of spots where they could they could slip in that chocolate map. Have you seen a picture of this? Yes. Yeah. Can you describe it?

Because, you know, I feel like the Grand Canyon is mostly known for like what's not there rather than what is there. Yeah, no. I'm pulling it up just so I can really do it, do it justice. Yeah. Try to use words like luscious and silky. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so sort of imagine if somebody took like a novelty, five pound chocolate bar, 10 pound chocolate bar, big old block of chocolate. And then just proceeded to carve away at it to create an aerial view of the Grand Canyon. So it is really, this is a novelty item defined by its negative spaces. It is very detailed. I don't know why it exists.

I don't know who means. I mean, I know that this company made it. But what's their deal? I don't know. And isn't it beautiful that people will be wondering this for as long as our great nation is capable of, you know, maintaining a library of Congress. So, and yeah, there are some items that they've like really gone out of their way to figure out how to preserve and display. So they have the whiteboard where Carl Sagan and

And Ryan sketched out the premise of the movie Contact. And it's double-sided. You know, it's one of those like, you flip it over and there's stuff on both sides. And they needed to figure out a way to display it that wouldn't risk wiping away any of the dry erase marker on it. But they also wanted people to be able to see both sides. So somebody actually like, designed and constructed a display case that was like solving the problem of displaying a double-sided whiteboard. Perfect. It's just incredible.

Again, science is people. Somebody had to do that. Yeah. Who was that person? Yeah. Yeah. They've also got a really nasty looking like chunk of fruit cake. It was a wedding cake from back in 1863 when P.T. Barnum sold tickets to the nuptials

of Charles Stratton, who was known professionally as General Tom Thumb. he was 2 foot 11 and his similarly statured bride, Lavinia Warren. That ended up in the Library of Congress, not because of P.T. Barnum, but because Lavinia, apparently in 1905, sent a piece of the cake to a theater manager named Harrison Gray Fisk, along with a letter promoting her upcoming book. And the cake wound up in the personal papers of he and his wife, the actress Minnie Madden Fisk. So again, it's just one of those things that it's like these papers were donated and also this old piece of fruit cake from a sideshow wedding. Why not?

Well, you know, nothing is more exemplifies a fruit cake than it's still existing 100 years later. Yeah. Well, and in the descriptions, it's just a piece of wedding cake. And looking at it, it really, it's got a very fruitcakey vibe. This is not like the topper of a modern wedding cake that got put away for the anniversary. That being said, who knows what it looked like originally, because it's been some time. So maybe that's just all that's left of it. So, you know, in this article about all these random items, we then get to this amazing line.

All of those are real. But it is not true, no matter how delightful the rumor, that the library has a very small stash of Sigmund Freud's cocaine. We have a very small stash of Freud's friends cocaine. I love that. He was holding it for a friend. Cheaky monkey. Wow. Wow. So yeah, what do you with this cocaine? Yeah, not hits at all. What's the deal with this cocaine? So to set the scene, in 1885, the Lancet, the medical journal, said that, quote, the medical press is full of cocaine just now. They were literally like, cocaine is so hot right now. And according to an article about this in Aon, the journal actually had trouble dealing with the sheer volume of cocaine-related research being submitted, in part because, all the researchers were also on cocaine, which I'll get to in a minute.

I was going to guess that. Yeah. Look at all the science we can do with it. So yeah, in 1884, Freud, Sigmund Freud, the famous guy, was getting very into cocaine in several ways. Coca leaves, of course, have indigenous use dating back thousands of years. But the active ingredient cocaine was only isolated in 1855. And, you know, it was sort of like people were aware of it in the, you know, three-due. decades preceding, but Freud and fellow doctors kind of just started to get super into it in the 1880s. And they were all experimenting with the potential benefits of cocaine. And they were like,

this stuff is great. I'm really calm, not anxious about social interactions at all. I feel great. I feel alive. Freud sent a vial of it to his fiance. And then he ended up writing this big essay, this monograph on all of the promise of cocaine in June of 1884. And he was like, what can't cocaine do? And how? So the person on cocaine? Yeah, exactly. And he was not alone in this.

Like you'll see researchers describing how awesome it is that they're getting so much done in their work on cocaine because they're on cocaine. It's wild. Really, like in retrospect, it's hilarious. But at the time, they were just like, this is going to be. revolutionized science. Right? They didn't know.

They didn't know. To be fair. Yeah. Yeah. And I found this paper from 2011 by physicist and science historian Howard Markle, who wrote about this in JAMA.

And Freud, who was 28 at the time, he wrote this monograph and called it Uber Coca on Coca, which is kind of ironic because he was indeed on cocaine. He met about cocaine, obviously. So this is from Markle's paper. Using himself as his

experimental self, subject over several months. Freud consumed a great deal of cocaine as he recorded the drug's physiological effects and potential therapeutic uses. However, he skimmed over cocaine's most important clinical use as a local anesthetic. It was a hurried last paragraph, a postscript really, where he noted that they had marked anesthetizing effects. And that was his big mistake. that brings in his friend at the Vienna General Hospital, ophthalmologist Carl Kohler. So Freud had been talking up cocaine to a lot of people, including Carl,

and he had gotten him to join his experiments, aka doing cocaine. But it was ultimately a solo experiment that made Kohler and cocaine very famous. He noticed that it made his tongue numb, and that gave him the idea to use it as an anesthetic, particularly for eye surgery. which was an issue that he and other people had really been trying to crack. Because eyes move reflexively in response to very little stimuli. So you really need to, like, settle those puppies down before you operate on them. And so he decided he was going to, he like slathered some on a frog's eye.

Great success. Then he tested it on himself because I guess that's every. That's the next step. That's true. Yeah. Exactly. Frog's eye, your eye. That's it.

And he published that work in 1884. And this was the first local anesthetic. which of course was a huge deal. Now, obviously it's really good that we have better local anesthetics than cocaine now. There are many issues that arise when you inject yourself with cocaine. If you need me to really elaborate on that, listeners, send me an email, but you shouldn't do it, is the real TLDR. But yeah, there was this guy, Dr. William Hull said, who tested it as an anesthetic for other parts of the body and again, just injected himself with it to test that. And he got like pretty addicted.

And this was a pretty common story among researchers at the time. But when Kohler published this, for all of cocaine's flaws, this was a huge advancement. It was the only alternative to like really brute force knocking someone out with with ether or chloroform. And so you got to keep a person conscious. You didn't like risk giving them too much of the sedative. You know, you could numb up the eye, keep the. eye still. So unsurprisingly, this really took the surgical world by storm and the, especially eye surgery. And Kohler became very famous. Freud was not thrilled about this.

He wrote to his fiance, the cocaine business has indeed brought me much honor, but the lion's share to others. Yeah, he was very salty about it. But again, like, you know, he had, he had had the opportunity to explore this use of cocaine and had not. You've been too busy exploring cocaine. cocaine. So I feel like it worked out for him, though, don't you? In the long run, he found, like, we don't really associate him with, like, cocaine so much more like, the father of psychology. Yeah, yeah, much of which is stuff he came up with while on cocaine. So it's like a subtext. It's like a, it's like when you, when you, yeah, it's that little footnote and, you know, but we, you know, he couldn't have become that

without said cocaine. So, yeah. It worked out. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I, and I, and I, and, and I, and should say that, you know, Freud eventually kind of soured on cocaine because he had seen it as this very promising treatment for morphine addiction, as many people did. Now we hear that and go like, yikes, you know. Yeah. But at the time, they really did not consider cocaine addictive based on what? I know not. I think just the fact that you were able to stay awake and be productive, they were like, when we say people are addicted, we mean they're on opium and they don't accomplish anything. I don't know. It just feels like this very hyper-capitalist view of drug use. But anyway, yeah, they considered cocaine totally fine and they thought it was a great way to get off of morphine. And there were people who really suffered because of that. And there were people who went on to struggle with cocaine addictions. And that was something that Freud seems to have had a lot of had a lot of about later. But back to Kohler, while all this was going on and, you know, his star was really rising, he put a tiny bit of extra cocaine from his, you know, groundbreaking surgical experiments

into an envelope and he tucked it away for posterity. And then more than a century later, his daughter donated a collection of his papers. And library staff were like, oh, look at that. I think this is the famous cocaine guy's cocaine. And the FBI checked it to make sure it was inert. I wasn't going to kill anybody just by sitting there, and then they put it back in the vault, and now there is a little bit of cocaine in the Library of Congress, and that's pretty fun. Now, as for Kohler, you know, unfortunately, he really should have been a phenom in his field because of this, but he faced a lot of anti-Semitism, and not long after he published this work, one of his colleagues at the hospital, called him a slur, and they got in a fight. He punched the guy in the face.

fair. And then they were both medical lieutenants in the Army Reserve. So the guy that he punched challenged him to a duel. They did that five days later. And Kohler emerged unharmed. His opponent survived but had two deep wounds. Oh. So Coler won. You won the duel. He won the duel. He did win the duel. But unfortunately because his opponent had been wounded, there was, there were criminal charges brought against both of them. I guess this was that awkward transition time where people still did duels, but there was like, don't do that anymore, but people still did. Stop dueling.

You're supposed to just like throw away your shot or something. And he was like, I know what I punched him. I'm ready to hit him some more. So he basically had to resign. He lived in the Netherlands for a bit and emigrated to New York. But it worked out. He ended up being, I think like that the head. of ophthalmology at Mount Sinai Hospital or something. Like he had a very successful career.

And Sigmund Freud apparently nicknamed him Coca-Cola, which is great. That's a delight. Perfect. That's excellent. I saw some sources saying that was a reference to the soda and some saying, no, absolutely not. It's just a coincidence. I think we simply can't know. I don't think Sigman Freud was going to write down. I call him Coca-Cola like the new soda that has just been invented. 1886. Right, right, right. But a brief note on Coca-Cola, because, yes, it did contain cocaine. And I know that that is something that people love to talk about. So just to wrap us up,

in the 1860s, French chemist Angelo Mariani started making cocoa wine, which is exactly what it sounds like. And his wine with ground up cocoa leaves. His brand was called Vin Mariani, super popular. A couple of popes liked it. Thomas Edison said, like, this makes me work real good. And yeah, the ethanol actually extracts the cocaine from the leaves. So it contained six or seven milligrams of cocaine per fluid ounce, typically. That's not nothing. Yeah. Ulysses S. Grant also credited cocoa wine with helping him, like, get through writing his memoirs when he had a third cancer. I think wine and cocaine could probably solve a lot.

Probably help a lot of people get through a lot of things. But, you know, your mileage may vary. It was marketed for all sorts of ailments and then enter an American physician, civil war vet, and morphine addict named John Steth Pemberton. He was looking for something to help him get off morphine. And like I said, cocaine in the 1880s was considered very promising in that regard. So he started making his own cocoa wine. One crucial difference is that he added the cola nut for caffeine because when you're drinking several milligrams of cocaine, what you really need is, is some caffeine in there to perk you up.

Yeah. Right. Then in 1886, prohibition legislation started passing. So he made a non-alcoholic version. So coca for the leaves, cola for the nuts. And then carbonation, because that was kind of another health craze at the time. It was marketed as Coca-Cola, the temperance drink, which is so funny to me. Amazing.

It's like we took the wine out of the cocaine drink. So now it's fine. Yeah. Hold on. Let me take a sip of this right now. I was wondering if this podcast is sponsored by Coca-Wine. I wish. You know, call us Coca-Wine.

But, yeah, also I should note there was a Spanish beverage called Cola Coca that came out the year before Coca-Cola was released. And the town it comes from in Spain is still pretty salty about that. But, yeah, Pemberton, when he died in 1888, he was still addicted to morphine. and his son who kept marketing his father's formula actually died an opium addict. So really just to hammer home, cocaine was so popular. And people were like, this is great for everything. And behind the seeds, a lot of these researchers and entrepreneurs were having a really bad time being on drugs.

And cocaine actually stayed as a key. ingredient in Coca-Cola until 1903, which feels so recent. And then for a while, there was sort of, they like did some stuff to try to keep the flavor of coca leaves in there, even though there wasn't cocaine in it. But they don't even do that anymore. I am very curious about like how the flavor profile was was different. Different. Yeah. And the, you know, there aren't cola nuts and cola anymore either we get the caffeine from from other sources. Do I actually want to go drink cocaine wine? No, I think that sounds very bad for your body and your mind. But I'm curious. Yeah, I'm curious. That's true. But yeah, that's why there is in fact a little bit of cocaine

in the Library of Congress. And honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if there's some more. Now that I know all the kinds of stuff that's in the nooks and crannies of the Library of Congress, I'm like, it would kind of be surprising if there's only that one little packet. Right, right, just the one. And how prevalent it was in and some probably other academic disciplines as well. Yeah, yeah. But no, I mean, I think that for me, the takeaway is that there's so much goofy stuff in people's personal paper collections. And thank goodness that somebody is grabbing all of it and preserving it because, you know, it would have been a shame if that, you know,

chocolate map of the Grand Canyon had gotten thrown away. One of the unifying facts of, you know, your weirdest thing today in mine is that my husband is a librarian, a digital librarian, a news librarian, but he is also the type of person who will make sure that some weird clips from NBC News is, gets, that they get preserved and that they, and that they are, remain in the archives so that we can go back and look at them. It all connects. It all connects. Yeah. We're going to take one more quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact. Okay, we're back. And Ben, tell me about fallout shelters.

All right. Are you in one right now? I look like I'm in one. I am in a recording closet, which is just like slowly accumulating heat because it's already a hot day in Los Angeles. And the whole thing about trying to give you guys good sound quality is not having the air conditioner on, not having any fans on. Taking one for the team. I'm really doing it for you. No, every time, every time I'm in here, one, I have to explain when I'm doing other interviews. You all know because you're doing audio. But I have to, like, explain, like, I haven't been taken hostage.

It's okay. So, yeah, thankful that this is an audio, an audio podcast. But, okay, it's the early 1960s. Nuclear fears are growing. Russia started to have bombs over the last decade that are on the scale nearing the U.S. is, a number nearing or exceeding the U.S. is. The Cold War is in full force. And people are thinking about what are we going to do? And, you know, I think that today we live with nuclear war in such a way that in some ways it's always in the back of our mind, but sort of that paradigm is in the back of our mind too.

Whereas the paradigm of the time is you're coming off of World War II still, right? And what happened in World War II during, you know, the bombing campaigns when, for instance, you know, Germany is bombing England and bombing London, right? They're digging bomb shelters. They're going underground. And so there's sort of a hard to answer question of, well, how do we save ourselves from these more powerful bombs? It's hard to come up with an answer. So the U.S. government is making sort of secret plans, a lot of them very grim. They're making their kind of private projections of how many people die.

But publicly, there's not really an answer for this. The U.S. is spending the equivalent of what would be about like four bucks a person today on what's called civil defense. And a lot of that is duck in cover, which, you know, sounds so inadequate for a nuclear bomb. But it's been explained to me that if you go back to the size of the bombs that, for instance, the U.S. had dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that, you know, at this point with nuclear bombs today and with the ones that started to get built later in the 1960s and 70s and so forth, the fallout from them, the radioactive material that sweeps across, right, is the huge sort of third part in addition to the heat and the blast that you have to escape. But those bombs were small enough that the fallout wasn't as big of a deal. So you were still kind of looking for ducking and covering. If the bomb dropped on you, you were going to be incinerated. But if you were sort of further outside the blast in a certain area where the shockwave, then yeah, you'd want to be duck and covered to avoid the glass and avoid, you know, things falling on you and whatever.

So it wasn't like that was, you know, just totally outlandish. By the time they're running those drills in maybe the 1960s, it's maybe a little bit more outlandish. But that's where that comes from, which I thought was sort of interesting. But the U.S. government is trying to figure out what do we do in this new age of huge nuclear weapons? John F. Kennedy is president. He's a big cold warrior. Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York, convinces him that he's got to do something. But, of course, they don't want to spend a lot of money on this. They want to build like highways. And it is very expensive to go and dig fallout shelters.

And one of the great lines in our episode that focuses on this comes from Alex Wollerstein, who's sort of this great nuclear historian who sort of knows everything. And Alex says, what do we do in this country when we have a public health problem or a public issue, but we don't want to spend money? Which is we say it's your responsibility. So it's your responsibility to protect your family from nuclear war. No experience with that. Right. Sure. When would we ever had that?

So this is what happens, right? So JFK famously goes on TV. He does ask for money, and we'll talk about what that money gets to set aside for some civil defense stuff. But the main message is protect your family from nuclear war. And it kicks off this whole industry and craze around building fallout shelters. So Life magazine puts on its cover. You can protect yourself from nuclear attack. 97 out of 100 people can be saved, which was wildly optimistic.

All these businesses rush in, hundreds of businesses. You know, they're advertising, save your family from deadly nuclear fallout. I mean, that's like just me doing a bad imitation. Not that bad, honestly, of one of the ads that we found. Thank you. I know what you were going for. Yep. Yeah.

And that's like sort of what it sounds like. I mean, you can hear it. Like, that's like what it sounds like. So it's this total gold rush, right? There's tons of coverage. And this is where our popular conception of like, like, you know, when you all think of the fallout shelter, what do you think of? I honestly because I lived in Manhattan for so long I think of the signs right outside

okay yeah because there was always we're gonna come back to those okay because like you know like there was one right across from our apartment and like even now in the back of my mind it was like you know I could probably get in there if I needed to if something I'm so excited to tell you I'm so excited to tell you what happens if you go there so yeah these are these are these placards that have the sort of the the radioactive symbol sign they say fallout shelter yeah and they're everywhere in New York Rachel do you have any image when I say fallout shelter Honestly, mostly the video game and show fallout. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's sort of like mid-century Americana, like, you know, hyper-capitalist. Yeah. Save your family. There was a good image of one in, I think the series was called Mrs. America on Hulu. Yes. With Phyllis-Lafling one.

Yeah. Yeah. Like they showed her putting like another gas mask and another cannon one, which made sense because she did study nuclear policy so you can see why, among other things, that was one of her issues. As a big Ein Rant fan, she was, you know, very much into the conception of this is your job. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So totally. So that fallout shelter, like the Schlafly style, we're thinking about like going down the ladder in your backyard and, you know, the green metal shelves with, you know, canned food on them, et cetera. Right. This is where the conception comes from. And also, this sort of rush kind of spawns the prepper culture. This is sort of where you can trace its roots to. So if you think about that, people like today who are doing kind of the more radical self-reliance preparation for the end of the world thing. This is where we start to see that really coalesce.

Hundreds of businesses emerge. A lot of them evolve from other businesses. A hardware store becomes that we're going to build your fallout shelter business. This is the big trend. But what happens? Capitalism. Yeah, well, yeah, but it doesn't work, right? Failed capital, right?

It's, yeah, the market decides. No, we don't need this. We don't need this. Yeah, people are like, wow, that's pretty expensive. I don't really want to do that. So there is an estimate that 200,000 homes have shelters, which is not none, right? That's not none. And that can be anything from your basement with some canned food.

It could be a storm shelter for tornadoes. But it's like, you know, less than half of one percent of homes have anything. And so this is all just like, you know, in a few months span in 1961 that this whole industry is just emerging and hot. And within a few years, it has collapsed to the point where 600 businesses have gone bankrupt or out of business. Yeah. And so it's a total crash.

Instead, what you have happened, and that's where that popular conception of like the sort of the family backyard shelter, you know, you're one from like the road that they have to emerge from because they're out of food or, you know, whatever. Instead, what does the U.S. do? So John Kennedy does request and is granted some money. He wants about $200 million, which is kind of close to like $2.5 billion today. Again, like not nothing. He doesn't get all of it, but he gets a lot of it. And what they're going to do is more makeshift public shelters. Right. So they're going to go to existing sites that have some form of protection from radiation. They're already underground. They're within a building and there are walls outside of that building. things that are going to stop the radiation from getting through. And we can talk a little bit about what makes a fallout shelter effective. But the way it was explained to me that you can hear in our episode is just walls, dense materials, you know, whether that's lead, which is like really good because it's super dense or, you know, bricks, water,

things that just layers of things for the radiation, the radioactive fallout, and then the radiation pinging off of it to hit instead of hitting you so you're not the wall. And so they go and the US Army Corps of Engineers goes through and survey, just tons of buildings in tons of cities and marks them out. Now, all this is criticized. It is expensive. There's questions of how effective it is. There's also this counterintuitive problem, which is, what if it works?

And this is still a problem today, right? Which is that if you create something that is essentially going to shelter your population from nuclear war, Whether that's a defense program that can shoot down missiles effectively, whether that's something where your citizens could all hide and then reemerge, although I think that that's still like less effective and not optimal. The worries become in this sort of system of deterrence, oh, you can win a nuclear war. So we need to fire before you can succeed in implementing this solution where you'll be able to win. And we see those fears today with things like implementing AI, for instance, where, oh, if you're able to respond more. quickly. And then countries, of course, saying, well, if one, if one country implements AI, maybe we have to implement AI, not to push the big red button. We have other episodes

that are sort of focused on this interesting aspect, but more just in this sort of the analysis and other sort of processes within command and control. That is a tangent. I'm sorry. All good. But so anyway, this makeshift shelter thing, it does happen. And the U.S. sorts out thousands of shelters. I think in New York, it's like tens of thousands, although I have the number in front of me. They are everywhere. They're everywhere. And so they go through and they go to these existing sites and they reinforce them. They'll add things like air, filtration so that you can put more people in there and they'll be able to breathe. They stocked them with food, you know, cans of foods, wafers, chemical toilets, which we talk about a little bit and

is maybe the most disgusting thing I've discussed on our show other than mosquitoes. And so they do all of this. And over the course of about a decade, there's sort of this major. effort, and it still probably doesn't house that much of your population. And you don't need to house everybody, right? Because what you need is essentially what these are designed for is if the nuclear bomb falls on you, you're still dead, because no amount of bomb shelter is going to protect you from a nuclear bomb falling on you. If you're far enough away that, like, you're on the far edges of the heat and the blast, maybe you can get through that. But mostly what you're doing is trying to avoid the nuclear fallout.

One thing that I thought was really interesting that I didn't know, particularly because of the way that our media sort of portrays fallout shelters, is how long you're down there. And I'm wondering if you all have a conception. Maybe you know this as science people about how long the idea is that you're in a fallout shelter hiding from the radiation. I, so what I think the case is, I could be super mistaken about this. But I think that, like, you know, the misconception is that you're going to be down there for a long time. And really it's like like 72 hours that the majority of the fallout dissipates. Is that right? I may have panicked Googled that one.

No, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's absolutely right. And I think that is like sort of the difference between certainly like my conception of it, particularly as a generalist, not someone who's, I mean, now I'm doing a lot of science journalism, it turns out, but was not necessarily my background. And I was more of a political reporter, a business reporter with some energy environment mixed in in various public radio careers.

But yes, that's right. So 72 hours, the longest that most these places were designed for was a week with the idea being that maybe two weeks at the most. If you were trying to be really safe, you didn't have a Geiger counter. And the reason for that is because of how quickly radiation, you know, the half-life of it spirals down to levels where you may not be safe, where it might increase your cancer risk. but you can go outside and not just like instantly fall over and die. So you get out and then you and then you walk. Yeah, exactly. It's like the key aspect to being able to get out and then walk is to not die immediately.

So that was what happened. That was the conception of shelters. That was the intention of shelters, the attempt to get people to build it themselves. And then the ultimate result of for most people, you weren't going to have anything, but for more people than home shelters, you were going to have makeshift shelters. But then you've got to maintain these things. So the shelter industry crashes. The threat of nuclear war kind of just hangs in the air.

We get into Vietnam. We have an economic downturn. And I think that we just sort of live with this. And so by the early 1970s, less than 10 years later, inspectors in Los Angeles, where I am, for instance, go through these shelters. And what do they find? They find the food is spoiled. The medicine that was stored there. What hasn't been stolen is expired.

And it's just this big cleanup job. And so, like, Laura, if you were in New York and you were following the signs to the fog shelter, you would follow the signs there. Rancid cans. You would be extraordinarily disappointed. Yeah, yep. And in fact, one of the things that's happening now in New York is they're trying to take down the signs. But it's not even entirely clear which agency, which city department or state department is responsible for doing this. Yeah, which also then like leaves us with this question of, well, what is the plan today?

You know, where do we go if there's nuclear war? It's back to being a you problem. It's a back to being a you problem. And in fact, like if you find sort of the city of Los Angeles guidance on it, it's essentially like take cover. It's like go find some walls. And we talk in our episode a little bit about like what those might be. And and and it's just kind of like earthquake preparedness where it's like have a go bag and and sort of find a spot to hunker down, which is probably not going to be a great solution. And it is true that in nuclear war, there is probably not a great solution other than don't have it, which is one of the things we land on.

But one of the other things that we land on, and this also surprised me, is that I think that I have taken for granted that, like, okay, if that happens, I'm in Los Angeles, so I'll just be melted and it won't be my problem anymore. And one of the things that we find is, like, maybe, but even the sort of most deadly projections of nuclear war are that, you know, even in the sort of the biggest most massive plans of destruction that we know about from the Cold War, which are bigger than sort of the more strategic plans today and more strategic being, you know, put in air quotes, but are that 40% of people in the U.S. would have been killed in the blasts and those first days of war from the war directly. And that is a lot of people. But that also means that most people are not.

Most people are not having that flash of light. And that could be true in cities as well for various reasons that we sort of get into. And so that means that you're left with in the event that this did happen, the sort of like grim reality of this is that there's no good solution. And sort of the most unfortunate thing would be surviving it in some ways. On Amy Poller's podcast, Kate McKinnon said she wants to survive four days of an apocalypse. Like that's her goal. And after hearing that, I was like, I love that because you get kind of like the. you know, gold star for being prepared and being able to do this, but then you don't have to deal

with, like, the completely terrible aftermath. Yeah, you're like, loss of infrastructure. No, no, thank you. Yeah, but she was like, you know, for four, I'd like to make it to day four. So after she said that, I was like, I think that's my personal goal. Make it today for. New plan. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, it's interesting because like that is, in some ways our, our darkest episode. We have a lot of ones where I think we land in a different place where it's like, okay, I can just kind of see the light. But that in and of itself sort of becomes, like, that grim reality and understanding it to me is actually like, yeah, like, let's spread the word on that one. Because it really does sort of emphasize in a real way, like all the reasons to not do this.

Yeah. All of the reasons. I would simply love if this chain of events had not been set off back in the day. That would be ideal, yeah. Right. But yeah, it's really interesting about getting the signs taken down because when I looked up local guidelines, which I did because I recently had a kid and I was just like, like, still, it's just that now I really can't justify being like a cool girl about the possibility of nuclear war, you know? I need to, I need to sort of know what I would do because I have a child. And again, looking at guidance, the sort of mean thing is they're like, please do not try to go to the quote-unquote fallout shelter that you have seen around the corner.

Don't go outside to a second location. If you're inside, that's so good, buddy, be inside. And I think, you know, there is. I think that's wrong. I think that's wrong. I think you go to the Library of Congress and you find the chocolate Grand Canyon. You're so right. And you're set.

You're set. And the fruit cake. That is probably one of the better places you could be if you had to hunker down for a few days. And then, you know, it's just like the laws are suspended so you get to eat the chocolate cramp cany in for sure. Yeah, 100%. As long as you save like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, you know, anything that was a national treasure. As long as you save that, you're fine. The cake and the chocolate, go for it, go for it.

In a lawless world. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's super interesting because like, it really is painted in pop culture as having been this huge cultural thing getting fallout shelters. But then when you think about it, like, how often do you meet someone whose backyard has a fallout shelter? I've never. We might have a makeshift one.

My house was built in 1948. And when we were first looking at it and I saw it, it's like this cupboard under the stairs kind of Harry Potter style. But there is a lot of concrete. And there is a lot of. So I jokingly have said that. that's, you know, you know, that that's ours. So I do wonder, I'd have to, again, you know, have to go look at, look back at those blueprints, but I do wonder if that was, you know, if that was whether, if that was the intention to like maybe at some point turn that into

something kind of, you know, or I always say that. It might have been a bomb shelter. Right, right. You know, I mean, coming out of the 1940s, that was a very common thing was to, yeah, yeah. I always say that that's where, like, if a tornado hits, that's where we're going. So, yeah. I did also once stumble on storm. shelter, tornado storm shelter, TikTok. Like my algorithm was just feeding me. And there are some really souped up shelters out in Oklahoma. Like my good, it was, I was like, I do not live there, but I kind of want that now. Look at that. They're really, really cool. People have ideas. They do. Yeah. Ingenuity. We love it. Well, Ben, thanks so much for coming on. Would you remind our

listeners what your show is called so they can go find it? I would love to. Yeah. Thank you for having me. The name of the show is, Are We Doomed? We are available on all podcasts? apps and we also have animated versions on YouTube at YouTube.com slash at are we doomed pod? Oh, that's so fun. Are we doomed pod on YouTube? Animation and existential dread just goes together. I love it. And the likeness of me, the likeness of me on the YouTube on the YouTube animation is a dead ringer. It's crazy.

That's awesome. The weirdest thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Fultman, along with Jess Bode, who also served. as our audio engineer and editor extraordinaire. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. Our logo is by Katie Belloff. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore Thing.

Thanks for listening, Weirdos.