The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - The Secret to Perfect Sleep, Naked Mole Rat Royalty, Baby Shark (do do do do do do) Puke

Episode Date: June 26, 2019

In the first half of our live show on June 14th, the weirdest things we learned range from the bloody path to becoming a naked mole rat queen to a tiger shark vomiting feathers onto the deck of a boat. Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? 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!  Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Eleanor Cummins: www.twitter.com/elliepsies Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Before we get started, I just wanted to give you a heads up that this episode sounds a little different. That's because it was recorded at our live show at caveat in New York City on June 14th. It was really awesome. Everyone had a great time. It was sold out again. And we hope you'll join us. us for the next one, which we promise we will schedule and announce very soon. So a few things to

keep in mind as you get ready to listen to part one of our live show. Number one, the sound quality is going to be different because instead of being in our studio, we were in front of a live, wonderful audience. Number two, we're sometimes going to mention visual aids because people were there watching us instead of just listening. We understand that you cannot see these things and that that might be frustrating. But we promise anything relevant will be linked at Popside We may not be able to share every lame Photoshop joke we made for the event, but hey, that's just one more reason to get your tickets next time. You'll also hear references to a drinking game because, as is tradition, there was a drinking game. We'll post the rules to that on popsight.com slash weird.

You're welcome to play along while you're listening as long as you're not driving a car or underage. And one last quick thing, I promise, and then we'll get to the show, you will hear an unfamiliar voice. That is our friend and fellow weirdo Ryan F. Mandelbaum from Gizmodo, who joined us as a very special guest host for part one of our live show. Thanks again, Ryan. Okay, weirdos. That's everything. Enjoy the show. A popular science, we report and edit dozens of science and tech stories every week.

And most of the information we come across ends up in our articles. But there are a lot of fun facts that just end up on the cutting room floor. So we decided why not share those with you. Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week, a podcast by the editor. of popular science. I'm Rachel Feldman. I'm Ryan Mandelbaum. I'm Claire Maldorelli. Thank you. Thank you, Jason. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a tease about some kind of story that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, preparing for a fabulous show at Caviott, and we decide which one we obviously have to hear about first,

or which one we put in the PowerPoint first. Drink, please. Please take a drink. So, Ryan, since you're our guest, How about you start with your T's? So this week, and I promise it was this week and not when I was told to prepare for the show, I learned that baby sharks eat birds and not like duck birds, like the birds that I like. Wow, it's crazy that I have this shark here for the winner of this segment. Claire, how about your T's? In the 17th century, humans had two sleeps. First sleep and second sleep.

I love to have as many sleeps as possible, personally speaking. My tease is that I'm here to celebrate the most majestic and powerful animal on the planet, which is the naked mole rat. I'm not convinced. They're gorge. Well, then I guess I'll have to start, Ryan. So I was recently reading up on the latest naked mole rat news, the latest mole rat news in general, in fact, which is the thing I get paid to do.

And it reminded me of one of the best headlines I've ever written. And no, I'm not talking about Uranus might be full of surprises. Which was the peak of my career, I believe. I got that in the Washington Post. So here in PowerPoint form, I will share with you my 2018 opus on our future rodent overlords. Here they are. Nine jaw-dropping facts about naked mole rats to celebrate the bloody assent of their new queen. So, audience, please hold your question.

until the end of the lecture and then keep holding them forever. Fact number one, they have queens, and there can only be one. This is a rodent queen. This is a naked mole rat queen, in fact. They are youth social animals, which is where one female makes all the babies, and everyone else takes care of them for her. So bees and ants are very well-known youth social animals, and in fact, there are only two mammals that are you social, two species of mammal, and they're both mole rats. Naked mole rats are one of them. Last year at the National Zoo,

they announced that a young upstart had risen to queen status, this young upstart, in fact, by breeding as quickly as possible and killing off her competitors and they're young, which is just how it works, if you're a naked morat.

The struggle brought the adult brewed down from 17 to 13 over the course of a few months, which is, like, statistically speaking, just carnage. And it's not a surprise because she weighed 81 grams and a second runner-up, as it were, weighed only 55 grams.

So she was a real bruiser. And her first litter included three pups, which is modest, but she was going to get pregnant again quickly. They do that, being rodents. And progressive pregnancies will stretch out her spine, which is gross, and she'll grow to carry much larger broods, because heavy is the uterus that holds the crown. So, wait, Rachel, does that mean she technically gets taller

if her spine grows? I guess, but she's probably not going to stand up much, if ever. Okay. So longer, maybe. Yeah. Cool. Good point, though. Thank you.

But what does it mean to be queen? The second fact is that queens can prevent puberty in everyone who's not queen. It's true. So if you are queen naked mole rat and there are other females in your brood, which of course there will be, and one of them wants to, to start making babies, you can be like, nah. So the mechanism behind this isn't quite understood, but scientists have found that non-breeding females

in a colony are infertile. They are similar to drones and bee colonies. Their sexual organs appear prepubescent. And what's really cool is that if you take one of these ladies and ship her out on her own, she'll have a growth spurt and show signs of sexual maturity. So there is something about being in a colony that already has a queen that makes you not go through people.

And if this queen were to die, other females would start, you know, making moves, and then they would kill each other until one of them was the queen. So it's a great system of government, honestly. Are they researching this for humans? I mean, we could do worse. We have. Fact number three, they don't only kill in cold blood. They live in cold blood. Figuratively and literally, they're the only mammals with bodies that can't regulate a steady, internal temperature. So their thermal regulation actually has a lot more in common with cold-blooded animals like reptiles. There's a lot of semantic debate about like whether they're cold-blooded. They're not technically, but words are meaningless and humans are stupid. What matters is that they have to squirm around in these big squishy piles that are just so full of skin and really gnarly

because they have to snuggle when they're not killing each other because otherwise they'll freeze to death. So that's great. Fact number four, you should not challenge them to a breath-holding contest. I really can't overstate the importance of this one. So in a recent study, scientists show that naked mole rats can survive oxygen levels that, quote, would be fatal to humans and fatal to lab mice and probably to everyone else. At 5% oxygen, which is less than the atmosphere at the top of Mount Everest, researchers thought they would start to be distressed within maybe 15 minutes.

But an hour later, they were totally fine. So after five hours, they were like, okay, we're going to call it a night. Clearly, they've won. And then after five minutes in a container with zero oxygen, the animals did pass out. So that's no oxygen. Literally no oxygen. They passed out after five minutes. But then once they were released, after a few seconds, they were fined.

So never turn your back on a dead naked moment. rat. And there's another reason for that, which is that you can't hurt them. You literally cannot, one thing to consider before taking a shot at the crown is that they don't seem to experience pain as we know it. Animals don't react to acid burns on their skin. They don't treat injured areas as if they're sensitive to the touch. Their pain receptors are basically the least sensitive of any mammals ever studied, and so they just like won't notice that they are injured until things are very dire. Also, the reason I was thinking

about mole rats in general this week is because a recent study on African mole rats, another less appreciated species, showed that they have no sensitivity to the chemical that makes wasabi painful. So also, don't challenge them to a sushi eating contest. Basically, they can't be beat in any sport. Fact number six.

They're really freaky looking. Listicals on the internet are hard. So one of my facts was just that they're really ugly. I think they're cute. I mean... I love the teeth, honestly. Okay. Sure.

They look like fingers. This one literally looks like my pointer finger. That's not what I think they look like, but okay. Yeah, well, I can't stop. There are so many facts about Megan Moratz that I had to split this into two columns. Number seven is also a really important fact which is that they don't eat nachos.

They actually eat tubers that they find under the ground while burrowing through their tunnels. Wait, did scientists feed them nachos? No, that's just from Kim Bosphol. Oh. It's just from TV. I'm sorry. However, they do eat poop, which I would love to talk about some more.

So, calories are calories. And naked molrots are known to scarf down feces if there are any leftover nutrients, or even if there aren't because I don't think they have a way of knowing that before they eat the poop. But recent research suggests that queenly poop may serve a greater

purpose. So pregnancy hormones predispose a new mother to care for her young. But naked mole rat mamas, aka fierce queens, rely on others in the colony to protect their pups, and they do. The drones care for the babies, the way in other

mammalian species, the mothers care for the babies. So it's possible that the poop carries that hormonal trigger from maternal instinct and that the queen feeds it to her infertile drones to condition them to care for her young. So she can have more drones, which is all they're good for. So if you find yourself in the midst of a naked mole rat coup, know that if you lose, you're going to take a lot of crap later. Finally, they might hold the secret to eternal life. Debatable. They are remarkably impervious to cancer, statistically speaking, compared to other mammals.

And researchers are, of course, really fascinated by that and hoping that they will figure out something that can translate to humans. A recent study also found that the bald rodent's risk of death isn't necessarily proportionate to age. In other words, they don't necessarily have a point at which their body is universally start to wear out and die. Now, yeah, like tortoises and oak trees do the same thing, but these are mammals, and they specifically seem to have cellular tricks for not letting their telomeres wear out. And if you guys ever listen to Silicon Valley guys talk about aging,

you know that telomeres are the secret to eternal life. The metaphor most people use is that they're like caps on the ends of our DNA. And as our cells replicate, the telomeres wear out, and you're more likely to have errors in your DNA replication that lead to signs of aging. And it does seem like whatever keeps naked molars from showing signs of old age as opposed to being eaten to death by their queen, which is, I guess, how most of them die,

or freezing because no one will snuggle with them. Yeah. Question. So given their looks, what is old age for naked moorats? Well, that's the thing, is that there really is no thing. They don't start to get more creaky jointed. They don't get more wrinkles. They're just kind of like the same until they die.

They get bigger. Their spine stretch if they get pregnant, apparently. So naked mole rats are like the natural end point of capitalism? Yes. Really cool. So the pinnacle of evolution, I would say so. And that is the naked mulrat for you all. Thank you for your attention.

Wow. I can't wait to be a naked mole rat. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to my days as a naked mole rat, I would say. Claire, why don't you take the clicker and go forth. Oh, we're going to break first. We have to go to break, which is really going to happen. Okay, we're back. And Claire, why don't you jump in with your fact?

Yeah, Rachel, I would love to. So as Rachel noted in my introduction, I love diseases. Cool. Okay, so for the past few weeks, every night, I've been waking up at 2 a.m. Exactly 2 a.m. Not 159, not 201, 2 a.m. Are you in a horror movie?

No. Is there a ghost? Okay. No. It's okay. No. This is real life. Real diseases. Has anyone else ever woken up at exactly the same time, every night for multiple nights? We have a cat that comes to our window every night, starts meowing really loudly, and it wakes us up around

3 a.m. every night. So yeah. Okay. This cat could have this disease. That's a stock. photo. It's not me. Same basic idea. Okay? All right. So this is not the first time that it's happened to me. I know several other people and I saw people raise their hands. So other people have experienced this. So when this happened for multiple nights in a row, I turned, well, first I called my mom. She ignored me. So then she hung up the phone and said she had better things to do and told me to go back to work because she is so sick of diseases. And I went to

to Dr. Google. And I found that it's a known condition called sleep maintenance insomnia. Here is proof that I'm not lying. Cool. Okay. There's a number of ways to treat it. All of them super boring, including things like not drinking coffee after a certain time of the day, like 4 p.m. 5 p.m. I don't know. I drink it at like 9 o'clock. I feel fine. Not exercising too close to bedtime. I recently ran a half marathon at midnight, so that's probably not what they would recommend. And plenty of other useful things that I probably won't do. But in doing my research, I found a weirdest thing fact that I would love to share with you. What I was most intrigued by was, yes, the fact that we should get eight hours of sleep every night. That's about

how much we should be getting according to science. In fact, back in 1938, a sleep researcher named Nathaniel Claytman and one of his students spent 32 days living in Manmuth Cave in which is one of the longest and deepest caves in the world. She knows. And all, which is completely devoid of sunlight. And when they analyze their sleep patterns, they found that they, too, slept about eight to eight and a half hours.

Super interesting. I get eight hours sleep every night. I want to go live in a deep dark cave for a good day. Actually, me too. Me too. Okay, so getting to my weirdest fact. However, while eight hours is indeed the right number, how we accumulate these eight hours is a different story.

Now, as Rachel mentioned in a previous episode while discussing the fact that people use birds as candles, true story, listen to that episode. Prior to the 18th century, historians surmise that humans slept in two phases, known in historical texts typically as first sleep and second sleep. Some historians have estimated 500-plus accounts of first sleep and second sleep, and I will give you a couple of them.

In Charles Dickens 1840, Barnaby Rouge, quote on quote, he knew this, even in the horror with which he started from his first sleep. Intriguing. In Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote, quote unquote, Don Quixote followed nature and being satisfied with his first sleep did not solicit more. And in the early English ballad, Old Robin of Portengale, quote on quote, and at the awakening of your first sleep you shall have a hot drink made. Lovely. And at the awakening of your next sleep, I'm assuming they mean second, your sorrows will have a slate. Cool. So first sleep, second sleep established. This text and the hundreds like it make it seem as if this biphasal sleep pattern wasn't just something reserved for the rich or that people did on occasion or something on their

leisure time, but rather it was just the way humans slept every day. No big deal. First, second sleep, get on with your day. One of the first historians to really dig into the history of sleep prior to the Industrial Revolution was Roger Eckertch, history professor at Virginia Tech. In his book, at days close, night in times past, that investigates this by phaselessly phenomenon, he says, rather than a backdrop to daily existence

or a natural hiatus nighttime in the early modern age, instead embodied a distinct culture with many of its own. customs and rituals, and I will now describe to you first sleep and second sleep. For a research paper published in 2001, followed by his book out in 2006, in case you were wondering, I don't know, I was at the time, I guess. He found over 500 documents of first sleep and second sleep from places such as diaries, court records, medical manuals, studies, and literature. From these accounts, he and other historians have found that first sleep tended to happen

about two hours after dusk. So people would finish their days, they would come home, they would eat dinner, and then they would just go to sleep, straight to sleep. And that ended around midnight, and then their second sleep, their second sleep describing it, on the other hand, it didn't start until 2 a.m., giving people about two hours between the times of midnight and 2 a.m. to just frolic about in the middle of the night.

This sounds amazing. During this time, historians note that people up in the middle of the night did everything and anything from sit in bed and meditate on their dreams, which is what I would do, probably, and smoke cigarettes, talk with fellow night owls, have sex, tend to their children, and generally just get shit done. In fact, historical notes make it seem as if the time in between first sleep and second sleep was actually an extremely productive time of the day. From a 2012 BBC article that reviewed Eckert's book noted a doctor's note from a 16th century

French manuals advised couples that the best time to conceive was not at the end of a long day's later, but rather, quote, unquote, after the first sleep when, quote, unquote, they have more enjoyment and do it better. From a logical perspective, now all of this makes sense. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, a few hours after dusk, things got really dark and without proper artificial lighting, being outside during the nighttime hours was a pretty risky move. This was the only image that I could find, so it's going to have to do. That looks scary. I don't know about you. It was far better to just fall asleep soon after dinner, wake up for a few hours in the

middle of the night to get things done around the house and go back to bed, only to wake up bright and early, ready to start the day, then to go out and this. Yes, there's stuff on fire. There is stuff on fire, Rachel. That happened every night. This is the 17th century. That's fair. As for me, I can't think of it. anything better than an 8 p.m. bedtime, a midnight chat with a friend in an early morning rise. I don't know about you. So what happened to all of this for sleep, second sleep? The shift from a bi-phazal sleep pattern to a modern-day straight eight hours was actually a pretty

rapid shift, and it occurred shortly after the Industrial Revolution. At that time, and increasingly up to today, we started to have better lighting. Oh, no. Light. It looks pretty similar to the last one. I know. Yeah. My slides are all. point. Life is hell. Just a little less fire. Yeah, really nice, really pleasant. We were also far more productive, so we thought it was far smarter, more logical, and efficient to just cram all of our sleep into one solid chunk, and we never looked back. Despite this, people seem to suffer

from improper sleep far more than they did in the past, and today, burnout insomnia, sleep deprivation, or common health issues, that there's no records of them in the 17th century. before all this proper lighting happened. Though, to be fair, people did just, like, die. That is true, Rachel. Before they had time to get tired. They couldn't contemplate rare diseases because they were dying from real bad ones.

But they also probably were less stressed about stupid stuff. Yeah, and they slept really well. Their skin was probably nicer. Starving. That's correct. They probably weren't, like, am I making anything of my life? Do people like my tweets? So artificial lighting certainly has to do with it.

Oh, wait, I had two terrible sides. Oh, no. That was awful, Claire. Thank you. The question remains, were humans, oh, you know what, actually? That was correct. So this was to explain that we have so much artificial light now. Look how pretty the earth is at night.

Okay. And then someone really, really tired. That was me a few hours ago. stock image same basic idea okay so the question remains were humans actually meant to sleep in two phases phase one phase two or were they meant to sleep in this eight-hour chunk back in the 1990s I found a psychiatrist named Thomas Weir while at the national institutes of health conducted an experiment where he placed a group of people in total darkness for 14 hours every day for an entire month that sounds like super fun by the fourth week all his subjects had settled into a new sleeping pattern.

Guess what it is. They slept for four hours, woke up for an hour or two, then fell back asleep for a second for our rest. So, if we all want to sleep like a baby, maybe we should just go to bed when we are tired, get up for a bit, talk to a friend, call your mom about a rare disease, and then go back to bed.

Inspiring. Thank you. Well, hello. Are you ready? Oh, Ryan, would you like the clicker? No, now I'm ready. I heard a rumor that your PowerPoint is really good. I learned Photoshop recently, and I was just trying it out. So we'll see how it works.

So this is the name of your show, the weirdest thing I learned this week. And this is my first slide. So my weirdest thing that I learned recently is that baby sharks eat sparrows, not ducks. Isn't that weird? That should be weird. That's really weird. Tell me more. What's a sparrow doing in the ocean, man?

Right, they fly, and they shark swim, and they're underwater. and birds are above. If you didn't do that, somebody would have come and arrested us, so... I was required to do that by law. I signed a contract before the show. Also, the base was like kicking. Anyway, in 2010, scientists were on a boat,

as some scientists tend to do. They hauled a shark onto the boat because they studied sharks. The shark promptly puked, as you might do if somebody hauled you, into the water and you had no idea what was going on. The scientists were like, well, we should look at the puke and see what's in there, as you would probably do

if you puked in the water, I guess. As sharks would do. The sharks would be like, let's investigate. Right, and so they looked. In the ocean. And there were feathers in the puke. What? What?

And so at first they were like, all right, okay, there's feathers in the puke. Maybe they like jot out of the water, like, jaw style, ate a duck, whatever. No problem. But it was not a duck. It was not a pelican either. I took that picture. Nor any manner of seafaring bird.

Nor any bird with like webbed feet. I just learned about this laser pointer right now. Anyway, for the people online, I just put my favorite picture I took last week in a pelican putting its mouth inside out, and I wish you could all see it. Pelicans yawning is really an amazing site. That is a pelican yawning.

It basically shoves its neck up into its mouth. We've talked about this on weirdest thing before. So if you're a listener, you should have Googled it. Sorry. Anyway, they found a bird like this. That's a brown thresher. I took that picture, and I just feel like this is really a great... The bird's on a gravestone, it's dead, and that is what was in the shark, not a pelican.

So, it's science time. Great. So, scientists were like, well, we should probably keep looking at these sharks' vomit, and they looked at shark vomit, indeed, from 2010 to 2018. everybody, if you're not okay with a very gross picture of a half-digested bird, please close your eyes. And inside the sharks, they found birds in the puke every year except for 2014. If you close your eyes, you can open them now. And birds indeed showed up in 24 of 105 of the sharks that they examined.

It says 41. 41 of the 105 sharks that they examined. It's really behind me. And 19 of those sharks were babies. that's why we played the baby shark song at the beginning. Here are the birds that they found. That's a brown thrash shirt. I took a lot of these.

You have to take a drink for every bird that's on here. Yeah, this is 11 birds. It's 11 drinks. So good luck. As you can tell, when I found out about this study, I was really sad. I was like, why are all these birds dying in their grave is the shark strikes? Do you like birds?

No, I hate them so much. I hate sharks is what I hate. I have a bird on my hat. So what they did was they, they use, no, that's a real thing. I'm serious. Don't get Ryan started on eBird. All right, this is now a fact about Ebert, all right?

So they went to the Cornell University EBird database, which is if you are a bird watcher in the crowd, you are very familiar with it. It is where you log your sightings. It's an amazing citizen science tool. And researchers can use EBRD to basically track bird movements, what birds show up where. And so they looked at where these birds were,

and when they were there, you can use EBRD to create little bar charts. that's, there you go, and they found that when they found the bird corpse in the vomit, it was right sort of in the middle of the bird's migratory period, which... Interesting, interesting. Another piece of evidence. That sounds like a science. That is a science.

One science for you all. How? So, yeah, I mean, the birds, we know. That makes sense. Okay, fine. Like, the timing of the puke is the same as the birds flying over the Gulf of Mexico. But that doesn't really answer a question, which is just like why are sharks? seeding the birds. So the answer is that birds are pretty sensitive to the weather. And when,

let's say, a big hurricane blows through the Gulf of Mexico in the middle of the birds migratory period, specifically the fall migration period, the birds are like, oh, frick, what do I do? And they all go into the water. And birds don't curse. They're very polite. I didn't curse. I said frick. And so, yeah, they go into the water, and then they are at the mercy of the baby sharks. And so, So I was like, hmm, is there evidence of this really happening? And indeed, when I wrote this story, one of my readers works in the Gulf of Mexico and sent me this picture. And he was like, you're totally right. Like, during their migration periods, if we expect the weather to suddenly change,

all of our oil rigs are suddenly covered in random migratory birds. So that's a Baltimore Oriole that's sitting on an oil rig for that one of my readers sent me. Wow. And why baby sharks? Why so many baby sharks with birds in their hometown? Well, the real reason is because baby sharks are not strong. They are weak babies. Me too.

Right, same. And so when the sort of period that the sharks are babies sort of aligns with the period that all these migratory birds are appearing in the Gulf of Mexico, the sharks aren't going to like go chase a fish. They're going to be like, well, this is really easy. It's dying and it's floating right above me. I'm going to eat that. And so that indeed leads to the last slide, which is that it actually, if this is true

and holds, then what it means is that. that migratory birds actually form a important part of the food web of the ocean in the Gulf of Mexico. So I've replaced small fish with screaming house wren. And that it's another, I mean, scientists, when it comes to things like conservation, they need to know about how animals relate to one another, who gets into fights with who, who, who eats who. And so, yeah, birds are just another little spot in the food web when it comes to the ocean. Sounds like big bird propaganda to me. Everything I do is big bird propaganda.

That is my fact. I hope you've all learned something. And thank you for having me on the show. Wow. So for those of you who haven't been to the live show before, on the podcast, we all talk about what our favorite fact was and decide who provided the weirdest fact. But at the live show, we do it by applause.

And I think Stan, you said you would be our applause meter. We've never had one before. Yeah, okay. All right, so I guess we'll just go in the order in which we presented. Was the weirdest thing you learned this week that naked mole rats are going to kill you? All right, all right. Was it that you should sleep in two sleeps? There was some like vibrato there.

It was great. Or was it that dead birds make the ocean keep oceaning? Sorry for that that description of your fact, Ryan. Stan, what do you think? Who's our winner? Amazing. Claire, congratulations.

Congratulations, Claire, you know what, Ryan, I'm going to give you this baby shark. It's actually probably a grown shark, but as a participatory token. And Claire, you are going to win. One of the weirdest crowns I found in the Party City bargain bin today. Is it happy New Year? Oh, yes.

So, congratulations. Thank you. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. We're available on all major podcast platforms. So subscribe wherever you're listening now. And if you like what you hear, please rate and review us on iTunes. It helps other weirdos find the show. You can buy our merch, including Weirdest Thing, T-shirts, tote bags, and mugs at popside.

threadless.com. Our show is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Faltman, and our editors, Jess Bodey and Jason Letterman. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore Thing. Thanks for listening, Weirdos. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. You can't reason with the sun. Trust us. We've tried.

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