January 31, 2013 • 45 mins
Only 161,00 metric tons of gold has been mined in the entire history of the world. Considering about 85 percent of the precious mineral is recycled, there's a chance your jewelry may once have been part of an Incan headdress or Mycenaean face mask. Learn the ins and outs of this metal that humans have killed over for millennia.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the two thousand twelve Toyota Camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff You Should Know?
From House Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W Chuck Bryant.
We're doing this again. It's been a little while, been
(00:22):
a little while, but it's still stuff you should know.
But I thought the name had changed since we took
our little Christmas break. No, don't you remember our race
to the Patent Office trademarket again at the eleven That
was a close one boom and they stamped it. Yeah,
s Y s K. Actually they said s N s
K right now. Wait, s Y s N is what
(00:45):
we get from people a lot sometimes, And I'm like,
you know, no starts with the K. One of them does,
one of Yes, it's not stuff you should know? Is right?
It doesn't make any sense. How do you doing? Oh?
I'm great man? Are you okay? Good? Um? You want
to do this one? We're talking about gold? Yeah, man,
(01:06):
I've got a little bit of an intro. It might
be a stretch. We'll find out. Okay, that's here. Today's January,
tomorrow's January Day. It is Big Newton Day. And also
on this day in history, in the Mayan general, fire
is born. Uh conquered the Mayan city to Call, which
(01:28):
was recently rediscovered, well not recently, it's been rediscovered, the
rediscovered anyone. Uh and Uh. What this did was it
enlarged the kingdom of King spear thrower Owl. The Minas
had the best names, great name um. And all of
this was going on in the heart of the Yucatan Peninsula.
(01:51):
If you went just a little to the north, you
would run into another group of people called Aztecs, which
were actually the Triple Federation, is what it's what they're
really called. Um. But if you were to stumble northward
and run into the Aztec Empire and ask for gold,
what they would give you is what they would call
(02:12):
excrement of the gods. Do you want to try to
pronounce it? Yeah, I'm gonna go with teo would. I
think that's pretty close. I think you may have done it, Chuck.
I think the last part is I love that language.
It's similar to like the some of the native languages
(02:35):
we heard in Guatemala. The that's because they're mine, yeah exactly,
but it's got that same like I don't know. It's
very staccato. It's kind of cool to hear, I think, right,
like the Mayan City, the heart of King, spirit thrower
owls um empires tetotactan, right, which sounds pretty close to
that word tilt, which means excrement of the gods. And
(02:57):
that's what the the the Aztecs considered gold. That was
a holy metal, a very very precious metal in every
sense of the word. And by three sight a d
they weren't the only ones to have loved gold for
a very long time. No, Egyptians were all over it.
They thought it was also divine. Wait, hold on, how
(03:19):
would you rate that intro? I would say that was
on a scale of what one to ten, I was
one to twenty. I would give it a solid like sixteen. Wow,
thanks Chuck, higher than you thought, way higher. I thought
I was gonna get a ten. That's why I extended it. No, no, no, um.
So the Egyptians, like I said, they also thought it
(03:40):
was divine of the gods, indestructible and uh they called
it uh. I guess Nube and ub and if you
know of the African region in Northeast Africa, Nubia or
if you're a fan of the rap group brand Nubians,
sure you would have heard of this. I was actually yeah,
yeah they were and um that that that name so
(04:00):
holds today because of the original original Egyptian word for
gold and um. Africa, of course, has always been a
major supplier of this stuff. Yeah. One of the first
world Nubia was I guess, yeah, like the first heavily
mined area for gold um. And then on the periodic table,
the shorthand for gold is a U, which I've never
(04:22):
understood until I realized that it's Latin, which makes a
lot of sense. I thought it would be g O right, right,
you had something like that. No, No, we had to
go with the Latin or um, which means um shining dawn.
That's nice. Yeah, And we said all this to say
that people have loved gold for a very very, very
(04:43):
very long time. Can I drop one of the stats
of the show for me? Right when I saw this,
I was like just gonna say this is this is
the fact. I think it's pretty good. I told Emily
this last night, and she was not as impressed as
I would hope. She would have been Um forever and ever,
all the gold we've ever mind from the beginning of time,
time is only a hundred and sixty one thousand tons, Yeah,
(05:03):
which sounds like a lot. Yeah, that's a lot of gold,
right for all of time. That's not a lot of gold.
They compare it to something like aluminium. We we get
a five point six million tons a year in the
United States alone of aluminum. And again, a hundred and
sixty one thousand tons of gold is all that's ever
been mined. Yeah. And the secondary stat that comes later,
(05:26):
which I'll go ahead and ruin now, is of all
the gold we've ever found is still around, We've only
lost or cannot account for fifteen percent of the gold
since the beginning of time. It's pretty good. Well, that
is pretty good. And it suggests two things that William
Harris points out. One, Um that means that if you
are wearing a piece of gold jewelry, it may have
(05:48):
belonged to somebody else a very very long time ago. Uh.
And two where exactly did they get that? Who are
they getting these like, um, gold masks and headpieces and
stuff of milking anch of time and then melting down
and reselling them. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's
efficient and it's good because gold is really bad for
the environment, as we'll see you later on. But it's
(06:09):
really recyclable though. Yeah, it makes you It makes me wonder,
like how are they acquiring that? Yeah? What is your
wedding ring? Sir? My wedding ring is platinum. Platinum. It's lovely,
isn't it. It's very nice? What is yours? Oh? Minus?
I think titanium. It's very cheap. And it's like that
I could. And it's actually my second one. I lost
(06:30):
my first one and inside of a turtle, inside of
a turtle. I have no idea where it is. Maybe
it's inside of a turtle. But I luckily I like
had the old email and I just sent like the
same order for the same ring, and boom, I'm married
all over again. It's it's a second time. Did you
guys have another mini ceremony? He's just like, you need
to buy another damn ring? Yeah? Alright. So, um, that's
(06:51):
a lot of gold stats. And as I've been trying
to um hammer out people of like gold for a
really long time, let's talk about your gold shower. Speaking
of hammering out, though I knew one more cool little
fact gold one ounce of gold. One ounce of gold
can be drawn out into a fifty mile wire or
(07:13):
hammered into a sheet five millions of an inch thick.
So it's really well we'll get to all this, but
it's it's not only, you know, a beautiful thing for jewelry,
but it's super handy and malleable and chemically inert and
all these great things you can do with gold. Yeah,
because of its property. It also makes it kind of
ironic that the Egyptian is considered it indestructible because one
(07:33):
of the more malleable medals around. It's so malleable that
it has like almost no practical purposes as far as
like hammering things go, Like you make a gold hammer,
you're dummy, you know. Alright, so element number seventy nine,
let's let's get in it. Okay, So gold again, uh?
Was people go back to the Egyptians because they were
(07:54):
the first ones to have like gold fever. Well, we've
actually found evidence of gold being um smithed i guess
um during the transition from the Stone Age, the Neolithic
Age to the Bronze Age, which is the first metal
age before Bronze even right, some some places that had
easy access to gold like Bulgaria. I believe in a
(08:16):
four thousand BC. Um, we're already working with gold long
before the Egyptians ever cut their hands on it. Yeah.
And the Egyptians, um, like you said, they really had
an appetite for the stuff um Hira glyphs as early gold,
and by b C they were it was like currency
(08:37):
basically in Egypt. Well, yeah, very much so, Um, it
was not that I don't know did they actually minted
is for is currency? Uh? The Egyptians, Yeah, I don't
know if they minted it. I don't think the menting
came until the Greeks and Romans. Actually King Crosius, the
(08:57):
ruler of ancient Lydia, which is a loss of list A,
really he was the first two mint in mint gold currencies.
Gold coins um in widespread use in sixt but it
was the Greeks and then the Romans that really started
to mint about a hundred years later though, So that's
that's a pretty nice jump on things. He got. He
(09:19):
was like, Hey, I like to look at this stuff.
I'm gonna put my face on it exactly, and you
guys are going to use it. Yeah. By five fifty,
the Greeks were doing it. Uh and then um, the
Romans of course, with their more sophisticated ways, followed suit.
The orious coins called Yeah, they've pro used millions of them.
Those are the ones that they find, like just some
(09:40):
farmer in like Devonshire in England, we'll dig up like
a chest filled with these things. Yeah, because the Romans
were everywhere they were, and they minted a lot of
these coins. So as they're doing this, the same thing
is going on about the same time in South America
because they have a lot of gold there as well.
And what's it called the Middle Cicon Era. Yeah, I
(10:03):
couldn't tell if it was Cicon or Cissan. I bet
a Cissan Sisson. I bet it's not unleven hundred And
this is modern day Peru. They there has been, there
have been a lot of gold artifacts found in that region.
So they were usually crazy, for sure. The Peruvians were
crazy about it. The Inca like masks, ornaments, chalices, stuff,
(10:26):
and their specialty was hammering gold into sheets and like
wrapping stuff in it, like creating gold leaf. Interesting. Yeah,
they were pretty good at that kind of thing. Um,
and then you know there's already a certain amount of
gold fever over in Europe. I think the the English
minted their first gold coin in the mid century, alright,
(10:50):
the same with the Florentine du get. Yeah, those were
both about the middle of the thirteenth century. That's a
popular coin. It was still is it among collectives? Um,
So there was people in Europe were exposed to gold.
They like gold, they wanted gold. Over in Central and
South America, Over in Asia they also had the thing
(11:13):
for gold. But the Europeans were one of the first
to say, Hey, let's see where the edge of the
Earth is and if there's gold there. And one of
the first people to do that was Marco Polo. And strangely,
a lot of people hate Christopher Columbus or think he
was one of the more evil characters in history. Possibly
rightfully so. Um, but you can actually trace the infection
(11:37):
that Columbus released, literally and metaphorically back to Marco Polo,
because apparently there's evidence that Marco Polo directly inspired Christopher
Columbus to set sail in search of gold. Yeah. Growing
up in history class, you always learned about the great explorers,
and the more you learn about it, like the real histories,
as you get older, the more you learn that many
(11:57):
times they weren't just sailing upon the shore with like
by a bouquet of flowers to deliver most of the time,
I would say, you know, it was usually and they
were in conquer mode. Uh, for one reason, to spread Christianity,
as the Spaniards really wanted to do. Yeah, that was
the cover story, the cover story. But King Ferdinand in
fifteen eleven also sent word quote while you're there. Well
(12:21):
I added that part. While you're there, then start quote
get gold humanly if you can, but by but at
all hazards, get the gold. So I mean that was
definitely a charge. And thanks to the travels of Marco Polo,
the book that he wrote where he talked about palaces
of silver and gold, Uh, you know, people thought it
(12:41):
was just like the streets were lined with this stuff
in the New World. And I mean imagine though, if
you were one of the conquistadors who started sailing um
west and you ran into the Maya or the Aztecs
or the Inca, and you saw that they had all
this gold, you would think, well, this is all very
much true in this place gold city. So let's kill
(13:04):
all these people and take their gold, and there was
actually a famed gold city, El Dorado. They're all looking
for exactly like everyone was looking for Eldorado. And apparently
every time a conquistador would find a significant seam of gold,
they found El Dorado, and everybody else would come and
it becomes like a boom area. But of course it
was a mythical city, right, Yeah, it was just like legend. Yeah,
(13:27):
and probably the closest thing to it obviously not a
city built of gold, the closest thing to it. It
was in Brazil, in the meanest Gurai region, Minas Gerais.
That looks good, freaky Gervais. We've been doing this like
five years in our pronunciation is maybe even worse rather
than better. Actually, we have a listener mail today where
(13:50):
someone lauds us just for taking a chance and being
willing to be creative. Corrected, thank you, I'm glad to
hear that. I'll read that one at the end of
this one. Yeah, that was in Brazil, and uh, there
was a lot of gold there and they were the
largest gold producer by seventeen twenty years. They became the
world's largest gold producer because of this area, using, of course,
(14:10):
slave labor panning for gold in sort of rudimentary ways.
Not good. No, we're not too far removed from that now. No,
So onto America, North America, California, the gold rush. Like
the point here is is that gold has rewritten history
and how we form societies because of the search for gold. Yeah,
(14:33):
it's like spread people out over the world and intermixed
and inter intermarried and inter did it. And you know,
like we have entire groups of people ethnicities who are
the result of gold. The gold rushes. Um, California gets
a lot of press obviously because by the end of
the first year of the gold rush afterwards discovered in
(14:56):
eighteen eight, five thousand people were mining there. By the
end of the second year, forty people were mining there.
But North Carolina actually was the first American gold rush. Yeah,
and like you're saying, California gets all the all the attention.
San Francisco forty Niners are named after the gold rush. Um.
There was that great Scooby Doo episode with the minor
forty niner, remember him, a scary guy. Yeah. When you
(15:19):
think of gold rush, you think of California, or I
also think of Delawaga. Yeah. Yeah, he was the mayor
of Delanaga was the one who said there's golden then
our hills. Oh really yeah, it was the mayor of Delnaga.
I had no idea, Stas Todd something. I think have
you ever panned up there in Delnah? I did that
when I was a kid. And you know it's fun
if you're a little kid, right right, You think you're
(15:40):
gonna find a little gold flag and it would be rich,
or you just might find a little gold flag. And
if you do, you won't be rich. Yeah, you're going
to find it doesn't buy you virtually anything. But you
were saying, North Carolina doesn't usually get much attention, and
that was the first gold rush. Yeah, up until the
eighteen thirties. In fact um, they supplied all of the
domestic gold that was coined here at the U. S.
(16:03):
Mint and Philly came from North Carolina, or North Kakaki
as we like to call it. Who calls it that?
You never called it that? Uh? Have you ever heard
it called that? I have. There's a tribe called quest Song.
Oh really, I can't remember what it is, but somebody
calls it North Kakillaka and Compton take a check. Check
it out. No, I didn't make that up. Well, I
(16:24):
just wrapped you did your j tip. So uh yeah,
we talked about the gold rushes in the US. There
was also a big one in Oz. Yeah, we can't
leave out our Ozzie mates. No, um hello Australia. Yeah,
they're like we got tons of gold. They're like it's
so hot. I watched Mad Max the other day, by
(16:46):
the way, all the way through the original it was,
and it was, um, I don't know. Road Warrior got
most of the attention because it was bigger and more
of an action adventure, but Mad Max was a really
dark kind of revenge the exploitation movie. Yeah, it was
really good oxploitation osploitation. So was that the one where
(17:07):
the guys in the personal helicopter is that road Warrior
Mad Max? That's road Warrior? Then it's like, I mean
it was when Mel Gibson was still a cop and
he was you know, there was this biker gang led
by the toe Cutter, and you don't it something cool?
You know justin my friend his uncle is was the
toe cutter in Mad Max? Wow? Is uh man? I
(17:31):
can't remember his name? Now uncle U uncle toe Cutter?
Now I can call him that it said, it say,
isn't as Christmas talking? Oh, I can know. He just
sends toes every year in the little card. Oh man,
I can't remember his name now Uncle yeah, Uncle toe cutter.
I think that's the better day. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah.
So Australia has this huge gold rush um in the
(17:55):
what eighteen fifties, Yes, Edward, him and Hargraves found gold
in New South Wales Bam gold brush. A few years later,
South Africa steps onto the scene. Eight George Harrison. Uh,
he uncovered gold in South Africa? And what how many
contributions has that man made humanity in his hundred and
(18:17):
sixty years? I mean he wrote here comes the Sun.
He discovered gold like a hundred years before he was born,
Not a hundred, but hundred years for he was famous
about the same time, about a full century. But down
South Africa is the leading gold producer in the world.
Oh today it is, wow, followed by the United States.
(18:39):
In the United States, Nevada is the number one gold
producer these days. You mean Nevada Nevada? Alright, So let's
talk about how you get gold onto your finger. It's
not as easy as you would think, but it's well
it's at times drudimentary and at times a little more
sophisticated the whole process. Yeah, and it come likes to
(19:00):
say the least. Yeah, I mean like it really shows
how much we want gold. Yeah, it's sort of like
fracking in a way to the one method. Alright, So
what you gotta do, there's diff You gotta start by prospecting,
which is the act of looking for gold, right, And
that's what you would call an old grizzled dude with
the pack mule up in the hills in California prospect or. Yeah,
(19:22):
that's what you call a geologist who finds gold. Today too,
they're still called prospectors. And I guess the idea is
that what are the prospects for finding gold? I'm sure
that's where it came from, right, So their prospecting, that
makes a lot of sense. I've never thought about that.
So back in the day, there was a lot of
luck involved, uh, looking around for it basically where you
think it might be. These days it is way more precise. Um,
(19:45):
they have equipment that can tell you if there is
likely gold there, and then well here's the thing is,
there's gold everywhere, but it's just not concentrated enough to
be worth mining. Yeah, that's an excellent point. In most cases,
it's a visible but it's still present in the soil.
Isn't it crazy? Invisible gold in dirt and rocks. Yeah,
(20:06):
or it's in gold, schlagger, that's crazy too. It's like
they're just throwing it away, throwing away, you're drinking it
for a premium price. It's crazy. That's gross. That was
like a college thing. Oh yeah, schlagger, jagger, maister anything
that sounded like vaguely Germanic. That was a college thing,
maister brow. Um. So where they find gold and heaviest
(20:30):
concentration is when they will say, all right, you know
what it's worth setting up a mining operation here. Um.
There may be other metals there, like silver, which is great. Yeah.
A lot of times gold is combined with silver in
an ore, which I'm sure you're just like, okay, great,
that's fine with me. That's twice the value, right, well,
not twice the value, but one in three quarters times
(20:52):
the value. We could figure it out. So they drill
down to obtain samples, um, analyze it see if there's
enough gold. If there is, they're going to set up
a mining operation there, right, there's not They're gonna move
on and look at another place that they think they
might have a lot of gold. Yeah. And then depending
on how the gold is present in the area. UM,
there's basically two ways. One is the load a load deposit,
(21:14):
which is it's combined with rock or or and it's UM.
It can be at the surface or underground. UM. And
with a load deposit, basically you just want to blow
things up when you find gold like that. If it's
at the surface, you're gonna use what's called an open
pit method, which is basically just drill a bunch of
holes into the ore the gold or put some explosives
(21:36):
in there and bloat up and then haul the ore out. Yeah.
I mean your goal here is just to make I mean,
if they could load up that huge boulder and take
it and do it need or somewhere else, they might,
but they're just trying to make smaller rocks excellent point
for transport. UM. And then if it's underground, If the
load is underground, they'll dig a shaft down to it
(21:56):
and add it. You go down to it, and this
is shaft. I'm sure they go down to it and
drill holes all the way through that ore rock um
and those holes are called stokes. Then they packed those
full of explosives and blow it up. So it's basically
like the open pit method, but underground because then they
just truck that or out and off to the um extractor.
(22:18):
That's right. If you're in Delonaga, Georgia, or maybe at
a river and Utah, why not, why not give a
Utah shout out, you might look for something called a
placer deposit, and that is when you find the loose
gold um in a stream bed, you know, the little
flakes for the little chunks of little nuggets in a
mountain stream or a beach, and uh, this is where
(22:40):
you would pan and you you know, you scoop it
up in a pan and you shake it in the Yeah,
a lot of water because gold is is more dense,
so it's gonna sink and collect at the bottom of
you a little screen that separates everything and then you
got a little bit of gold hopefully, and then the
sixth graders are all very happy. That's right. Or I'm egine.
(23:00):
If you were a prospector in California back in the day,
you could do quite well as a banner. Yeah, you
look around and be like, it's mine, it's my gold,
all right, So then you have to extract it. That's
the next step. Right, So you've got all these big
rocks that you've blown up. Uh, yeah, I guess this
is mostly The first couple of steps are from load deposits.
You have a bunch of rocks, You put them on
(23:22):
a on a conveyor belt, and they go into a
machine that's appropriately called the crusher, which breaks the ore
into gravel. Then you take that gravel and you put
them into drums with a bunch of little steel balls.
Spin it around real quickness. Steel balls collide with that
gravel and they turn it into basically like a powder,
and you add water to that powder. You form a slurry,
(23:43):
add cyanide to that slurry and exposed it to oxygen,
and all of a sudden you're starting to extract gold
from ore. Yeah, the pulp. Basically, the gold in the
pulp dissolves with that chemical reaction, the side and side
and O two and uh, the little carbon in there,
like tiny little carbon grains, and um, the gold is
(24:04):
gonna adhere to it. They have They like each other
very much, so they're gonna get together in party for
a little while. Then you filter that and you have
gold bearing carbon at this point, still not pure gold, right,
so it's gold with carbon. Then you move that to
something called a stripping vessel. They put another solution, a
(24:24):
caustic solution to separate the gold from the carbon, have
more filters to filter out the carbon, and so now
you have actual gold bearing solution. But you're still not done.
And this is my favorite part. Yeah, this is pretty cool.
It's called electro winning, which thank god, Charlie she never
heard of this because this whole thing would be even
(24:45):
more annoying. But um, you put you put the gold
into a cell with positive and negative terminals, pass an
electrical current over it, and the gold separates uh from
the carbon solution or the gold bearing solution, and is
attracted to the negative terminal so much so that I
(25:06):
get the impression that basically becomes embedded in the negative terminal. Yeah,
I kind of wondered, because the next step is to
actually melt that negative terminal along with the gold, right,
and then you begin to separate the two. Basically, you
pour off the negative terminal metal metal, maybe steel or
something like that, Right, exactly. Um, so when you smell,
and I thought smell it was just melting, Like why
(25:28):
they add the s because it's not melting, it's smelting exactly.
So when you pour off the steel, I guess maybe
that comes off first, and then what you have left
is relatively impure gold, but as close as you're gonna
get it in the extracting process. You pour them into
bars called door a bars, and then you ship them
off to the refiner. Yeah, and that's not the bar
(25:49):
that you will see in die Hard three. Um, this
is a more impure door a bar. Sure, still nice
to have one. Yeah, I'm sure you can be the
look at me. Um okay. And then you need to
refine gold from that point once you have it in
its uh purest impure form. So imagine the process that
(26:11):
we just went through. It was like add this, subtract this,
remove that, but add this, and then like the gold
that here this, and let's burn the whole thing up
until it gets melty. Still impure, it still has to
be refined. So um, when refineries get gold dory bars.
They also frequently when you sell your your gold to J. D.
(26:32):
Wentworth or whoever. Um, they take all this gold scrap
and send that off also to these um refineries which
are all which also served as recycling centers to basically,
that's like the saddest shipment. Yeah, it's just full of
people's like lost hopes and dreams and wedding rings and
gold bracelets, anniversary bracelets. I'll just sent back to be
(26:53):
melted down because of the economy. Um. So when they
throw all this into the same they add a little
bit of soda ash, a little bit of borax, And honestly,
what camp borax do, um and the soda ash and
borax basically filters out impurities and then what you have
left most of the time and they use essay tests
(27:15):
to uh to to figure out the purity. But um,
they you have about ninety nine point nine percent pure
gold and that's usually what they stamp on the bar
that they pour. And those bars are called ingots. Yeah,
those are the ones you'll see in the heist movies.
And um, if you have ever seen Diehard three and
you see them loading up these ingots into big gym
(27:37):
bags and then throwing them over their shoulder and running out,
that is uh not possible because each one of those
bars weighs twenty seven pounds. So if you have fifty
of those in a bag, like Jeremy Irons might Jeremy
Irons not a strong man. You're not gonna throw that
on your back, like three pounds of gold and like
go running up a bunch of stairs and out of
(27:57):
the New York Uh. Where is it the New York
feder Yeah, supposedly they're in Fort Knox is where they
have all the gold, and he was talking last night
about that. She's like, let in summary safe to have
all this golden one place. I was like, well, that's
why they say, like it's built like Fort Knox. It's
like it's super secure. She's like, yeah, but what if
you know some terrors just bombed it. She's like, you
(28:19):
could just bomb it and then sneak out of there
with the gold. And I went, you just wrote Diehard three.
She's like, is that what happened out? That's exactly what happened.
But I think she makes a good point. I was
thinking last night to like, if we have all this gold,
and if it is all there, just keeping it in
two places, it seems I don't know, it seems unusually
like tempting fate. I I think I agree with Emily. Yeah,
(28:41):
six billion dollars worth of gold at Fort Knox. You know,
my friend, is that more now? Dude? So when when
Harris wrote this one gold was forty two twenty two
an ounces and ounce. Right now it's six hundred and
sixty seven dollars and forty nine cents and ounce. What
So that means that if Knocks holds a hundred and
(29:01):
forty seven point three million ounces of gold, the gold
is worth two five point six billion dollars just sitting
there and Fort Knock this article. Like, No, I think
gold went up in the last couple of years because
of the economy. Everybody flocked to gold. Demand increased, and
so the price did. It's so amazing to me after
(29:21):
all these years, gold is still like people hoard it. Yeah. Man,
When gold prices are low, you're very smart to invest
in gold because there's always going to be another economic
downturn and the prices are always just gonna skyrocket. You
got a couple of in gets in your closet. I
have them. I have them strapped in my leg. That's
how I have a limp. That's how we walk. Funny um, alright,
so during the refining stage, we should point out that
(29:43):
a lot of times they will um because gold is
so soft pure gold is, they will combine it with
other medals to form alloys. And that's why you will
get something like white gold, which is gold combined with
nicol or silver pladium. A red gold is golden copper.
That's pretty and I've ne seen red gold on them.
They seen roads gold surely all my fans. I mean
(30:04):
it has like has like a just a slight pink
hue too. It's very pretty stuff. I'm not big into gold,
like as far as jewelry. Yeah, no, I'm like you. Uh.
And then of course you have to talk about a
carrots caritage, and that is how much gold is in
the object compared to like silver, nickel or whatever else
is in that alloy. And interestingly, um, different countries have
(30:29):
different preferences. Here. You always hear about fourteen carrot gold
in the United States, which is only fifty eight point
five percent gold. Apparently in India they're partial to the
twenty two carrot and uh, which is ninety one point
seven five percent gold. And the Europeans like to take
that middle road and hit eighteen carrots Yeah, that's very strange,
and I don't understand what it is. I can understand
(30:50):
price being a factor, but maybe it's very odd to
me that like cultures. Yeah, so it's twenty four carrots
is percent gold obviously, Yeah, and in for twelve carried
is fift and about two thirds of all the gold
is uh jewelry, Yeah, which makes sense. And what's interesting
about the jewelry is that it's still basically produced as
(31:13):
it has been for hundreds or thousands of years, um,
using the same techniques, virtually the same tools. I mean,
I'm sure they're manufactured much differently, but they are kind
of the same thing. Yeah. Um. And while jewelry accounts
for what do you say, two thirds use, there's a
(31:33):
lot of other pretty interesting uses for gold to electronics
use a lot of gold and a lot of other
rare earth minerals like um. Uh. Apparently gold is very
very conductive. It's more conductive than any metal except for
copper and um silver. But it has a leg up
on conference silver and that it corrode. It's very difficult
(31:56):
for gold to corrode. So that means that if you
want something that's gonna last a very long time, and
be conductive. You might as well use some gold, so
they do, and things like processors and hard drives and
that kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean you you might
see gold on your headphone plug. Your headphone jack might
(32:16):
be gold plated because it's if it's higher end, they
might use gold conducts electricity therefore sound better. I have
seen that. I just thought it was like fancy high
end or something. Uh. Here's a cool stat because they
use it so much in electronics and microelectronics. NASA use
more than forty kilograms ninety pounds of gold on the
(32:40):
construction of the Space Shuttle Columbia. Right, that's pretty cool.
FA electronics, And they used it as a reflective surface.
They use gold film. Remember, you can be gold into
like a point um point one five millimeter thin sheet.
It's amazing. So it's light at that point, highly reflective,
effective against radiation. Yeah, so that's pretty awesome. Um. You
(33:03):
also use it for crowns. Yeah, they still use gold
crowns suddenly, I guess, and I imagine it because it's
not reactive because when things are reactive, especially with cooking,
it will make things taste terribly. Like there was something
called a fish fork and it was made of silver,
and apparently if you had this thing, it was like
(33:24):
a status symbol or whatever in Victorian the Victorian era.
But it also did have a practical use in that
silver didn't react with um lemon juice, which is often
used to serve with fish, so it didn't affect the taste.
I imagine that's probably one of the reasons why they
use gold and crowns, so that you everything doesn't just
taste back because it's not reacting with anything because it's
(33:45):
chemically inert. That's a good point, yeah, because you don't
want to be eating something and think, oh man, my
new gold tooth makes this Telapia tastes like squid, tastes
like squid. I don't know, that's not so bad. No,
I like squid. But if you're eat in telapia, you
don't want to eat squid? Do eat squid? Will you
eat octopus? I mean I'll eat all that stuff to
a certain degree. I mean like Emily when it comes
(34:08):
to calamari, she will only eat like the things that
look like little onion rings. As soon as it looks
like the little miniature creature, She's like, that's for you,
And I popped that in my mouth. I will probably both,
especially eat squid. You we won't eat octopus because of
Remember one of our friends had a friend. They told
us a story that their friend was a cook for
some couple down in the Caribbean and the couple like
(34:31):
caught an octopus and was going to cook it, or
they gave it to the to their cook to cook,
and the cook was going to put it in the
pot alive, and the octopus was wrapping its tentacles around
the woman like, please don't kill me. And she said
it was, you know, like one of the worst things
that ever happened to because she did it anyway, like
you literally when you literally have to fight to put
(34:52):
the animal to their death. And and then so that
combined with I think being inspired to go research octopi
and finding that they were very intelligent and just like,
I just can't eat those anymore, which is because there's
they pop up. It's some pretty delicious dishes, I imagine,
but they're a very smart animals. And he's like, I'm
just gonna eat them animals, just stupid ones. Right, Yeah,
(35:17):
I could see that I would be traumatized, Oh my god. Yeah,
because it was like no, yeah, I would just walk
slowly into the ocean until it released itself and swam away. Yeah,
you'd be like the Woodsman and snow White, like I
don't know what happened to it. But then you start
to walk back and the octopus reaches up with one
hand and holds your hand. He's like, I want to
(35:37):
be your pet. I don't want to go back to
the sea. Just don't cook me. Don't cook me? All right?
Where do we leave off food and beverage. You can
get it in gold slagger, in certain jellies, gold by
the way, not octopus. Yeah, yeah, yeah, um. And that
that's all just for marketing and making things. It really is.
You know. They have like the World's most Expensive Sunday
(35:58):
or the World's most expensive tells always got gold flakes.
It does so much so that I think we've talked
about this. They have another category for world's most expensive
non gold because it's like any smoke, can you know,
spit out a hot dog and relish and then put
gold flakes on and be like World's expensive hot dog
and that doesn't really you know, So then that means
some of the gold that we've lost that has been
(36:20):
pooped out. Yeah. So that's sad, is it. I think so,
since it's you know, so limited and supply and bad
for the environment to get well, I guess we should
talk about that. Yeah, we probably should, because I was
very surprised. I mean, I've heard that gold was bad
for the environment, but I didn't realize this. You want
to you want to tell one of the facts of
(36:42):
the podcast. Yes, it is like most mining operations, um,
not great for the environment. In order to get just
one ounce of gold, you have to get out two
and fifty tons of the rock and ore and a
lot of times um well of course, just the cyanide,
which is never great when you're introducing those kind of chemicals. No,
and apparently they take this affluent, right, yeah, refluent and
(37:08):
they dump it out in the ocean, which probably affects OCTOPI. Yeah,
it's like, hey, here's a bunch of cyanide water, and
I'm sure the ocean will eventually like even things out,
But for that local area where it gets dumped, that
can't be good. Of course not. And that's why there's
a group, a nonprofit called Earthworks that runs a campaign
called no Dirty Gold. So I imagine if you have
(37:29):
a gold wedding band and a blood diamond on your finger,
then uh, you just like you're that's a double whammy's hatrick? Yeah?
That well, now hatrick could be three, so not in
this not in this case. Okay, that's as good as
you can get, as bad as it gets. So we
should talk a little bit about gold. Although I think
(37:50):
we should do a full podcast in the gold standard
at some point. I know we've touched at some point,
let's do it. But um, the gold standard was, wasn't
it like, uh, every dollar amount like was that you
could print, there was a certain amount of gold that
had to be in reserve that matched that. Is that
what it was, Yes, exactly, And if you had a bunch,
(38:12):
if you had enough money, you could go up to
you know, the Federal Deservance say I want to catch
this money out for gold, and they had to give
it to you by federal law. And that was from
nineteen hundred to nineteen seventy one. When didn't we just
start pretty more money than gold and said we should
abandon the gold standard? Yea, And I think when you
detach your currency from gold becomes a fiat currency right
(38:35):
to the whims of the market. I seem to remember
discussing this sum in one of our econ podcasts way
back when, maybe even audiobook How the Economy Work. Uh,
the super stuff got into the economy, that's what it's called. Um,
that was a good one. Um. So two thirty six
tons of gold are uh being so called hoarded by
(38:58):
people in governments. Um, is that all two six tons? Yeah,
it seemed like if if there was still of the
hundred and sixty one thousand tons. Yeah, if that doesn't
seem like much, But it doesn't. It's a lot of
jewelry being more. Yeah. But um, they think there's actually
gold out and outer space, you know, and some of
these big asteroids flying by that are chuck full of
(39:20):
minerals and other metals. Um. There was a near Earth
asteroid rendezvous spacecraft passed close enough to the asteroid arrows
to actually send back data and um, they think the
arrows might have as much as twenty billion tons of gold,
which would probably really drop the value of gold here
on Earth if anyone ever got their hands on that.
(39:43):
How many How do you go about capturing an asteroid?
I wonder we've we did a podcast on asteroid minding.
Remember is that the same thing? Okay, that's what they
would do. Well, I retreat, Then we should just do that.
I could do that. Senders will us up with a lasso,
a golden lasso riding a jackalope and attach it to
(40:05):
the jackalobes tale and ride it back to Earth. You
got anything else? I don't, Well, that's uh oh, I
have one more thing I want to recommend. Um Harris
didn't mention this. One of the other really bad environmental
impacts of gold is illegal gold mining. Apparently, um Guiana
has a lot of illegal gold mining. And one of
(40:27):
the things that you if you're an illegal underground gold miner,
you're not going through this elaborate extraction and refining process.
You are basically taking your ore in. You're refining or
extracting on site using mercury. Mercury is what they use.
So there's not only a lot of like illegal, horrible
(40:48):
for the environment gold mining going on, there's also a
lot of mercury mining and a lot of mercury like runoff.
So there's mercury poisoning all over Guiana right now. And
there's a really great article may have one appealed to
I found it puels or dot org, but it was
originally in Harper's That's where I read it. Gold Guns
and guaren Pierros. That is g A R I M
(41:09):
P E I R O S. And it's by Damon Tabor.
Good stuff, awesome. Article is so engrossing, one of those
that makes you want to like not ever use gold
for anything. Uh, it has that effect a little bit,
but it's it's more just completely fascinating, like you can't
believe that people are doing this. Yeah, and child labor two, right,
(41:29):
isn't that a big problem? I think that's part of it,
but more um, it's just you are you really risk
death in these like called wildcat camps, these illegal gold
mining operations, because I mean if some in the mercury
in the guns, and you know, people staking other people's claims,
bad bad news. So there you can gold gold. If
(41:53):
you want to learn more about gold, you can type
that words into the handy search bar at how stuff
works dot com. And since I said that, it's time
for a listener mail Josh, I'm gonna call this the
ten Commandments of Chuck and Josh, although there's only eight.
Um and this is from Professor Tom uh, guys, I
teach a communications course at an area of community college
(42:16):
and UH and in universities. I often recommend your podcast
in my classes, especially to students that seem to love
learning but may have not been encouraged by family, your friends. UM,
I'm hoping that they may pick up a few important
life lessons from you guys, as well as interesting guys.
Here a few life lesson highlights that I think you
guys display. Number one, normal guys can talk about something
(42:38):
other than sports. It's true, I don't know sports. Number two.
Good presentations begin with an attention getting introduction. Josh will
tell you this is sometimes easier said, been done. Yes,
that's absolutely true. Um, if you don't know something, UH,
look it up. And if you're looking it up on
the internet, check more than one source. Life lessons this
(43:00):
this this guy is really paying attention to what we're doing. Yes,
learning involves mistakes. Number four. Take a shot at pronouncing
new word to get wrong, venture I guess, share a
new hypothesis, then invite feedback, which is the important part.
Karen Pierro's number five. You don't have to make fun
of people to be funny. If you absolutely must mock
someone mock yourself. You're fit at that. Number six, It's
(43:23):
okay for guys to have a variety of emotions. There's
nothing unmanly with being sensitive or expressing emotions other than anger.
It's even healthy for guys to talk about their emotions. Chuckle.
Do you like the new Rosy career? Yeah? Number seven,
it's worth the effort to be respectful of others. Sometimes
you have to stop yourself before you make an off
hand joke, which we do. Um. Sometimes you have to
(43:45):
use a term that is more accurate up to date,
which we try and do. Sometimes you have to remember
what it feels like to be seen as different and
see if your language could be more inclusive or encouraging.
Even if only one person in your audience notices the efforts,
It's worth it, man, This this is my conscience writing.
And number eight, curiosity can last a lifetime. And that
was the last one, and he said, guys, there's a
(44:07):
lot to be said for teaching by example. Whether you
realize it or not, you're doing it every week, and
he goes on with an interesting ps from Professor Tom. Yes,
if you have my gay male friends and I got
talking about your show. We tried to figure out which
type you would be if you'd been born gay. It
was unanimous. Chuck is clearly a bear. If you have
(44:27):
a gay brother, Chuck, I have a few friends who
would like to meet him. I do have a brother,
but he's not gay, and he would not be a bear.
He's he's prettier than me. He is very pretty. You
would actually love my brother. Yeah, he's got great hair.
I thought you guys would know with like knowing that
you were being stereotyped by a bunch of gay guys
standing around drinking beer at a bar called the Whole
Performing Stuff you Should Know podcast analysis, What a world,
(44:50):
Thanks Professor Tom. Yeah, that's a great email. That was
a great email. We gotta print that one out frame
it Um. If you ever do an analysis of stuff
you should Know, we want to hear what you've can concluded. Um,
you can tweak to us if it's a short conclusion
at s Y s K Podcast. You can join us
(45:11):
at Facebook dot com slash Stuff you Should Know. You
can send us an email to uh Stuff Podcast at
Discovery dot com, and you can join us on our
website always the Home of Stuff you Should Know That
is stuff you should know dot com. Hey, and don't
forget to watch our TV show Science Channel Saturdays. It
didn't be in Eastern That's exactly right. Dot com For
(45:38):
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
How stuff works? Dot Com Brought to you by the
two thousand twelve Toyota Camera. It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the two thousand twelve Toyota Camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff You Should Know?
From House Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W Chuck Bryant.
We're doing this again. It's been a little while, been
(00:22):
a little while, but it's still stuff you should know.
But I thought the name had changed since we took
our little Christmas break. No, don't you remember our race
to the Patent Office trademarket again at the eleven That
was a close one boom and they stamped it. Yeah,
s Y s K. Actually they said s N s
K right now. Wait, s Y s N is what
(00:45):
we get from people a lot sometimes, And I'm like,
you know, no starts with the K. One of them does,
one of Yes, it's not stuff you should know? Is right?
It doesn't make any sense. How do you doing? Oh?
I'm great man? Are you okay? Good? Um? You want
to do this one? We're talking about gold? Yeah, man,
(01:06):
I've got a little bit of an intro. It might
be a stretch. We'll find out. Okay, that's here. Today's January,
tomorrow's January Day. It is Big Newton Day. And also
on this day in history, in the Mayan general, fire
is born. Uh conquered the Mayan city to Call, which
(01:28):
was recently rediscovered, well not recently, it's been rediscovered, the
rediscovered anyone. Uh and Uh. What this did was it
enlarged the kingdom of King spear thrower Owl. The Minas
had the best names, great name um. And all of
this was going on in the heart of the Yucatan Peninsula.
(01:51):
If you went just a little to the north, you
would run into another group of people called Aztecs, which
were actually the Triple Federation, is what it's what they're
really called. Um. But if you were to stumble northward
and run into the Aztec Empire and ask for gold,
what they would give you is what they would call
(02:12):
excrement of the gods. Do you want to try to
pronounce it? Yeah, I'm gonna go with teo would. I
think that's pretty close. I think you may have done it, Chuck.
I think the last part is I love that language.
It's similar to like the some of the native languages
(02:35):
we heard in Guatemala. The that's because they're mine, yeah exactly,
but it's got that same like I don't know. It's
very staccato. It's kind of cool to hear, I think, right,
like the Mayan City, the heart of King, spirit thrower
owls um empires tetotactan, right, which sounds pretty close to
that word tilt, which means excrement of the gods. And
(02:57):
that's what the the the Aztecs considered gold. That was
a holy metal, a very very precious metal in every
sense of the word. And by three sight a d
they weren't the only ones to have loved gold for
a very long time. No, Egyptians were all over it.
They thought it was also divine. Wait, hold on, how
(03:19):
would you rate that intro? I would say that was
on a scale of what one to ten, I was
one to twenty. I would give it a solid like sixteen. Wow,
thanks Chuck, higher than you thought, way higher. I thought
I was gonna get a ten. That's why I extended it. No, no, no, um.
So the Egyptians, like I said, they also thought it
(03:40):
was divine of the gods, indestructible and uh they called
it uh. I guess Nube and ub and if you
know of the African region in Northeast Africa, Nubia or
if you're a fan of the rap group brand Nubians,
sure you would have heard of this. I was actually yeah,
yeah they were and um that that that name so
(04:00):
holds today because of the original original Egyptian word for
gold and um. Africa, of course, has always been a
major supplier of this stuff. Yeah. One of the first
world Nubia was I guess, yeah, like the first heavily
mined area for gold um. And then on the periodic table,
the shorthand for gold is a U, which I've never
(04:22):
understood until I realized that it's Latin, which makes a
lot of sense. I thought it would be g O right, right,
you had something like that. No, No, we had to
go with the Latin or um, which means um shining dawn.
That's nice. Yeah, And we said all this to say
that people have loved gold for a very very, very
(04:43):
very long time. Can I drop one of the stats
of the show for me? Right when I saw this,
I was like just gonna say this is this is
the fact. I think it's pretty good. I told Emily
this last night, and she was not as impressed as
I would hope. She would have been Um forever and ever,
all the gold we've ever mind from the beginning of time,
time is only a hundred and sixty one thousand tons, Yeah,
(05:03):
which sounds like a lot. Yeah, that's a lot of gold,
right for all of time. That's not a lot of gold.
They compare it to something like aluminium. We we get
a five point six million tons a year in the
United States alone of aluminum. And again, a hundred and
sixty one thousand tons of gold is all that's ever
been mined. Yeah. And the secondary stat that comes later,
(05:26):
which I'll go ahead and ruin now, is of all
the gold we've ever found is still around, We've only
lost or cannot account for fifteen percent of the gold
since the beginning of time. It's pretty good. Well, that
is pretty good. And it suggests two things that William
Harris points out. One, Um that means that if you
are wearing a piece of gold jewelry, it may have
(05:48):
belonged to somebody else a very very long time ago. Uh.
And two where exactly did they get that? Who are
they getting these like, um, gold masks and headpieces and
stuff of milking anch of time and then melting down
and reselling them. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's
efficient and it's good because gold is really bad for
the environment, as we'll see you later on. But it's
(06:09):
really recyclable though. Yeah, it makes you It makes me wonder,
like how are they acquiring that? Yeah? What is your
wedding ring? Sir? My wedding ring is platinum. Platinum. It's lovely,
isn't it. It's very nice? What is yours? Oh? Minus?
I think titanium. It's very cheap. And it's like that
I could. And it's actually my second one. I lost
(06:30):
my first one and inside of a turtle, inside of
a turtle. I have no idea where it is. Maybe
it's inside of a turtle. But I luckily I like
had the old email and I just sent like the
same order for the same ring, and boom, I'm married
all over again. It's it's a second time. Did you
guys have another mini ceremony? He's just like, you need
to buy another damn ring? Yeah? Alright. So, um, that's
(06:51):
a lot of gold stats. And as I've been trying
to um hammer out people of like gold for a
really long time, let's talk about your gold shower. Speaking
of hammering out, though I knew one more cool little
fact gold one ounce of gold. One ounce of gold
can be drawn out into a fifty mile wire or
(07:13):
hammered into a sheet five millions of an inch thick.
So it's really well we'll get to all this, but
it's it's not only, you know, a beautiful thing for jewelry,
but it's super handy and malleable and chemically inert and
all these great things you can do with gold. Yeah,
because of its property. It also makes it kind of
ironic that the Egyptian is considered it indestructible because one
(07:33):
of the more malleable medals around. It's so malleable that
it has like almost no practical purposes as far as
like hammering things go, Like you make a gold hammer,
you're dummy, you know. Alright, so element number seventy nine,
let's let's get in it. Okay, So gold again, uh?
Was people go back to the Egyptians because they were
(07:54):
the first ones to have like gold fever. Well, we've
actually found evidence of gold being um smithed i guess
um during the transition from the Stone Age, the Neolithic
Age to the Bronze Age, which is the first metal
age before Bronze even right, some some places that had
easy access to gold like Bulgaria. I believe in a
(08:16):
four thousand BC. Um, we're already working with gold long
before the Egyptians ever cut their hands on it. Yeah.
And the Egyptians, um, like you said, they really had
an appetite for the stuff um Hira glyphs as early gold,
and by b C they were it was like currency
(08:37):
basically in Egypt. Well, yeah, very much so, Um, it
was not that I don't know did they actually minted
is for is currency? Uh? The Egyptians, Yeah, I don't
know if they minted it. I don't think the menting
came until the Greeks and Romans. Actually King Crosius, the
(08:57):
ruler of ancient Lydia, which is a loss of list A,
really he was the first two mint in mint gold currencies.
Gold coins um in widespread use in sixt but it
was the Greeks and then the Romans that really started
to mint about a hundred years later though, So that's
that's a pretty nice jump on things. He got. He
(09:19):
was like, Hey, I like to look at this stuff.
I'm gonna put my face on it exactly, and you
guys are going to use it. Yeah. By five fifty,
the Greeks were doing it. Uh and then um, the
Romans of course, with their more sophisticated ways, followed suit.
The orious coins called Yeah, they've pro used millions of them.
Those are the ones that they find, like just some
(09:40):
farmer in like Devonshire in England, we'll dig up like
a chest filled with these things. Yeah, because the Romans
were everywhere they were, and they minted a lot of
these coins. So as they're doing this, the same thing
is going on about the same time in South America
because they have a lot of gold there as well.
And what's it called the Middle Cicon Era. Yeah, I
(10:03):
couldn't tell if it was Cicon or Cissan. I bet
a Cissan Sisson. I bet it's not unleven hundred And
this is modern day Peru. They there has been, there
have been a lot of gold artifacts found in that region.
So they were usually crazy, for sure. The Peruvians were
crazy about it. The Inca like masks, ornaments, chalices, stuff,
(10:26):
and their specialty was hammering gold into sheets and like
wrapping stuff in it, like creating gold leaf. Interesting. Yeah,
they were pretty good at that kind of thing. Um,
and then you know there's already a certain amount of
gold fever over in Europe. I think the the English
minted their first gold coin in the mid century, alright,
(10:50):
the same with the Florentine du get. Yeah, those were
both about the middle of the thirteenth century. That's a
popular coin. It was still is it among collectives? Um,
So there was people in Europe were exposed to gold.
They like gold, they wanted gold. Over in Central and
South America, Over in Asia they also had the thing
(11:13):
for gold. But the Europeans were one of the first
to say, Hey, let's see where the edge of the
Earth is and if there's gold there. And one of
the first people to do that was Marco Polo. And strangely,
a lot of people hate Christopher Columbus or think he
was one of the more evil characters in history. Possibly
rightfully so. Um, but you can actually trace the infection
(11:37):
that Columbus released, literally and metaphorically back to Marco Polo,
because apparently there's evidence that Marco Polo directly inspired Christopher
Columbus to set sail in search of gold. Yeah. Growing
up in history class, you always learned about the great explorers,
and the more you learn about it, like the real histories,
as you get older, the more you learn that many
(11:57):
times they weren't just sailing upon the shore with like
by a bouquet of flowers to deliver most of the time,
I would say, you know, it was usually and they
were in conquer mode. Uh, for one reason, to spread Christianity,
as the Spaniards really wanted to do. Yeah, that was
the cover story, the cover story. But King Ferdinand in
fifteen eleven also sent word quote while you're there. Well
(12:21):
I added that part. While you're there, then start quote
get gold humanly if you can, but by but at
all hazards, get the gold. So I mean that was
definitely a charge. And thanks to the travels of Marco Polo,
the book that he wrote where he talked about palaces
of silver and gold, Uh, you know, people thought it
(12:41):
was just like the streets were lined with this stuff
in the New World. And I mean imagine though, if
you were one of the conquistadors who started sailing um
west and you ran into the Maya or the Aztecs
or the Inca, and you saw that they had all
this gold, you would think, well, this is all very
much true in this place gold city. So let's kill
(13:04):
all these people and take their gold, and there was
actually a famed gold city, El Dorado. They're all looking
for exactly like everyone was looking for Eldorado. And apparently
every time a conquistador would find a significant seam of gold,
they found El Dorado, and everybody else would come and
it becomes like a boom area. But of course it
was a mythical city, right, Yeah, it was just like legend. Yeah,
(13:27):
and probably the closest thing to it obviously not a
city built of gold, the closest thing to it. It
was in Brazil, in the meanest Gurai region, Minas Gerais.
That looks good, freaky Gervais. We've been doing this like
five years in our pronunciation is maybe even worse rather
than better. Actually, we have a listener mail today where
(13:50):
someone lauds us just for taking a chance and being
willing to be creative. Corrected, thank you, I'm glad to
hear that. I'll read that one at the end of
this one. Yeah, that was in Brazil, and uh, there
was a lot of gold there and they were the
largest gold producer by seventeen twenty years. They became the
world's largest gold producer because of this area, using, of course,
(14:10):
slave labor panning for gold in sort of rudimentary ways.
Not good. No, we're not too far removed from that now. No,
So onto America, North America, California, the gold rush. Like
the point here is is that gold has rewritten history
and how we form societies because of the search for gold. Yeah,
(14:33):
it's like spread people out over the world and intermixed
and inter intermarried and inter did it. And you know,
like we have entire groups of people ethnicities who are
the result of gold. The gold rushes. Um, California gets
a lot of press obviously because by the end of
the first year of the gold rush afterwards discovered in
(14:56):
eighteen eight, five thousand people were mining there. By the
end of the second year, forty people were mining there.
But North Carolina actually was the first American gold rush. Yeah,
and like you're saying, California gets all the all the attention.
San Francisco forty Niners are named after the gold rush. Um.
There was that great Scooby Doo episode with the minor
forty niner, remember him, a scary guy. Yeah. When you
(15:19):
think of gold rush, you think of California, or I
also think of Delawaga. Yeah. Yeah, he was the mayor
of Delanaga was the one who said there's golden then
our hills. Oh really yeah, it was the mayor of Delnaga.
I had no idea, Stas Todd something. I think have
you ever panned up there in Delnah? I did that
when I was a kid. And you know it's fun
if you're a little kid, right right, You think you're
(15:40):
gonna find a little gold flag and it would be rich,
or you just might find a little gold flag. And
if you do, you won't be rich. Yeah, you're going
to find it doesn't buy you virtually anything. But you
were saying, North Carolina doesn't usually get much attention, and
that was the first gold rush. Yeah, up until the
eighteen thirties. In fact um, they supplied all of the
domestic gold that was coined here at the U. S.
(16:03):
Mint and Philly came from North Carolina, or North Kakaki
as we like to call it. Who calls it that?
You never called it that? Uh? Have you ever heard
it called that? I have. There's a tribe called quest Song.
Oh really, I can't remember what it is, but somebody
calls it North Kakillaka and Compton take a check. Check
it out. No, I didn't make that up. Well, I
(16:24):
just wrapped you did your j tip. So uh yeah,
we talked about the gold rushes in the US. There
was also a big one in Oz. Yeah, we can't
leave out our Ozzie mates. No, um hello Australia. Yeah,
they're like we got tons of gold. They're like it's
so hot. I watched Mad Max the other day, by
(16:46):
the way, all the way through the original it was,
and it was, um, I don't know. Road Warrior got
most of the attention because it was bigger and more
of an action adventure, but Mad Max was a really
dark kind of revenge the exploitation movie. Yeah, it was
really good oxploitation osploitation. So was that the one where
(17:07):
the guys in the personal helicopter is that road Warrior
Mad Max? That's road Warrior? Then it's like, I mean
it was when Mel Gibson was still a cop and
he was you know, there was this biker gang led
by the toe Cutter, and you don't it something cool?
You know justin my friend his uncle is was the
toe cutter in Mad Max? Wow? Is uh man? I
(17:31):
can't remember his name? Now uncle U uncle toe Cutter?
Now I can call him that it said, it say,
isn't as Christmas talking? Oh, I can know. He just
sends toes every year in the little card. Oh man,
I can't remember his name now Uncle yeah, Uncle toe cutter.
I think that's the better day. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah.
So Australia has this huge gold rush um in the
(17:55):
what eighteen fifties, Yes, Edward, him and Hargraves found gold
in New South Wales Bam gold brush. A few years later,
South Africa steps onto the scene. Eight George Harrison. Uh,
he uncovered gold in South Africa? And what how many
contributions has that man made humanity in his hundred and
(18:17):
sixty years? I mean he wrote here comes the Sun.
He discovered gold like a hundred years before he was born,
Not a hundred, but hundred years for he was famous
about the same time, about a full century. But down
South Africa is the leading gold producer in the world.
Oh today it is, wow, followed by the United States.
(18:39):
In the United States, Nevada is the number one gold
producer these days. You mean Nevada Nevada? Alright, So let's
talk about how you get gold onto your finger. It's
not as easy as you would think, but it's well
it's at times drudimentary and at times a little more
sophisticated the whole process. Yeah, and it come likes to
(19:00):
say the least. Yeah, I mean like it really shows
how much we want gold. Yeah, it's sort of like
fracking in a way to the one method. Alright, So
what you gotta do, there's diff You gotta start by prospecting,
which is the act of looking for gold, right, And
that's what you would call an old grizzled dude with
the pack mule up in the hills in California prospect or. Yeah,
(19:22):
that's what you call a geologist who finds gold. Today too,
they're still called prospectors. And I guess the idea is
that what are the prospects for finding gold? I'm sure
that's where it came from, right, So their prospecting, that
makes a lot of sense. I've never thought about that.
So back in the day, there was a lot of
luck involved, uh, looking around for it basically where you
think it might be. These days it is way more precise. Um,
(19:45):
they have equipment that can tell you if there is
likely gold there, and then well here's the thing is,
there's gold everywhere, but it's just not concentrated enough to
be worth mining. Yeah, that's an excellent point. In most cases,
it's a visible but it's still present in the soil.
Isn't it crazy? Invisible gold in dirt and rocks. Yeah,
(20:06):
or it's in gold, schlagger, that's crazy too. It's like
they're just throwing it away, throwing away, you're drinking it
for a premium price. It's crazy. That's gross. That was
like a college thing. Oh yeah, schlagger, jagger, maister anything
that sounded like vaguely Germanic. That was a college thing,
maister brow. Um. So where they find gold and heaviest
(20:30):
concentration is when they will say, all right, you know
what it's worth setting up a mining operation here. Um.
There may be other metals there, like silver, which is great. Yeah.
A lot of times gold is combined with silver in
an ore, which I'm sure you're just like, okay, great,
that's fine with me. That's twice the value, right, well,
not twice the value, but one in three quarters times
(20:52):
the value. We could figure it out. So they drill
down to obtain samples, um, analyze it see if there's
enough gold. If there is, they're going to set up
a mining operation there, right, there's not They're gonna move
on and look at another place that they think they
might have a lot of gold. Yeah. And then depending
on how the gold is present in the area. UM,
there's basically two ways. One is the load a load deposit,
(21:14):
which is it's combined with rock or or and it's UM.
It can be at the surface or underground. UM. And
with a load deposit, basically you just want to blow
things up when you find gold like that. If it's
at the surface, you're gonna use what's called an open
pit method, which is basically just drill a bunch of
holes into the ore the gold or put some explosives
(21:36):
in there and bloat up and then haul the ore out. Yeah.
I mean your goal here is just to make I mean,
if they could load up that huge boulder and take
it and do it need or somewhere else, they might,
but they're just trying to make smaller rocks excellent point
for transport. UM. And then if it's underground, If the
load is underground, they'll dig a shaft down to it
(21:56):
and add it. You go down to it, and this
is shaft. I'm sure they go down to it and
drill holes all the way through that ore rock um
and those holes are called stokes. Then they packed those
full of explosives and blow it up. So it's basically
like the open pit method, but underground because then they
just truck that or out and off to the um extractor.
(22:18):
That's right. If you're in Delonaga, Georgia, or maybe at
a river and Utah, why not, why not give a
Utah shout out, you might look for something called a
placer deposit, and that is when you find the loose
gold um in a stream bed, you know, the little
flakes for the little chunks of little nuggets in a
mountain stream or a beach, and uh, this is where
(22:40):
you would pan and you you know, you scoop it
up in a pan and you shake it in the Yeah,
a lot of water because gold is is more dense,
so it's gonna sink and collect at the bottom of
you a little screen that separates everything and then you
got a little bit of gold hopefully, and then the
sixth graders are all very happy. That's right. Or I'm egine.
(23:00):
If you were a prospector in California back in the day,
you could do quite well as a banner. Yeah, you
look around and be like, it's mine, it's my gold,
all right, So then you have to extract it. That's
the next step. Right, So you've got all these big
rocks that you've blown up. Uh, yeah, I guess this
is mostly The first couple of steps are from load deposits.
You have a bunch of rocks, You put them on
(23:22):
a on a conveyor belt, and they go into a
machine that's appropriately called the crusher, which breaks the ore
into gravel. Then you take that gravel and you put
them into drums with a bunch of little steel balls.
Spin it around real quickness. Steel balls collide with that
gravel and they turn it into basically like a powder,
and you add water to that powder. You form a slurry,
(23:43):
add cyanide to that slurry and exposed it to oxygen,
and all of a sudden you're starting to extract gold
from ore. Yeah, the pulp. Basically, the gold in the
pulp dissolves with that chemical reaction, the side and side
and O two and uh, the little carbon in there,
like tiny little carbon grains, and um, the gold is
(24:04):
gonna adhere to it. They have They like each other
very much, so they're gonna get together in party for
a little while. Then you filter that and you have
gold bearing carbon at this point, still not pure gold, right,
so it's gold with carbon. Then you move that to
something called a stripping vessel. They put another solution, a
(24:24):
caustic solution to separate the gold from the carbon, have
more filters to filter out the carbon, and so now
you have actual gold bearing solution. But you're still not done.
And this is my favorite part. Yeah, this is pretty cool.
It's called electro winning, which thank god, Charlie she never
heard of this because this whole thing would be even
(24:45):
more annoying. But um, you put you put the gold
into a cell with positive and negative terminals, pass an
electrical current over it, and the gold separates uh from
the carbon solution or the gold bearing solution, and is
attracted to the negative terminal so much so that I
(25:06):
get the impression that basically becomes embedded in the negative terminal. Yeah,
I kind of wondered, because the next step is to
actually melt that negative terminal along with the gold, right,
and then you begin to separate the two. Basically, you
pour off the negative terminal metal metal, maybe steel or
something like that, Right, exactly. Um, so when you smell,
and I thought smell it was just melting, Like why
(25:28):
they add the s because it's not melting, it's smelting exactly.
So when you pour off the steel, I guess maybe
that comes off first, and then what you have left
is relatively impure gold, but as close as you're gonna
get it in the extracting process. You pour them into
bars called door a bars, and then you ship them
off to the refiner. Yeah, and that's not the bar
(25:49):
that you will see in die Hard three. Um, this
is a more impure door a bar. Sure, still nice
to have one. Yeah, I'm sure you can be the
look at me. Um okay. And then you need to
refine gold from that point once you have it in
its uh purest impure form. So imagine the process that
(26:11):
we just went through. It was like add this, subtract this,
remove that, but add this, and then like the gold
that here this, and let's burn the whole thing up
until it gets melty. Still impure, it still has to
be refined. So um, when refineries get gold dory bars.
They also frequently when you sell your your gold to J. D.
(26:32):
Wentworth or whoever. Um, they take all this gold scrap
and send that off also to these um refineries which
are all which also served as recycling centers to basically,
that's like the saddest shipment. Yeah, it's just full of
people's like lost hopes and dreams and wedding rings and
gold bracelets, anniversary bracelets. I'll just sent back to be
(26:53):
melted down because of the economy. Um. So when they
throw all this into the same they add a little
bit of soda ash, a little bit of borax, And honestly,
what camp borax do, um and the soda ash and
borax basically filters out impurities and then what you have
left most of the time and they use essay tests
(27:15):
to uh to to figure out the purity. But um,
they you have about ninety nine point nine percent pure
gold and that's usually what they stamp on the bar
that they pour. And those bars are called ingots. Yeah,
those are the ones you'll see in the heist movies.
And um, if you have ever seen Diehard three and
you see them loading up these ingots into big gym
(27:37):
bags and then throwing them over their shoulder and running out,
that is uh not possible because each one of those
bars weighs twenty seven pounds. So if you have fifty
of those in a bag, like Jeremy Irons might Jeremy
Irons not a strong man. You're not gonna throw that
on your back, like three pounds of gold and like
go running up a bunch of stairs and out of
(27:57):
the New York Uh. Where is it the New York
feder Yeah, supposedly they're in Fort Knox is where they
have all the gold, and he was talking last night
about that. She's like, let in summary safe to have
all this golden one place. I was like, well, that's
why they say, like it's built like Fort Knox. It's
like it's super secure. She's like, yeah, but what if
you know some terrors just bombed it. She's like, you
(28:19):
could just bomb it and then sneak out of there
with the gold. And I went, you just wrote Diehard three.
She's like, is that what happened out? That's exactly what happened.
But I think she makes a good point. I was
thinking last night to like, if we have all this gold,
and if it is all there, just keeping it in
two places, it seems I don't know, it seems unusually
like tempting fate. I I think I agree with Emily. Yeah,
(28:41):
six billion dollars worth of gold at Fort Knox. You know,
my friend, is that more now? Dude? So when when
Harris wrote this one gold was forty two twenty two
an ounces and ounce. Right now it's six hundred and
sixty seven dollars and forty nine cents and ounce. What
So that means that if Knocks holds a hundred and
(29:01):
forty seven point three million ounces of gold, the gold
is worth two five point six billion dollars just sitting
there and Fort Knock this article. Like, No, I think
gold went up in the last couple of years because
of the economy. Everybody flocked to gold. Demand increased, and
so the price did. It's so amazing to me after
(29:21):
all these years, gold is still like people hoard it. Yeah. Man,
When gold prices are low, you're very smart to invest
in gold because there's always going to be another economic
downturn and the prices are always just gonna skyrocket. You
got a couple of in gets in your closet. I
have them. I have them strapped in my leg. That's
how I have a limp. That's how we walk. Funny um, alright,
so during the refining stage, we should point out that
(29:43):
a lot of times they will um because gold is
so soft pure gold is, they will combine it with
other medals to form alloys. And that's why you will
get something like white gold, which is gold combined with
nicol or silver pladium. A red gold is golden copper.
That's pretty and I've ne seen red gold on them.
They seen roads gold surely all my fans. I mean
(30:04):
it has like has like a just a slight pink
hue too. It's very pretty stuff. I'm not big into gold,
like as far as jewelry. Yeah, no, I'm like you. Uh.
And then of course you have to talk about a
carrots caritage, and that is how much gold is in
the object compared to like silver, nickel or whatever else
is in that alloy. And interestingly, um, different countries have
(30:29):
different preferences. Here. You always hear about fourteen carrot gold
in the United States, which is only fifty eight point
five percent gold. Apparently in India they're partial to the
twenty two carrot and uh, which is ninety one point
seven five percent gold. And the Europeans like to take
that middle road and hit eighteen carrots Yeah, that's very strange,
and I don't understand what it is. I can understand
(30:50):
price being a factor, but maybe it's very odd to
me that like cultures. Yeah, so it's twenty four carrots
is percent gold obviously, Yeah, and in for twelve carried
is fift and about two thirds of all the gold
is uh jewelry, Yeah, which makes sense. And what's interesting
about the jewelry is that it's still basically produced as
(31:13):
it has been for hundreds or thousands of years, um,
using the same techniques, virtually the same tools. I mean,
I'm sure they're manufactured much differently, but they are kind
of the same thing. Yeah. Um. And while jewelry accounts
for what do you say, two thirds use, there's a
(31:33):
lot of other pretty interesting uses for gold to electronics
use a lot of gold and a lot of other
rare earth minerals like um. Uh. Apparently gold is very
very conductive. It's more conductive than any metal except for
copper and um silver. But it has a leg up
on conference silver and that it corrode. It's very difficult
(31:56):
for gold to corrode. So that means that if you
want something that's gonna last a very long time, and
be conductive. You might as well use some gold, so
they do, and things like processors and hard drives and
that kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean you you might
see gold on your headphone plug. Your headphone jack might
(32:16):
be gold plated because it's if it's higher end, they
might use gold conducts electricity therefore sound better. I have
seen that. I just thought it was like fancy high
end or something. Uh. Here's a cool stat because they
use it so much in electronics and microelectronics. NASA use
more than forty kilograms ninety pounds of gold on the
(32:40):
construction of the Space Shuttle Columbia. Right, that's pretty cool.
FA electronics, And they used it as a reflective surface.
They use gold film. Remember, you can be gold into
like a point um point one five millimeter thin sheet.
It's amazing. So it's light at that point, highly reflective,
effective against radiation. Yeah, so that's pretty awesome. Um. You
(33:03):
also use it for crowns. Yeah, they still use gold
crowns suddenly, I guess, and I imagine it because it's
not reactive because when things are reactive, especially with cooking,
it will make things taste terribly. Like there was something
called a fish fork and it was made of silver,
and apparently if you had this thing, it was like
(33:24):
a status symbol or whatever in Victorian the Victorian era.
But it also did have a practical use in that
silver didn't react with um lemon juice, which is often
used to serve with fish, so it didn't affect the taste.
I imagine that's probably one of the reasons why they
use gold and crowns, so that you everything doesn't just
taste back because it's not reacting with anything because it's
(33:45):
chemically inert. That's a good point, yeah, because you don't
want to be eating something and think, oh man, my
new gold tooth makes this Telapia tastes like squid, tastes
like squid. I don't know, that's not so bad. No,
I like squid. But if you're eat in telapia, you
don't want to eat squid? Do eat squid? Will you
eat octopus? I mean I'll eat all that stuff to
a certain degree. I mean like Emily when it comes
(34:08):
to calamari, she will only eat like the things that
look like little onion rings. As soon as it looks
like the little miniature creature, She's like, that's for you,
And I popped that in my mouth. I will probably both,
especially eat squid. You we won't eat octopus because of
Remember one of our friends had a friend. They told
us a story that their friend was a cook for
some couple down in the Caribbean and the couple like
(34:31):
caught an octopus and was going to cook it, or
they gave it to the to their cook to cook,
and the cook was going to put it in the
pot alive, and the octopus was wrapping its tentacles around
the woman like, please don't kill me. And she said
it was, you know, like one of the worst things
that ever happened to because she did it anyway, like
you literally when you literally have to fight to put
(34:52):
the animal to their death. And and then so that
combined with I think being inspired to go research octopi
and finding that they were very intelligent and just like,
I just can't eat those anymore, which is because there's
they pop up. It's some pretty delicious dishes, I imagine,
but they're a very smart animals. And he's like, I'm
just gonna eat them animals, just stupid ones. Right, Yeah,
(35:17):
I could see that I would be traumatized, Oh my god. Yeah,
because it was like no, yeah, I would just walk
slowly into the ocean until it released itself and swam away. Yeah,
you'd be like the Woodsman and snow White, like I
don't know what happened to it. But then you start
to walk back and the octopus reaches up with one
hand and holds your hand. He's like, I want to
(35:37):
be your pet. I don't want to go back to
the sea. Just don't cook me. Don't cook me? All right?
Where do we leave off food and beverage. You can
get it in gold slagger, in certain jellies, gold by
the way, not octopus. Yeah, yeah, yeah, um. And that
that's all just for marketing and making things. It really is.
You know. They have like the World's most Expensive Sunday
(35:58):
or the World's most expensive tells always got gold flakes.
It does so much so that I think we've talked
about this. They have another category for world's most expensive
non gold because it's like any smoke, can you know,
spit out a hot dog and relish and then put
gold flakes on and be like World's expensive hot dog
and that doesn't really you know, So then that means
some of the gold that we've lost that has been
(36:20):
pooped out. Yeah. So that's sad, is it. I think so,
since it's you know, so limited and supply and bad
for the environment to get well, I guess we should
talk about that. Yeah, we probably should, because I was
very surprised. I mean, I've heard that gold was bad
for the environment, but I didn't realize this. You want
to you want to tell one of the facts of
(36:42):
the podcast. Yes, it is like most mining operations, um,
not great for the environment. In order to get just
one ounce of gold, you have to get out two
and fifty tons of the rock and ore and a
lot of times um well of course, just the cyanide,
which is never great when you're introducing those kind of chemicals. No,
and apparently they take this affluent, right, yeah, refluent and
(37:08):
they dump it out in the ocean, which probably affects OCTOPI. Yeah,
it's like, hey, here's a bunch of cyanide water, and
I'm sure the ocean will eventually like even things out,
But for that local area where it gets dumped, that
can't be good. Of course not. And that's why there's
a group, a nonprofit called Earthworks that runs a campaign
called no Dirty Gold. So I imagine if you have
(37:29):
a gold wedding band and a blood diamond on your finger,
then uh, you just like you're that's a double whammy's hatrick? Yeah?
That well, now hatrick could be three, so not in
this not in this case. Okay, that's as good as
you can get, as bad as it gets. So we
should talk a little bit about gold. Although I think
(37:50):
we should do a full podcast in the gold standard
at some point. I know we've touched at some point,
let's do it. But um, the gold standard was, wasn't
it like, uh, every dollar amount like was that you
could print, there was a certain amount of gold that
had to be in reserve that matched that. Is that
what it was, Yes, exactly, And if you had a bunch,
(38:12):
if you had enough money, you could go up to
you know, the Federal Deservance say I want to catch
this money out for gold, and they had to give
it to you by federal law. And that was from
nineteen hundred to nineteen seventy one. When didn't we just
start pretty more money than gold and said we should
abandon the gold standard? Yea, And I think when you
detach your currency from gold becomes a fiat currency right
(38:35):
to the whims of the market. I seem to remember
discussing this sum in one of our econ podcasts way
back when, maybe even audiobook How the Economy Work. Uh,
the super stuff got into the economy, that's what it's called. Um,
that was a good one. Um. So two thirty six
tons of gold are uh being so called hoarded by
(38:58):
people in governments. Um, is that all two six tons? Yeah,
it seemed like if if there was still of the
hundred and sixty one thousand tons. Yeah, if that doesn't
seem like much, But it doesn't. It's a lot of
jewelry being more. Yeah. But um, they think there's actually
gold out and outer space, you know, and some of
these big asteroids flying by that are chuck full of
(39:20):
minerals and other metals. Um. There was a near Earth
asteroid rendezvous spacecraft passed close enough to the asteroid arrows
to actually send back data and um, they think the
arrows might have as much as twenty billion tons of gold,
which would probably really drop the value of gold here
on Earth if anyone ever got their hands on that.
(39:43):
How many How do you go about capturing an asteroid?
I wonder we've we did a podcast on asteroid minding.
Remember is that the same thing? Okay, that's what they
would do. Well, I retreat, Then we should just do that.
I could do that. Senders will us up with a lasso,
a golden lasso riding a jackalope and attach it to
(40:05):
the jackalobes tale and ride it back to Earth. You
got anything else? I don't, Well, that's uh oh, I
have one more thing I want to recommend. Um Harris
didn't mention this. One of the other really bad environmental
impacts of gold is illegal gold mining. Apparently, um Guiana
has a lot of illegal gold mining. And one of
(40:27):
the things that you if you're an illegal underground gold miner,
you're not going through this elaborate extraction and refining process.
You are basically taking your ore in. You're refining or
extracting on site using mercury. Mercury is what they use.
So there's not only a lot of like illegal, horrible
(40:48):
for the environment gold mining going on, there's also a
lot of mercury mining and a lot of mercury like runoff.
So there's mercury poisoning all over Guiana right now. And
there's a really great article may have one appealed to
I found it puels or dot org, but it was
originally in Harper's That's where I read it. Gold Guns
and guaren Pierros. That is g A R I M
(41:09):
P E I R O S. And it's by Damon Tabor.
Good stuff, awesome. Article is so engrossing, one of those
that makes you want to like not ever use gold
for anything. Uh, it has that effect a little bit,
but it's it's more just completely fascinating, like you can't
believe that people are doing this. Yeah, and child labor two, right,
(41:29):
isn't that a big problem? I think that's part of it,
but more um, it's just you are you really risk
death in these like called wildcat camps, these illegal gold
mining operations, because I mean if some in the mercury
in the guns, and you know, people staking other people's claims,
bad bad news. So there you can gold gold. If
(41:53):
you want to learn more about gold, you can type
that words into the handy search bar at how stuff
works dot com. And since I said that, it's time
for a listener mail Josh, I'm gonna call this the
ten Commandments of Chuck and Josh, although there's only eight.
Um and this is from Professor Tom uh, guys, I
teach a communications course at an area of community college
(42:16):
and UH and in universities. I often recommend your podcast
in my classes, especially to students that seem to love
learning but may have not been encouraged by family, your friends. UM,
I'm hoping that they may pick up a few important
life lessons from you guys, as well as interesting guys.
Here a few life lesson highlights that I think you
guys display. Number one, normal guys can talk about something
(42:38):
other than sports. It's true, I don't know sports. Number two.
Good presentations begin with an attention getting introduction. Josh will
tell you this is sometimes easier said, been done. Yes,
that's absolutely true. Um, if you don't know something, UH,
look it up. And if you're looking it up on
the internet, check more than one source. Life lessons this
(43:00):
this this guy is really paying attention to what we're doing. Yes,
learning involves mistakes. Number four. Take a shot at pronouncing
new word to get wrong, venture I guess, share a
new hypothesis, then invite feedback, which is the important part.
Karen Pierro's number five. You don't have to make fun
of people to be funny. If you absolutely must mock
someone mock yourself. You're fit at that. Number six, It's
(43:23):
okay for guys to have a variety of emotions. There's
nothing unmanly with being sensitive or expressing emotions other than anger.
It's even healthy for guys to talk about their emotions. Chuckle.
Do you like the new Rosy career? Yeah? Number seven,
it's worth the effort to be respectful of others. Sometimes
you have to stop yourself before you make an off
hand joke, which we do. Um. Sometimes you have to
(43:45):
use a term that is more accurate up to date,
which we try and do. Sometimes you have to remember
what it feels like to be seen as different and
see if your language could be more inclusive or encouraging.
Even if only one person in your audience notices the efforts,
It's worth it, man, This this is my conscience writing.
And number eight, curiosity can last a lifetime. And that
was the last one, and he said, guys, there's a
(44:07):
lot to be said for teaching by example. Whether you
realize it or not, you're doing it every week, and
he goes on with an interesting ps from Professor Tom. Yes,
if you have my gay male friends and I got
talking about your show. We tried to figure out which
type you would be if you'd been born gay. It
was unanimous. Chuck is clearly a bear. If you have
(44:27):
a gay brother, Chuck, I have a few friends who
would like to meet him. I do have a brother,
but he's not gay, and he would not be a bear.
He's he's prettier than me. He is very pretty. You
would actually love my brother. Yeah, he's got great hair.
I thought you guys would know with like knowing that
you were being stereotyped by a bunch of gay guys
standing around drinking beer at a bar called the Whole
Performing Stuff you Should Know podcast analysis, What a world,
(44:50):
Thanks Professor Tom. Yeah, that's a great email. That was
a great email. We gotta print that one out frame
it Um. If you ever do an analysis of stuff
you should Know, we want to hear what you've can concluded. Um,
you can tweak to us if it's a short conclusion
at s Y s K Podcast. You can join us
(45:11):
at Facebook dot com slash Stuff you Should Know. You
can send us an email to uh Stuff Podcast at
Discovery dot com, and you can join us on our
website always the Home of Stuff you Should Know That
is stuff you should know dot com. Hey, and don't
forget to watch our TV show Science Channel Saturdays. It
didn't be in Eastern That's exactly right. Dot com For
(45:38):
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
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