March 7, 2020 • 46 mins
As of early 2013, only 161,00 metric tons of gold had been mined in the entire history of the world. Considering about 85 percent of it is recycled, there's a decent chance your jewelry may once have been part of an Incan headdress or Mycenaean face mask. Dive in to gold in this classic episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Good afternoon, folks, Happy weekend. You ever wanted to know
how gold works? You're thinking that does gold work? It's
just gold, It just is. Well, there's a lot more
that goes into it, and we talk about all the
history of gold, very very fascinating stuff from February first,
two thousand thirteen, How Gold Works. Welcome to Stuff you
(00:24):
Should Know, a production of My Heart Radios How Stuff Works. 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. It's been a little while, but it's still
stuff you should know that. I thought the name had
changed since we took our little Christmas break. Don't you
(00:47):
remember our race to the patent office, right, trademarket again
at the eleventh hour. Yeah, that was a close one.
Boom and they stamped it. Yeah, that's y s K.
Actually they said s N s K right now. Wait,
s Y s N is what we get from people
a lot sometimes, and I'm like, you know, no, it
starts with a K. One of them does one of Yes,
(01:11):
it's not stuff you should know is because it doesn't
make any sense. How are 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, I've got a little
bit of an intro. It might be a stretch. We'll
find out. Okay, let's here. Today's January. Okay, tomorrow's January
(01:33):
fig Newton Day. It is Big Newton Day. And also
on this day in history in the Maya in general,
fire is born. Uh. Conquered the Mayan city to Call,
which was recently rediscovered, well not recently, it's been rediscovered,
the rediscovered a new one. Uh. And Uh. What this
did was it enlarged the kingdom of King spear thrower Owl.
(01:59):
The Maya's had the best names. That's pretty great name. Um.
And all of this was going on in the heart
of the Yucatan Peninsula. 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
(02:22):
were to stumble northward and run into the Aztec Empire
and ask for gold, what they would give you is
what they would call excrement of the gods. Do you
want to try to pronounce it. Yeah, I'm gonna go
with do. I think that's pretty close. I think you
(02:43):
may have done it, Chuck. The last part is I
love that language. It's similar to like the some of
the native languages 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, spear thrower, owls um empires, tetoto acton right,
(03:08):
which sounds pretty close to that word teo quilt, Yeah,
which means excrement of the gods. And that's what the
the Aztecs considered gold. It was a holy metal, a
very very precious metal in every sense of the word.
And by three sev a d. They weren't the only
ones to have loved gold for a very long time. No,
(03:31):
Egyptians were all over it. They thought it was also divine. Wait,
hold on, how would you rate that intro? I would
say that was on a scale of what one to ten,
I still one to one to twenty. I would give
it a solid like sixteen. Wow, thanks, Chuck, higher than
you thought, way higher. I thought I was going to
(03:51):
get a ten. That's why I extended it twenty. No, no,
no um. So the Egyptians, like I said, they also
thought it was divine of the gods, indestructive 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,
(04:12):
sure you would haven't heard of this. I was actually yeah,
yeah they were, and um that that that name so
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 well,
Nubia was I guess, yeah, like the first heavily mined
area for gold um. And then on the periodic table,
(04:35):
the shorthand for gold is a U, which I've never
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
(04:56):
that people have loved gold for a very very, very
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 mined from the beginning of
(05:17):
time is only a hundred and sixty one thousand tons, yeah,
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
(05:38):
sixty one thousand tons of gold is all that's ever
been mined. Yeah. And the secondary stat that comes later,
which I'll go ahead and ruin now, is that 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,
it is pretty good. And it suggests two things that
(05:59):
William Harris points out. One UM that means that if
you are wearing a piece of gold jewelry, it may
have belonged to somebody else a very very long time ago.
Uh And two, where exactly did they get that? Where
are they getting these like um gold masks and headpieces
and stuff of ancient time and then melting them down
and reselling them? Yeah? I don't know. I mean it's
(06:21):
efficient and it's good because gold is really bad for
the environment, as we'll see you later on. But it's
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 did yours? Oh? Minus, I think titanium.
(06:42):
It's very cheap. It's like take too though with that
I could. And this is actually my second one. I
lost 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 the second time. Did you guys
have another mini ceremony. He's just like you need to
(07:05):
buy another damn ring. Yeah alright, So, um, that's a
lot of gold stats. And as we've been trying to
um hammer out people of like gold for a really
long time, let's talk about the history of gold show.
Speaking of hammering out, though I knew one more cool
little fact gold. One ounce of gold. One ounce of
(07:26):
gold can be drawn out into a fifty mile wire
or 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 and nert
and like all these great things you can do with
gold because of its property. It also makes it kind
(07:47):
of ironic that the Egyptian is considered it indestructible because
one 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 dumb, you know. Yeah, alright, so element number seventy nine,
let's let's get in it Okay, so uh gold again.
(08:07):
Uh was people go back to the Egyptians because they
were the first ones to have like gold fever. But
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
(08:30):
had easy access to gold, like Bulgaria, I believe in
a four thousand BC. Um, we're already working with gold
long before the Egyptians ever got their hands on it. Yeah.
And the Egyptians, um, like you said, they really had
an appetite for the stuff um hira glyps as early
as gold, and by b C they were it was
(08:53):
like currency basically. Yeah in Egypt, well yeah, very much so,
Um it was not the I don't know if do
they actually minted is for is currency? Uh the Egyptians, Yeah,
I don't know if they minted it. I don't think
the minting came until the Greeks and Romans. Actually King Crosius,
(09:14):
the ruler of ancient Lydia, which is a low civilization,
really he was the first to mint in mint gold
currencies gold coins um in widespread use in sixty b C.
But it was the Greeks and then the Romans that
really started to to mint about a hundred years later though. Yeah,
so that's that's a pretty nice jump on things he got. Yeah,
(09:37):
he was like, hey, I like the 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 they were called, Yeah, they produced millions
of them. Those are the ones that they find, like
(09:57):
to some farmer and like Devon Shy in England will
still find 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
(10:18):
the Middle Skon Era. Yeah, I couldn't tell if it
was Cicon or Cissan. I bet at Cissan Sisson, I
bet it's not. Um a D nine to eleven hundred
and this is modern day Peru. They there has been,
there's been a lot of gold artifacts found in their region.
So they were usually like crazy for sure. The Peruvians
(10:39):
were crazy about the inca like masks, ornaments, chalices, stuff,
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. Yeah. I think the the
(11:02):
English minted their first gold coin in the mid century,
the same with the um Florentine du get. Those were
both about the middle of the thirteenth century. That's a
popular coin, it was still is is it among collectors? Sure? Um,
so there was. People in Europe were exposed to gold.
(11:24):
They like gold, They wanted gold. Over in Central and
South America, Over in Asia they also had a thing
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
(11:47):
rightfully so. Um, but you can actually trace the infection
that Columbus released literally and metaphorically back to Marco Polo,
because only it was 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
(12:09):
great explorers, and the more you learn about it, like
the real histories, as you get older, the more you
learn that many times they weren't just sailing upon the
shore with like 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,
(12:30):
that was the cover story, the cover story. But King
Ferdinand in fifteen eleven also sent word quote while you're there.
Well 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 in thanks to the travels of
(12:52):
Marco Polo, the book that he wrote where he talked
about palaces of silver and gold. Uh, you know, people
thought it was just like this. Treets were lined with
this stuff in the 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
(13:15):
all this gold, you would think, well, this is all
very much true in this place, gold city, So let's
kill all these people and take their gold. And there
was actually a famed gold city, El Dorado. What 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
(13:38):
would come and it become like a boom area. But
of course it was a mythical city, right, Yeah, it
was just like legend. Yeah, 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
Minat Gurai region, Minas Gerais. That looks good, freaky Gervais. Oh,
(13:59):
we've been doing it's like five years in Our pronunciation
is maybe even worse rather than better. Actually, we have
a listener mail today where 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
invent in Brazil, and uh, there was a lot of
gold there and they were the largest gold producer by sea.
(14:22):
Twenty years. They became the world's largest gold producer because
of this area, using of course slave labor painting for
gold in sort of rudim entry ways. It's not good. No,
we're not too far removed from that now. No, so
(14:55):
onto America, North America, California. The the gold rush, Like
the point here is is the gold has rewritten history
and how we form societies because of the search for gold. Yeah,
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
(15:18):
the result of gold the gold rushes. Yeah. Um, California
gets a lot of press obviously because by the end
of the first year of the gold rush, afterwards discovered
in eighty 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,
(15:41):
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, Yes, a scary guy. Yeah. When
you think of gold rush, you think of California, or
I also think of Delonaga. Yeah it was Gei. Yeah,
he was the mayor of del on Goo was the
one who said there's gold and then our hills. Oh
(16:03):
really yeah, it was the mayor of Delanica. I had
no idea. There was todd something. I think. Have you
ever panned up there in Delana Huh? I did that
when I was a kid. And you know, it's fun
if you're a little kid, right, you think you're gonna
find a little gold flak and it would be rich.
Or you just might find a little gold flak and
if you do, you won't be rich. Yeah, you're going
to find it doesn't buy you virtually anything. But you
(16:26):
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
Mint in Philly came from North Carolina or North Kakaaki
as we like to call it. Who calls it that?
You never called it that? Uh? Have you ever heard
(16:46):
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 check a check it out. No,
I didn't make that up. Well I just ran you
did your j tip so uh yeah, we talked about
(17:07):
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 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
(17:28):
because it was bigger and more of an action adventure,
but Mad Max was a really dark kind of revenge
ee exploitation movie. Yeah, it was really good ozploitation. Osploitation.
So was that the one where the guys in the
personal helicopters, that road Warrior Mad Max. That's road Warrior.
I don't think I've seen Max. Then. It's like I
(17:49):
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 know what it
was something cool, you know, justin my friend. Yeah, his
uncle is that was the toe cutter in Mad Max.
Wow is uh? Man, I can't remember his name now, uncle,
Uncle toe Cutter. I didn't call him that, that's what
(18:11):
it saysn't as Christmas talking. Oh, I can know. He
just sends toes every year in a little guard. 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
what eighteen fifties, Yes, Edward Ham and Hargraves found golden
(18:36):
New South Wales Bam gold brush. A few years later,
South Africa steps onto the scene eighteen sixty eight. George Harrison,
he uncovered gold in South Africa and what how many
contributions has that man made humanity? In his hundred and
sixty years. I mean he wrote here comes the Sun.
(18:56):
He discovered gold like a hundred years before he was born. Yeah,
not a hundred, but hundred us for he was famous
right about the same time, about a full century. But
down South Africa is the leading gold producer in the world.
Oh today it is, oh wow, followed by the United States.
In the United States, Nevada is the number one gold
(19:16):
producer these days. You mean Nevada, Nevada. All right, 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 rudimentary and at times a little more sophisticated.
The whole process. Yeah, and it complex to say the least. Yeah,
I mean, like it really shows how much we want gold. Yeah.
(19:40):
It's sort of like fracking in a way to the
one method. Yeah, alright, So what you gotta do there's different.
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, that's what you
call a geologists who finds gold today to still called prospectors,
(20:01):
and I guess the idea is that, what are the
prospects for finding gold. I'm sure that's where it came from,
right maybe 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, they have equipment
(20:21):
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 invisible, but
it's still present in the soil. Isn't it crazy? Invisible
gold in dirt and rocks? Yeah, or it's in gold Schlagger.
(20:43):
That's crazy too. It's like they're just throwing it away,
throwing away. You're drinking it for a premium price. That's crazy.
That's gross. That was like a college thing. Oh yeah, slager, yegger,
maister anything that sounded like vaguely Germanic. That was a
college thing, maister brow. Um, So where they find gold
(21:05):
and the heaviest 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
(21:26):
of valid. I don't know, 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 going to 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
(21:47):
load a load deposit, 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
(22:08):
gold ore, put some explosives in there and blow it
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. Yeah. Um.
And then if it's underground, if the load is underground,
(22:29):
they'll dig a shaft down to it and add it.
They go down to it, and this is a big 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 stops. Then they pack 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. That's right.
(22:53):
If you're in Dlonaga, Georgia, or maybe at a river
and Utah, why not why not give a utash 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 or the
little chunks of little nuggets in a mountain stream or
a beach, and uh, this is where you would pan
(23:15):
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
going to sink and collect at the bottom of your
little screen that separates everything. And then you've got a
little bit of gold hopefully, and then the sixth graders
are all very happy. That's right. Or I imagine if
you were a prospector in California back in the day,
(23:37):
you could do quite well as a panner. Yeah. You
look around and be like, it's mine, Yeah, 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
a on a conveyor belt and they go into a
(23:59):
machine that's a pally 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,
add cyanide to that slurry, and expose it to oxygen,
(24:21):
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 greens, and um, the gold is
gonna adhere to it. They have. They like each other
very much, so they're gonna get together in party for
(24:43):
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, acoustic
solution to separate the gold from the carbon, have more
(25:04):
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
more annoying. But um, you put you put the gold
into a cell with positive and negative terminals, pass an
(25:28):
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
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,
(25:50):
and then you begin to separate the two. Basically, you
pour off the negative terminal metal metal, maybe steel or
something like that, by right exactly. Um, so when you
smell and I thought smelt was just melting, Like why
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
(26:12):
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
that you will see in die Hard three. Um, this
is a more impure do a bar. So you're still
(26:32):
nice to have one. Yeah, I'm sure you can be
like look at me right, 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 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
(26:53):
thing up until it gets melting. 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. Wentworth or whoever, um, they take
all this gold scrap and send that off also to
these um refineries, which are all which also serve as
(27:16):
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 melted down because of the economy. Um.
So when they throw all this into the same pot,
they add a little bit of soda ash, a little
(27:37):
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 to to to figure out
the purity. But um, they you have about ninety nine
nine percent pure gold and that's usually what they stamp
(27:58):
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 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
(28:21):
if you have fifty of those in a bag, like
Jeremy Irons, might Jeremy Irons not a strong man. No,
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 the New York Uh where
is it the New York Reserve Bank? Yeah, supposedly they're
in Fort knox Is where they have all the gold. Yeah.
Emily was talking last night about that. She's like, well,
(28:43):
that be 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 super secure. She's like, yeah,
but what if you know some terrors just bombed it.
She's like, you could just bomb it and then sneak
out of there with a gold and I went, you
just wrote die Hard three. She's like, is that what
upen out? That's exactly what happened. But I think she
makes a good point. I was thinking last night to like,
(29:04):
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
think I agree with Emily. Yeah, six billion dollars worth
of gold at Fort Knox. No, No, my friend was
that more? Now? Dude? So when when Harris wrote this
one gold was forty two twenty two an ounces and ounce.
(29:28):
Right now it's sixteen hundred and sixty seven dollars and
forty nine cents and ounces. So that means that if
Fort Knox holds a hundred and forty seven point three
million ounces of gold, the gold is worth two hundred
forty five point six billion dollars just sitting there in
Fort Knox. Art No, I think gold went up much
(29:50):
in the last couple of years because of the economy.
Everybody flocked to gold. Demand increased, and so the price
did so amazing to me, after 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 downd turn
and the prices are always just gonna skyrocket. You got
a couple of and gets in your closet. I have them.
(30:10):
I have them strepped on my leg. That's why I
have a limp. That's how you walk funny um alright,
So during the refining stage, we should point out that
a lot of times they will um because gold is
so solift pure gold is, they will combine it with
other metals to form alloys, and that's why you will
get something like white gold, which is gold combined with
nickel or silver pladium. Red gold is golden copper. That's
(30:33):
pretty and I've never seen red gold on they seen
rose gold surely at all my fans. I mean it
has like it has like a just a slight pink hue. Two.
It's very pretty stuff. I'm not big into gold, like
as far as jewelry, Yeah, I know, I'm with you. Uh.
And then of course you have to talk about carrots carritage,
and that is how much gold is in the object
(30:55):
compared to like silver, nickel or whatever else is in
that alloy. And interestingly, um, different countries have 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
(31:17):
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 price being a factor,
but it's very odd to me that like cultures, yeah
prefer it. So twenty four carrots is percent gold obviously. Yeah.
In in fourteen or twelve carrot is fifty percent cold
and about two thirds of all the gold is uh jewelry. Yeah,
(31:42):
which makes sense. And what's interesting about the jewelries that
it's still basically produced as 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
(32:04):
thirds of nearly two thirds, there's a 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.
(32:26):
But it has a leg up on conference olver and
that it corrodes. It's very difficult 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 in things
like processors and hard drives and that kind of stuff. Yeah,
I mean you you might see gold on your headphone plug.
(32:50):
Your headphone jack might be gold plated because it's if
it's higher end, they might use gold. Yeah, conducts h
electricity therefore sound better that I just thought it was
like fancy high end or something. Here's a cool stat
because they use it so much in electronics and microelectronics,
NASA used more than forty kilograms ninety pounds of gold
(33:14):
and the construction of the Space Shuttle Columbia. Right, that's
pretty cool. Fat electronics, and they used it as a
reflective surface. They use gold film. Remember, you can 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
(33:37):
also use it for crowns. Yeah, they still use gold
crowns cuddenly, and then I imagine it because it's not reactive,
because when things are reactive, especially with cooking, it will
make things taste terribly. Yeah, that's true. Like there was
something called a fish fork and it was made of silver,
and apparently if you had this thing, it was like
(33:59):
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, right, so that you everything doesn't
just taste bad because it's not reacting with anything because
(34:19):
it's 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 you eat squid? Will
you eat octopus? I mean I'll eat all that stuff
to a certain degree. I mean, like Emily when it
(34:42):
comes to calamari, she will only eat like the things
that look like little onion rings. Right as soon as
it looks like the little miniature creature, she's like, that's
for you, and I pop that in my mouth. I
will probably eat both, especially eat squid. You we won't
eat octopus because of Remember one of our friends had
ad and they told us a story that their friend
was a cook for some couple down in the Caribbean,
(35:05):
and the couple like 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 her because she
did it anyway, like you literally when you literally have
(35:26):
to fight to put 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 intelligents,
like I just can't eat those anymore, which is said
because there's they pop up. It's some pretty delicious dishes,
I imagine, but they're a very smart animals, and he's
(35:46):
like the animals just stupid ones. Right, Yeah, I could
see that I would be dramatized, 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
(36:07):
to walk back and the octopus reaches up with one
hand and holds your hand. He's like, I want to
be your pet. I don't want to go back to
the sea. Just don't cook me. Don't cook me, all right,
(36:34):
where do we leave off food and beverage. You can
get it in gold Schlagger in certain jellies gold by
the way, not octopus. Yeah yeah, yeah, um, And that
that's all just for marketing and making things fans. It
really is. You know. They have like the World's most
Expensive Sunday or the world's most expensive salary always got
gold flakes. It does so much so that I think
(36:56):
we've talked about this. They have another category for World's
most expensive non old 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 experienceive
hot dog and that doesn't really you know. So then
that means some of the gold that we've lost that
has been pooped out. Yeah. I guess that's sad, is it.
(37:18):
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'd 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 the podcast. Yes, it is like most mining operations, um,
(37:39):
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 there's the cyanide,
which is never great when you're introducing those kind of chemicals. No,
and apparently they take this affluent, right yeah, or a
fluent and they dump it out in the ocean. Oh really,
(38:03):
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 dumb, 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 a gold wedding band and a
(38:24):
blood diamond on your finger, then uh, you just like
you're that's a double whammy against hat trick. Yeah, well no,
hatrick could be three. So not in this not in
this the 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 we should do
a full podcast in the gold standard at some point.
(38:46):
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. Yes. Is that what it was? Yes? Exactly.
And if you had a bunch, if you had enough money,
(39:07):
you could go up to you know, the federal reserve
and 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? Yeah? And
I think when you detach your currency from gold becomes
a fiat currency right to the whims of the market.
(39:29):
I seem to remember discussing this sum in one of
our econ podcasts way back when maybe even audiobook man,
how the economy were uh the super stuff guidet to
the economy, that's what it's called. Um. That was a
good one. Um. So two d thirty six tons of
gold are uh being so called hoarded by people and governments? Um?
(39:54):
Is that all twoty 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 worn. Yeah.
But um, they think there is actually gold out and
outer space, you know, and some of these big asteroids
flying by that are chuck full of minerals and other metals. Um,
(40:16):
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. How I mean, how
(40:37):
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 would send Bruce Willis up with a lasso, a
golden lasso, riding a jackalope and attach it to the
(40:58):
jackalop's tail and ride it back to Earth. You got
anything else? No? 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
(41:20):
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
(41:41):
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 of peels.
I found it on peels or dot org, but it
was originally in Harper's that's where I read it, gold
Guns and Gumpiers. That is g A R I M
(42:02):
P E I R O S. And it's by Damon Tabor.
Good stuff. Awesome article is so engross, 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,
isn't that a big problem? I think that was part
(42:24):
of it. But more um, it's just you are you
really risk death in these like they're 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 go,
gold gold. If you want to learn more about gold,
(42:47):
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
(43:08):
college 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
or friends. Um, I'm hoping that they may pick up
a few important life lessons from you, guys, as well
as interesting facts. Here a few life lesson highlights, So
I think you guys, display number one, normal guys can
(43:30):
talk about something other than sports. That's true, I know
I like sports. Number two. Good presentations begin with an
attention getting introduction. Josh. Josh will tell you this is
sometimes easier said than done. Yes, that's absolutely correct. Um.
If you don't know something, uh, look it up. And
if you're looking it up on the internet, check more
(43:50):
than one source. Life lessons this 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. If
you get it wrong, venture a guest, share a new hypothesis,
then invite feedback, which is the important part. Jerem Pierro's
number five. If you don't have to make fun of
people to be funny. If you absolutely must mock someone,
(44:12):
mock yourself and you're good at that. Number six, it's
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
and to 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
(44:35):
off hand joke, which we do. Um Sometimes you have
to use a term that is more accurate or 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 is my
conscience writing. And number eight, curiosity can last a lifetime.
(44:57):
And that was the last one, and he said, guy,
there's a lot to be said. We're 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've been born gay. It
(45:17):
was unanimous. Chuck is clearly a bear. If you have
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 here.
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
(45:39):
Performing Stuff you Should Know podcast analysis. What a world,
Thanks Professor Tom. Yeah, that's a great email. That was
a great email. We gotta print that one out frame. Um,
if you ever do analysis of stuff you should Know,
we want to hear what you've concluded. Um. You can
tweet to us if it's a short inclusion at s
(46:01):
y s K podcast. You can join us at Facebook
dot com, slash Stuff you Should Know. You can send
us an email to stuff podcast at how stuff Works
dot com and as always, joined us at our home
on the web. Stuff you Should Know dot com. Stuff
you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radios How
Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit
(46:23):
the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows. H
Good afternoon, folks, Happy weekend. You ever wanted to know
how gold works? You're thinking that does gold work? It's
just gold, It just is. Well, there's a lot more
that goes into it, and we talk about all the
history of gold, very very fascinating stuff from February first,
two thousand thirteen, How Gold Works. Welcome to Stuff you
(00:24):
Should Know, a production of My Heart Radios How Stuff Works. 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. It's been a little while, but it's still
stuff you should know that. I thought the name had
changed since we took our little Christmas break. Don't you
(00:47):
remember our race to the patent office, right, trademarket again
at the eleventh hour. Yeah, that was a close one.
Boom and they stamped it. Yeah, that's y s K.
Actually they said s N s K right now. Wait,
s Y s N is what we get from people
a lot sometimes, and I'm like, you know, no, it
starts with a K. One of them does one of Yes,
(01:11):
it's not stuff you should know is because it doesn't
make any sense. How are 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, I've got a little
bit of an intro. It might be a stretch. We'll
find out. Okay, let's here. Today's January. Okay, tomorrow's January
(01:33):
fig Newton Day. It is Big Newton Day. And also
on this day in history in the Maya in general,
fire is born. Uh. Conquered the Mayan city to Call,
which was recently rediscovered, well not recently, it's been rediscovered,
the rediscovered a new one. Uh. And Uh. What this
did was it enlarged the kingdom of King spear thrower Owl.
(01:59):
The Maya's had the best names. That's pretty great name. Um.
And all of this was going on in the heart
of the Yucatan Peninsula. 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
(02:22):
were to stumble northward and run into the Aztec Empire
and ask for gold, what they would give you is
what they would call excrement of the gods. Do you
want to try to pronounce it. Yeah, I'm gonna go
with do. I think that's pretty close. I think you
(02:43):
may have done it, Chuck. The last part is I
love that language. It's similar to like the some of
the native languages 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, spear thrower, owls um empires, tetoto acton right,
(03:08):
which sounds pretty close to that word teo quilt, Yeah,
which means excrement of the gods. And that's what the
the Aztecs considered gold. It was a holy metal, a
very very precious metal in every sense of the word.
And by three sev a d. They weren't the only
ones to have loved gold for a very long time. No,
(03:31):
Egyptians were all over it. They thought it was also divine. Wait,
hold on, how would you rate that intro? I would
say that was on a scale of what one to ten,
I still one to one to twenty. I would give
it a solid like sixteen. Wow, thanks, Chuck, higher than
you thought, way higher. I thought I was going to
(03:51):
get a ten. That's why I extended it twenty. No, no,
no um. So the Egyptians, like I said, they also
thought it was divine of the gods, indestructive 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,
(04:12):
sure you would haven't heard of this. I was actually yeah,
yeah they were, and um that that that name so
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 well,
Nubia was I guess, yeah, like the first heavily mined
area for gold um. And then on the periodic table,
(04:35):
the shorthand for gold is a U, which I've never
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
(04:56):
that people have loved gold for a very very, very
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 mined from the beginning of
(05:17):
time is only a hundred and sixty one thousand tons, yeah,
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
(05:38):
sixty one thousand tons of gold is all that's ever
been mined. Yeah. And the secondary stat that comes later,
which I'll go ahead and ruin now, is that 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,
it is pretty good. And it suggests two things that
(05:59):
William Harris points out. One UM that means that if
you are wearing a piece of gold jewelry, it may
have belonged to somebody else a very very long time ago.
Uh And two, where exactly did they get that? Where
are they getting these like um gold masks and headpieces
and stuff of ancient time and then melting them down
and reselling them? Yeah? I don't know. I mean it's
(06:21):
efficient and it's good because gold is really bad for
the environment, as we'll see you later on. But it's
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 did yours? Oh? Minus, I think titanium.
(06:42):
It's very cheap. It's like take too though with that
I could. And this is actually my second one. I
lost 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 the second time. Did you guys
have another mini ceremony. He's just like you need to
(07:05):
buy another damn ring. Yeah alright, So, um, that's a
lot of gold stats. And as we've been trying to
um hammer out people of like gold for a really
long time, let's talk about the history of gold show.
Speaking of hammering out, though I knew one more cool
little fact gold. One ounce of gold. One ounce of
(07:26):
gold can be drawn out into a fifty mile wire
or 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 and nert
and like all these great things you can do with
gold because of its property. It also makes it kind
(07:47):
of ironic that the Egyptian is considered it indestructible because
one 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 dumb, you know. Yeah, alright, so element number seventy nine,
let's let's get in it Okay, so uh gold again.
(08:07):
Uh was people go back to the Egyptians because they
were the first ones to have like gold fever. But
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
(08:30):
had easy access to gold, like Bulgaria, I believe in
a four thousand BC. Um, we're already working with gold
long before the Egyptians ever got their hands on it. Yeah.
And the Egyptians, um, like you said, they really had
an appetite for the stuff um hira glyps as early
as gold, and by b C they were it was
(08:53):
like currency basically. Yeah in Egypt, well yeah, very much so,
Um it was not the I don't know if do
they actually minted is for is currency? Uh the Egyptians, Yeah,
I don't know if they minted it. I don't think
the minting came until the Greeks and Romans. Actually King Crosius,
(09:14):
the ruler of ancient Lydia, which is a low civilization,
really he was the first to mint in mint gold
currencies gold coins um in widespread use in sixty b C.
But it was the Greeks and then the Romans that
really started to to mint about a hundred years later though. Yeah,
so that's that's a pretty nice jump on things he got. Yeah,
(09:37):
he was like, hey, I like the 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 they were called, Yeah, they produced millions
of them. Those are the ones that they find, like
(09:57):
to some farmer and like Devon Shy in England will
still find 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
(10:18):
the Middle Skon Era. Yeah, I couldn't tell if it
was Cicon or Cissan. I bet at Cissan Sisson, I
bet it's not. Um a D nine to eleven hundred
and this is modern day Peru. They there has been,
there's been a lot of gold artifacts found in their region.
So they were usually like crazy for sure. The Peruvians
(10:39):
were crazy about the inca like masks, ornaments, chalices, stuff,
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. Yeah. I think the the
(11:02):
English minted their first gold coin in the mid century,
the same with the um Florentine du get. Those were
both about the middle of the thirteenth century. That's a
popular coin, it was still is is it among collectors? Sure? Um,
so there was. People in Europe were exposed to gold.
(11:24):
They like gold, They wanted gold. Over in Central and
South America, Over in Asia they also had a thing
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
(11:47):
rightfully so. Um, but you can actually trace the infection
that Columbus released literally and metaphorically back to Marco Polo,
because only it was 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
(12:09):
great explorers, and the more you learn about it, like
the real histories, as you get older, the more you
learn that many times they weren't just sailing upon the
shore with like 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,
(12:30):
that was the cover story, the cover story. But King
Ferdinand in fifteen eleven also sent word quote while you're there.
Well 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 in thanks to the travels of
(12:52):
Marco Polo, the book that he wrote where he talked
about palaces of silver and gold. Uh, you know, people
thought it was just like this. Treets were lined with
this stuff in the 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
(13:15):
all this gold, you would think, well, this is all
very much true in this place, gold city, So let's
kill all these people and take their gold. And there
was actually a famed gold city, El Dorado. What 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
(13:38):
would come and it become like a boom area. But
of course it was a mythical city, right, Yeah, it
was just like legend. Yeah, 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
Minat Gurai region, Minas Gerais. That looks good, freaky Gervais. Oh,
(13:59):
we've been doing it's like five years in Our pronunciation
is maybe even worse rather than better. Actually, we have
a listener mail today where 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
invent in Brazil, and uh, there was a lot of
gold there and they were the largest gold producer by sea.
(14:22):
Twenty years. They became the world's largest gold producer because
of this area, using of course slave labor painting for
gold in sort of rudim entry ways. It's not good. No,
we're not too far removed from that now. No, so
(14:55):
onto America, North America, California. The the gold rush, Like
the point here is is the gold has rewritten history
and how we form societies because of the search for gold. Yeah,
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
(15:18):
the result of gold the gold rushes. Yeah. Um, California
gets a lot of press obviously because by the end
of the first year of the gold rush, afterwards discovered
in eighty 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,
(15:41):
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, Yes, a scary guy. Yeah. When
you think of gold rush, you think of California, or
I also think of Delonaga. Yeah it was Gei. Yeah,
he was the mayor of del on Goo was the
one who said there's gold and then our hills. Oh
(16:03):
really yeah, it was the mayor of Delanica. I had
no idea. There was todd something. I think. Have you
ever panned up there in Delana Huh? I did that
when I was a kid. And you know, it's fun
if you're a little kid, right, you think you're gonna
find a little gold flak and it would be rich.
Or you just might find a little gold flak and
if you do, you won't be rich. Yeah, you're going
to find it doesn't buy you virtually anything. But you
(16:26):
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
Mint in Philly came from North Carolina or North Kakaaki
as we like to call it. Who calls it that?
You never called it that? Uh? Have you ever heard
(16:46):
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 check a check it out. No,
I didn't make that up. Well I just ran you
did your j tip so uh yeah, we talked about
(17:07):
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 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
(17:28):
because it was bigger and more of an action adventure,
but Mad Max was a really dark kind of revenge
ee exploitation movie. Yeah, it was really good ozploitation. Osploitation.
So was that the one where the guys in the
personal helicopters, that road Warrior Mad Max. That's road Warrior.
I don't think I've seen Max. Then. It's like I
(17:49):
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 know what it
was something cool, you know, justin my friend. Yeah, his
uncle is that was the toe cutter in Mad Max.
Wow is uh? Man, I can't remember his name now, uncle,
Uncle toe Cutter. I didn't call him that, that's what
(18:11):
it saysn't as Christmas talking. Oh, I can know. He
just sends toes every year in a little guard. 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
what eighteen fifties, Yes, Edward Ham and Hargraves found golden
(18:36):
New South Wales Bam gold brush. A few years later,
South Africa steps onto the scene eighteen sixty eight. George Harrison,
he uncovered gold in South Africa and what how many
contributions has that man made humanity? In his hundred and
sixty years. I mean he wrote here comes the Sun.
(18:56):
He discovered gold like a hundred years before he was born. Yeah,
not a hundred, but hundred us for he was famous
right about the same time, about a full century. But
down South Africa is the leading gold producer in the world.
Oh today it is, oh wow, followed by the United States.
In the United States, Nevada is the number one gold
(19:16):
producer these days. You mean Nevada, Nevada. All right, 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 rudimentary and at times a little more sophisticated.
The whole process. Yeah, and it complex to say the least. Yeah,
I mean, like it really shows how much we want gold. Yeah.
(19:40):
It's sort of like fracking in a way to the
one method. Yeah, alright, So what you gotta do there's different.
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, that's what you
call a geologists who finds gold today to still called prospectors,
(20:01):
and I guess the idea is that, what are the
prospects for finding gold. I'm sure that's where it came from,
right maybe 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, they have equipment
(20:21):
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 invisible, but
it's still present in the soil. Isn't it crazy? Invisible
gold in dirt and rocks? Yeah, or it's in gold Schlagger.
(20:43):
That's crazy too. It's like they're just throwing it away,
throwing away. You're drinking it for a premium price. That's crazy.
That's gross. That was like a college thing. Oh yeah, slager, yegger,
maister anything that sounded like vaguely Germanic. That was a
college thing, maister brow. Um, So where they find gold
(21:05):
and the heaviest 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
(21:26):
of valid. I don't know, 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 going to 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
(21:47):
load a load deposit, 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
(22:08):
gold ore, put some explosives in there and blow it
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. Yeah. Um.
And then if it's underground, if the load is underground,
(22:29):
they'll dig a shaft down to it and add it.
They go down to it, and this is a big 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 stops. Then they pack 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. That's right.
(22:53):
If you're in Dlonaga, Georgia, or maybe at a river
and Utah, why not why not give a utash 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 or the
little chunks of little nuggets in a mountain stream or
a beach, and uh, this is where you would pan
(23:15):
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
going to sink and collect at the bottom of your
little screen that separates everything. And then you've got a
little bit of gold hopefully, and then the sixth graders
are all very happy. That's right. Or I imagine if
you were a prospector in California back in the day,
(23:37):
you could do quite well as a panner. Yeah. You
look around and be like, it's mine, Yeah, 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
a on a conveyor belt and they go into a
(23:59):
machine that's a pally 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,
add cyanide to that slurry, and expose it to oxygen,
(24:21):
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 greens, and um, the gold is
gonna adhere to it. They have. They like each other
very much, so they're gonna get together in party for
(24:43):
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, acoustic
solution to separate the gold from the carbon, have more
(25:04):
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
more annoying. But um, you put you put the gold
into a cell with positive and negative terminals, pass an
(25:28):
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
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,
(25:50):
and then you begin to separate the two. Basically, you
pour off the negative terminal metal metal, maybe steel or
something like that, by right exactly. Um, so when you
smell and I thought smelt was just melting, Like why
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
(26:12):
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
that you will see in die Hard three. Um, this
is a more impure do a bar. So you're still
(26:32):
nice to have one. Yeah, I'm sure you can be
like look at me right, 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 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
(26:53):
thing up until it gets melting. 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. Wentworth or whoever, um, they take
all this gold scrap and send that off also to
these um refineries, which are all which also serve as
(27:16):
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 melted down because of the economy. Um.
So when they throw all this into the same pot,
they add a little bit of soda ash, a little
(27:37):
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 to to to figure out
the purity. But um, they you have about ninety nine
nine percent pure gold and that's usually what they stamp
(27:58):
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 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
(28:21):
if you have fifty of those in a bag, like
Jeremy Irons, might Jeremy Irons not a strong man. No,
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 the New York Uh where
is it the New York Reserve Bank? Yeah, supposedly they're
in Fort knox Is where they have all the gold. Yeah.
Emily was talking last night about that. She's like, well,
(28:43):
that be 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 super secure. She's like, yeah,
but what if you know some terrors just bombed it.
She's like, you could just bomb it and then sneak
out of there with a gold and I went, you
just wrote die Hard three. She's like, is that what
upen out? That's exactly what happened. But I think she
makes a good point. I was thinking last night to like,
(29:04):
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
think I agree with Emily. Yeah, six billion dollars worth
of gold at Fort Knox. No, No, my friend was
that more? Now? Dude? So when when Harris wrote this
one gold was forty two twenty two an ounces and ounce.
(29:28):
Right now it's sixteen hundred and sixty seven dollars and
forty nine cents and ounces. So that means that if
Fort Knox holds a hundred and forty seven point three
million ounces of gold, the gold is worth two hundred
forty five point six billion dollars just sitting there in
Fort Knox. Art No, I think gold went up much
(29:50):
in the last couple of years because of the economy.
Everybody flocked to gold. Demand increased, and so the price
did so amazing to me, after 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 downd turn
and the prices are always just gonna skyrocket. You got
a couple of and gets in your closet. I have them.
(30:10):
I have them strepped on my leg. That's why I
have a limp. That's how you walk funny um alright,
So during the refining stage, we should point out that
a lot of times they will um because gold is
so solift pure gold is, they will combine it with
other metals to form alloys, and that's why you will
get something like white gold, which is gold combined with
nickel or silver pladium. Red gold is golden copper. That's
(30:33):
pretty and I've never seen red gold on they seen
rose gold surely at all my fans. I mean it
has like it has like a just a slight pink hue. Two.
It's very pretty stuff. I'm not big into gold, like
as far as jewelry, Yeah, I know, I'm with you. Uh.
And then of course you have to talk about carrots carritage,
and that is how much gold is in the object
(30:55):
compared to like silver, nickel or whatever else is in
that alloy. And interestingly, um, different countries have 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
(31:17):
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 price being a factor,
but it's very odd to me that like cultures, yeah
prefer it. So twenty four carrots is percent gold obviously. Yeah.
In in fourteen or twelve carrot is fifty percent cold
and about two thirds of all the gold is uh jewelry. Yeah,
(31:42):
which makes sense. And what's interesting about the jewelries that
it's still basically produced as 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
(32:04):
thirds of nearly two thirds, there's a 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.
(32:26):
But it has a leg up on conference olver and
that it corrodes. It's very difficult 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 in things
like processors and hard drives and that kind of stuff. Yeah,
I mean you you might see gold on your headphone plug.
(32:50):
Your headphone jack might be gold plated because it's if
it's higher end, they might use gold. Yeah, conducts h
electricity therefore sound better that I just thought it was
like fancy high end or something. Here's a cool stat
because they use it so much in electronics and microelectronics,
NASA used more than forty kilograms ninety pounds of gold
(33:14):
and the construction of the Space Shuttle Columbia. Right, that's
pretty cool. Fat electronics, and they used it as a
reflective surface. They use gold film. Remember, you can 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
(33:37):
also use it for crowns. Yeah, they still use gold
crowns cuddenly, and then I imagine it because it's not reactive,
because when things are reactive, especially with cooking, it will
make things taste terribly. Yeah, that's true. Like there was
something called a fish fork and it was made of silver,
and apparently if you had this thing, it was like
(33:59):
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, right, so that you everything doesn't
just taste bad because it's not reacting with anything because
(34:19):
it's 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 you eat squid? Will
you eat octopus? I mean I'll eat all that stuff
to a certain degree. I mean, like Emily when it
(34:42):
comes to calamari, she will only eat like the things
that look like little onion rings. Right as soon as
it looks like the little miniature creature, she's like, that's
for you, and I pop that in my mouth. I
will probably eat both, especially eat squid. You we won't
eat octopus because of Remember one of our friends had
ad and they told us a story that their friend
was a cook for some couple down in the Caribbean,
(35:05):
and the couple like 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 her because she
did it anyway, like you literally when you literally have
(35:26):
to fight to put 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 intelligents,
like I just can't eat those anymore, which is said
because there's they pop up. It's some pretty delicious dishes,
I imagine, but they're a very smart animals, and he's
(35:46):
like the animals just stupid ones. Right, Yeah, I could
see that I would be dramatized, 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
(36:07):
to walk back and the octopus reaches up with one
hand and holds your hand. He's like, I want to
be your pet. I don't want to go back to
the sea. Just don't cook me. Don't cook me, all right,
(36:34):
where do we leave off food and beverage. You can
get it in gold Schlagger in certain jellies gold by
the way, not octopus. Yeah yeah, yeah, um, And that
that's all just for marketing and making things fans. It
really is. You know. They have like the World's most
Expensive Sunday or the world's most expensive salary always got
gold flakes. It does so much so that I think
(36:56):
we've talked about this. They have another category for World's
most expensive non old 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 experienceive
hot dog and that doesn't really you know. So then
that means some of the gold that we've lost that
has been pooped out. Yeah. I guess that's sad, is it.
(37:18):
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'd 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 the podcast. Yes, it is like most mining operations, um,
(37:39):
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 there's the cyanide,
which is never great when you're introducing those kind of chemicals. No,
and apparently they take this affluent, right yeah, or a
fluent and they dump it out in the ocean. Oh really,
(38:03):
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 dumb, 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 a gold wedding band and a
(38:24):
blood diamond on your finger, then uh, you just like
you're that's a double whammy against hat trick. Yeah, well no,
hatrick could be three. So not in this not in
this the 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 we should do
a full podcast in the gold standard at some point.
(38:46):
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. Yes. Is that what it was? Yes? Exactly.
And if you had a bunch, if you had enough money,
(39:07):
you could go up to you know, the federal reserve
and 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? Yeah? And
I think when you detach your currency from gold becomes
a fiat currency right to the whims of the market.
(39:29):
I seem to remember discussing this sum in one of
our econ podcasts way back when maybe even audiobook man,
how the economy were uh the super stuff guidet to
the economy, that's what it's called. Um. That was a
good one. Um. So two d thirty six tons of
gold are uh being so called hoarded by people and governments? Um?
(39:54):
Is that all twoty 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 worn. Yeah.
But um, they think there is actually gold out and
outer space, you know, and some of these big asteroids
flying by that are chuck full of minerals and other metals. Um,
(40:16):
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. How I mean, how
(40:37):
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 would send Bruce Willis up with a lasso, a
golden lasso, riding a jackalope and attach it to the
(40:58):
jackalop's tail and ride it back to Earth. You got
anything else? No? 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
(41:20):
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
(41:41):
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 of peels.
I found it on peels or dot org, but it
was originally in Harper's that's where I read it, gold
Guns and Gumpiers. That is g A R I M
(42:02):
P E I R O S. And it's by Damon Tabor.
Good stuff. Awesome article is so engross, 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,
isn't that a big problem? I think that was part
(42:24):
of it. But more um, it's just you are you
really risk death in these like they're 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 go,
gold gold. If you want to learn more about gold,
(42:47):
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
(43:08):
college 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
or friends. Um, I'm hoping that they may pick up
a few important life lessons from you, guys, as well
as interesting facts. Here a few life lesson highlights, So
I think you guys, display number one, normal guys can
(43:30):
talk about something other than sports. That's true, I know
I like sports. Number two. Good presentations begin with an
attention getting introduction. Josh. Josh will tell you this is
sometimes easier said than done. Yes, that's absolutely correct. Um.
If you don't know something, uh, look it up. And
if you're looking it up on the internet, check more
(43:50):
than one source. Life lessons this 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. If
you get it wrong, venture a guest, share a new hypothesis,
then invite feedback, which is the important part. Jerem Pierro's
number five. If you don't have to make fun of
people to be funny. If you absolutely must mock someone,
(44:12):
mock yourself and you're good at that. Number six, it's
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
and to 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
(44:35):
off hand joke, which we do. Um Sometimes you have
to use a term that is more accurate or 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 is my
conscience writing. And number eight, curiosity can last a lifetime.
(44:57):
And that was the last one, and he said, guy,
there's a lot to be said. We're 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've been born gay. It
(45:17):
was unanimous. Chuck is clearly a bear. If you have
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 here.
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
(45:39):
Performing Stuff you Should Know podcast analysis. What a world,
Thanks Professor Tom. Yeah, that's a great email. That was
a great email. We gotta print that one out frame. Um,
if you ever do analysis of stuff you should Know,
we want to hear what you've concluded. Um. You can
tweet to us if it's a short inclusion at s
(46:01):
y s K podcast. You can join us at Facebook
dot com, slash Stuff you Should Know. You can send
us an email to stuff podcast at how stuff Works
dot com and as always, joined us at our home
on the web. Stuff you Should Know dot com. Stuff
you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radios How
Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit
(46:23):
the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
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