December 8, 2018 • 29 mins
Due to a condition known as Thomsen's disease, the muscles of fainting goats tense up whenever the animal is startled. In this episode, Josh and Chuck break down the science behind this bizarre condition.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey there everyone, it's me Josh, and for this week's
s Y S Case select, I've chosen our episode on
fainting Goats from two thousand eleven. It's about the funniest,
saddest breed of goats around, plus sad kittens too, but
it's also really cute in a weird way. At any rate,
this one I will advise you to listen to, accompanyed
(00:21):
by your laptop or phone. Ready to go on YouTube
because there's gonna be a lot of stuff for you
to check out, enjoy it. Welcome to Stuff you should
know from house stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome
(00:42):
to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Brant. Yeah,
that's right, that's me fall over. But yes, not yet, Chuck.
We're getting there, okay, okay, Um, how are you doing.
You're feeling a little sick after Los Angeles? Yes, Josh,
heavy workload and stress usually means Chuck crashes and gets
(01:04):
sick afterward. Yeah. I came very close. That's what happened.
As I was telling you, I'm a walking ad for
emergency It works really well. It's good stuff, Um, Chuck.
I hope you feel better. Soon, thank you. Um. In
the meantime, let's talk about the Satanic symbol that is
the goat. Yeah, the the inverted star is supposed to
be a goat head, is that right? Yes? That is
(01:26):
actually the bah fomat. It's a I think a seventeenth
century French illustration. Um No, nineteenth century French magician uh
eliphas Levi drew the bah fomat of Mendy's right. Okay,
(01:48):
and Mendy's is like the key term here. This is
where the idea that the goat was Satanic came from. Okay,
so back in the day, back when the Greeks were
running around Egypt, let's say the fourth sent free bc Um.
One of them, Herodotus wrote of the Mendees, people who
lived along the Nile and venerated and essentially worshiped goats,
(02:12):
specifically male goats as symbols of fertility, and the Greeks,
doing what they did, eventually ripped this idea off and
labeled their god Pan the the King of the Satyrs,
half god, half man god who like to woo the
ladies and basically press his male goat sexuality onto them. Right. Okay,
(02:34):
so we have the idea that a male goat a
k a ram in a lot of cases, I'm pretty sure,
became the symbol for powerful male sexuality. Right as the
Christian Church came about sexuality kind of diverged from um reality.
Uh that that I that concept became more and more taboo,
(02:57):
increasingly taboo, until finally you get to the point where, um,
we arrive at the Knights Templar who supposedly venerated Bafometse
guys pop up a lot with us. They do, um
that that that image of Bafo met not the nineteenth
century one, but the image of a goat head, which
they supposedly idolized. Um was used against them to persecute
(03:20):
them as Satanists and kill them. And from that point forward,
the goat went from pagan god of male fertility or
sexuality to satanic from that moment on to the point
now where you can look at a goat and you
get a touch of evil from it, don't you know.
I was just about to counter and say, that's funny,
(03:41):
because goats are the sweetest, most adorable little creatures on
the planet. It depends, first of all, it depends on
their age, It depends on their size. It depends on
how readily you can see those satanic eyes of theirs.
It's satan walking their chuck. Let's just come out and
say it. Okay, well we know we everyone knows the
head pet goats, so you're not to get me to
say anything like that. Plus, if you're anything, you're lackey
(04:03):
for the goat lobby. I am. Yeah, what about fainting goats?
Though I have to agree these are not satanic? They
are they fall into the cute camp, right, Yeah, it's
pretty cute and sad and funny, it's all wrapped up
into one. In fact, I have never experienced such a
range of emotions as when I watched fainting goats and
fainting kittens. Yeah, fainting kittens in particular got my goat.
(04:26):
I just showed Lizzie. It's awesome, she laughed. I thought,
it's a hilarious chuck. It's so sad looking though, I know,
but then they kind of look around and look like
a stupid kitten and like like a few times and
they're fine. I I urge anyone who hasn't seen, first
of all fainting goats to go onto YouTube dot com.
That's why oh, you tube dot com. It's a kind
(04:51):
of like a video repository of sorts. You can share video.
Type in yeah, yeah, it's amazing. Um, you type in
fainting goats and then watch the one with the greatest
number of hits and you will see what we're talking about.
I think it's ten million, eight hundred thousand hits right now.
Watch that one. You'll see what we're talking about. The
rest of the time. You can also, if you want
(05:11):
to treat yourself, type in fainting goat kittens hyphen original
video and you'll see what makes me laugh and makes
Chuck cry. And if you want to really treat yourself,
type in war's be Oh that one's adorable. That little lamb,
Yeah that's the Is that a lamb or a goat?
It's a lamb, but a lamb is a female goat, right,
or it's a baby goat. Isn't a goat? A mail
(05:33):
lamb a baby goat as a kid, a lamb is
a lamb. Huh oh yeah, lamb is a baby sheep. Yeah, Okay,
we're all set. No need for emails, everybody my autonic goats. Okay,
So yeah, there's other names for these things. Now that
hopefully you've gone and watched this, you're up to speed,
and you don't know we're about to be talking about,
because we are going to explain this weird phenomenon that
(05:54):
is feigning goats a k a. As you just said,
my autonic goats. What else, Chuck where is some other
awesome names for these things? The Tennessee stiff legs just
good name for a band, as is my atonic Goats,
Tennessee wooden legs, nervous goats, and fall down goats. Imagine
fall down goats was pretty early in the game. So
that's what Bam Bam from Flintstem calls exactly. Uh, they
(06:16):
go by several different names, Josh, but they are not
fading at all. Actually, no, no, And we should say
if you are too lazy to go look up this
YouTube video and you don't know what we're talking about. Basically, um,
these goats videos of goats who are being chased by
like a farmer or something with an umbrella, and all
of a sudden, they'll just stiffen up and fall over
and it looks like they fainted dead away or possibly
(06:38):
died and instantly gone into rigor mortis It looks like
they've been shot and killed by a sniper exactly. And
then after a second, they just kind of get up
and and uh, you know, run away some more um
and yeah, they're called feigning goats, but it's not at
all what's going on instead, chuck, it's like an altered
startle response. Right. Yeah, it's congen little condition. Means they
(07:02):
get it since you know their little baby kid goats,
they were born with it. It's called myotonia congenita. And
there's another couple of names, the Becker type disease or
Thompson's disease, and you know they basically we'll get into
the specifics. But what happens is they tense up like
the fight or flight. Like if an explosion went off
(07:22):
right behind you right now, you tense up and then
go Maybe what happens here is they tins up and
they don't untense. They stay stiff long enough to fall
over on their side as if they were dead. Appropriately.
Robert Lamb, who wrote this article, points out it's like that,
you know, when you tense up from a from a
fight or a startle or danger, flight or fight, fight,
(07:45):
fight or flight. It's been a while, clearly Um, that
tension that's relieved almost immediately. That basically your brain like
getting your body like zapped into preparedness, like like get
ready to run. Stop thinking about tutsie, roll pops, jerk,
It's time for you to to kick some bottom. Yeah.
(08:06):
Or in the goats case, quit thinking about that big
patch of grass. Right, there's a wolf behind you running
get out of here exactly. But instead of running, they
tense up, they fall over because their muscles take about
ten or twenty seconds to relax. Right. Yes, so you
talked about um myotonic, they're myotonic goats. Myotonia exists in
(08:27):
more than just um goats. It exists in humans as well,
kittens we said, yeah, um satis video however, so awesome.
And mayotonia is basically this, Uh, it's a nervous it's
a disorder of the central nervous system, a congenital one
like you said, chuck, Um, that's characterized by stiff muscles
that they're they're rigid and they take time to relax. Right. Yeah.
(08:48):
I think the voluntary or voluntary muscles we should say,
not like your cardiac muscle or you're voluntary muscles. Um.
The stat I found was that it affects about one
and one hundred thousand people and in northern ind an
Avia one in ten. Huh, who knew? Well, I guess
they they have a bottleneck up there some sort, because
(09:08):
not that many people want to move up to cannon Ava.
I didn't see any kind of explanation for why there
would be more abundant there. But that's how many it
effects in people. If it's uh, if you have it,
there's some medication. It's not that big of a deal.
Stay exercise, stay loose, don't walk around big piles of glass,
I would say, are beds of nails. You don't want
to fall on anything like that. Maybe you shouldn't be
(09:30):
driving a car. But I don't think humans actually stiffen
and fall over like the goats. I think it's more
of a you know, temporary stiffening and or again, as
Robert Lamb put it, a full body Charlie horse, but
without the pain. Yeah, yeah, they say they don't feel pain.
I don't know about that. Yeah, we'll get into that
in a second, all right. But there's a there's a
similar condition to called um myo clonus and um it's
(09:54):
actually the basis of my favorite, probably my favorite um
physiological trade of humans, the myoclonic jerk. You know, when
you're falling asleep and then all of a sudden you
go and awake. Yeah, yeah, that happens to me. And
if you'll notice, most of the time you're dozing and
you're you're dreaming of maybe falling down a stare or
(10:14):
something like that. So apparently your brain is either confused
that you are in fact falling, or it does it
doesn't understand why you're why your muscles are relaxing in
some weird way, and it's jolting you awake. Um, or
it thinks you're dying and it's railing against dying, trying
to get your heart going again. Of her. Either way,
(10:37):
thank you, body, yes, and mind. But another another name
for is the hypnic jerk. The hypnic jerk, it's just great.
Do you like it when it happens to you or
you just it's so it's just funny. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That it's a weird feeling. It's sort of like when
you when you almost fall back in a chair and
you catch yourself. There's nothing more like, you know, thrilling
to the body than that. That. Oh my gosh, I'm
(10:59):
going to die here in one second exactly, so you're
you're it's thrilling because your muscles tense up. You have
to wonder, if you're just sitting there for ten or
twenty seconds, does your brain your brain apparently would know
that there's no longer any danger, but you can't move,
which I imagine would kind of be kind of stressful.
In dings Joan, stop in dings, jo. We know that
(11:48):
the brain knows that there's no longer any danger because
the actual UM disorder is on the cellular level in
the muscles. Right. Yeah, there's a gene Josh called the
c l c in one, the chloride channel one gene,
of course, and it's involved in the production of proteins,
which are you know proteins are good for muscle relaxing
(12:10):
and contracting and stuff like that. Well, yeah, and chloride
uh ion specifically, right, yeah, what's the deal? Too much chloride? Yeah?
You will? You want remember check the point of being
alive as a functioning body is homeostasis, right, right, So
you want um an equal amount or a relatively comparable
amount of positively charged sodium ions which tell your muscles
(12:32):
to contract and negatively charged chloride ions, which say go
ahead and relax muscles. Right, Oh, there's not enough chloride
in this case. Yes, so there's an abundance of sodium
and not enough chloride, which means that when you when
the cells are innervated, the muscle cells are innervated with
an electrical impulse from the brain turns up. It takes
(12:54):
them longer to relax because they're out of whack because
this gene is not expressing those will ride ions like
it should be. But so it's not the brain any
longer thinking that we're afraid or that there's a danger.
It's the muscles. It's all in the muscles, that's right.
And it is hereditary. It can be dominant or ascessive,
(13:14):
meaning either one of your parents can have the gene
or both. Not too picky there. And uh, the difference
is with the goats is they're actually bread to encourage this, right,
And here you mentioned something a second ago um that
kind of smacked of the ethics of it, right, I
(13:34):
don't remember what it would be, kind of like let's
go to well just people laughing. Every time I see
those videos, I think the goats, you know, they're all
they're they're roaming around their pin and then I get
the feeling they see people coming, They're like, oh God,
here we go again. Some i'm jerk is gonna shoot
a gun in the air or something and we're all
gonna fallow and they're gonna laugh at us. Very funny.
(13:56):
Ha ha, right exactly, So here we go, agare we
go again? And every time they see a human without fail,
I'm sure human does that to that and that humans
laugh and think it's the funniest thing they've ever seen.
The goats are just like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And
actually there's two reasons that fainting goats are bred these days.
One is for novelty because they do that, and another
(14:17):
is for meat. Basically, yeah, that made me sad. I
thought it would just be strictly novelty and having them
as a pet. No. And initially, I mean, that's what's
what most livestock goats are used for as meat, and frankly,
they're delicious, but um, I wouldn't know they're so delicious. Um.
But if you think of them as satanic, you can
(14:38):
eat them all day long. It's like you're eradicating evil
by eating the goat. You know what? I'm saying, give
me one of those evil satanic goat tacos. I want
to do my part. Can I give you like a
tad of history? Yeah? Do you want to talk about
the history of it? Okay, I know we're hopping around here,
go on fire like b But the the reason that
(15:01):
Tennessee stiff legs are fall down goats, as some people
call them, are called Tennessee stiff legs or Tennessee wooden legs,
is because they were brought down from Nova Scotia allegedly
by a farmhand named John Tinsley. That's what they think. Yeah,
from what I saw, that was the likeliest explanation. Yeah,
to Marshall County, Tennessee in the late eighteen hundreds eighteen eighties, yep,
(15:24):
and he started breeding them, which uh is called unnatural selection.
Will get to that in a second, But um, this,
these the goats whore originally not bred for novelty, right.
It took a hundred years for them to really start
to be bread for novelty. They were bred because Chuck,
as you pointed out, their muscles don't atrophy, right, they
(15:44):
do the opposite, right. Well, yeah, I mean, if you
think there's muscle waste going on, think again, because it
actually makes the animal much leaner for slaughter. Right, it's
hard for me to even say that, right. So there's
because of all the tensing and untensing that they do
more than the average animal. They're kind of bulk, they're ripped,
they're but so they have a loaf their lean meat.
(16:07):
But there's a lot of meat to um to muscle
as well. So they're prized for their meat and apparently
they're they're propensity toward um myotonism to tensing up. Painting
prevents them from keep from climbing fences, which is a
big problem when you're keeping goats as livestock. They like
(16:29):
to just hop right over a fence to erect forum. Minded. No,
my goats loved being pet goats, I'm sure. Well. No,
we had a big pen and they were actually in
there with the dogs. We had two dogs and two
goats and they were I mean the goats I think
took their cues from the dogs because they were very,
very playful. And uh, I used to play games with
my goat, Nestor all the time. Whatever happened uh Nestor, Well,
(16:51):
Billy died, which is very sad. And then of course,
and then Nestor. We eventually were like, you know, we
we need to move Nestor out a farm. So this
lady took him and Nestor wrote it back to the
truck with me with his head on my lap the
whole way. And what the lady dude to Nestor? Do
you think? I think she kept Nestor as a goat.
And that's the story I'm sticking to that Nestor was
(17:12):
a pet until he died of old age. Has a
beautiful story each other. Y Um, okay, so good. So
your your goats fared very well. I'm glad to hear that.
I remember the goats at my birthday party. They one
of them was a housecoat. Remember, Oh yeah, house goat. Wow. Um.
So there was an actual reason that feigning goats were
bred initially, and it wasn't for kicks. The Tennessee farmers
(17:36):
of the eighteen eighties. Actually we're a little more soulful
than the ones today. And it wasn't funny back then.
Nothing was somebody right, right, Yeah, don't laugh at that.
I can't say it. I just had like eighty great
jokes in through my hand sor are you talking about
the protection of the herd, not yet. Okay, So the
(17:57):
goats become an established breed of their own by the
nineteen fifties, and about that time they started to leave Tennessee.
I think for Texas was the next place that they
really spread out. But it wasn't until the nineteen eighties
that the the goats were really diverged into two not
necessarily two different breeds because they haven't separated yet. But
(18:19):
there's one line that's generally bred for meat, like the
original version, and the other line is bred as a novelty,
and they tend to be smaller and just faint like that. Cuter, yes, faint, longer, Yeah,
because if you just kind of leave it alone, Um,
the the myotonia is worse as a younger worse early
(18:42):
in life. Yeah, they get kind of used to it
sometimes more they adapt to it. They're not as scared
later in life. So yeah, younger goat is more prone
to fall over, exactly so. But I think if you
compare an adult um fainting goat bread in that line
to be a novelty to a goat it was spread
for its meat of the same age, the novelty goats
(19:03):
can probably fall over at the drop of a hat.
Stough right, right, because farmer thinks that's funny. Well, the
other reason that that Robert says, they can't find much
evidence of this anymore, but I guess back in the
day they would, and this sort of makes sense, they
would they would add some of these fainting goats to
their herd of regular goats in case there were predators around.
(19:25):
A pack of wolves come up, scares the little pebbly
dodo out of these goats, and then the stiff goats
fall over and get eaten while the other ones take
off and run. So it essentially it's almost like they're
not bait. But uh, you know, a much easier kill
keep the wolves occupied so the rest of them can escape.
(19:46):
You know what they are? What sacrificial lamb? Yeah, you're right,
that's exactly what they are. But there's no evidence that
that's really the reason that they're breeding them now. No,
and there's apparently not much evidence that or how how
much that was used, as I think it could have
just been a good idea, right yeah, in things like
(20:08):
job in jo in things like job in jo, So Chuck,
(20:36):
the idea of like make no no no mistake. Mayotonia
is a um it's a deficiency, it's a disorder. It's
not a desirable trait. So the idea of taking because
it's an undesirable trait under natural selection, it shouldn't exist, right,
(20:56):
because if you take a fainting goat out in nature,
like you said, a long with a herd of sheep
or other goats or whatever, h No, they'll they'll be
the first eating and then they won't have a chance
to reproduce eventually, and he'll that trade to die out.
But then being um bred for that for an undesirable trait,
and then protected by humans, whether by a fence or
you know, like it, he'll be with he'll a billy
(21:18):
with the shotgun or whatever. That's called unnatural selection, right, Yeah,
nothing natural about it, no, or artificial selection is another
way to put it. Yeah, And anytime something like that happens,
there's gonna be some people, probably at an organization called Peter,
that might stand up and say, I don't know if
this is such a cool thing for humans to do.
And Peter, as expected, isn't the biggest fan of raising
(21:41):
feigning goats. Humane society isn't so worried about it, and
they say there's a lot uh more breeding issues in
the world that we should be more concerned about. And
neither one of them have an official stance. But no,
the woman from Peter that Robert interviewed in this article
sounded like she hadn't heard of feigning goats until he
called her. Oh really, yeah, that's the impression that got.
(22:02):
Oh yeah, the quote is a little vague, isn't it. Yeah, yeah,
she just like the standard pea quote, just plug in
the animal. Well, who knows. There is no official stance though,
so maybe maybe Robert alerted her to this whole phenomena.
But they have an official stance now and it stopped
breeding feinting goats. It's a little late for that though.
It's a recognized and um prized as a separate American
(22:25):
breed of goat. There's about three thousand to five thousand
of them running around and then falling over right, um,
and they don't look like they're going anywhere. Um. The
Livestock Conservancy, I think is what it's called, UM suggests
that this uh, this breed of goat be very much
um protected and taking care of and conserved, is I
(22:46):
guess the best word to use. Did I tell you
about Emily and the little baby goat at the winery
at the winery in Athens. No, we went to uh
right before this l a trip, you know, we went
over to Santa Barbara, one country, and we went in
this one winery and as we were going in, there
was a guy with a dog outside, and you know,
of course we attacked this dog and repetting it. He said, yeah,
they wouldn't let it in because they got a goat,
(23:07):
a baby goat in there. So Emily, here's this, of course,
and it's just like in this inside and saying where's
the goat? Where's the goat? This lady has a probably
about a six week old kid in her arms, wrapped
in a blanket. That's um has some sort of physical ailment,
not feigning a goat syndrome. It was part human, part human.
(23:28):
It had human hands. Um. No, but she had this
little baby kid and uh, you know, Emily goes over
and starts drooling, and the lady says, do you want
to hold it? And in less than a second the
goat swap had been made, and you know, for the
next twenty minutes, this goat is literally like nuzzling Emily
in the neck, and I took about twenty pictures of
the range of emotions on Emily's face. There wasn't crying,
(23:50):
It was just it was a type of ecstasy that
you rarely see in an adult human female. Very cute.
You're like a long story short. We own that goat now? Yes? Yeah, no,
not true. My aunt used to have a pigmy goat
in California along the Russian River. Did they not get big?
I guess hence the I would say a pigmy fainting
goat would be about the cutest combination, especially one that
(24:14):
like asked to shine your shoes with like big Those kittens, so, man,
I can't watch that. Yeah, it looks it just doesn't
look right. It's awesome, I think because they don't look
like they're hurt. They don't look injured. They just look
surprised every time. And then fine, well, kittens look surprised
with everything. They just they have that constant look at surprise.
Anything else. No, we've touched on the satanic nature of goats,
(24:38):
meat goats, fainting goats, fainting kittens, unnatural selection Tennessee, uh
Texas the nineteenth century and that's about it, right, Emily's
a natural love of animals. Yeah, my iconic jerks. Yeah,
everything's right on. Uh. And now you know when you
(25:00):
these videos and you show your buddies, you can now
tell people something exactly what's going on. Say they're not
fainting at all. Actually, yeah, stupid. So if you want
to learn more about feigning goats, remember go to YouTube
why o you tube dot com and type in fainting
goats and then fainting goat kittens. It doesn't really make sense.
(25:21):
It could just be feigning kittens, but still um and
you'll see some hilarity. You can also learn more about
feigning goats in a very well written and wild research
article by Robert Lamb of Stuff to Blow your Mind,
How fainting goats work. Type that into the handy search
bar and how stuff works dot com and that we'll
bring that up. And that means I just brought up
(25:41):
listener melt. That's right, Josh, I'm gonna call this a
real c S I dude, this is from ed in Chico, California. Hey,
Josh and Chuck and Jerry. I'm a crime scene investigator
for a municipal police department. In rural northern California. Being
a c s I is just one of my collateral asignments.
I'm also an evidence technician and have a couple of
(26:03):
other titles depending on who has given me orders that day.
Nearly every agency in my area has trained cops for
civilians to be a c s I when needed, not
as a standalone assignment, so that kind of answers one
of the questions we had. I showed interest in being
a c s I when I started my evidence assignment
four years ago and was sent to Basic c s
I school and later Advanced c s I Crime Scene
(26:26):
Reconstruction School. He's skipped right over intermediate Yeah, I guess so,
and finally blood spatter analysis. We also do monthly in
house training on topics like photography, trajectories, DNA collection, buried
body excavation, et cetera, our c s I or jacks
of all trades since our agencies are too small to
(26:47):
be able to afford specialized positions. Your show was very
well researched and had all the highlights of blood spatter
and forensic photography. Uh and, as a sidebar, while we
do have two big expensive U two thou and dollar
sl our cameras. We really only use them for the
most specialized photos, like nighttime crime scenes of the time
(27:08):
they use a point and shoot from Walmart. Really yeah,
I could see that though. I mean like that. The
technology has gotten good enough so that I'm sure I know,
but it would just seem weird if you saw Dexter
like walk up with a little point and shoot. Yeah.
And plus I think if you were the family of
like a murder victim, and you saw some guy walk
on the point, you would be like, are you even
supposed to be here? How about a real camera? Yeah,
(27:29):
not about a little respect. You mentioned blood avoids at
a crime scene. We call them blood shadows. Oh, I
like that one too. That enjoy being a c S I.
But like Josh said, Ages Ago, television ain't nothing like reality.
I can't stand watching those shows. They're drive me crazy,
But they're not based in reality. Writing in reality. DNA
(27:50):
evidence takes one to two months, and latent princes can
take four or five months, not four to six minutes. Yeah.
And the other thing is is like everybody is just
this jack of all trades, Like, oh, I got these
prints off of this scene, and I'm going to go
analyze them, and I'm going to go like shake down
the bad guys. You know, it's like spend more money
(28:12):
on an ensemble. Will you? Thank you? Ed from Chico.
Oh that was it. Yeah, sorry to end your letter
with a rant from me. Thank you very much for
your illuminating letter. We appreciate it. Um, we want to
hear from you. First of all, you can go um
check us out on Facebook, Facebook, dot com, slash stuff
you should Know. You can follow us on Twitter, s
(28:35):
y s K podcast, and you can join our QB
team k I v A dot org slash Team slash
stuff you should Know. You can also always email us,
and specifically, if you have ever tampered with natural selection
through artificial selection, we want to hear about it. Send
us an email about this, right, Chuck, that's right. That's
(28:57):
a stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com. For
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Hey there everyone, it's me Josh, and for this week's
s Y S Case select, I've chosen our episode on
fainting Goats from two thousand eleven. It's about the funniest,
saddest breed of goats around, plus sad kittens too, but
it's also really cute in a weird way. At any rate,
this one I will advise you to listen to, accompanyed
(00:21):
by your laptop or phone. Ready to go on YouTube
because there's gonna be a lot of stuff for you
to check out, enjoy it. Welcome to Stuff you should
know from house stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome
(00:42):
to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Brant. Yeah,
that's right, that's me fall over. But yes, not yet, Chuck.
We're getting there, okay, okay, Um, how are you doing.
You're feeling a little sick after Los Angeles? Yes, Josh,
heavy workload and stress usually means Chuck crashes and gets
(01:04):
sick afterward. Yeah. I came very close. That's what happened.
As I was telling you, I'm a walking ad for
emergency It works really well. It's good stuff, Um, Chuck.
I hope you feel better. Soon, thank you. Um. In
the meantime, let's talk about the Satanic symbol that is
the goat. Yeah, the the inverted star is supposed to
be a goat head, is that right? Yes? That is
(01:26):
actually the bah fomat. It's a I think a seventeenth
century French illustration. Um No, nineteenth century French magician uh
eliphas Levi drew the bah fomat of Mendy's right. Okay,
(01:48):
and Mendy's is like the key term here. This is
where the idea that the goat was Satanic came from. Okay,
so back in the day, back when the Greeks were
running around Egypt, let's say the fourth sent free bc Um.
One of them, Herodotus wrote of the Mendees, people who
lived along the Nile and venerated and essentially worshiped goats,
(02:12):
specifically male goats as symbols of fertility, and the Greeks,
doing what they did, eventually ripped this idea off and
labeled their god Pan the the King of the Satyrs,
half god, half man god who like to woo the
ladies and basically press his male goat sexuality onto them. Right. Okay,
(02:34):
so we have the idea that a male goat a
k a ram in a lot of cases, I'm pretty sure,
became the symbol for powerful male sexuality. Right as the
Christian Church came about sexuality kind of diverged from um reality.
Uh that that I that concept became more and more taboo,
(02:57):
increasingly taboo, until finally you get to the point where, um,
we arrive at the Knights Templar who supposedly venerated Bafometse
guys pop up a lot with us. They do, um
that that that image of Bafo met not the nineteenth
century one, but the image of a goat head, which
they supposedly idolized. Um was used against them to persecute
(03:20):
them as Satanists and kill them. And from that point forward,
the goat went from pagan god of male fertility or
sexuality to satanic from that moment on to the point
now where you can look at a goat and you
get a touch of evil from it, don't you know.
I was just about to counter and say, that's funny,
(03:41):
because goats are the sweetest, most adorable little creatures on
the planet. It depends, first of all, it depends on
their age, It depends on their size. It depends on
how readily you can see those satanic eyes of theirs.
It's satan walking their chuck. Let's just come out and
say it. Okay, well we know we everyone knows the
head pet goats, so you're not to get me to
say anything like that. Plus, if you're anything, you're lackey
(04:03):
for the goat lobby. I am. Yeah, what about fainting goats?
Though I have to agree these are not satanic? They
are they fall into the cute camp, right, Yeah, it's
pretty cute and sad and funny, it's all wrapped up
into one. In fact, I have never experienced such a
range of emotions as when I watched fainting goats and
fainting kittens. Yeah, fainting kittens in particular got my goat.
(04:26):
I just showed Lizzie. It's awesome, she laughed. I thought,
it's a hilarious chuck. It's so sad looking though, I know,
but then they kind of look around and look like
a stupid kitten and like like a few times and
they're fine. I I urge anyone who hasn't seen, first
of all fainting goats to go onto YouTube dot com.
That's why oh, you tube dot com. It's a kind
(04:51):
of like a video repository of sorts. You can share video.
Type in yeah, yeah, it's amazing. Um, you type in
fainting goats and then watch the one with the greatest
number of hits and you will see what we're talking about.
I think it's ten million, eight hundred thousand hits right now.
Watch that one. You'll see what we're talking about. The
rest of the time. You can also, if you want
(05:11):
to treat yourself, type in fainting goat kittens hyphen original
video and you'll see what makes me laugh and makes
Chuck cry. And if you want to really treat yourself,
type in war's be Oh that one's adorable. That little lamb,
Yeah that's the Is that a lamb or a goat?
It's a lamb, but a lamb is a female goat, right,
or it's a baby goat. Isn't a goat? A mail
(05:33):
lamb a baby goat as a kid, a lamb is
a lamb. Huh oh yeah, lamb is a baby sheep. Yeah, Okay,
we're all set. No need for emails, everybody my autonic goats. Okay,
So yeah, there's other names for these things. Now that
hopefully you've gone and watched this, you're up to speed,
and you don't know we're about to be talking about,
because we are going to explain this weird phenomenon that
(05:54):
is feigning goats a k a. As you just said,
my autonic goats. What else, Chuck where is some other
awesome names for these things? The Tennessee stiff legs just
good name for a band, as is my atonic Goats,
Tennessee wooden legs, nervous goats, and fall down goats. Imagine
fall down goats was pretty early in the game. So
that's what Bam Bam from Flintstem calls exactly. Uh, they
(06:16):
go by several different names, Josh, but they are not
fading at all. Actually, no, no, And we should say
if you are too lazy to go look up this
YouTube video and you don't know what we're talking about. Basically, um,
these goats videos of goats who are being chased by
like a farmer or something with an umbrella, and all
of a sudden, they'll just stiffen up and fall over
and it looks like they fainted dead away or possibly
(06:38):
died and instantly gone into rigor mortis It looks like
they've been shot and killed by a sniper exactly. And
then after a second, they just kind of get up
and and uh, you know, run away some more um
and yeah, they're called feigning goats, but it's not at
all what's going on instead, chuck, it's like an altered
startle response. Right. Yeah, it's congen little condition. Means they
(07:02):
get it since you know their little baby kid goats,
they were born with it. It's called myotonia congenita. And
there's another couple of names, the Becker type disease or
Thompson's disease, and you know they basically we'll get into
the specifics. But what happens is they tense up like
the fight or flight. Like if an explosion went off
(07:22):
right behind you right now, you tense up and then
go Maybe what happens here is they tins up and
they don't untense. They stay stiff long enough to fall
over on their side as if they were dead. Appropriately.
Robert Lamb, who wrote this article, points out it's like that,
you know, when you tense up from a from a
fight or a startle or danger, flight or fight, fight,
(07:45):
fight or flight. It's been a while, clearly Um, that
tension that's relieved almost immediately. That basically your brain like
getting your body like zapped into preparedness, like like get
ready to run. Stop thinking about tutsie, roll pops, jerk,
It's time for you to to kick some bottom. Yeah.
(08:06):
Or in the goats case, quit thinking about that big
patch of grass. Right, there's a wolf behind you running
get out of here exactly. But instead of running, they
tense up, they fall over because their muscles take about
ten or twenty seconds to relax. Right. Yes, so you
talked about um myotonic, they're myotonic goats. Myotonia exists in
(08:27):
more than just um goats. It exists in humans as well,
kittens we said, yeah, um satis video however, so awesome.
And mayotonia is basically this, Uh, it's a nervous it's
a disorder of the central nervous system, a congenital one
like you said, chuck, Um, that's characterized by stiff muscles
that they're they're rigid and they take time to relax. Right. Yeah.
(08:48):
I think the voluntary or voluntary muscles we should say,
not like your cardiac muscle or you're voluntary muscles. Um.
The stat I found was that it affects about one
and one hundred thousand people and in northern ind an
Avia one in ten. Huh, who knew? Well, I guess
they they have a bottleneck up there some sort, because
(09:08):
not that many people want to move up to cannon Ava.
I didn't see any kind of explanation for why there
would be more abundant there. But that's how many it
effects in people. If it's uh, if you have it,
there's some medication. It's not that big of a deal.
Stay exercise, stay loose, don't walk around big piles of glass,
I would say, are beds of nails. You don't want
to fall on anything like that. Maybe you shouldn't be
(09:30):
driving a car. But I don't think humans actually stiffen
and fall over like the goats. I think it's more
of a you know, temporary stiffening and or again, as
Robert Lamb put it, a full body Charlie horse, but
without the pain. Yeah, yeah, they say they don't feel pain.
I don't know about that. Yeah, we'll get into that
in a second, all right. But there's a there's a
similar condition to called um myo clonus and um it's
(09:54):
actually the basis of my favorite, probably my favorite um
physiological trade of humans, the myoclonic jerk. You know, when
you're falling asleep and then all of a sudden you
go and awake. Yeah, yeah, that happens to me. And
if you'll notice, most of the time you're dozing and
you're you're dreaming of maybe falling down a stare or
(10:14):
something like that. So apparently your brain is either confused
that you are in fact falling, or it does it
doesn't understand why you're why your muscles are relaxing in
some weird way, and it's jolting you awake. Um, or
it thinks you're dying and it's railing against dying, trying
to get your heart going again. Of her. Either way,
(10:37):
thank you, body, yes, and mind. But another another name
for is the hypnic jerk. The hypnic jerk, it's just great.
Do you like it when it happens to you or
you just it's so it's just funny. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That it's a weird feeling. It's sort of like when
you when you almost fall back in a chair and
you catch yourself. There's nothing more like, you know, thrilling
to the body than that. That. Oh my gosh, I'm
(10:59):
going to die here in one second exactly, so you're
you're it's thrilling because your muscles tense up. You have
to wonder, if you're just sitting there for ten or
twenty seconds, does your brain your brain apparently would know
that there's no longer any danger, but you can't move,
which I imagine would kind of be kind of stressful.
In dings Joan, stop in dings, jo. We know that
(11:48):
the brain knows that there's no longer any danger because
the actual UM disorder is on the cellular level in
the muscles. Right. Yeah, there's a gene Josh called the
c l c in one, the chloride channel one gene,
of course, and it's involved in the production of proteins,
which are you know proteins are good for muscle relaxing
(12:10):
and contracting and stuff like that. Well, yeah, and chloride
uh ion specifically, right, yeah, what's the deal? Too much chloride? Yeah?
You will? You want remember check the point of being
alive as a functioning body is homeostasis, right, right, So
you want um an equal amount or a relatively comparable
amount of positively charged sodium ions which tell your muscles
(12:32):
to contract and negatively charged chloride ions, which say go
ahead and relax muscles. Right, Oh, there's not enough chloride
in this case. Yes, so there's an abundance of sodium
and not enough chloride, which means that when you when
the cells are innervated, the muscle cells are innervated with
an electrical impulse from the brain turns up. It takes
(12:54):
them longer to relax because they're out of whack because
this gene is not expressing those will ride ions like
it should be. But so it's not the brain any
longer thinking that we're afraid or that there's a danger.
It's the muscles. It's all in the muscles, that's right.
And it is hereditary. It can be dominant or ascessive,
(13:14):
meaning either one of your parents can have the gene
or both. Not too picky there. And uh, the difference
is with the goats is they're actually bread to encourage this, right,
And here you mentioned something a second ago um that
kind of smacked of the ethics of it, right, I
(13:34):
don't remember what it would be, kind of like let's
go to well just people laughing. Every time I see
those videos, I think the goats, you know, they're all
they're they're roaming around their pin and then I get
the feeling they see people coming, They're like, oh God,
here we go again. Some i'm jerk is gonna shoot
a gun in the air or something and we're all
gonna fallow and they're gonna laugh at us. Very funny.
(13:56):
Ha ha, right exactly, So here we go, agare we
go again? And every time they see a human without fail,
I'm sure human does that to that and that humans
laugh and think it's the funniest thing they've ever seen.
The goats are just like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And
actually there's two reasons that fainting goats are bred these days.
One is for novelty because they do that, and another
(14:17):
is for meat. Basically, yeah, that made me sad. I
thought it would just be strictly novelty and having them
as a pet. No. And initially, I mean, that's what's
what most livestock goats are used for as meat, and frankly,
they're delicious, but um, I wouldn't know they're so delicious. Um.
But if you think of them as satanic, you can
(14:38):
eat them all day long. It's like you're eradicating evil
by eating the goat. You know what? I'm saying, give
me one of those evil satanic goat tacos. I want
to do my part. Can I give you like a
tad of history? Yeah? Do you want to talk about
the history of it? Okay, I know we're hopping around here,
go on fire like b But the the reason that
(15:01):
Tennessee stiff legs are fall down goats, as some people
call them, are called Tennessee stiff legs or Tennessee wooden legs,
is because they were brought down from Nova Scotia allegedly
by a farmhand named John Tinsley. That's what they think. Yeah,
from what I saw, that was the likeliest explanation. Yeah,
to Marshall County, Tennessee in the late eighteen hundreds eighteen eighties, yep,
(15:24):
and he started breeding them, which uh is called unnatural selection.
Will get to that in a second, But um, this,
these the goats whore originally not bred for novelty, right.
It took a hundred years for them to really start
to be bread for novelty. They were bred because Chuck,
as you pointed out, their muscles don't atrophy, right, they
(15:44):
do the opposite, right. Well, yeah, I mean, if you
think there's muscle waste going on, think again, because it
actually makes the animal much leaner for slaughter. Right, it's
hard for me to even say that, right. So there's
because of all the tensing and untensing that they do
more than the average animal. They're kind of bulk, they're ripped,
they're but so they have a loaf their lean meat.
(16:07):
But there's a lot of meat to um to muscle
as well. So they're prized for their meat and apparently
they're they're propensity toward um myotonism to tensing up. Painting
prevents them from keep from climbing fences, which is a
big problem when you're keeping goats as livestock. They like
(16:29):
to just hop right over a fence to erect forum. Minded. No,
my goats loved being pet goats, I'm sure. Well. No,
we had a big pen and they were actually in
there with the dogs. We had two dogs and two
goats and they were I mean the goats I think
took their cues from the dogs because they were very,
very playful. And uh, I used to play games with
my goat, Nestor all the time. Whatever happened uh Nestor, Well,
(16:51):
Billy died, which is very sad. And then of course,
and then Nestor. We eventually were like, you know, we
we need to move Nestor out a farm. So this
lady took him and Nestor wrote it back to the
truck with me with his head on my lap the
whole way. And what the lady dude to Nestor? Do
you think? I think she kept Nestor as a goat.
And that's the story I'm sticking to that Nestor was
(17:12):
a pet until he died of old age. Has a
beautiful story each other. Y Um, okay, so good. So
your your goats fared very well. I'm glad to hear that.
I remember the goats at my birthday party. They one
of them was a housecoat. Remember, Oh yeah, house goat. Wow. Um.
So there was an actual reason that feigning goats were
bred initially, and it wasn't for kicks. The Tennessee farmers
(17:36):
of the eighteen eighties. Actually we're a little more soulful
than the ones today. And it wasn't funny back then.
Nothing was somebody right, right, Yeah, don't laugh at that.
I can't say it. I just had like eighty great
jokes in through my hand sor are you talking about
the protection of the herd, not yet. Okay, So the
(17:57):
goats become an established breed of their own by the
nineteen fifties, and about that time they started to leave Tennessee.
I think for Texas was the next place that they
really spread out. But it wasn't until the nineteen eighties
that the the goats were really diverged into two not
necessarily two different breeds because they haven't separated yet. But
(18:19):
there's one line that's generally bred for meat, like the
original version, and the other line is bred as a novelty,
and they tend to be smaller and just faint like that. Cuter, yes, faint, longer, Yeah,
because if you just kind of leave it alone, Um,
the the myotonia is worse as a younger worse early
(18:42):
in life. Yeah, they get kind of used to it
sometimes more they adapt to it. They're not as scared
later in life. So yeah, younger goat is more prone
to fall over, exactly so. But I think if you
compare an adult um fainting goat bread in that line
to be a novelty to a goat it was spread
for its meat of the same age, the novelty goats
(19:03):
can probably fall over at the drop of a hat.
Stough right, right, because farmer thinks that's funny. Well, the
other reason that that Robert says, they can't find much
evidence of this anymore, but I guess back in the
day they would, and this sort of makes sense, they
would they would add some of these fainting goats to
their herd of regular goats in case there were predators around.
(19:25):
A pack of wolves come up, scares the little pebbly
dodo out of these goats, and then the stiff goats
fall over and get eaten while the other ones take
off and run. So it essentially it's almost like they're
not bait. But uh, you know, a much easier kill
keep the wolves occupied so the rest of them can escape.
(19:46):
You know what they are? What sacrificial lamb? Yeah, you're right,
that's exactly what they are. But there's no evidence that
that's really the reason that they're breeding them now. No,
and there's apparently not much evidence that or how how
much that was used, as I think it could have
just been a good idea, right yeah, in things like
(20:08):
job in jo in things like job in jo, So Chuck,
(20:36):
the idea of like make no no no mistake. Mayotonia
is a um it's a deficiency, it's a disorder. It's
not a desirable trait. So the idea of taking because
it's an undesirable trait under natural selection, it shouldn't exist, right,
(20:56):
because if you take a fainting goat out in nature,
like you said, a long with a herd of sheep
or other goats or whatever, h No, they'll they'll be
the first eating and then they won't have a chance
to reproduce eventually, and he'll that trade to die out.
But then being um bred for that for an undesirable trait,
and then protected by humans, whether by a fence or
you know, like it, he'll be with he'll a billy
(21:18):
with the shotgun or whatever. That's called unnatural selection, right, Yeah,
nothing natural about it, no, or artificial selection is another
way to put it. Yeah, And anytime something like that happens,
there's gonna be some people, probably at an organization called Peter,
that might stand up and say, I don't know if
this is such a cool thing for humans to do.
And Peter, as expected, isn't the biggest fan of raising
(21:41):
feigning goats. Humane society isn't so worried about it, and
they say there's a lot uh more breeding issues in
the world that we should be more concerned about. And
neither one of them have an official stance. But no,
the woman from Peter that Robert interviewed in this article
sounded like she hadn't heard of feigning goats until he
called her. Oh really, yeah, that's the impression that got.
(22:02):
Oh yeah, the quote is a little vague, isn't it. Yeah, yeah,
she just like the standard pea quote, just plug in
the animal. Well, who knows. There is no official stance though,
so maybe maybe Robert alerted her to this whole phenomena.
But they have an official stance now and it stopped
breeding feinting goats. It's a little late for that though.
It's a recognized and um prized as a separate American
(22:25):
breed of goat. There's about three thousand to five thousand
of them running around and then falling over right, um,
and they don't look like they're going anywhere. Um. The
Livestock Conservancy, I think is what it's called, UM suggests
that this uh, this breed of goat be very much
um protected and taking care of and conserved, is I
(22:46):
guess the best word to use. Did I tell you
about Emily and the little baby goat at the winery
at the winery in Athens. No, we went to uh
right before this l a trip, you know, we went
over to Santa Barbara, one country, and we went in
this one winery and as we were going in, there
was a guy with a dog outside, and you know,
of course we attacked this dog and repetting it. He said, yeah,
they wouldn't let it in because they got a goat,
(23:07):
a baby goat in there. So Emily, here's this, of course,
and it's just like in this inside and saying where's
the goat? Where's the goat? This lady has a probably
about a six week old kid in her arms, wrapped
in a blanket. That's um has some sort of physical ailment,
not feigning a goat syndrome. It was part human, part human.
(23:28):
It had human hands. Um. No, but she had this
little baby kid and uh, you know, Emily goes over
and starts drooling, and the lady says, do you want
to hold it? And in less than a second the
goat swap had been made, and you know, for the
next twenty minutes, this goat is literally like nuzzling Emily
in the neck, and I took about twenty pictures of
the range of emotions on Emily's face. There wasn't crying,
(23:50):
It was just it was a type of ecstasy that
you rarely see in an adult human female. Very cute.
You're like a long story short. We own that goat now? Yes? Yeah, no,
not true. My aunt used to have a pigmy goat
in California along the Russian River. Did they not get big?
I guess hence the I would say a pigmy fainting
goat would be about the cutest combination, especially one that
(24:14):
like asked to shine your shoes with like big Those kittens, so, man,
I can't watch that. Yeah, it looks it just doesn't
look right. It's awesome, I think because they don't look
like they're hurt. They don't look injured. They just look
surprised every time. And then fine, well, kittens look surprised
with everything. They just they have that constant look at surprise.
Anything else. No, we've touched on the satanic nature of goats,
(24:38):
meat goats, fainting goats, fainting kittens, unnatural selection Tennessee, uh
Texas the nineteenth century and that's about it, right, Emily's
a natural love of animals. Yeah, my iconic jerks. Yeah,
everything's right on. Uh. And now you know when you
(25:00):
these videos and you show your buddies, you can now
tell people something exactly what's going on. Say they're not
fainting at all. Actually, yeah, stupid. So if you want
to learn more about feigning goats, remember go to YouTube
why o you tube dot com and type in fainting
goats and then fainting goat kittens. It doesn't really make sense.
(25:21):
It could just be feigning kittens, but still um and
you'll see some hilarity. You can also learn more about
feigning goats in a very well written and wild research
article by Robert Lamb of Stuff to Blow your Mind,
How fainting goats work. Type that into the handy search
bar and how stuff works dot com and that we'll
bring that up. And that means I just brought up
(25:41):
listener melt. That's right, Josh, I'm gonna call this a
real c S I dude, this is from ed in Chico, California. Hey,
Josh and Chuck and Jerry. I'm a crime scene investigator
for a municipal police department. In rural northern California. Being
a c s I is just one of my collateral asignments.
I'm also an evidence technician and have a couple of
(26:03):
other titles depending on who has given me orders that day.
Nearly every agency in my area has trained cops for
civilians to be a c s I when needed, not
as a standalone assignment, so that kind of answers one
of the questions we had. I showed interest in being
a c s I when I started my evidence assignment
four years ago and was sent to Basic c s
I school and later Advanced c s I Crime Scene
(26:26):
Reconstruction School. He's skipped right over intermediate Yeah, I guess so,
and finally blood spatter analysis. We also do monthly in
house training on topics like photography, trajectories, DNA collection, buried
body excavation, et cetera, our c s I or jacks
of all trades since our agencies are too small to
(26:47):
be able to afford specialized positions. Your show was very
well researched and had all the highlights of blood spatter
and forensic photography. Uh and, as a sidebar, while we
do have two big expensive U two thou and dollar
sl our cameras. We really only use them for the
most specialized photos, like nighttime crime scenes of the time
(27:08):
they use a point and shoot from Walmart. Really yeah,
I could see that though. I mean like that. The
technology has gotten good enough so that I'm sure I know,
but it would just seem weird if you saw Dexter
like walk up with a little point and shoot. Yeah.
And plus I think if you were the family of
like a murder victim, and you saw some guy walk
on the point, you would be like, are you even
supposed to be here? How about a real camera? Yeah,
(27:29):
not about a little respect. You mentioned blood avoids at
a crime scene. We call them blood shadows. Oh, I
like that one too. That enjoy being a c S I.
But like Josh said, Ages Ago, television ain't nothing like reality.
I can't stand watching those shows. They're drive me crazy,
But they're not based in reality. Writing in reality. DNA
(27:50):
evidence takes one to two months, and latent princes can
take four or five months, not four to six minutes. Yeah.
And the other thing is is like everybody is just
this jack of all trades, Like, oh, I got these
prints off of this scene, and I'm going to go
analyze them, and I'm going to go like shake down
the bad guys. You know, it's like spend more money
(28:12):
on an ensemble. Will you? Thank you? Ed from Chico.
Oh that was it. Yeah, sorry to end your letter
with a rant from me. Thank you very much for
your illuminating letter. We appreciate it. Um, we want to
hear from you. First of all, you can go um
check us out on Facebook, Facebook, dot com, slash stuff
you should Know. You can follow us on Twitter, s
(28:35):
y s K podcast, and you can join our QB
team k I v A dot org slash Team slash
stuff you should Know. You can also always email us,
and specifically, if you have ever tampered with natural selection
through artificial selection, we want to hear about it. Send
us an email about this, right, Chuck, that's right. That's
(28:57):
a stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
stuff works dot com. Want more how stuff works, check
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Josh Clark
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Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
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Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.