What's the deal with the debt ceiling?

Lately it's been common news fodder that Congress uses its ability to raise the debt ceiling to hold the executive branch hostage to its demands, but exactly how does that work, and what does the debt ceiling do? Learn about it in this fascinating episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to you. Stuff you should know Fronhouse stuff works
dot com right, and uh, this is stuff you should
know Financial times. Yeah, and you know what, Usually I
shy away from finance, as you know. Yeah, this was

(00:21):
This was good though, like timely and easy to understand.
And I don't think a lot of people. Oh that's
not true. I don't know how many people I know
when people say that, I don't think many people. Most
people don't understand what I understand. But I think if
you were like me before, you probably didn't know what
the death ceiling was. And it's really not that difficult.

(00:41):
I mean, yeah, I had an idea what the death
ceiling was. It certainly didn't understand the nuts and bolts
of it. And I also didn't understand that it's fairly
straightforward the whole thing, yeah, or that our company or company,
how's that proportian slip our country? The way they do
business is just it's it's kind of staggered. Oh, it's
an enormous shell game. It's pretty weird that's being held

(01:03):
together with duct tape and bubble gum. It's disheartening and
frightening and all that stuff. So um chuck. The debt
ceiling has been around for a while, and we'll talk
about the history of it in a little while, But um,
it really kind of came into focus in two thousand
eleven there was a big fight over raising the debt ceiling,
which to that point had happened more than a hundred

(01:23):
times since the beginning of the twentieth century UM, and
it had been routine at any given point in time,
like it was just that ceiling needs to be raised,
Congress says, okay, raise it, and that's that. In two
eleven UM, thanks to a faction of the Republican Party
known as the Tea Party, the this very normal procedure

(01:47):
or routine i should say procedure of raising the death
ceiling was basically like held up and the therefore the
function of government was basically held hostage. And it happened
again in two thousand thirteen to even greater effect. But um,
what's crazy to me? After understanding and investigating what the

(02:11):
debt ceiling is and what's going on, I'm chilled to
say that I understand it from both sides now, Like
I get where both sides are coming from and why
the debt ceiling is this. It is literally the full
chrome on which the entire federal government, the entire country,

(02:32):
and not just the operations of the government, but the
whole U. S economy, and in turn, the global economy
sits rests. And if you hold up the debt ceiling,
you hold the entire global economy hostage. If you hold
up the process of raising the debt ceiling, yes, yeah,
you might hold it up like a buttress. If you
hold yes, if you're doing that, then your back hurts.

(02:56):
But that's that's the point. That's why it was pretty
shrewd to target the debt ceiling. But it's not just shrewdness.
Like I I understand that the people who held it
up were characterized as political terrorists. I think even if
you take that aside or not, like, it was pretty
smart that to target that, not just because that's a

(03:16):
great thing to hold hostage, but because you can make
a case like they're in is the greatest symbol or
functional symbol of all of the problems that are plaguing
the United States today or the solution to all of
its problems. Man, you are right down the middle on
this one, aren't you. I I truly understand it from
both sides. It's really weird. I think that's a healthy perspective.

(03:38):
I guess so, and maybe that's what it is. I'm like, well,
I feel healthy, healthy perspective. Uh yeah, it definitely beats uh,
hardline partisan views on things. I think when it comes
to something this huge and complicated, Well, the irony is
that the people who were holding it up or about

(03:59):
his hardline partisans as you can get you know. Yeah,
but the prospect of attacking the debt ceiling and focusing
light on it is I think a very smart move politically. Yeah.
So it may not make friends on the playground, No,
it definitely will not. It is effective. Yeah, okay, so Chuck,
let's talk about this. Let's talk about the debts. Let's

(04:20):
talk about the federal government in general and how it operates. Yeah.
There's a thing that I didn't know exist until recently. Um,
that is issued every day called the Daily Treasury Statement.
And if while we're doing this, this sounds just like
a company or just like given your own personal finance,
as as it is, it's just a large a lot
more zeros, a lot more zeros. But it's the principles
the exact same. Yeah. Um, the daily Treasury statement is

(04:43):
basically just the balance sheet of what we spend in
a day as a government and what we take in
in a day. So let's just pick a day at
random that's featured in this article. Okay, let's say October. Okay,
October three of last year, not too long ago. It's
a third a The sun was shining here in Atlanta.
The federal government took in about a hundred and ten

(05:05):
billion and revenue. We were in Los Angeles. Yeah, the
sun was shining there. Took it in about a hundred
and ten billion dollars from things like massive amounts of
taxes that we have to pay my words, bailout loan
payments from tarp uh selling old jet planes and things

(05:25):
and guns to other countries, about twenty seven million dollars
made on that day alone. Uh. And then we spent
a hundred and forty three billion dollars. So if we
took in a hundred and ten and we spent a
hundred and forty three billions, and we spent a hundred
and forty three on hundreds, if not thousands, of programs

(05:50):
just all sorts of everything from Social Security to think
made up the lions share of the the spending that day,
which was billion um down to tax refunds and not
just programs, but like you know, the electric bill at
the White House, right exactly, paying the private in the army. Yes,
like you know, everything the government pays for, which includes

(06:12):
a lot of programs. Uh. So that is a difference
of thirty three billion dollars in that one day, A
bad a negative difference, right, So that's a deficit we
ran on that day. We ran a deficit, which is
not unusual. Thirty three billion dollar deficit on October three. Okay,
So the rest of the three d and sixty four

(06:34):
days of that year fiscal or otherwise calendar, even if
we didn't let's say we had a day where we
ran a surplus. Um. You take all of those together,
You take your surpluses and your deficits for all those days,
and you add them up, and you have whether you
have a surplus or a deficit for the year. If
everything equals out, you have what's called the balanced budget

(06:56):
for that year, which is just doesn't happen, not not
very frequently. No, I don't see I haven't seen any balance.
I've seen like for the most part, though, we've been
in a death sit especially since um, well for many
many years. Well I've got some numbers actually, uh in
and this I'm not saying this president is good. This

(07:17):
president is bad because Congress in the House have probably
more to do with it than the president does. Well.
Not only that, it's possible some presidents have inherited the
the benefits of policies from other presidents, like economists don't know. Yeah,
like it very contentious to man when people start I
read a few articles. It's really pretty interesting to see
people's takes on the economies of the presidency. But in ninete, regardless, uh,

(07:42):
Bill Clinton inherited a two hundred and fifty five billion
dollar deficit. Uh. In two starting, we had the first
budget surplus since nineteen sixty nine, and then two years
later in two thousand, we hit the high water mark
of two hundred already six billion dollars surplus in two thousand.

(08:04):
I mean, that's mind boggling these days. Yeah, man, to
think about that. That means that the government, after paying
all of its bills, still had two hundred and thirty
six billion dollars left over. Yeah. And and people today
still are like Clinton got lucky because the internet boom
or no. Clinton's policies were wide or no, it was
the Republican controlled house in Congress that forced him. It

(08:27):
was it was kind of a lot of stuff. I
think the rational approaches, There was a lot of stuff. Regardless,
those were great years. Uh. And then so in two
thousand and two hundred thirty six billion dollars surplus. Clinton
left office with a hundred and twenty seven billion dollars surplus,
and just a year later we had a hundred and
fifty seven billion dollar deficit. And by the time Obama

(08:50):
came into office in two thousand nine, we had a
one point two trillion dollar deficit when he came into office. Yes,
and now it's at about seven fifty nine billion, depending
on what numbers you look at. That's just the deficit,
not the national debt. Okay, all right, So this is
this is a very big point of um clarification that

(09:10):
we need to make. That's the annual budget, right, Yeah,
that's the deficit. Now, when you take all of those
annual budgets over all the years, all the money we've
ever owed, all the money we've ever came out on
top with, come out on top with, and you put
it all together, you have what's called the national debt. Yeah,

(09:31):
that's basically the money we borrow to cover those losses.
If if we ever had if you ever took all
of those years together and we had a surplus, then
you would call it the national surplus. I don't think
that's ever happened, or ever will happen. I don't think
that's ever happened. Yeah, since we started borrowing money, even

(09:52):
though we've had budget surpluses, right, because let's say we've
we've had a good year two fifty billion dollars surp
us year. That's a great year, but we also maybe
had five trillion dollars in national debt that that had
to be thrown at. Right, So, when you take all
of those deficits, in all the surpluses, and you add

(10:12):
them all together, what you come up with is how
much in the hole the United States is, and that
is the national debt. And as it stands right now,
it's add about seventeen trillion, two hundred and eighty two billion,
five hundred and seventy five million, zero forty four thousand,

(10:34):
seven hundred and fifty five dollars and thirty five cents.
That's as of January two thousand, fourteen, and with every
minute getting more and more so it's tired now than
it was when you read it, which is a pretty
significant amount, especially if you consider that in two thousand
it was at about five trillion. Yeah, you know a

(10:56):
number is bad when you have to look at it
from right to left and counting to zeros, like I
gotta see what the thousands of millions of billions? Okay,
oh that's trillions. Yeah, so if you if you think
about that, I mean, think about that, chuck in. In
just fourteen years, like we've gone up well over twelve

(11:17):
trillion dollars in debt, twelve trillion dollars, our national debt
has increased by that much. And so now we kind
of come to my intro again, if you'll indulge me
for a second, if you look at the increase. Right,
of course, there were there were two wars that we

(11:38):
fought there EXPI that definitely did that didn't help anything
at all. Like it started, Flint was not at war.
So that was a lot of people to say, you know,
those were eight peaceful years. I think they call it
a piece okay, Yeah. Clayton preferred the surgical um air strike.
That was his big thing, rather than troops and relying

(11:59):
on though. Um. But it was so wars they cost
quite a bit of money, so we were fighting not one,
but two wars. Then all of a sudden you have
the global markets just go into the toilet. And now
all of a sudden, you have a lot of people
who are unemployed, which means your tax revenue goes down,

(12:21):
and you have in the in the office a president
who believes in spending your way out of a crisis,
a debt crisis. And this is why the Tea Party
hijacked the the debt ceiling because a lot of people
are saying, we don't agree with you. There's a lot

(12:43):
of people who believe in austerity, which is you cut
government spending to get your way out of a crisis. Um.
And if you look at Greece, that pretty much proved
that you can't do that, that it will just completely
destroy your economy and possibly your entire government. And that
was actually based on a paper by a couple of economists,
um who came out with this data that any government

(13:08):
whose debt to income ratio was if your debt was
you GDP, you didn't grow as fast and so all
of a sudden you had all these people saying austerity, austerity,
And then it turned out that this grad student from
I believe m y u Um got ahold of the
original data set and basically saw that they didn't carry
like a zero and got an incorrect thing. And the

(13:30):
the government of Greece almost toppled because of this incorrect paper. Yeah,
but at the time, there are a lot of people saying, well,
first of all, we don't agree with deficit spending as
a means of getting out of an economic problem. Um.
But also you have some other people saying we maybe

(13:50):
that works, maybe it doesn't. History hasn't proven that yet.
We still think as twelve trillion dollar increase in the
national deficit is too much, so we need to curb
this runaways spending. And one way to do that is
to target the debt ceiling. Yeah, and debt ceiling, I
don't even think we've even said specifically, is basically the

(14:10):
maximum amount of of deficit that we can incur. And
we literally it's got a ceiling. When we borrow or
when we have a deficit that hits that, we're at
the debt ceiling. And the only way to to change
that is, uh for Congress, like we said, to to
raise the debt ceiling, which has happened, Um, how many

(14:30):
times I think at least a hundred times since it started. Well,
since nineteen sixty they voted seventy eight times. So let's
call that modern times. Yeah, because okay, So, no matter
what your politics are, no matter what's going on, no
matter whose president, this is the way the federal government
is set up. You have a bunch of money going out.
You have a bunch of money coming in, usually in

(14:50):
the form of income tax or like you said, selling
old fighter jets or that kind of thing. Um, And
the amount you have coming in very very rarely seeds
the amount you're putting out. So there's two things you
can do. You can increase your income, or you can
cut your spending and raise taxes right so, um the well,
increasing income by raising taxes right exactly, or you can

(15:13):
cut your spending. We have two political parties. One is
completely attached to not increasing taxes, the other one is
completely attached to not cutting spending, especially on entitlement programs.
So it doesn't matter who's in office these days. The
way that things operate is you just go borrow more money.
That's how you fund the government. That's how it's been done,

(15:36):
that's how you've gotten around the politics to this point. Yeah,
and we could, you know, Congress could erase that, you
know by like you said, raising taxes that's not popular,
or cutting spending and that that's not popular. So it's
really kind of a bad situation. So what we have
is the U. S. Treasury, which issues death that's right,

(15:57):
US Treasury securities to people regular old schmos. Well not
regular lord schmos. No, we can well, that's true, that's true.
You can go buy a US Treasury bond, banks, corporations, governments. UM.
It's basically a very low interest rate loan and uh,
you know, up until recently a very very safe one, right,

(16:20):
and you would still think it's pretty safe. But you know,
that could go off the cliff. It could. And that
was the big problem in October of two thousand thirteen
is a lot of people were saying, like, um, we're
gonna default on our loan obligations. Yeah, we'll get to
that though, because that's the bad news at the end.
This is the bad news in the middle. Uh, China
and Japan, for instance, UM each owned more than a

(16:42):
trillion dollars in Treasury securities as of July last year,
So a lot of people borrow money from the United
States at pretty low rates. I think it's it's worth
explaining again, like a Treasury bond, is you chuck going
to buy going to the U. S. Government saying here,

(17:02):
I'll give you some money. You give me a promisory
note that says you'll repay it with a little bit
extra big right at the at the end when this
thing matures, and the government says, thanks, we're gonna take
this money and we're going to use it to pay
our bills. Because Congress is going over and saying, yes,
we want to keep our national parks open, and we
want to um, we want to fund um like security whatever, um.

(17:28):
And we have bills to pay. So thanks for the money.
We're gonna pay the bills because that's what Treasury does.
Congress spend the money. Treasury pays the money, and if
you're under that ceiling, then it's it's it's all good. Yeah,
it's fine, just figure out a way to pay the bills.
And it's just like a big company. And Treasury also
has more than one financial security. They have all sorts
of ones that different that mature at different times and

(17:48):
all that, and um, they do a pretty good job
of figuring out how to raise money. But the problem
is for every Treasury bill that they sell, Chuck, that's
that much more in debt. The federal government has just
gone yeah, okay with the debt ceiling. Like you said,
there is a certain limit to the amount of outstanding

(18:12):
debt the Treasury Department can issue, and it's just like
a credit card limit to an extent. Yeah, there's there's
one pretty big difference is um. But it is a
helpful way to think about it because most people have
credit cards. But the bank sets your credit card limit
because they say, Josh, you know you're risky as a spender.
We don't want to give you a credit card more

(18:32):
than like Tim Grant. Let's say, yeah, so the bank
puts the cap on it. There. Um. On the other
side of the coin, foreign governments that by treasury securities
are like, I'll take all you got basically, so it's
a reliable investment. And the credit limit is imposed by
the borrow instead of the lender. Right, that's the big
difference with with your credit card. It's the person lending

(18:55):
you the money that wants to say that that says no,
you can't borrow anymore. With the debt ceiling, it's us
saying no, we can't. We can't go borrow anymore. We
could issue as much as we wanted, and people would
buy teabills all day long because they're so safe. That's right,
supposedly or at the moment they are. All right, you

(19:15):
want to talk about the history a little bit, Well,
hold one, before we talk history, let's do a message
break real quick, okay, And now we are talking about
the history of the death ceiling, right. I think that's
where we left off. Back in the day, UM, Congress
used to be a little tighter with this, a lot tighter.

(19:37):
In fact, we could not sell securities without explicit approval.
UH Treasury wanted to borrow some money, so Congress would say, Hey,
what kind of security should we sell? Large or small?
What should the interest rate be? Um? How many should
we sell? And they kind of worked it out that
way up until UH war In War Revenue Act of

(20:02):
basically said, you know what, in times of war, we
need to loosen the chains a little bit, and let's
say we can borrow up to five hundred million dollars
by some of these securities to fund the Spanish American War, right,
And then after that they were like, okay, that worked,
but let's just leave that be. And then there was
World War One, and there was the First and Second

(20:23):
Liberty Bonds Acts, which basically did the same thing to
help fund World War One, and it worked really well.
And the secretaries of the Treasury, um, I think Andrew
Carnegie Mellon. Andrew Mellon, Yeah, you can understand why I
would be confused there, um. And Henry Morgan Thou later

(20:43):
on in the nineteen twenties and thirties basically said why
not just do this to fund the government as as
a whole instead of just in times of war? And
now today, if you could go back and sit down
with him, you could say, because it gets out of
control when you do, because it's right. Um. But they
got uh was it Franklin? Yeah, fdr Yeah, they got

(21:06):
Roosevelt on on board, and they got Congress to pass
this for the first time ever, an aggregate debt limit,
which is all the debts that the U s ode
as long as it was beneath a certain amount um.
The Treasury could do whatever it wanted to pay its
bills as long as it didn't need to borrow any

(21:26):
more than that. And that was the first time that
a debt ceiling was ever set in nine I think, yeah,
thirty nine, and that was It's pretty similar to kind
of the debt ceiling that we have today. Not too different. Uh,
Congress approved spending. Treasury figures out how to pay for
it all. As long as you're under that, it's all good.
The problem is when you bump up against it, like
we've been doing over and over again lately, it seems like, yeah, so,

(21:50):
like you said, that is a problem, you just vote
to raise it. Yes, and again. This has been pretty routine.
You know, a hundred times since the the the nineteen thirties,
a hundred times these things been lifted. Um, and you
just say, okay, well, just go issue some more debt.

(22:10):
People want the debt, people want to lend us money,
So go issue some more debt and we can keep
paying our bills. Because here's the thing with the debt ceiling.
When you raise the debt ceiling, a lot of people
are like, well, if you don't raise the debt ceiling,
it curbs spending. That's true. Indirectly, what the Treasury is
doing is paying for stuff that we've already received on credit,

(22:35):
whether it's you know, meals for soldiers from a private
contractor to you know, a bunch of like Boeing jets, whatever,
We've already received these things, and now Treasury has to pay.
So if if you don't extend the debt ceiling, then
you're defaulting on uh payments. You have to make bills,

(22:57):
you have to pay, just like you your credit card exactly.
And that's not good. And it's kind of the same
thing happens really if we default. Uh, Well, here's what happens.
If we don't raise the debt ceiling and we are
in danger of defaulting, we uh defaulting would basically start
raising all other interest rates across the board, well, the

(23:19):
Marke loan rates, UH, basically anything your average Joe would
go and get alone for your your rates are going
to go up, right, And the reason why is because
the ten year Treasury note um is what the home
loan rates are tied to. And if the value or
the credit rating of a T bill goes down, then

(23:42):
the people who are lending money and return for a
T bill are going to be able to say, like, yeah,
I'll give you some money, but you're a little more
risky than you were before. So I want to hire
percentage rate and interest, which means it's more expensive for
the government to borrow money. And if the percentage of
interest goes up on the T bill, anything that's attached
to that, like home loans, business loans go up as well,

(24:04):
which means what well, that means everybody suffers and the
whole country goes into an economic drag and maybe even worse. Yeah,
it could get a lot worse. Did you see that
that thing I sent to you from Forbes. Yeah, so
a lot of people were saying in October, like, oh,
going over defaulting on our debt, that's not that big

(24:25):
of a deal. You know, it's a colossal deal. It
doesn't matter what your politics are. One thing could happen
is we could actually lose our credit triple a credit rating,
which would be horrible. It would be horrible because people
who buy TEA bills would be able to say, I
want to hire interest, right, yeah, they still want to
borrow the money. They would just stick it to us,
right right. But the thing is to make it more

(24:46):
attractive because fewer people would want to borrow money, so
to make it more attractive, the government would have to
raise interest rate on what it paid back. Right um,
Also the T bills. If everything just went off the
cliff and and the government said, you know what, we
can't pay back this debt, any T bill you hold
would be as valueless as any other T bill. No

(25:07):
one would know what they were maybe going to eventually
repay what was worth what they so they would all
in effect become worthless. The problem is not only do
entire federal govern or foreign governments rely on tea bills
for you know, their reserves, so do banks. Banks also
used T bills as collateral for overnight loans. Sometimes companies

(25:30):
cash them in because they need to be more liquid.
Right So, there's a lot of use of T bills
that's totally entrenched in the economy. And if all of
a sudden they went valueless because the government defaulted on
its loans obligations on its debt, then that would be
that like the the entire banking system would lose at

(25:51):
least a third of its collateral it's it's reserves, and
they would actually probably be hold holding these things illegally
so they'd have to get rid of them, so they'd
be selling these things off for whatever they could, and
a genuine collapse of the markets. Whereas this Ford writer
puts it, um it would make the what happened in

(26:12):
two thousand and eight after the Lehman debacle look like
a children's exercise. It would be catastrophic cats and dogs
living together. And that's really not hyperbole, Like that's obviously
the worst case scenario. But the point is these T
bills are so entrenched in the global economy. They'd just
be if they became valueless, so too would the global economy. Yeah,

(26:36):
I wonder how you regain your credit rating. I don't know, sure,
it's probably much the same as an individual, you know.
Uh So, one thing that would happen if we decided
not to raise the debt ceiling is Congress would have
to operate within a budget, which means the things that
we were talking about before, like huge spinning cuts or

(26:58):
raising taxes both probably or both. And that's just tricky politics.
People would get upset, like what programs do you cut?
Whose taxes do you raise? It's just a very dangerous game.
They'd be very very deep cuts too. Yeah, and the
problem is is any time, um, the federal government makes
huge cuts so to do corporations, and then all of

(27:18):
a sudden, unemployment goes up, so you have to raise
taxes even further because there's fewer people who are employed
paying taxes, and or they may fall onto the teeth
of the government as well. Yeah, because they're unemployed. Yeah. Man,
should we be worried, No, because they're going to vote
to raise the dead every time. Yeah, there's no way
that they would ever default. It would just be too again,

(27:41):
catastrophically bad. Yeah. I think though, you can be worried
about continuing on like this. Yeah, I mean that has
to pay. Uh, you gotta pay it at some point
down the road. Yeah. You know. Um, there was one
thing we didn't quite touch on that I think really
kind of reveals just what a big shell game this is. Right. So, again,
if you don't want to raise taxes and you don't

(28:01):
want to cut um programs, you just go to the
treasury to get more money. Well, if the treasury doesn't
have that much more money, you can also go to
your own accounts and take whatever you can. So Social Security,
for example, there's a trust fund and you're not allowed
to take from Social Security except to a certain amount. Right,

(28:22):
So say social Security at any time has to have
two billion dollars. What that's a ridiculously low number. Let's
say it's two billion, and then one day social Security
has two billion, one million and its accounts. Federal government
takes that extra hundred million because it's over and above
the legal mandate and then uses it for whatever else. Well,

(28:43):
it gets social Security from payroll, right from payroll taxes
through you being employed. So it's another that's basically like
a hidden tax, that's like a hidden way of generating revenue.
Increasing social Security tax isn't actually helping social Security, it's
helping fund this the government. That's just like hemorrhaging money

(29:03):
left and right. Yeah, it sounds like you know the
old saying robbing Peter to pay Paul. That's exactly right.
That's why al Gore was talking about in the two
thousand election with the famous lock box thing, like put
social Security in a lockbox, like if it has a surplus,
you can't touch it. And then that way, so social
Security will be able to actually pay for the people
it's supposed to in thirty years rather than being robbed

(29:26):
to fund the federal government, which won't either raise taxes
or cut spending or both. Yeah, I think most people.
I don't know when it's gonna happen, but at some
point someone's not going to get their Social Security that
they paid into. Oh yeah, well, I think we're definitely
in that generation. Think. Yeah, I don't think it's going
to keep going on much longer, or if we do,
it'll be such a paltry amount that it'll just be laughable,

(29:48):
not like other people getting rich office security. Now, well,
I mean there's no and you certainly can't just live
on it. And I mean you can't, I'm sure in
certain parts of the country, but for most people it's
a supplement to something. But I think it would just
be like bucks or something for us who knows, I'm depressed,
don't don't be depressed. Why take action? Yeah, by you know,

(30:12):
taking care of your own personal finances in spite of
the government, I guess so. But I mean, yeah, yeah,
it's weird, And this one is. I think it's great
because everybody's involved, like all political factions are involved in this,
and everybody has an opinion, you know, like of how
to do this best. But I feel like, aside from

(30:32):
the people who are ready to push this into default, um,
everybody has an understanding like this is a very fragile
game of Jenga going on right now, and we could
conceivably go on like this, but it would be better
to fix it, but we need to do it surgically. Yeah, jinga,
that's a good analogy, because the wooden tower feels like

(30:53):
it's could topple at any moment. Yeah. Okay, so you
got anything else? Uh nope? All right, Well that was
the debts you. If you want to learn more about it,
you can type those words into the search part How
Stuff Works dot Com. Since I said search far, which
means it's time for listener mail. That's right. I'm gonna
call this shout out to my gmo or as he

(31:16):
calls her momo, his grandmother. Hey guys, I had I
had your How Dying Works podcast my playlist for quite
some time now, afraid to listen to your take on
what is happening in my life at the moment. I
lost my father to a rare form of cancer at
the beginning of the summer, and I'm currently caring for
my grandmother who was in the closing days of her life.
I'm an avid listener, and when the title appeared on

(31:38):
my podcast list, I began to avoid the topic. I
decided to finally listen to your take on the end
of life today, and I have to let you know
how much I appreciated your take on death and dying.
It's a topic that is never far from my mind
these days, and I found the information you provided both
informational and uplifting. Thanks for informing me that death is
a process, not an event. I got a lot of information,

(32:00):
as I always do from your show, but a surprising
amount of comfort and reassurance. I also know you guys
don't do shout outs a lot, but I took the
challenge at the end of the show seriously. I would
like to ask if you'd give a shout out to
my grandmother Mamo. It's a great grandmother name who was
the person who originally instilled the curiosity and love of
learning and me that led me to your podcast in

(32:22):
the first place. Please let her know how grateful I
am for all the things she's given me, and caring
for her at the end of her life is the
greatest gift I could ever ask for. That is from
Chris Howell. So, Mamo, I hope you're still with us
and listening. Thank you for raising an awesome grandson and
instilling that curiosity. And Chris, if Mama was no longer

(32:46):
with us, then uh godspeed. I hope uh, I hope
that end process was comforting nice somehow very nice. Yeah,
thanks Chris, Thanks Mamo. That's some. That was a great one. Yeah,
that was a good one. If you have something, some
nice email that will knock our socks off like that,
you can tweet to us at s y s K podcast.

(33:08):
You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff
you Should Know. You can send us a regular old
email to Stuff Podcast at Discovery dot com, and you
can hang out with us at our website. It's called
Stuff you Should Know dot com. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works

(33:28):
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(33:50):
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