March 17, 2011 • 32 mins
Freegans prefer scavenging, volunteering and squatting to the more mainstream consumer practices of buying, working and renting a home. But how does this actually work, and why are these people sometimes called 'Dumpster divers?' Tune in to find out.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
from House toff works dot com. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with me as always as
(00:20):
Charles W. Chuck Bryant. We are the Koch Brothers and
we own you. How you doing good, sir? Top of
theod morning. I saw you give me a tip of
the hat and everything off the old cap. Wow, we're
suddenly like Will Ferrell and anchor man. You're a London
gentleman went in Rome. Uh, Chuck, I think before we
(00:42):
go any further, we should um plug our Kuba Team,
Big time awesome Cuba team. That's k I v A
dot Org slash team Slash stuff you should know. Nice. Yeah,
that's where you can find us. Yeah. Um we founded
that team in October two, right, brilliant idea. Yeah. Um.
By October two, last October, we'd already hit the quarter
(01:07):
of a million dollars in loans mark right, Um, we
are on track to hit half a million dollars in
loans made to entrepreneurs in developing countries. Um. By May
we just hit four hundred thousand. Our team did, and
we just wanted to let everybody know who's not a member,
the team is open. Just go on and make a loan. Uh,
(01:30):
twenty five bucks is the lowest increment you can make.
But it's alone. This is not just an outright donation.
Because it's repaid. You can reloan again, or you can
take it and go on your merry way. But it's
pretty cool. It's a good feeling. Everybody on the Kiva
message board is a happy chipper person. And I don't
know that they are all the time, but I think
(01:52):
when they come to Kiva and hang out there for
a little while, they get happy. Feel better about yourself.
I know I do. But yes, halfs half million, it
was nice. It's crazy. Who knew? Well, that's Cuba. Also
we're on Facebook stuff you should know and Twitter, the Twitter,
s Y s K podcast. Yes, all right, let's go
(02:14):
to sleep. All right, let's get started. Huh, Chuck, did
you know that UM xerox and I think the twenty
one century, maybe a little before that, UM took out
ads in all sorts of publications. I saw it in
some sort of bar association UM magazine. I can't remember
which one. Um saying hey, Mr and Mrs Consumer or
(02:38):
Mr Mrs Lawyer, UM, don't use the word xerox, use
the word photocopy instead. Yeah, xerox is. It's like a
Kleenex or cute dip or as Britain was once a
brand name, Heroin once a brand name. UM. And the
reason that Xerox is so up in arms about this
is because if enough people's start using your term generically,
(03:03):
especially as a verb like xerox ng or facebooking, you
can lose your trademark status. It can become a part
of the vernacular. And it has happened to to some
other um, some other brands before. Evidently Alan Wrench Um,
(03:23):
like I said, Aspirin, Escalator Um, the Jungle Gym, Tarmac,
Yo Yo, Zipper, all of these were once brand named
shattering my everything, the illusion of everything I know, But
isn't that weird? And then there's a there's a whole
this is pretty cool. There's a whole list of stuff
that's um become. It's in that's in danger, it's in
(03:45):
that realm where xerox is right now, where it's very
commonly used. But these people still managed to keep their
their trademark Jaws of Life, Yeah, Neilla Wafers Yeah, ban
Pong Yeah, is table tennis Yeah, and um, let's see uh,
Skivvy's is underwear. Crock pot Rolodex is technically supposed to
(04:06):
be called a rotary card file. We should just read
each one of these with a question mark at the end.
After everyone for Mica, go card, and my voice will
go higher and higher until you can't even hear any
more untill only dogs start howling. Jack. This is one
that I knew to. Realtor is a real estate agent
that is not any real real estate agent. A realtor
(04:26):
is a specific company's real estate agent, centuries any one
real tour oka. Um, but you have all of these uh,
all of these bands are all these brands band Aid,
by the way, that's why I said that. UM. Originally
their tune was I Am Stuck on band Aids because
band Aid stuck on me. They changed it to I
Am Stuck on band Aid brand because band Aid stuck
(04:48):
on stuck in the brand because the adhesive. They don't
want to genericize their own name. There's one in this
list that I didn't see that should be and that
my friend is Dumpster. Did you know dumpster is a
trademark name. He told me, okay, well, the dumpster the
(05:08):
big trash bin usually on wheels um that can be
lifted by a garbage truck. That whole process was actually,
this whole process was originally called the Dempster dumpster, and
it was invented in by George Dempster, who was later
the mayor of Knoxville, Tennessee. And apparently up to that point,
(05:30):
if you were making something or you had a construction
job going on, you just park a dump truck nearby,
and everybody would throw their waist in or take piles
and moving into the dump truck. It was somebody's job.
So Dempster was like, why don't we just create this receptacle,
receptacle that we can eventually, you know, start by hoisting
with the chain and just dump into the back of
the dump truck, or you know, will eventually create these
(05:53):
hydraulic arms that can go into the slots on the
side of this dumpster with a capital and that can
just lift itself up into the back. I bet you,
he said, I'll call it the Dempster, and his wife said,
you're not calling that thing the Dempster. I'm not being
associated with trash and how about dumpster and she was
(06:14):
like genius copyright at trade market pour me and Martini.
So and I've always noticed have you ever noticed it
seems like a lot of waste management UM companies, especially
locally owned ones, tend to have a person's first and
last name, like Jackie Curtis Porta potties. Have you ever
look around, You'll start to see it's really weird. Interesting,
(06:35):
It's a lot of pride um. But Chuck, the point
is the whole reason I say this is because um,
we had to fatten up freegans. Anytime we use the
word dumpster, we're using it with a capital D. I
just want to say, so we don't have to say
t M every time. The dumpsters with a capital D
every time we use it, and we're gonna use it
(06:56):
a lot because we are talking about freegans who are,
in other words, dumpster divers. Yes, Josh, the word freagan
is a combination with word free and vegan. Doesn't necessarily
mean they're vegan. I think they just thought I had
a nice ring. Probably, I'm sure a lot of them
were vegans when they started. Yeah, of course there's a
lot of overlap or maybe the guy was named Frogan
(07:17):
who started the movement. That's not true. No, actually his
name is Keith McHenry. Okay, Well, freagans, Josh, are I know?
You know this are people who are it's also called
post consumerism or reclaimism. They are anti consumerism. They say,
we don't like this whole cycle of working and spending
(07:38):
and buying and wasting and trashing and then buying it again.
And we are going to try and reclaim and scavenge.
We're gonna try and not buy things. We're gonna try
and not work, maybe just volunteer were we don't want
to pay rent. We're gonna squat when we can. And uh,
that's what we are. We're freagans. In a very big
distinction between freagans and um tramps, hobo the homeless is
(08:01):
that freakings are doing this by choice um and if
they don't actually have the money to buy food, they
usually have the skills or education to um to go
out and make the money needed to buy food. This
is all very much a lifestyle choice, and it is
also their very presence, Their very existence is a thumb
(08:22):
in the nose to the consumer economy that America has
which is in many ways very wasteful. One right, Uh,
stat time, I guess in the United States of America,
Josh wastes billion pounds of food each year. That if
you go by the stat that we waste a quarter
of our food, it's between a quarter and a half.
(08:44):
I've seen a half. So it's entirely possible that a
hundred and nineties six billion pounds of food are wasted
every year. And we'll get in two more specifics on
what kind of food is being thrown out, But a
lot of times it's not oh, this big box of uh,
completely rotted apples. It's uh, these apples are pretty bruised. Uh,
(09:06):
this container is mashed, So we're gonna throw this stuff
out exactly. Um, And I guess it's not just food.
You know, food makes a lot of sense. We need
food to live, work, play, freaking eyes, do whatever. Everybody
needs food. But food has a lot of other inputs
wrapped up into it. Right, Like I think we talked
(09:27):
before about virtual water, like the movement of crops from
a place that has an abundance of water and can
grow these crops to a place that doesn't have it
is technically the movement of water needed to grow those crops.
You're just moving the crops, so there's a loss of
water when that's thrown away. There's a loss of energy
to produce and transport these things. Um, there's just all
(09:48):
of these losses represented by just throwing away of food,
and Freakings are like, okay, two things. Number one, I'm
gonna eat that food for free, because I'm not grossed
out by jumping jumping in your dumpster and technically it's
perfectly fine food. And number two, I'm also gonna do
it to make you feel like a jerk for throwing
it out right. Yeah, critics will fire right back at freakings.
(10:09):
Oh yeah, well you're putting gas in your car and
you're using electricity to cook that food, so you're on
the grid, So you're a big hypocrite freaking say oh yeah,
well every little bit counts, jerk. Everybody's calling one another jerk, yeah,
pointing fingers. It just goes downhill from there, throwing food
at each other. Well, I do take issue with with
that a little bit, like I I do. It's true
(10:30):
every little bit counts, um, And obviously you do need
electricity or heat or something to to live, to freaking
another day. Um. The thing that gets me is the
idea that, um, you should hitchhike um or hot box
cars or whatever, because that way, in that sense, you're
just freeloading on somebody else who's using that gas and
(10:51):
you're still using it too, You're just freeloading it. That's
the one that I do have an issue with is hitchhiking. Yeah,
because I guess so they would fire back. Hey, dude,
that train is going from here to Topeka. I can
totally understand the train. And technically, if somebody, if you
only catch a ride with somebody in a distance or
(11:11):
for in the to the place that they're going anyway,
isn't that what hitchucking is? People out of their way here? Yeah?
And plus where do you give them the person in return?
I can understand the train. It's a company and yeah,
well yeah, yeah, so uh freaking figure. We should point
out that freegans there's not an official organization. Uh, there
(11:34):
is a website freaking uh f R E E g
A and dot info and that's very robust and up
and running. Yeah, that's that's kind of the central home
where you can learn how to forage urban forage. Uh,
They also forage in the woods. We'll talk about that
in a minute. They have classes, they talk about scavenging sites, like, hey, dude,
(11:54):
the dumpster on the street is loaded with baked goods
this morning. Get over there and it gets the other
And I want to say, also, I have nothing against
freakan is um um, it's just freeloading drives me crazy.
But for the most part, freakans don't you know hippie
rob Yeah, yeah, heeries again. But if for the most
part freakans um don't freeload. And there they they squat,
(12:18):
but they squat in abandoned buildings. It's not being used anymore.
They they eat free food, but it's food that other
people throughout. Um. But the I think the key here
that really differentiates freagans from other people who eat out dumpsters,
aside from being able to buy food, is that they
actually do work or they do activities. They're just not
(12:41):
doing it for money. So for example, they volunteer, right,
because how much money do you need if you eat
out of a dumpster on purpose and you don't have
any you know, house payment or anything. So you have
all this extra free time aside from foraging and um
most of them tend to volunteer or um work on
activist causes. Like there's a freaking colony um in old
(13:04):
growth forests around North America where basically they just built
tree houses in these huge old trees and said now
you can't cut them down. It's called the resistance community, right, yeah,
which is pretty cool. It's a cool thing to do
with your time. So let's talk for a second about freaking's.
The key to their philosophy to me is they think
that consumerism is bad because it destroys the environment through
(13:26):
things like deforestation, factory farming, labor practices that stink, and
it's all profits centered. So they think, uh, you know,
that's implicit approval. If you're working, yeah, living in what
most people get, still in a normal life, working and buying,
you're saying that all this, all this is okay with
you because you're taking part in it. We don't want
(13:46):
any part of it. So we're gonna do our thing.
We're gonna not upgrade our iPhone. We probably wouldn't get
an iPhone. We have an old flip phone, or maybe
we don't even have a phone like that. We have
cans on the strength. I'm not gonna update my fashion
because the sweat her is perfectly nice. Just because Bill
Cosby might have worn it in it's still a great sweater.
Your mom liked it, and fashion is like, how important
(14:09):
is that really is there? You know their philosophy. Um,
we're gonna repair things that we have to. That's that's
that's another big point with volunteering and and um donating
time and all that. Um. Like, if you can do
something like repair somebody's camp stove, that's a valuable activity, right,
(14:30):
and uh, in the end, Josh, what they end up
with is a lifestyle that is very much not financially
dependent on things like, uh, some stinky job that you
have to do that you hate doing, so that frees
them up. They're like, Hey, I need a couple hundred
bucks a month to live, so I'm gonna make that
by doing some odd jobs. And then I'm gonna volunteer
and give back, right, And also you can you can
(14:53):
get back when you give and you volunteer through things
like time banks. There's a website um called TimeBank dot
org that I found on the freaking website and basically
it's like, um, let's say that I know how to
repair your bike, and you know how to um teach
people how to play the guitar. So I'll go, you know,
(15:15):
repair your bike, and and you teach me how to
play the guitar um and it's equitable. We don't remember
in the bartering podcast that doesn't always happen. You sometimes
have to engage in multilateral barters all that kind of thing.
Time banks get around that by saying like, Okay, well
you went and volunteered at the animal shelter for a
couple of hours, you earned two time dollars that you
can turn around and use for anything, you know, from
(15:38):
a member of this time bank. So that's pretty cool too,
although again it's pretty much impossible to get away from
currency in one form or fashion. Huh Yeah, I mean
most freegans have a very limited uh budget to endorse
your lifestyle. They're they're probably not completely free, although there
there might be some that don't use money at all,
but most of them like limited as much as possible.
(16:02):
So where's this going on, Josh? It's going on all
over the world. But if I was a freaking I
would move to New York City, New York City, New
York City. Yeah, because New York city has got a
lot of rich folks. That means there's gonna be a
lot of great trash. I know, what do you Allen's trash? Yeah,
and in trash Day in New York, imagine it's a
(16:23):
field day and the night before trash night, which is
called um. It's pretty bad. You know. The worst in
New York is in the summertime and it's hot and
it's rainy, and it's trash day and the sidewalks are
just full of garbage or in the middle of a
garbage strike. I mean, hats off to whoever makes that
(16:45):
city run. They're doing a good job, I think Michael Bloomberg,
Oh yeah, yeah, it's off to you, then, sir, h
They forage in New York for things like furniture, bags
of clothes, electronics, Like they'll camp out behind an office
that's moving. M All of what you just said is
called urban foraging, right. It all fall falls under that umbrella,
(17:06):
which is just like foraging, except rather than looking for
um routes to drink water from, you're getting office chairs
for your squad or water. Yeah, that's another thing you
want to But the point is is the the um
the city is the forest with everything you need and
then some if you know where to look and you
(17:27):
can hold your nose. It depends. So you know, every
everyone who's ever once a bad kid knows that the
cops can go through your trash once it comes out
to the curb. So there is actually a Supreme Court
case UM from California v. Greenwood, wherein the the Supreme
Court ruled that cops could once you put your trash
(17:51):
out it was public property. You expected someone else to
come along and take it eventually. And that means that
anybody wants you can go to your trash, including cops
looking for evidence that you're a drug dealer, or freakans
looking for bananas that still look pretty good. Yeah, freakings thought, hey,
this should apply to us too, right, Well, that's what
they use and I think they I think they use
(18:13):
it to a great success. Although there are a lot
of laws UM like local, state, regional, municipal laws that
UM are anti scavenging laws, basically because most people think
of people who go dumpster diving is strictly UM hobos
who you don't necessarily want around. I'm not sure that
(18:34):
there's plenty of cities out there, you know, well, a
lot of stores, grocery stores and the like will lock
up and cage up their dumpsters to discourage this kind
of thing. Some will put sharks in their dumpsters. Yeah,
land sharks very dangerous if you come across one of those. Uh.
The deal is they think that they can get a
lawsuit if someone dumpster dives on your property get some
(18:57):
food and get sick by it. And and um, that's
not exactly true though, is it. Didn't the us D
have a ruling on that. Uh No, the U s
c A encouraged this. It's called the um Bill Emerson
Good Samaritan Act. And I could just barely find who
he was. He was a uh A congressman who encourage
(19:17):
this act died before it could get passed. When they
passed that, they named it after him. But basically it said,
if you are a good person and you are giving
away food, you're picking up food, you have any anything
to do in the chain of taking food, rescuing it
from the landfill to feed the poor, and you are
not purposefully poisoning the poor um or doing it for
(19:40):
your own benefit, and someone gets harmed, you can't be
held liable for anything that happens. We're gonna protect you,
but that that prevents that. The whole point was to
encourage people like you, like you said, grocery stores and um,
other groups to donate their leftover food rather than just
let it go to way and a lot of people,
a lot of places do that. We're not saying everyone
just hatches their food. A lot of restaurants donate their food.
(20:02):
It's great. Yeah, Um, speaking of food, though I did
mention bruised fruit. A lot of times you're just crushed
packaging boxes. Sometimes the cell by date is cruised on
by and that doesn't necessarily mean that it's rotten. No,
the FEDS don't have any kind of mandatory dating low
except for baby formula and baby food, and cell by
(20:25):
date is all voluntary. The used by date is the
one you want to stick to. That's actually kind of rare.
The cell by date is just saying it's past it's prime,
but it's still got tons of life in it. Like,
for example, if you can keep eggs at forty degrees
fahrenheight just you know standard for a refrigerator. Um, the
(20:46):
last for three to five weeks past the cell by date?
Did you know that? And if you talk to my Mom,
you can drink milk for up to two months after
the date. I don't know about that one. The U.
S c A Does say, though, that factory sealed bacon,
not fresh bacon, but stuff that was in the in
the factory that came last two weeks beyond its sell
by date. And you mentioned New York being the center
(21:06):
of freakingism, Well, it stays fairly cold New York throughout
the year, right, which prevents bacteria from being from growing
because bacteria throws between forty and a hundred and forty
degrees fahrenh height. So I imagine that you're safest in
below forty degree Weather's good point, you know what I say?
What the nose? Nose? Yeah, I don't even look at
(21:28):
the dates. I give it a good sniff. That'll tell
me all I need to know about whether it's gonna
go in my body. Yeah. I usually don't have time
to sniff. I'm too hungry wolfing it down. And then
if I'm still standing afterwards, so much the better. Uh.
So that is urban foraging. Um. We should also point
out to that sometimes stores uh actually bag discarded food
(21:50):
separately from the other trash, so it's not like you're
picking an Eclaire off of a lot of toilet paper
and saying, oh, this looks fine. Uh. And then there's
why all foraging. If you live near the forest and
you're freaking you can collect plants. Uh. The website freaking
dot info will actually tell you how to do this,
tell you what's safe to eat. Um. Sometimes they practice
(22:12):
guerrilla gardening. They'll go find a little unused plot of land.
We've talked about this. Have you noticed that, like in
the last couple of podcasts we've recorded, like five other
podcasts have been touched on. You know, this means we're
we're growing a body of work. Well, our quest to
explain the world. It's all coming together. Oh it isn't it. Yeah,
it's all tying. And at some point we're gonna say
(22:33):
that's the last one. It'll be the time when we
use the word is and realize we did a podcast
on is. It depends on what your definition of is is.
It's gonna be a long podcast, but we'll do it.
A lot of them barter, like we said, they call
it free sharing though, but what it is is bartering.
They'll have a little market, freaking marketplace that's set up
like every Saturday morning in this this part of New York,
(22:55):
will all go meet and hey, I see you've got
a a laptop that you fixed. I've always wanted a
toaster oven. Let's make a deal throwing some rotten eggs
and we're all good. Just sell buy man. What about healthcare,
that's a big one, And I looked all over the
freaking info site for this. Um. Basically, they don't have
(23:18):
healthcare licked yet. Um. They've got it close though. There
are healthcare collectives which have been successful here there say
if you get enough people, you can get it down
to about a hundred bucks a year per person, and
those go to fun free clinics relies heavily on volunteers. Um.
But the state operates all sorts of free clinics as well. UM,
(23:42):
which I imagine if you just go in and say
I dumpster dive every day, they'll be like, we'll take
care of you. Um. So that one is not kind
of licked because you can also make the you can
make the case that well, that's freeloading again, and that
completely undermines everything that freagans are about reloading, because it's
(24:03):
not waste. Health health care is not wasteful. The um
hours of a volunteering doctor or are in or not wasted.
Of course not somebody would use those right well, but
a lot of times they are avoiding the healthcare because
of we don't want to support the pharmaceutical industry. We
don't want to support these h ms. Have a feeling
(24:23):
if it was the you know doctor down the street
from with the white picket fence that gives you a
coke and tells you to everything will be better, they
might be a little more apt to support something like
the health care syst right, And that I saw that
stated somewhere that they were saying, like if you just
cut out the profits, that it's much cheaper than we think. Interesting,
(24:44):
So Josh, this food recovery is um what they're into
as a freaking But that's not a new thing because
we have a long history in this country and other
places as far back as biblical days of gleaning. And
that's when you have a crop. You especially nowadays with
the big mechanic systems, they'll leave behind a lot of
(25:04):
waste that they're not gonna go back and pick it
all up, so they'll allow people, um, and they did
this some biblical days after they've reaped the harvest. So
if you're poor, you can come into the field after
us and pick up what we've left behind. Yes, it's
called gleaning, not gleaning the cube. You no gleaning. Gleaning UM.
There's a group called the Society of St Andrew And
there's a lot of gleaning organizations, but UM. One of
(25:26):
the more famous ones is a Society of St Andrew
UM where basically they just have a central hub and
they say volunteers go pick up you know, discarded food
anywhere you can and bring it here and then we'll
distribute it. Right, a simple model, but it works very well.
They And if you are a freaking I would imagine
(25:47):
you get some sort of halo for volunteering at the
Society of St Andrew. Yeah, you're the ultimate circle is
completely you have a good, nice spot in freaking heaven
if you do that. The whole idea, the anti consumer
culture idea that forms freaking is um apparently finds its
roots back in the sixteen forties in England and Chuck
(26:09):
there's a guy named Gerard wind Stanley who lost his
shirt in business, moved to the countryside and founded a
colony that he called the Diggers, and the Diggers basically
lived without money for as long as they could, not
that long. But UM, when Stanley and the Diggers inspired
the sixties counterculture diggers who UM created their own kind
(26:33):
of utopian colony or movement, and they inspired Keith McHenry,
who is basically thought of as the father of freakani
is um, which popped up in the early twenty one
century as far as you know, and now he lives
a lush, rich life collecting on that word freaking. And
then food he's a fat cat, right. And then Food
(26:56):
not Bombs is another good, good example of UM. The
free in movement incarnate right, which is basically like they're
a gleaner society and then they go feed the homeless,
feed the poor, feed freagans UM. And one of my friends, Justin,
who's living on tour for a while UM out in California.
(27:17):
He told me they used to call him soup not
food instead of food not bombs. I was like, that's
kind of jerky, don't you think? And he said yes.
And as a sister a sister group to Food not
bombs as homes not jails, which is pretty self explanatory.
That's it. Uh, well, let me give you a quick example.
(27:38):
If you're wondering and thinking these people are really weird,
let me tell you about Daniel Zeta. He's an American
who moved to Tasmania. But you might think it is
weird in and of itself, not necessarily. About a decade ago,
he's thirty five, and he gradually became a freagan as
he became a little more conscious of the world around him,
(27:59):
the environment, it wanting to help out the environment. He
had a great job, government job. It's pretty good money
from what I understand. Uh, And he eventually quit the job,
and now he is a freaking pretty much full time.
He doesn't dumpster dive though. He works for a food market.
Basically trades his work for food. Whatever they're gonna discard
(28:21):
he'll take. He travels around the state. He builds environment
environmentally friendly houses in return for lodging, and then in
his off hours he services the community. So he says
he needs about two hundred bucks a month to live.
And for a while he lived on a boat that
had solar panels, and the whole bed of the boat
(28:41):
was a garden, a vegetable garden, and he bought you know,
sandals off the Internet that were returned because the dude
didn't like him. He got his computer from his friend
who was throwing it out because the hard drive was busted,
replaced a hard drive. He's been using it for like
five years. And uh, that's just one story. He's not
some Weirdoh, he's not a freeloader. He's not some crazed
(29:04):
hippie hobo freak. He's just a guy that was like,
you know that, I'm kind of tired of buying into
this whole system. So this is my life now. Chumps,
if you ever me to freaking assume they think you're
a chump. How they do chuck. If anybody wants to
learn more about freakings, they can check out f R
E G A N in the handy search bar, how
(29:26):
stuff works dot com. And if this picked your interest,
you should check out our another podcast of ours on
how much money do I really need to live? Remember
that one that was good? Uh, you can find both
of those on how stuff works? Right, And I said
handy search bar, So that handy failed search bar. I
failed in my attempt to find a replacement. It is
(29:48):
handy though. It's time for a listener ma'il okay, Josh,
I'm gonna call this zebra fish email of course, from Alex.
Dear Chuck and Josh and Jerry. I'm a research technician
in a neuroscience science lab studying sleep in circadian rhythms
with zebra fish. I first discovered your scintillating podcast several
(30:09):
months ago, and they had quickly become part of my
daily routine. Each morning when I come in to feed
the fish, I turned up the speaker's blasting the show,
and there are suddenly over ten thousand fans listening to
your podcasts in a fifteen by fifteen foot room. They
eagerly swim to the left sides of their tanks the
position of the speakers as soon as the podcast begins,
(30:30):
so the zebra fisher are reacting to the dulcet tones
of Thus, I consider myself apparent to these fish, and
that I feed them, clean their tanks, and educate them
through your podcasts. One of the first errors I made
as a parent was to make a false promise to
these fish that if they continue to work hard in
our experiments, which is administering cocaine to sleep deprived fish,
(30:54):
that's what he's studying. Chuck and Josh would acknowledge their
hard work on the podcast. Please help me out. Don't
let down my fish for a false promise I made
long ago. God speed. Keep your ear to the grindstone, Alex.
I wonder if that tiny room that they keep them
in is a bathroom. I don't know. And I wonder
if Alex is really a scientist. Yeah right, he's just
into getting fish high. Well we'll see. Well, Thank you, Alex.
(31:17):
Thank you two our ten thousands zebra fish fans. Hello fish,
You guys get some sleep. Okay they can't, they're dying
to or they're just dying. If you are conducting some
sort of odd experiments, we want to hear about it.
Wrap it up in an email, will you spank it
on the buttocks and send it to stuff podcast at
(31:38):
how stuff works dot com For more on this and
thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com.
Want more how stuff works, check out our blogs on
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(32:00):
are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
from House toff works dot com. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with me as always as
(00:20):
Charles W. Chuck Bryant. We are the Koch Brothers and
we own you. How you doing good, sir? Top of
theod morning. I saw you give me a tip of
the hat and everything off the old cap. Wow, we're
suddenly like Will Ferrell and anchor man. You're a London
gentleman went in Rome. Uh, Chuck, I think before we
(00:42):
go any further, we should um plug our Kuba Team,
Big time awesome Cuba team. That's k I v A
dot Org slash team Slash stuff you should know. Nice. Yeah,
that's where you can find us. Yeah. Um we founded
that team in October two, right, brilliant idea. Yeah. Um.
By October two, last October, we'd already hit the quarter
(01:07):
of a million dollars in loans mark right, Um, we
are on track to hit half a million dollars in
loans made to entrepreneurs in developing countries. Um. By May
we just hit four hundred thousand. Our team did, and
we just wanted to let everybody know who's not a member,
the team is open. Just go on and make a loan. Uh,
(01:30):
twenty five bucks is the lowest increment you can make.
But it's alone. This is not just an outright donation.
Because it's repaid. You can reloan again, or you can
take it and go on your merry way. But it's
pretty cool. It's a good feeling. Everybody on the Kiva
message board is a happy chipper person. And I don't
know that they are all the time, but I think
(01:52):
when they come to Kiva and hang out there for
a little while, they get happy. Feel better about yourself.
I know I do. But yes, halfs half million, it
was nice. It's crazy. Who knew? Well, that's Cuba. Also
we're on Facebook stuff you should know and Twitter, the Twitter,
s Y s K podcast. Yes, all right, let's go
(02:14):
to sleep. All right, let's get started. Huh, Chuck, did
you know that UM xerox and I think the twenty
one century, maybe a little before that, UM took out
ads in all sorts of publications. I saw it in
some sort of bar association UM magazine. I can't remember
which one. Um saying hey, Mr and Mrs Consumer or
(02:38):
Mr Mrs Lawyer, UM, don't use the word xerox, use
the word photocopy instead. Yeah, xerox is. It's like a
Kleenex or cute dip or as Britain was once a
brand name, Heroin once a brand name. UM. And the
reason that Xerox is so up in arms about this
is because if enough people's start using your term generically,
(03:03):
especially as a verb like xerox ng or facebooking, you
can lose your trademark status. It can become a part
of the vernacular. And it has happened to to some
other um, some other brands before. Evidently Alan Wrench Um,
(03:23):
like I said, Aspirin, Escalator Um, the Jungle Gym, Tarmac,
Yo Yo, Zipper, all of these were once brand named
shattering my everything, the illusion of everything I know, But
isn't that weird? And then there's a there's a whole
this is pretty cool. There's a whole list of stuff
that's um become. It's in that's in danger, it's in
(03:45):
that realm where xerox is right now, where it's very
commonly used. But these people still managed to keep their
their trademark Jaws of Life, Yeah, Neilla Wafers Yeah, ban
Pong Yeah, is table tennis Yeah, and um, let's see uh,
Skivvy's is underwear. Crock pot Rolodex is technically supposed to
(04:06):
be called a rotary card file. We should just read
each one of these with a question mark at the end.
After everyone for Mica, go card, and my voice will
go higher and higher until you can't even hear any
more untill only dogs start howling. Jack. This is one
that I knew to. Realtor is a real estate agent
that is not any real real estate agent. A realtor
(04:26):
is a specific company's real estate agent, centuries any one
real tour oka. Um, but you have all of these uh,
all of these bands are all these brands band Aid,
by the way, that's why I said that. UM. Originally
their tune was I Am Stuck on band Aids because
band Aid stuck on me. They changed it to I
Am Stuck on band Aid brand because band Aid stuck
(04:48):
on stuck in the brand because the adhesive. They don't
want to genericize their own name. There's one in this
list that I didn't see that should be and that
my friend is Dumpster. Did you know dumpster is a
trademark name. He told me, okay, well, the dumpster the
(05:08):
big trash bin usually on wheels um that can be
lifted by a garbage truck. That whole process was actually,
this whole process was originally called the Dempster dumpster, and
it was invented in by George Dempster, who was later
the mayor of Knoxville, Tennessee. And apparently up to that point,
(05:30):
if you were making something or you had a construction
job going on, you just park a dump truck nearby,
and everybody would throw their waist in or take piles
and moving into the dump truck. It was somebody's job.
So Dempster was like, why don't we just create this receptacle,
receptacle that we can eventually, you know, start by hoisting
with the chain and just dump into the back of
the dump truck, or you know, will eventually create these
(05:53):
hydraulic arms that can go into the slots on the
side of this dumpster with a capital and that can
just lift itself up into the back. I bet you,
he said, I'll call it the Dempster, and his wife said,
you're not calling that thing the Dempster. I'm not being
associated with trash and how about dumpster and she was
(06:14):
like genius copyright at trade market pour me and Martini.
So and I've always noticed have you ever noticed it
seems like a lot of waste management UM companies, especially
locally owned ones, tend to have a person's first and
last name, like Jackie Curtis Porta potties. Have you ever
look around, You'll start to see it's really weird. Interesting,
(06:35):
It's a lot of pride um. But Chuck, the point
is the whole reason I say this is because um,
we had to fatten up freegans. Anytime we use the
word dumpster, we're using it with a capital D. I
just want to say, so we don't have to say
t M every time. The dumpsters with a capital D
every time we use it, and we're gonna use it
(06:56):
a lot because we are talking about freegans who are,
in other words, dumpster divers. Yes, Josh, the word freagan
is a combination with word free and vegan. Doesn't necessarily
mean they're vegan. I think they just thought I had
a nice ring. Probably, I'm sure a lot of them
were vegans when they started. Yeah, of course there's a
lot of overlap or maybe the guy was named Frogan
(07:17):
who started the movement. That's not true. No, actually his
name is Keith McHenry. Okay, Well, freagans, Josh, are I know?
You know this are people who are it's also called
post consumerism or reclaimism. They are anti consumerism. They say,
we don't like this whole cycle of working and spending
(07:38):
and buying and wasting and trashing and then buying it again.
And we are going to try and reclaim and scavenge.
We're gonna try and not buy things. We're gonna try
and not work, maybe just volunteer were we don't want
to pay rent. We're gonna squat when we can. And uh,
that's what we are. We're freagans. In a very big
distinction between freagans and um tramps, hobo the homeless is
(08:01):
that freakings are doing this by choice um and if
they don't actually have the money to buy food, they
usually have the skills or education to um to go
out and make the money needed to buy food. This
is all very much a lifestyle choice, and it is
also their very presence, Their very existence is a thumb
(08:22):
in the nose to the consumer economy that America has
which is in many ways very wasteful. One right, Uh,
stat time, I guess in the United States of America,
Josh wastes billion pounds of food each year. That if
you go by the stat that we waste a quarter
of our food, it's between a quarter and a half.
(08:44):
I've seen a half. So it's entirely possible that a
hundred and nineties six billion pounds of food are wasted
every year. And we'll get in two more specifics on
what kind of food is being thrown out, But a
lot of times it's not oh, this big box of uh,
completely rotted apples. It's uh, these apples are pretty bruised. Uh,
(09:06):
this container is mashed, So we're gonna throw this stuff
out exactly. Um, And I guess it's not just food.
You know, food makes a lot of sense. We need
food to live, work, play, freaking eyes, do whatever. Everybody
needs food. But food has a lot of other inputs
wrapped up into it. Right, Like I think we talked
(09:27):
before about virtual water, like the movement of crops from
a place that has an abundance of water and can
grow these crops to a place that doesn't have it
is technically the movement of water needed to grow those crops.
You're just moving the crops, so there's a loss of
water when that's thrown away. There's a loss of energy
to produce and transport these things. Um, there's just all
(09:48):
of these losses represented by just throwing away of food,
and Freakings are like, okay, two things. Number one, I'm
gonna eat that food for free, because I'm not grossed
out by jumping jumping in your dumpster and technically it's
perfectly fine food. And number two, I'm also gonna do
it to make you feel like a jerk for throwing
it out right. Yeah, critics will fire right back at freakings.
(10:09):
Oh yeah, well you're putting gas in your car and
you're using electricity to cook that food, so you're on
the grid, So you're a big hypocrite freaking say oh yeah,
well every little bit counts, jerk. Everybody's calling one another jerk, yeah,
pointing fingers. It just goes downhill from there, throwing food
at each other. Well, I do take issue with with
that a little bit, like I I do. It's true
(10:30):
every little bit counts, um, And obviously you do need
electricity or heat or something to to live, to freaking
another day. Um. The thing that gets me is the
idea that, um, you should hitchhike um or hot box
cars or whatever, because that way, in that sense, you're
just freeloading on somebody else who's using that gas and
(10:51):
you're still using it too, You're just freeloading it. That's
the one that I do have an issue with is hitchhiking. Yeah,
because I guess so they would fire back. Hey, dude,
that train is going from here to Topeka. I can
totally understand the train. And technically, if somebody, if you
only catch a ride with somebody in a distance or
(11:11):
for in the to the place that they're going anyway,
isn't that what hitchucking is? People out of their way here? Yeah?
And plus where do you give them the person in return?
I can understand the train. It's a company and yeah,
well yeah, yeah, so uh freaking figure. We should point
out that freegans there's not an official organization. Uh, there
(11:34):
is a website freaking uh f R E E g
A and dot info and that's very robust and up
and running. Yeah, that's that's kind of the central home
where you can learn how to forage urban forage. Uh,
They also forage in the woods. We'll talk about that
in a minute. They have classes, they talk about scavenging sites, like, hey, dude,
(11:54):
the dumpster on the street is loaded with baked goods
this morning. Get over there and it gets the other
And I want to say, also, I have nothing against
freakan is um um, it's just freeloading drives me crazy.
But for the most part, freakans don't you know hippie
rob Yeah, yeah, heeries again. But if for the most
part freakans um don't freeload. And there they they squat,
(12:18):
but they squat in abandoned buildings. It's not being used anymore.
They they eat free food, but it's food that other
people throughout. Um. But the I think the key here
that really differentiates freagans from other people who eat out dumpsters,
aside from being able to buy food, is that they
actually do work or they do activities. They're just not
(12:41):
doing it for money. So for example, they volunteer, right,
because how much money do you need if you eat
out of a dumpster on purpose and you don't have
any you know, house payment or anything. So you have
all this extra free time aside from foraging and um
most of them tend to volunteer or um work on
activist causes. Like there's a freaking colony um in old
(13:04):
growth forests around North America where basically they just built
tree houses in these huge old trees and said now
you can't cut them down. It's called the resistance community, right, yeah,
which is pretty cool. It's a cool thing to do
with your time. So let's talk for a second about freaking's.
The key to their philosophy to me is they think
that consumerism is bad because it destroys the environment through
(13:26):
things like deforestation, factory farming, labor practices that stink, and
it's all profits centered. So they think, uh, you know,
that's implicit approval. If you're working, yeah, living in what
most people get, still in a normal life, working and buying,
you're saying that all this, all this is okay with
you because you're taking part in it. We don't want
(13:46):
any part of it. So we're gonna do our thing.
We're gonna not upgrade our iPhone. We probably wouldn't get
an iPhone. We have an old flip phone, or maybe
we don't even have a phone like that. We have
cans on the strength. I'm not gonna update my fashion
because the sweat her is perfectly nice. Just because Bill
Cosby might have worn it in it's still a great sweater.
Your mom liked it, and fashion is like, how important
(14:09):
is that really is there? You know their philosophy. Um,
we're gonna repair things that we have to. That's that's
that's another big point with volunteering and and um donating
time and all that. Um. Like, if you can do
something like repair somebody's camp stove, that's a valuable activity, right,
(14:30):
and uh, in the end, Josh, what they end up
with is a lifestyle that is very much not financially
dependent on things like, uh, some stinky job that you
have to do that you hate doing, so that frees
them up. They're like, Hey, I need a couple hundred
bucks a month to live, so I'm gonna make that
by doing some odd jobs. And then I'm gonna volunteer
and give back, right, And also you can you can
(14:53):
get back when you give and you volunteer through things
like time banks. There's a website um called TimeBank dot
org that I found on the freaking website and basically
it's like, um, let's say that I know how to
repair your bike, and you know how to um teach
people how to play the guitar. So I'll go, you know,
(15:15):
repair your bike, and and you teach me how to
play the guitar um and it's equitable. We don't remember
in the bartering podcast that doesn't always happen. You sometimes
have to engage in multilateral barters all that kind of thing.
Time banks get around that by saying like, Okay, well
you went and volunteered at the animal shelter for a
couple of hours, you earned two time dollars that you
can turn around and use for anything, you know, from
(15:38):
a member of this time bank. So that's pretty cool too,
although again it's pretty much impossible to get away from
currency in one form or fashion. Huh Yeah, I mean
most freegans have a very limited uh budget to endorse
your lifestyle. They're they're probably not completely free, although there
there might be some that don't use money at all,
but most of them like limited as much as possible.
(16:02):
So where's this going on, Josh? It's going on all
over the world. But if I was a freaking I
would move to New York City, New York City, New
York City. Yeah, because New York city has got a
lot of rich folks. That means there's gonna be a
lot of great trash. I know, what do you Allen's trash? Yeah,
and in trash Day in New York, imagine it's a
(16:23):
field day and the night before trash night, which is
called um. It's pretty bad. You know. The worst in
New York is in the summertime and it's hot and
it's rainy, and it's trash day and the sidewalks are
just full of garbage or in the middle of a
garbage strike. I mean, hats off to whoever makes that
(16:45):
city run. They're doing a good job, I think Michael Bloomberg,
Oh yeah, yeah, it's off to you, then, sir, h
They forage in New York for things like furniture, bags
of clothes, electronics, Like they'll camp out behind an office
that's moving. M All of what you just said is
called urban foraging, right. It all fall falls under that umbrella,
(17:06):
which is just like foraging, except rather than looking for
um routes to drink water from, you're getting office chairs
for your squad or water. Yeah, that's another thing you
want to But the point is is the the um
the city is the forest with everything you need and
then some if you know where to look and you
(17:27):
can hold your nose. It depends. So you know, every
everyone who's ever once a bad kid knows that the
cops can go through your trash once it comes out
to the curb. So there is actually a Supreme Court
case UM from California v. Greenwood, wherein the the Supreme
Court ruled that cops could once you put your trash
(17:51):
out it was public property. You expected someone else to
come along and take it eventually. And that means that
anybody wants you can go to your trash, including cops
looking for evidence that you're a drug dealer, or freakans
looking for bananas that still look pretty good. Yeah, freakings thought, hey,
this should apply to us too, right, Well, that's what
they use and I think they I think they use
(18:13):
it to a great success. Although there are a lot
of laws UM like local, state, regional, municipal laws that
UM are anti scavenging laws, basically because most people think
of people who go dumpster diving is strictly UM hobos
who you don't necessarily want around. I'm not sure that
(18:34):
there's plenty of cities out there, you know, well, a
lot of stores, grocery stores and the like will lock
up and cage up their dumpsters to discourage this kind
of thing. Some will put sharks in their dumpsters. Yeah,
land sharks very dangerous if you come across one of those. Uh.
The deal is they think that they can get a
lawsuit if someone dumpster dives on your property get some
(18:57):
food and get sick by it. And and um, that's
not exactly true though, is it. Didn't the us D
have a ruling on that. Uh No, the U s
c A encouraged this. It's called the um Bill Emerson
Good Samaritan Act. And I could just barely find who
he was. He was a uh A congressman who encourage
(19:17):
this act died before it could get passed. When they
passed that, they named it after him. But basically it said,
if you are a good person and you are giving
away food, you're picking up food, you have any anything
to do in the chain of taking food, rescuing it
from the landfill to feed the poor, and you are
not purposefully poisoning the poor um or doing it for
(19:40):
your own benefit, and someone gets harmed, you can't be
held liable for anything that happens. We're gonna protect you,
but that that prevents that. The whole point was to
encourage people like you, like you said, grocery stores and um,
other groups to donate their leftover food rather than just
let it go to way and a lot of people,
a lot of places do that. We're not saying everyone
just hatches their food. A lot of restaurants donate their food.
(20:02):
It's great. Yeah, Um, speaking of food, though I did
mention bruised fruit. A lot of times you're just crushed
packaging boxes. Sometimes the cell by date is cruised on
by and that doesn't necessarily mean that it's rotten. No,
the FEDS don't have any kind of mandatory dating low
except for baby formula and baby food, and cell by
(20:25):
date is all voluntary. The used by date is the
one you want to stick to. That's actually kind of rare.
The cell by date is just saying it's past it's prime,
but it's still got tons of life in it. Like,
for example, if you can keep eggs at forty degrees
fahrenheight just you know standard for a refrigerator. Um, the
(20:46):
last for three to five weeks past the cell by date?
Did you know that? And if you talk to my Mom,
you can drink milk for up to two months after
the date. I don't know about that one. The U.
S c A Does say, though, that factory sealed bacon,
not fresh bacon, but stuff that was in the in
the factory that came last two weeks beyond its sell
by date. And you mentioned New York being the center
(21:06):
of freakingism, Well, it stays fairly cold New York throughout
the year, right, which prevents bacteria from being from growing
because bacteria throws between forty and a hundred and forty
degrees fahrenh height. So I imagine that you're safest in
below forty degree Weather's good point, you know what I say?
What the nose? Nose? Yeah, I don't even look at
(21:28):
the dates. I give it a good sniff. That'll tell
me all I need to know about whether it's gonna
go in my body. Yeah. I usually don't have time
to sniff. I'm too hungry wolfing it down. And then
if I'm still standing afterwards, so much the better. Uh.
So that is urban foraging. Um. We should also point
out to that sometimes stores uh actually bag discarded food
(21:50):
separately from the other trash, so it's not like you're
picking an Eclaire off of a lot of toilet paper
and saying, oh, this looks fine. Uh. And then there's
why all foraging. If you live near the forest and
you're freaking you can collect plants. Uh. The website freaking
dot info will actually tell you how to do this,
tell you what's safe to eat. Um. Sometimes they practice
(22:12):
guerrilla gardening. They'll go find a little unused plot of land.
We've talked about this. Have you noticed that, like in
the last couple of podcasts we've recorded, like five other
podcasts have been touched on. You know, this means we're
we're growing a body of work. Well, our quest to
explain the world. It's all coming together. Oh it isn't it. Yeah,
it's all tying. And at some point we're gonna say
(22:33):
that's the last one. It'll be the time when we
use the word is and realize we did a podcast
on is. It depends on what your definition of is is.
It's gonna be a long podcast, but we'll do it.
A lot of them barter, like we said, they call
it free sharing though, but what it is is bartering.
They'll have a little market, freaking marketplace that's set up
like every Saturday morning in this this part of New York,
(22:55):
will all go meet and hey, I see you've got
a a laptop that you fixed. I've always wanted a
toaster oven. Let's make a deal throwing some rotten eggs
and we're all good. Just sell buy man. What about healthcare,
that's a big one, And I looked all over the
freaking info site for this. Um. Basically, they don't have
(23:18):
healthcare licked yet. Um. They've got it close though. There
are healthcare collectives which have been successful here there say
if you get enough people, you can get it down
to about a hundred bucks a year per person, and
those go to fun free clinics relies heavily on volunteers. Um.
But the state operates all sorts of free clinics as well. UM,
(23:42):
which I imagine if you just go in and say
I dumpster dive every day, they'll be like, we'll take
care of you. Um. So that one is not kind
of licked because you can also make the you can
make the case that well, that's freeloading again, and that
completely undermines everything that freagans are about reloading, because it's
(24:03):
not waste. Health health care is not wasteful. The um
hours of a volunteering doctor or are in or not wasted.
Of course not somebody would use those right well, but
a lot of times they are avoiding the healthcare because
of we don't want to support the pharmaceutical industry. We
don't want to support these h ms. Have a feeling
(24:23):
if it was the you know doctor down the street
from with the white picket fence that gives you a
coke and tells you to everything will be better, they
might be a little more apt to support something like
the health care syst right, And that I saw that
stated somewhere that they were saying, like if you just
cut out the profits, that it's much cheaper than we think. Interesting,
(24:44):
So Josh, this food recovery is um what they're into
as a freaking But that's not a new thing because
we have a long history in this country and other
places as far back as biblical days of gleaning. And
that's when you have a crop. You especially nowadays with
the big mechanic systems, they'll leave behind a lot of
(25:04):
waste that they're not gonna go back and pick it
all up, so they'll allow people, um, and they did
this some biblical days after they've reaped the harvest. So
if you're poor, you can come into the field after
us and pick up what we've left behind. Yes, it's
called gleaning, not gleaning the cube. You no gleaning. Gleaning UM.
There's a group called the Society of St Andrew And
there's a lot of gleaning organizations, but UM. One of
(25:26):
the more famous ones is a Society of St Andrew
UM where basically they just have a central hub and
they say volunteers go pick up you know, discarded food
anywhere you can and bring it here and then we'll
distribute it. Right, a simple model, but it works very well.
They And if you are a freaking I would imagine
(25:47):
you get some sort of halo for volunteering at the
Society of St Andrew. Yeah, you're the ultimate circle is
completely you have a good, nice spot in freaking heaven
if you do that. The whole idea, the anti consumer
culture idea that forms freaking is um apparently finds its
roots back in the sixteen forties in England and Chuck
(26:09):
there's a guy named Gerard wind Stanley who lost his
shirt in business, moved to the countryside and founded a
colony that he called the Diggers, and the Diggers basically
lived without money for as long as they could, not
that long. But UM, when Stanley and the Diggers inspired
the sixties counterculture diggers who UM created their own kind
(26:33):
of utopian colony or movement, and they inspired Keith McHenry,
who is basically thought of as the father of freakani
is um, which popped up in the early twenty one
century as far as you know, and now he lives
a lush, rich life collecting on that word freaking. And
then food he's a fat cat, right. And then Food
(26:56):
not Bombs is another good, good example of UM. The
free in movement incarnate right, which is basically like they're
a gleaner society and then they go feed the homeless,
feed the poor, feed freagans UM. And one of my friends, Justin,
who's living on tour for a while UM out in California.
(27:17):
He told me they used to call him soup not
food instead of food not bombs. I was like, that's
kind of jerky, don't you think? And he said yes.
And as a sister a sister group to Food not
bombs as homes not jails, which is pretty self explanatory.
That's it. Uh, well, let me give you a quick example.
(27:38):
If you're wondering and thinking these people are really weird,
let me tell you about Daniel Zeta. He's an American
who moved to Tasmania. But you might think it is
weird in and of itself, not necessarily. About a decade ago,
he's thirty five, and he gradually became a freagan as
he became a little more conscious of the world around him,
(27:59):
the environment, it wanting to help out the environment. He
had a great job, government job. It's pretty good money
from what I understand. Uh, And he eventually quit the job,
and now he is a freaking pretty much full time.
He doesn't dumpster dive though. He works for a food market.
Basically trades his work for food. Whatever they're gonna discard
(28:21):
he'll take. He travels around the state. He builds environment
environmentally friendly houses in return for lodging, and then in
his off hours he services the community. So he says
he needs about two hundred bucks a month to live.
And for a while he lived on a boat that
had solar panels, and the whole bed of the boat
(28:41):
was a garden, a vegetable garden, and he bought you know,
sandals off the Internet that were returned because the dude
didn't like him. He got his computer from his friend
who was throwing it out because the hard drive was busted,
replaced a hard drive. He's been using it for like
five years. And uh, that's just one story. He's not
some Weirdoh, he's not a freeloader. He's not some crazed
(29:04):
hippie hobo freak. He's just a guy that was like,
you know that, I'm kind of tired of buying into
this whole system. So this is my life now. Chumps,
if you ever me to freaking assume they think you're
a chump. How they do chuck. If anybody wants to
learn more about freakings, they can check out f R
E G A N in the handy search bar, how
(29:26):
stuff works dot com. And if this picked your interest,
you should check out our another podcast of ours on
how much money do I really need to live? Remember
that one that was good? Uh, you can find both
of those on how stuff works? Right, And I said
handy search bar, So that handy failed search bar. I
failed in my attempt to find a replacement. It is
(29:48):
handy though. It's time for a listener ma'il okay, Josh,
I'm gonna call this zebra fish email of course, from Alex.
Dear Chuck and Josh and Jerry. I'm a research technician
in a neuroscience science lab studying sleep in circadian rhythms
with zebra fish. I first discovered your scintillating podcast several
(30:09):
months ago, and they had quickly become part of my
daily routine. Each morning when I come in to feed
the fish, I turned up the speaker's blasting the show,
and there are suddenly over ten thousand fans listening to
your podcasts in a fifteen by fifteen foot room. They
eagerly swim to the left sides of their tanks the
position of the speakers as soon as the podcast begins,
(30:30):
so the zebra fisher are reacting to the dulcet tones
of Thus, I consider myself apparent to these fish, and
that I feed them, clean their tanks, and educate them
through your podcasts. One of the first errors I made
as a parent was to make a false promise to
these fish that if they continue to work hard in
our experiments, which is administering cocaine to sleep deprived fish,
(30:54):
that's what he's studying. Chuck and Josh would acknowledge their
hard work on the podcast. Please help me out. Don't
let down my fish for a false promise I made
long ago. God speed. Keep your ear to the grindstone, Alex.
I wonder if that tiny room that they keep them
in is a bathroom. I don't know. And I wonder
if Alex is really a scientist. Yeah right, he's just
into getting fish high. Well we'll see. Well, Thank you, Alex.
(31:17):
Thank you two our ten thousands zebra fish fans. Hello fish,
You guys get some sleep. Okay they can't, they're dying
to or they're just dying. If you are conducting some
sort of odd experiments, we want to hear about it.
Wrap it up in an email, will you spank it
on the buttocks and send it to stuff podcast at
(31:38):
how stuff works dot com For more on this and
thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com.
Want more how stuff works, check out our blogs on
the house stuff works dot com home page. Brought to
you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready,
(32:00):
are you
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