Lessons of Vesuvius, Part 2

In the year 79 CE, the Italian volcano Mount Vesuvius erupted with with the thermal energy of 100,000 atomic bombs. Ashen destruction rained down on Pompeii, Herculaneum, Oplontis and Stabiae. In this Stuff to Blow Your Mind two-parter, Robert and Joe explore this terrifying episode in history and what we can learn from it.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of
I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, you, welcome to
Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb
and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back following up our
last episode about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in seventy nine.

(00:23):
You know, Robert, this is something that I have wanted
to do an episode about for a long time. I
think it was mainly just because I love those letters
of Plenties and I wanted to read them and talk
about them. But there was a reason that we just
recently decided, Okay, it's time to do Vesuvius, And it
was because of a new study I read about that
set the lava of my heart flowing anew. And so

(00:44):
here we are because a lot of the really great
and shocking research about Vesuvius is like basically, what happened
to people's bodies when when the volcano erupted? Oh absolutely,
I mentioned in the first episode, how I how much,
how clearly I remember looking through at only Geographic when
I was a child and and seeing these images of

(01:04):
the remains of uh In Pompeii and Herculaneum uh one
in particular, I remember, was a photograph of this one
bit of human remains that are referred to as ring
Lady because it is the skeleton and you see, uh,
these these rings there, and it's just like the skeleton
emerging from the you know, half half revealed in the

(01:28):
in the ash and soil, and it was just very haunting.
It's this idea of this place just buried and frozen
in time. I'm looking at this image. Does she have
rings on her fingers but also bigger rings down around
her like her elbow? Yes, I believe so. And I
think another photo included in our notes is rather small,
but I believe they are serpents too, their like, you know,

(01:50):
precious metal serpents. Uh. So you know that all these
little details like that, you know, always were just very
intriguing me. Such a dramatic moment in history, and then
to have so much of it preserved, Yeah, in some
cases preserved in a shockingly pristine way, but in other
cases transformed in an even more shocking way. So this
new study that that I was reading about was by

(02:11):
pure Paolo Petrona, published in the New England Journal of
Medicine just this month or just last month in January. Actually,
so Patroni was the lead author, but there were a
bunch of authors named on it. And I'm not going
to say the name of the study because that might
spoil a little bit about what happened. But basically, there
have been a lot of modern analyzes trying to understand
exactly what happened to the bodies of the victims of

(02:34):
Vesuvius in settlements like Pompeii and Herculaneum. It's like some
of them the ones people were most familiar with, or
when essentially the like the the the ashes that formed
around body have been used as a kind of mold,
you know, pour a substance down in there, let it uh,
you know, harden, and then when you bring it back out,

(02:56):
you have this this picture of these these humans from
any nine see at the basically the moment of death. Yeah,
And in a lot of cases, these people died under
circumstances so extreme that it's difficult to imagine exactly how
it would play out on our soft, fluid filled bodies. Um.
This particular study concerns one such case, which got a

(03:16):
good right up in the New York Times by Jennifer Pinkowski.
So this study looked at one specific body exhumed from
the buried ruins of Herculaneum, and this was a man
who was believed to have been in his mid twenties,
and he was found lying on a wooden bed in
the colleg Gum august Stallium, which was a building on
the main street of the town away from the waterfront.

(03:39):
And the man's ash entombed remains were discovered sometime in
the nineteen sixties, but more recently researchers were able to
extract a strange object from inside the dead man's head.
And it is a warped, black, shiny fragment of glassy material.
What is it? Well, I mean, if if one worked

(04:01):
it to guess, you might think, well, this must be
a piece of you know, volcanic shrapnel, something that you know,
flying through the air and become it gets embedded in
the skull, right sure. And when I was looking at
images of the fragment, I was thinking exactly along those lines,
because it reminded me a bit of the appearance of
tech tits, which are these gravel sized pieces of natural

(04:21):
glass that are formed from terrestrial material, including things like sand,
which get rapidly superheated to the melting point during meteorite impacts. So,
like you know, a meteor hits the surface, it kicks
up a lot of stuff is some of it quickly
melts and turns into glass. And natural impact glass is amazing.
I think we talked about it a bit in our

(04:42):
episode about the Kabba Um but but yeah, just to
imagine that, like an object falling from space hits the
surface of the Earth, throws up this big explosion of debris,
and some of that debris gets so hot from the
impact it turns into a shower of glass. So anyway,
the images of this object extract it from the man's
head look kind of like tech tits or kind of

(05:03):
like obsidian. But it also has this crazy complicated shape
and texture with these sharp hooks and crags and little
rounded divots as if created by frozen bubbles. And so anyway,
the authors of this study believe the evidence tells us
what the glassy material is. It's vitrified brain tissue, human

(05:23):
brain turned into glass. Hence the name of the study.
Heat induced brain vitrification from the vesuvious eruption in CE
seventy nine uh and is summarized in Pinkowski's article. According
to pure Paolo Patrona, who is a forensic anthropologist at
the University Federico, the second of Naples and the first
author on the study, again, the man's brain quote turned

(05:45):
to glass as a result of high heat from the
pyroclastic flow, and the victim's skull exploded. Now, this is
not actually the first case of research indicating that heat
from the volcanic eruption caused people's heads to explode. That
that's the thing that had been established by some previous
research right. In fact, one of the older episodes of

(06:06):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind, I think titled stuff that
will literally blow your mind. Well, that's one of the
things we mentioned as being something that could actually make
your your head pop, would be becoming caught in say
a pyroclastic flow like this. Yeah, not not to be
too grim, but I mean I think of the comparison
to like when we've discussed our problems microwaving butter, where

(06:28):
there's like too much vapor formation, very rapidly rapid temperature
change like that. Yeah. So, to quote some text from
the study itself, and this was quoted secondarily from the
BBC quote the detection of glassy material from the victim's head,
of proteins expressed in the human brain, and if fatty
acids found in human hair indicates the thermally induced preservation

(06:51):
of vitrified human brain tissue. So first you'd have extreme
radiant heat which would pretty much instantly ignite fat in
the body and vapor rise fluid content and body tissues.
What kind of heat are we talking about? Well, analysis
of the charred wood nearby shows temperatures right around the
man probably reached to something like five hundred and twenty

(07:12):
degrees celsius, which is over nine hundred and sixty degrees fahrenheit,
which I believe is hotter than the average surface temperature
on the planet Venus. Uh. So we're we're in extreme
territory here and uh And though I should say that
not all experts are convinced that the black glass is
truly the man's brain, because Pinkowski Uh in her article

(07:33):
for The Times, also quote somebody named Christina Kilgrove, who
is a bioarchaeologist at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill,
who's done firsthand research on Vesuvius and of the brain
to glass study. She says, quote, while their analysis is intriguing.
I do not think they've proved its human brain material,
nor nor have they ruled out other origins. The fatty

(07:54):
acids they identified are typical of vegetable or animal fat
or hair. So apparently, you know, once you start achieving
temperatures that potentially turn all kinds of organic material into glass,
you create some room for confusion. Maybe this is some
kind of other organic material that terrified, right, And and
then again this is like these are special circumstances to

(08:15):
create this these forensic remains, so it's difficult to compare
these to other cases. Now, that's not the only study
to come out recently about grim death scenes in these towns.
There was another one I was looking at that was
revising some earlier research about how some people had died
when their their remains were found within these stone houses

(08:35):
that were along the shores at Herculaneum that were sort
of known as the boat houses, to appear that people
died crowded inside. I think they had probably crowded into
the buildings for shelter. The buildings got closed up and
then got superheated, and the question was how did the
people die inside? And again it's a very grim scene.
But it looks like it's sort of turned. The buildings

(08:56):
provided some insulation from the flow of what was happening outside.
I'd but just gradually heated up and sort of worked
like an oven. It's kind of horrible to imagine. Oh yeah,
so yeah, they they managed to avoid like instant cooking,
but instead got slightly more gradual cooking. Now his luck
would habit there was. There was another very recent bit
of news concerning the eruption of the Suvious. In January,

(09:20):
a number of news sources ran a story about the
possible discovery of Plenty the Elder's skull. What yes, um
in one of the better red ups that the one
I was looking at, in fact, was Katherine J. Woo's
This two thousand year old skull may belong to Plenty
of the Elder, published on smithsonian dot Com. Okay, what's
the case here? Alright, So this, this latest wrinkle in

(09:42):
the story comes via Italian researchers regarding one of some
seventy skeletons buried together in the aftermath of the eruption.
So this particular body that they're looking at, or really
particularly particularly we're dealing with a skull and job on uh.
They were found to have the body that it's associated with,

(10:03):
found to have heavy or heavily ornamented short sword in
its possession, and jewels, all of this becoming of a
person of means. Perhaps they speculate a high ranking naval officer. Now,
these remains were unearthed about a hundred years ago, and
engineer Gennero Mathrone theorized that this might be Plenty Uh,

(10:25):
but there was no way to really explore this any further. Um.
You know, it's just kind of circumstance, like, hey, we
found a this this body looks like it was somebody
of of means. The most famous person of means to
have we know died uh in the eruption of Vesuvius
is of course Plenty of the elder. So he's thought,
I think this might be him. So fast forward to

(10:47):
the twenty one century and the skull and the jaw
are now in the possession of Rome's Museum of the
History of the Art of Medicine, and using DNA sequencing technology,
researchers found that it was the skull of Quote, a
man who could trace some of his lineage to Italy
and who likely died in his forties or fifties. Now
Plenty would have been fifty six, so it's possible. The jaw,

(11:09):
on the other hand, turned out to be from a
different individual of North African heritage. Okay, so it wasn't
even from the same head as to the rest of
the skull. So all of this is still very uncertain.
This is not a this is not They're not really
hitting it out of the park with this one. I
think you can fairly say, yes, it sounds possible that

(11:31):
this particular skull could have belonged to Plenty of the
elder But narrowing it down to just a you know,
a man who could trace some of his lineage to
Italy and who likely died in his forties or fifties,
I mean, obviously they're going to be other individuals in
that category that died with the eruption of Vesuvius. Yeah,

(11:51):
this is interesting, but yeah, I'm I'm far from convinced.
So again to go over to the evidence, he would
have been in the right age bracket, but a lot
of people would have been. He would have been an
Italian man, but a lot of people there would have been,
and he had some he had some possessions indicating that
he was rich, like an ornamented sword and jewels. But again,

(12:13):
so the argument is like, well, this was the kind
of stuff that you might expect to find upon a
naval officer, to to find upon you know, somebody like
Plenty of the Elder. But that's about as far as
we can really go with it. Yeah, uh yeah. This
reminds me of other cases where we've talked about on
the show before where people kind of like, you're so
eager to take one fact or character or place from

(12:37):
a historical narrative and try to connect it with physical
artifacts on on often a very tenuous basis. Like I
remember in our episode about Lot's Wife where we discussed
the Dead Sea region and the tendency to take a
rock or salt formation, and people would say, that's a
Lot's wife, um, and like even so, even if you

(12:57):
were someone who believed the you know, destruction of Ottoman
Gomora story as as history, and believe the whole Lot's
of Wife thing, why would you expect an individual rock
you come across to actually be her? Right? Yeah, The
idea is of course endlessly attractive to be able to
have this physical proof of Plenty of the Elder and
individual who factors so heavily into this particular historical narrative.

(13:18):
But also it is just such an uh an important
figure in the you know, the historical writings. Yeah, I
think it speaks to a kind of human tendency of
like the characters we know from literary sources, whether it's
history or mythology. They're like friends and you know, the
same way that you walk through a crowd and you
yearn to recognize people. You know, you see somebody and like, oh,

(13:39):
is that Jeff, No it's not him, but your your
brain went there for a second, is that plenty Skull? Oh?
Wait what it might be somebody else, But still it
feels it feels special for a second there, Yeah, it does.
So I guess i'd say the evidence here not even
close to decisive, But if you want to imagine maybe
it's plenty Skull, I guess there's no harm in that,
right and now. And on the same hand, I don't

(14:00):
to criticize this more recent research because because clearly they
were they were following up on this much earlier speculation
where this goes like I think it's plenty and they said, well,
let's let's apply some science to this. Let's what we
can we can discern from the bone of the skull itself,
and yeah, this is what they figured out. Yeah, you
can find out more that's either consistent or not consistent

(14:22):
with what somebody has already claimed. Yeah, and if they
had found that it was, you know, the skull of
a of a woman in her eighties, then it probably
wouldn't have been Plenty, right, Or if the the the
entire like the skull and the job bone had both
turned out to have North African origin, that would have
also been a firmer. No, So instead we just have
a lingering maybe. All right, on that note, we're going

(14:44):
to take the possible skull of Plenty of the elder
and we're gonna place it up on the shelf, and
we're going to drink coffee from it. Yes, and we're
going to take a quick break, but we will be
right back and we will continue to discuss the lessons
of Vesuvius. Alright, we're back. So there are all these
genres of things that archaeologists have uncovered at at the

(15:07):
settlements that were ruined by the eruption of Vesuvius, especially
like Pompeii and Herculaneum, and there's no way for us
to talk about all of the discoveries. A lot of
them are just things about, like, you know, everyday Roman life,
you know, the way the houses are preserved, things about
how the kitchens would have run, and stuff like that,
because you have all the stuff still in there. Yeah.

(15:28):
One of the things about the past that and then
we've touched on this plenty of times before, is you know,
it's the everyday stuff that is not always preserved in
say the history books or and you know, religious art
or what have you. And and that's often the most
interesting thing, like how did the common people live? How
what did people eat? What did they drink? Well, how

(15:48):
healthy were they? But like the common information like that
is not the kind of stuff that is usually thought
notable to be recorded by historians of the time because
common life is not interesting to them at least because
it's common, might be interesting to us for which it
is unusual and unknown. Instead, the things that historians are
likely to record are the unusual events, you know, the

(16:10):
wars and everything like that. Yeah, yeah, the the the
the dramatic moments, etcetera. So or and indeed, with the
with Vesuvius and its eruption, like you know, that's we
have this wonderful account that survived and provides all these
these details about the this, the unnatural horror that fall,
the falls, the cities that exist in the area surrounding

(16:32):
the Volcanic mountain. But you know, Plenty is not taking
a lot of time to talk about what he ate
for breakfast that morning, right, so I think he does
say his uncle had a light luncheon. You don't say
what it was. But one of the amazing genres of
things that archaeologists have uncovered at Pompeii that is definitely
worth looking up if you haven't seen it, is this

(16:53):
some of the surviving original artwork, which in some cases
is preserved in a strikingly vivid and colorful way. Oh yes, yeah,
these are definitely worth looking up. And some of them
are you know, it's it's one of these things where
it makes you really think about trying and put yourself
in the shoes of the of these people who lived

(17:13):
in and so there are things that make perfect sense, like, yeah,
of course you'd want to live in a uh in
a in a space that is uh you know, has
rich decoration. But then you ask, well, why this painting,
why this particular fresco et cetera. Well, I'm thinking if
it happened to my house and future archaeologists were digging
it up, they'd be like, what does it mean that

(17:33):
he had a poster for the film Attack of the
Crab Monsters on his wall. Clearly he thought it was
a great film, or he he realized that giant psychic
crabs were holy creatures and were to be venerated in
the home as a kind of a household god. They
might think this is a religious artifact. But so one
of the fresco is that I wanted to talk about

(17:54):
was something I was just reading about from a site
called Reggio five Reggio v. Uh assume that means five
and not just the letter V, which is still under excavation.
And this is a well preserved fresco that appears to
have been in the basement of a large building, underneath
the stairwell. I don't know if that contributed to how
well it was preserved. It might have, might have, But

(18:17):
it depicts the end of a fight between two gladiators
of fighter types that we can actually identify based on
their weapons in their armor in the painting. So one
is of a type known as the Murmillo, and the
other is a of a type known as the three
X or the Thracian. So I was looking these up
in a book called Gladiators at Pompeii by Luciana Jacobelli

(18:40):
from two thousand three, and she writes of the mrmalo
that had so the name of the mrmalo type fighter
originally comes from a marine fish, the murma, which had
an image of this fish was drawn on this type
of fighter's helmet. So this fighter would have a very
scary looking helmet actually. So it's got a visor that
closed is over the face, and it's got kind of

(19:02):
a chain pattern, like chain link pattern across the visor um.
And then of course it depicts this fish. And then
the gladiator to fight bare chested or sometimes we're something
known as the subla gaculum uh. And then he'd have
his right arm protected by something called a manica, which
I've seen depicted as like a kind of a sleeve

(19:23):
of padding laced up around the right arm, which was
the sword arm. So you'd hold your short sword called
a gladius in the right arm with that laced up
with this padding. And then in the other hand you
would have a rectangular shield called a screwed them that's
about one meter high. And as we've discussed in the
past talking about gladiators on the show Roaming Gladiatorial Combat.

(19:44):
You know, it's not unfair to compare it to the
film adaptation of The Running Man. You know, it's there's
theatrics here, there's mythic symbology involved here. Uh so it's
a it's it's not merely there's there's a mix of
a function but also just mythic form and entertainment. Yes,
and there's another element of it that comes in, which

(20:06):
is just like ethnic representations, like the Romans would have
some fighter types that were supposed to represent sort of
like exotic foreign types of warriors who the fighters might
not necessarily actually be from those regions. But say the
other fighter in this not the Mrmala, but the Thracian,
you know, so that's like a type of person. And

(20:27):
so this is supposed to be modeled after the idea
of a Thracian warrior. I'm well, I'm not sure if
it would actually in any accurate way represent what the
Thracians were Like. Yeah, I mean this is actually something
you see reflected even in some I think contemporary examples,
but definitely in twentieth century examples of professional wrestling, yes,
where various. And this is something you would see in

(20:47):
different parts in pretty much everywhere that pro wrestling was
slash is popular. So talking about Mexico, Japan, the United States, uh,
those three anyway, you would often see depictions of other
nationalities UH in different enemy roles. And of course you
see all manner of you know, xenophobia and UH and

(21:10):
racial stereotypes, the cultural stereotypes embodied in those forms. Yes,
and you know a funny thing that I was reading
about with the Roman gladiators that like sometimes gladiator types
would go out of style as as certain ethnic groups
were more comprehensively incorporated into the empire. So like earlier
on you would have a type of fighter that was

(21:31):
basically the gallic fighter, you know, like this is our
this is our parody of the UH, I don't know
what you want to call it, you know, their parody
or their understanding of like the the ethnic Gaul as
a warrior as Gaul. Then goal today modern like France
basically became a more fully incorporated part of the Roman Empire.
That type of fighter fell out of fashion and was

(21:53):
replaced by representations of ethnic groups that were still more
considered outsiders or there's Yeah, it's a it's an interesting
way to think about the you know, that space where
where sport and war meet, and and they meet more
directly in gladiatorial combat obviously, but you see this in

(22:14):
other types of sporting entertainment out there, even like full
on team sports. Uh. You know, there's this idea that uh,
instead of two nations going to war, they go to game. Uh.
And that you know, that's ultimately part of the spirit
of even the Olympics, which are again often uh you know,
held up as an example of nations coming together in
peace and uh. And I think certainly certainly fulfills that

(22:38):
that need for the international community. And yet at the
same time, it is about my country and your country
going head to head and we're going to see which
one has the has the right stuff to to emerge
victorious at the end. Yeah. But at least in the
case of the Olympics, it's like people actually from the
original countries coming together to compete. It would be a
different thing if you were just like wherever somebody actually

(23:00):
came from, you had them depicting a person from a
certain country, and then in that you would see more
of a parallel in say twentieth century American professional wrestling. Yeah.
So jacob Elli writes about this other type, that the
second type in the Fresco, the Thracian quote. The Thracians
armor included a small, strongly convex squarish shield known as

(23:22):
a parmula a manica. Again this is an arm bands
like this like padding laced up around the sword arm
uh and two high leggings, often decorated up to the knee.
The weapon most typical of this gladiator was a short sword,
either curved or angled, called a ska, so like you
have a little kind of curved scimitar thing. And she

(23:42):
writes that even the helmet was unusual, usually be decorated
with this tall decorated crest. So in the Fresco, it's
a battle scene, and it's at the end of the battle,
and the Mermalo fighter stands victorious, holding his sword in
his right hand and holding his shield high in his left,
and the Thracian is bent over badly wounded, bleeding from

(24:03):
wounds on his wrist, in his chest. He's disarmed, his
shield is lying on the ground. Next to him, and
he's making a sign with his left hand, and it's
not clear exactly what that is, but some historians and
archaeologists think that he's possibly appealing to the audience for
mercy with this sign, and we don't know if the
fight would have ended with mercy or execution. That's interesting

(24:26):
because then it then also not not only you're wondering
about what he's depicted in the art, but then why
is it depicted, Like why is this image celebrated? Are
we celebrating the presumably the valiant warrior that has fallen
and is is appealing for for mercy, like saying, Hey,
I put up a good fight, didn't you? And and
maybe the people looking at the art can be like, yeah,

(24:46):
even if you lose, if you put up a good fight,
there's there's grace and honor in that. Or is it
about the other guy, like yeah, defeat the other of
combating at all costs, and maybe they'll beg for mercy,
but you still want right is the purpose us of
the artwork to be like look at this thration loser? Uh? Yeah?
And according it gets even more interesting because, according to

(25:07):
Massimo Osana, director general of Pompei's Archaeological Park. This building
was probably both a tavern and a brothel that was
frequented by local gladiators. So Reggio five is very near
to another side that's believed to have been a barracks
for the fighters, So the gladiators would have had their
barracks nearby. They would go for I guess recreation at

(25:27):
this tavern and brothel. And inside the tavern and brothel
where the gladiators go, there are scenes on the walls
of gladiators killing each other, And it's like, is that
what they would have wanted to see? Is that what
they just had to put up with? Yeah? Like who
who decorated this space? I don't. It's so interesting trying
to understand what would motivate people to to decorate buildings

(25:49):
in certain ways in the ancient world. You like, you
can't again the same thing we were talking about, like, like,
how would a future civilization understand the spirit with which
I hang up a Poe stir for a trashy nineteen
fifties sci fi movie, Like do they like do they
have the level of complexity and imagining? My mind that says, okay,
this had something to do with like love of horror movies,

(26:12):
but also a sense of irony and you know, like
or would they just have to assume I guess this
is just like a religious artifact or something. Yeah, yeah,
there's some of there's Yeah, there's so many generalities to
potentially apply to that situation. And then and then it's
going to get you know, very specific about the individual
whose house it is. Of course, in this case, it
is a you know, again more of a less a

(26:33):
public space for the gladiators that are assembled there. But
then you have to again question who decided that this
is what should be on the wall, and then what
is the intended meaning of that? Like what are they
trying to enforce or celebrate? Right? Is it valiant? Is
it funny? Is it honoring them? Is it scaring them?
Like what if they put that that image up at
work here, like would we take away from that? Or

(26:56):
it's like, oh, I don't know. Are they both podcasters?
So I don't I don't know what's happening. So again,
we're not gonna be able to get into anywhere close
to all the studies that discuss what daily life was
like in Pompeii or Herculaneum prior to the eruption of
Vesuvius and seventy nine CE. But but I do want
to discuss just a few quick ones, and these are
all relatively recent that shed some interesting light on everything.

(27:20):
So the first one I want to talk about is
a two thousand seventeen University of Southern Denmark study that
looked at the drinking water situation for the Romans of
Pompeii and they found that while yes, lead pipes which
they used would sometimes poison the water, of the issue
here is they would quickly calcify, so you would only
be dealing with high toxicity levels after they've been initially

(27:44):
installed or when you've had to make some repairs. H So,
so the lad would from time to time poison you,
but that the toxic chemical element antimony would have been
more of a factor it was with the lead, and
it was a more It was also more common in
the groundwater, as is typical of areas of volcanic activity.

(28:09):
So this would have, according to the researchers quote, lead
to daily problems with vomiting, diarrhea, and liver and kidney
dan So um, I mean, it's yeah, it's it's it's
it's terrific to imagine. But but but it does shed
a little a little more light, like, what does it
what does it mean to have amazing and really advanced

(28:30):
plumbing in uh in seventy nine CE? While it probably
meant being poisoned part of the time, especially in this area, Well,
it makes me think. So Pompei is basically a rich town.
It's kind of a resort region. A lot of successful
elites lived there poisoning themselves with diarrhea pipes. And it
reminds me of the raw water trend from a couple
of years. I remember that a lot of like rich

(28:52):
tech world kind of people decided they were going to
pay fifteen dollars a gallon for untreated drinking water full
of giardia. I haven't looked it up. Is that like,
is that still a thing or did that go away?
I hope it went away, but but I don't know.
We'll have to say, maybe we'll do an episode on that.
Maybe we'll get as a sponsor. Who knows. Um, Now,
a couple of other study. Both of these other studies,

(29:14):
I'm going to talk about our University of Cincinnati studies. UM, Okay,
there's a teams there that have have been working uh
in POMPEII, and both of them have really concerned, like
refuse what we can learn, not so much from the
the artistry that has survived or the human remains that
we can look at, but digging around in the trash,
looking in the sewer pipes and trying to solve the

(29:36):
riddle of you know what they ate, what they how
they lived and uh and you know how they disposed
of their trash. So there's two thousand and twelve University
of Cincinnati study looked at a question that has come
up in archaeology concerning trash uh in POMPEII. Why was
there so much garbage littered among the tombs? So one

(29:57):
theory was that we saw garbage dumb in tombs and
a grave sites that had been damaged by previous earthquakes
in the vicinity and therefore they had been abandoned. And
since this was an abandoned you know, grave area that
wasn't used anymore, people decided, what would just dump our
trash here? Right? Yester year's graveyard is today's dump. Yeah,

(30:17):
And we see shades of this in today's society. Right.
You have you have, say a house that's under repair
or it's you know, it's there's something there's nobody's living there.
One person dumped some garbage there, and then suddenly other
people were dumping old couches and what have you. And
there may be signs to try and prevent people from
doing it. But now this is a place where garbage accumulates. Yeah,

(30:39):
it's the RLO go three principle. You know, the Thanksgiving
day masaker. Okay, is this from Alice's restaurant? Yeah? Yeah, yeah,
Or they find where you find garbage somewhere you figure
that's where you put the other garbage on top. That's
that's that's part of the human experience. However, in this
particular study, Allison Emerson argued that the Romans of the

(31:00):
time they simply had a more casual approach to trash.
So she points out that there's no evidence for any
kind of a centrally managed system for garbage disposal, and
so life was probably just lived in close proximity to
the refuse that created, especially in the alleys, the streets, roads, cemeteries,

(31:21):
and tombs as well. Plus one thing that she drives
home is that tombs at the time, like these were
places you didn't want your tomb just today we think of, oh,
where do I want to be buried? Where do want
my remains to go? I wanted to be a nice,
quiet place that occasionally be visited by children or families,
but for the most part is just left to the
squirrels and the birds. Uh So, Emmerson argues that this

(31:44):
was not the Roman way you wanted to be remembered.
Uh So, your tomb needed to be seen. Your tomb
needed to be in a place that was going to
be highly trafficked. Uh And so these tombs would have
been high traffic spaces, which meant people would probably be
littering everywhere, that they would be leaving graffiti, etcetera. And
that was I mean, that was just part of it.

(32:04):
Like this is, you want to be seen, you want
to be remembered, you need to be in a living space.
Living space means graffiti and garbage. Oh yeah, this is
common in the ancient world. It makes me think of
the Chattelhoya situation, where people would literally bury the remains
of their ancestors in the floor of the house where
they lived. Yeah, you want to be near the living

(32:25):
That's that's part of the whole equation here. And they
would often keep body parts of that, like maybe keep
their head covered in plaster just on the shelf. Now,
another University of Cincinnati study came from and this one
looked specifically at the drains, cisterns, and the trains of
Pompeii to learn what people ate. And it's interesting we've

(32:47):
we've talked about how yes, there were definitely some very wealthy,
uh members of Roman society in the area. This was
a very rich part of the Roman Empire. At the
same time, there were, of course commoners, there were people
lower down all on the socioeconomic spectrum. And so in
looking at the the these remains, these vestiges of of

(33:08):
the of these diets you were, they were able to
find these clear socio economic divisions. So for instance, they
looked at one area and they found grains, or they
found the remnants of grains, fruits, nuts, olives, lintels, local
fish and chicken eggs, as well as minimal cuts of
more expensive meat and salted fish that had been imported

(33:29):
from Spain. And so this would have been you know, um,
this would have been the the the food of of
people lower down on the socioeconomic spectrum, the workers throughout
the regular people, yeah, eating you know, the staples, but
then occasionally having something a little more fancy. But then,
of course there were the richer areas. UH. And here

(33:50):
they found more imports from outside Italy, such as various shellfish,
sea urchins, and I love this detail, even delicacies that
included the butchered leg joint of a giraffe. And UH
Professor Steven Ellis points out that the bone quote represents
the height of exotic food and is underscored by the

(34:11):
fact that this is thought to be the only giraffe
bone ever recorded from an archaeological excavation in Roman Italy. So,
as far as we know, the only bone from a
giraffe ever found in Italy at the time, and it's
in it's underneath the restaurant. Now, some of you might
be wondering, Well, you might think to yourself, well, it

(34:34):
wouldn't even occur to me to eat a giraffe, which
is a giraffe taste like? Well, there's a wonderful article
you should read on this. This was published in New
York Magazine in februaryeen titled what does Giraffe Meat Taste Like?
By Adam Martin and basically, UH, Martin says that, you know,
descriptions are gonna vary, but on one hand, you'll see

(34:55):
it described as a very tender meat that is served
extra rare and it kind of melts in the mouth.
Health Other accounts have said that it's an intensely flavored,
lean meat like that of a tender horse, so like
horse meat, except not as tough. And another source said
that what that giraffe meat was tough and chewy but
also flavorful. Now I would have guessed like tough and gamey. Yeah,

(35:19):
I mean it's a wild animal. Yeah, this is not
like the kind of the breeds of cattle that are
bred for meat. Yeah. Yeah, I felt the same. And
of course a big part of this too is like
it's exotic, right, people, And this is the reason why
rich Romans would have potentially ordered this in a menu.
It's like, what do you have? What are your specials today? Well,
we have the leg of a giraffe, you know, exciting.

(35:40):
I've never had that before. I will try it and
then I'll have some cost on how I respond to
the taste exactly. Now, Martin does our drive home though
that okay, Yes, there are examples of modern giraffe meat
that have been obtained legally, uh, certain like from calling
efforts in certain places. But if you but don't use

(36:01):
this as license to go and try and obtain giraffe
meat because it's also giraffe meed is gonna bring with
it a high risk of being harvested unethically. So ultimately
it's not worth it because it's not it doesn't sound
like it's gonna taste great, and you don't want to
go around trying to order yourself up a leg of
giraffe for the barbecue. Uh, if you're gonna have to

(36:22):
contend with the fact that it might be obtained unethically.
I wonder how many pounds of meat you get out
of side of giraffe. I mean, it's it's quite a bit.
This Uh, this article by Martin goes into that a bit.
How sometimes they're poaching. There's there you'll see poaching of
giraffes because if you land a giraffe, it's worth like
it's as much meat as you would get from say,
sell several say in Paula or gazelles or something. Um.

(36:46):
That being said, it's going to be probably tough and weird. Yeah,
Now if you were one of those people thinking like
it would never occur to you to eat a giraffe.
I was thinking like that, this, this really indicates that
you do not have a Roman elitement tality. Because we've
discussed on the show several times. Uh, the Romans ate everything,
you know, like, oh, look at this interesting exotic animal.

(37:08):
Get the butcher knife. Uh. They were they were really like,
let's try to eat that culture. Uh. And apparently another
thing I was reading about is that they loved the
rare delicacy of flamingo tongue. I was reading about this
in Food of the Ancient World by Joan p Alcock,
where she writes, quote, flamingo's tongue was a great delicacy.

(37:30):
Emperor Vitellius in a d. Sixty nine presented the goddess
Minerva with a dish containing peacock brains, pike livers, pheasant brains,
and flamingo tongues, which he afterward ate, Which is great.
You know, you got to present it to Minerva and
then you know, chow down yourself because Minerva is not
going to eat it. Now. I feel I love two

(37:51):
minds on all of this, because on one hand, yes,
they're all these wonderfully really exotic sounding things with the
Romans eight. And yet if you had to decipher, like
which which menu of possibilities is more exotic and uh,
you know, it depends on on wider you know, geographic sourcing.
Is it this restaurant in Pompeii where the giraffe leg

(38:14):
was was served? Is it even the the available menu,
say it even any given time in Rome itself? Or
is it what you might get at the large whole
foods or armies or what's the restaurant with the colossal
menu cheesecake factory? You know, like like if you like
trace the origins of all those things and see it

(38:36):
as see cheesecake Factory as a restaurant of empire, is
it ultimately a larger empire by far than that of
the the even like the richest table setting in the
Roman Empire? Well, I mean you clearly drive home that
like some of our judgments about these kinds of things
are completely arbitrary, you know, about like what is an

(38:56):
exotic extravagant food and what is just normal food? And
the Roman poet Marshall was actually he lamented the idea
of eating flamingo tongues. I don't know why exactly. It's
it's what's so bad about flamingo tongues compared to the
other stuff. But he was generally attacking, you know, like, uh,
certain Roman elites as decadent, you know, decadent epicureans or whatever.

(39:19):
But there's this couplet that Marshall wrote that I found
translated in a book called The Flamingo Smile by Stephen
Jay Gould, And so Marshall wrote, my red wing gives
me my name, but epicures regard my tongue is tasty,
but what if my tongue could sing? Well? I think
it sounds like what he's getting at is is a
basic truth. The flamingo is a beautiful animal that we

(39:41):
love to look at. It is it is different from
other varieties of bird that we might behold. And and
that's why generally you go to a zoo, what's the
first thing you see? Flamingos there? Like this the standard
greeters at. It's so many different zoological parks. I mean,
flamingos are weird. They are beautiful, like I the way
they eat with their heads upside down, you know. In

(40:03):
this book, Gould goes on to write about the about
how the flamingos tongue has special texture and taste because
of its unique evolutionary function that unlike most birds, flamingos
are actually filter feeders. They're more like billen whales, and
they dip their heads into the water turned down too,
and they open up their mouths and they've got these little, uh,

(40:25):
these hair like things called lamlay. And then the tongue here,
the part that the emperor would eat. It serves as
a kind of pump to like rapidly suck water in
and out of the mouth through the filters. And this
pulls in all the you know, weird little bits and
life forms that the flamingos ultimately survived based on. But
that it's this strange morphology that apparently made it so

(40:47):
delicious to uh, to Roman epicures like Vitelius. Well, you
know it's I guess it's possible it had a special
taste or special texture, uh that that made people want
to eat it. But I you at the impression, it's
mostly like here is a unique animal. Uh, serve it
to me. Well, I just want to say, as an addendum,

(41:08):
Vitelius did not last long. He he was only emperor
for less than a year. Uh. He lost a power
struggle to Vespasian, was dragged out of hiding by a
mob of his enemies and beheaded in the streets of Rome.
And uh, I attached a picture for you to look at.
I don't know if you've seen this artwork, but it's
called Vitelius dragged through the streets of Rome by the
Populace by George Rosia Gross. He looks like he's having

(41:30):
a bad day. Yeah, yeah, that is a yeah, that's that.
That is a bad day for sure. But maybe he
should have served giraffe to Minerva instead and his luck
could have changed. Well, I think even today it would
probably be just political death for most politicians to to
suddenly publicly eat the tongue of a of a flamingo,
or or eat a big chunk of giraffes at the

(41:50):
Iowa State Fair eating fried flamingo tongue on a stick. Yeah,
I don't know. Well, okay, and now I'm second guessing myself.
But all right, on that lovely note, we will take
one more break, but when we come back, we will
return more specifically two volcanoes. Alright, we're back, So we

(42:11):
mentioned earlier. How the slopes of Vesuvius, you know, once
more are home to vineyards and and uh in human populations.
The area around Vesuvius is highly urbanized today, but authorities
have established a red zone a Zona Rosa, to be
evacuated if signs indicate that an eruption is likely Sona rosa.

(42:32):
That sounds so nice, yeah, I mean, or or it
sounds like like a horror movie, doesn't it like Origento
kind of cold, be a jello like Lazona Rosa. Yeah. Now,
the general consensus is that if the signs were to
prevent themselves, we'd have about two weeks notice on an eruption.
But there are a lot has been written about, like

(42:54):
the the actual preparedness in place for an event like this.
So Lee Marshall wrote about this topic in a September
seen article for The Telegraph, pointing out that again at
the time, seven hundred thousand people lived in this red
zone of Vesuvius, and while there there was a finalized

(43:16):
evacuation plan and it was still in the process of
coming online in six uh. But according to to one
Francisco Emilio Barelli Regional Council for the Green Party, quoted
in a November two thousand nineteen euronews dot com article
exercises regarding evacuation, we're no longer being carried out. And

(43:39):
in that article, Filipo Pultronieri pointed out that other urban
areas near volcanic areas are also highlighted for insufficient planning,
namely the island vacation destination of Iscia and UH and
also of Flagrian Fields, which is another another area in
that region that is known for its volcanic activity. Lee Marshall,

(44:02):
writing at the time, pointed out quote the notorious ss
TO six S eight dual carriageway between Naples and the
Sarentine Peninsula, design not only to relieve congestion but also
provide an escape route from the volcano, is still not complete.
Construction of the road started incredibly in the eighties. So
in that article, Marshall contended that the locals were more

(44:23):
inclined to take solace in religious faith than in emergency planning. Now,
this was obviously written a few years ago, and I
was looking around trying to find any confirmation that ss
TO has actually been completed and is, you know, in operation.
I couldn't find any articles about it. Uh some of
them were, you know, in Italian somewhere translated into English.

(44:44):
So if we have any Italian or Italian speaking Italian
reading listeners out there who want to set the record straight, uh,
we would love to hear from you. But based on
I was looking around, like Google Maps. If you look
a Google Map inquiry for a route between Naples and
the Sarentine Peninsula, it initially only provides a route via
SS three, sixty six and forty five which travels right

(45:06):
between the ocean and the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. So like,
not a good place to be. So that sounds like
a roughly herculaneum zone. Yeah yeah, like and like, yeah,
you don't want to be between Vesuvius and the ocean. Yeah,
this is this is definitely in the red zone. Um.
But the more I, when I look closely, it looked
like you could actually it would route you on s

(45:26):
S two if you dragged the route around with your
mouse cursor. So I personally cannot tell to what degree
like that is now a valid option to deal with
the evacuation. Okay, we have had an official Google Maps
fail getting out, but but to whatever degree you know,
this is finally in place etcetera. Like what I'm trying

(45:48):
to to drive home from those articles that I that
I cited there is that you know, we still live,
We still have people living in high concentration in areas
near active volcanoes. And yes, even with modern science, we
may have again two weeks notice on a pending eruption,
but that's two weeks to sometimes move a very large

(46:10):
number of people out of the danger zone. It, I mean,
it makes you start to wonder more broadly about like
what are the kinds of risks that human settlements should
be tolerant of, because it's clear, you know, they're all
kinds of places where there are there are different risks
of natural disasters that are going to come with different severity,
different frequency. I mean, I don't know how exactly you

(46:33):
compare say like densely populated areas around a volcano that
you know that sometimes will erupt, hasn't had a majorly
destructive eruption, and while but you know probably is at
some point in the indeterminate future going to erupt again. Uh,
and you know that would be massively destructive versus I
don't know, like having civilizations in like a tornado zone

(46:55):
where each you know each tornado is that tornadoes are
going to be more regular, They're gonna happen every year.
Each one is less destructive than a volcanic eruption. But
they're just coming in these constant waves, and you just
hope one doesn't come near your house. Yeah, and then
you have to what degree are you leaning on, um,
emergency preparation or even again religious faith to deal with

(47:17):
that probability? Yeah, I guess I just mean I don't
know how to do the math on you know, how
to compare those types of risks. Well, I mean, you know,
a big one, of course, is residing in coastal regions
that are gonna be affected by hurricanes, you know, and
in some cases the I've read that the best advice
is like, well, if your home is destroyed, like do
not rebuild it. You need to move further inland. Um.

(47:41):
So you know there there's a version of this for
for various different environments around the world. I mean, even
places where the risk is not as notably catastrophic. If
it's just say, and a region that is highly susceptible
to the ravages of drought, you know, uh, it doesn't
look is good on a painting the drought, uh, you know,

(48:04):
reaking habit compared to that of a volcano. But still
it can be extremely deadly, and it has proven deadly
many times in the past. So Vesuvius has been described
as the most densely populated area of active volcanism in
the world. But here are a few others of note. Um.
One is Cotapaxi, Ecuador, which is actually a volcano I

(48:25):
hope to see in the in the not too distant future.
Uh three hundred thousand people. I've also seen it listed
his three hundred twenty five thousand live relatively closely nearby.
A last eruption was and it was mostly steam. But
it is an area of a frequent discussion with these
and but on top of that, it is also supposed

(48:46):
to be just a very beautiful location and fun fact,
Alexander von Humboldt attempted to climbate in eighteen o two. Okay,
I must uh that must be described in that book
about him. I like what I recommend of this in
our summer reading many years ago, The Invention of Nature
by Andrea Wolf fantastic book about Alexander von Humboldt. If

(49:07):
if you haven't read it, you should all right, here's
another one, Katla, Iceland. This is near the town of
the Vic and it last erupted in nineteen eighteen. Katla
is even larger than e Figilogical, which disrupted European flights
when it erupted in So I've been to the town
of Vic. I stayed in a hotel near Vick one time,

(49:29):
and I remember having a conversation with the guy. The
hotel I think was basically this guy's house and it's
sort of been expanded out to have hotel rooms in it. Uh,
And I remember talking to this guy who ran the place,
and he was like showing us a map of the
area on the wall and just sort of talking about like,
you know how, yeah, here's what happened the last time
the volcano erupted, and it will erupt again at some point.

(49:53):
I don't know, it was strange. I mean, he he
must have just had a different attitude about this different
emotional relationship to the idea of his home being destroyed
by a volcano, because he didn't seem all that concerned
about it. He was just sort of matter of factly
explaining that at some point there will be a geological
event that will completely destroy his home. And uh, I

(50:14):
don't know if his matter of factness was just something
about this guy in particular, if more people would seem
more upset by the idea, or if like, living in
a place like that kind of forces you to make
peace with it in a way that I don't know,
you're just like, yeah, it will happen at some point, Yeah, yeah,
I mean probably a little bit of both, right. Yeah.
A few other places of note. There's uh uh Sakurajima, Japan,

(50:37):
near the city of Kegoshima. That's a six hundred thousand people.
There's Mount Etna that we mentioned earlier. Then there's also Papocotta, Petal, Mexico,
and this is near Mexico City itself. And of course
one of the big concerns with all these is not
you know, it's not necessarily it's not only who are
in the danger zone, but then having to deal with
people from the danger zone, refugee crisis, et cetera. Now

(51:01):
you might be wondering, you know, why do we find
so many people living near some of these volcanoes. So
we've already touched, you know, on the the advantages of
say the volcanic soil and all and the geological advantages
to some of these locations. And you know, again on
one levels, just part of the human experience, part of
living on a volatile planet where various regions offer threats

(51:22):
like hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquake drouts, blizzards and more. Um. According
to the U S Geological Survey, not counting ocean floor volcanoes,
which are is where we find most of them, UH,
there are fifteen hundred potentially active volcanoes worldwide, five hundred
of which have erupted during historical time. Some of these

(51:42):
are more remote and perhaps only threatened a limited number
of people, such as say the two hundred people who
live on the remote Japanese island of Agoshima in the
Philippine Sea. It would this particular volcano last erupted in
the eighteenth century, killing half the population, and today uh
people live inside the volcanic crater depending on its geothermal power.

(52:06):
And you can you should look up a picture of this.
It's spelled Ao g A s h I m A,
and they had some of these images. You can you
see the whole volcanic island, and you can pinpoint um.
You know, the signs of human habitation within the crater.
And again it's just kind of a reminder of what
it means to be a human in uh, you know,

(52:27):
on a planet that is subject to to to upheaval
like this. And then of course they're the Hawaiian islands,
which are of course products of volcanic activity. The islands
themselves were created by eruptions, and then ideal bays and
harbors or you know, often the remnants of the calderas
with Vesuvius. The region is beautiful and economically valuable because
of the volcanic formation of the surrounding region. And on

(52:49):
top of that, the volcanic soil, like we mentioned in
the first episode, rich ideal for orchards and vineyards, and
it's a vacation destination as well. But isn't like the
most active volcano in the world old in Hawaii. Yeah,
Kilauea on the Big Island is is quite active. Yeah,
and uh, and it's it's really it's worth looking at
because there's a there's a wonderful two eighteen New York

(53:10):
Times article by Simon Romero titled Hawaii's volcano country, where
land is cheap and the living is risky. And I
thought this, this is really telling to again getting that
question of why do people live in close proximity to
U volcanoes? Sometimes um so in this particular situation. Obviously,
Hawaii is beautiful. I love Hawaii. I have when I've visited.

(53:34):
I've been fortunate to visit a few times, and uh
and I always love it. I never want to leave
when I am there. But here's the thing. There's limited
land there, and the way that land is used is
oftentimes controversial. On top of this, there's a severe housing
shortage and very little affordable property and uh, you know,
Ramero writes that the economic factors alone have led some

(53:57):
on the Big Island to live ever closer to the
wrath of this, this beautiful but active volcano. In this article,
which I do recommend reading in full, the author speaks
with one uh, an individual by the name of Jaris
dreaming um musician. So that's thus the colorful name uh.
And he's an individual who purchased some one hundred acres

(54:18):
of land for a hundred thousand dollars. And the reason
it was so cheap was because it's very close proximity
to active lava flows. So not just the possibility of
volcanic activity, but the the visual like the clear of
volcanic activity of moving lava um. Another example, I just sorry,

(54:38):
I just had a question. How does real estate law
deal with lava flows that like change the outlines of land?
That's that's a great question. Yeah. Yeah, So like if
you say, if you own land and then it gets
paved over by lava flows, I assume you still own
I don't know how you measure it, like afly the

(55:00):
same land with the same borders. What about if so
lava flows create new land going out into the ocean
where it was previously, Like who gets that land? I
don't know, that's a that's a good question. I'm thinking
I'm imagining that in most of the situations that we'd
be able to look at, it would not be like
an individual's land. I don't know that would it be

(55:21):
whoever owns the shoreline that it extends from. I guess.
But then also I'm I'm I'm pretty sure that would
be off limits anyway, Like you wouldn't be able to
They wouldn't let you even try to build an active
lava um for instance. An example that Romero brings up
in this particular article is that a nine eruption buried

(55:42):
a hundred homes in Kalapana in uh In, Hawaii on
the Big Island, and today you'll find dozens of not
to code homes that have been built atop the same
flow field. So it's I mean, you know, this is
the place was buried. Now there is new land there,
and you know, aparently nobody's supposed to officially be living there,
but there's available land there in a place where available

(56:05):
land is scarce, so of course people are going to
move there despite the risks. I mean, it's kind of
like I think about haunted houses a lot, especially when
when topics of like home values come up and and
so forth, in part because I find those topics of
dreary and depressing and I want to retreat into fantasy.
But also I'm like, I would put up with a
ghost if you know, if it meant uh, you know,

(56:27):
lower lower mortgage payment and whatnot. I maybe I would
even invent the idea of a ghost if it resulted
in that, you know, um, so oh yeah, can you
get a discount that way? Like call up your bank
and say, like, nobody told me this house was haunted.
I want to I want to reduce my mortgage. Yeah.
I mean, plus the other side, the other way of
looking at it is that you know, a ghost is

(56:48):
much safer than an act of lava flow in your backyard,
So I would be all for it. You know what
this makes me think is we could do a whole
other episode sometime on the theology of volcanic eruptions. Oh
for sure, Yeah, yeah, yeah, the various divine interpretations of
the eruptions, the mythological reasons given for the eruptions, that

(57:09):
would be cool to get into. Yeah. We didn't even
really touch that, didn't. I think the most we did
was discussing how there were stories of the rumblings of
Vesuvius being tied to tales or accules fighting monsters or
giants in the earth. Yeah. Probably. I think that has
something to do with the naming of Herculaneum. Yeah, like
the idea that it was founded by hercules. Yeah, and
of course in uh in the culture of Hawaii you

(57:31):
find the tales of of Pale the volcano deity. So yeah,
there there would be a lot of rich territory to
discuss there. So maybe we'll return. If everybody's into the
topic of volcanoes. There's a lot more to discuss. There's
a like. One area I'd like to come back to
potentially would be to discuss volcanic winter, discussed the year
without summer. Yes, that would be uh, I think a

(57:54):
good one to return to. We'll be back in the meantime,
just like the lava flow will be back. Yes, they will.
It's an active world. Uh. In the meantime, we would
love to hear from any of you, especially if you
out there have if you live or have lived in
an area of volcanic activity, Uh, definitely right in and
let us know what it's like. If you have, if

(58:16):
you can answer our questions about the highways surrounding vesuvious,
we'd like to hear from you as well. Have you
visited some of these places, We'd we'd love to hear
from you about that as well. Uh. In the meantime,
also check out our other episodes. You'll find them wherever
you get podcasts, wherever that happens to be. Just make
sure you rate and review, give us some stars, subscribe,

(58:38):
tell a few friends, and if you go to stuffable
your mind dot com that should redirect you to the
I heart listing for the show. Huge thanks as always
to our excellent audio producer, Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for
the future, just to say hello, you can email us
at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

(59:06):
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