April 29, 2014 • 29 mins
The Cuckoo Mafia: Sure, humans have their organized crime, but what about the Earth's other residents? Are their animal mafias? How does "crime" even work outside the confines of human culture? Find out in this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas.
I really thought you were going to go for a nickname.
There you something you're throwing up? Cool on topic. Nickname,
I can really think a nacking. It's really Dumpsy Douglas,
(00:25):
may Bagel Oranges Douglas. Yeah, he would be your your
mafia names. You're you're you're a monster personas. Yeah, Julie
bat in the corner, Douglas, bat in the corner baseball back.
I was thinking an actual bat since we just did
an episode on Vampire Back. Oh no, no, no, it's
like I got a bat in the corner. This this
guy might be rabbit. I'll just unleash ing at you
(00:47):
any moment you have to go get a raby shot
and everything going from the jugula. Yeah, all right, Or
maybe we can just call me Joe Pesci, Joe Phi okay,
forever associated with movie. That's right, very very typecast that man. Yeah. So,
if you haven't guessed already or bothered to read the
title of podcasts, we are of course talking about the
(01:10):
cuckoo mafia. We're talking about the animal mafia. We're talking
a little bit about the the human mafia as well,
and in the various forms one encounters it. Yeah, because
you do if you actually take this system, this organized system,
when you begin to really peel back the layers you
can see in all different places in society, right, Yeah,
you really begin to see mafia organized crime. And is
(01:33):
not this uh bunch of stereotypical looking guys. Uh, you know,
Joe Pesci's and uh and and their their ilk standing
in the corner and doing very stereotypical things. You see
it as kind of an economic model that is spread
not only through all human culture, but even into the
animal world. Well, I was gonna say, like even in
(01:54):
our break room, you have Jonathan Strickland there, who you know,
you gotta put money in a certain place in the
the break room right to get access to the coffee. Coffee, right,
or there's no more coffee. And that's just the way
it is, right if you want coffee supply fresh and
you want it every day, and then Stricklin gets his payment, right,
(02:14):
Or the way that when we bring our yogurts and
we always have to bring in that one extra yogurt
because one Christian conger insists on having quote just enough
to wetter beak otherwise, otherwise all the yogurt winds up
on the floor, all of it, and it's it's it's
discussing in it and it it really takes to that
because like that's delicious yogurt and it all went to waste.
(02:35):
And why because I wasn't willing to put up with
just a little yogurt loss in my diet each week.
That's right. Everybody loses the yogurt if you do not
supply it for Kristen alright, So we are not trying
to glorify the mafia, which is actually if you think
about mafia, that is a huge umbrella term under which
many different organizations from different cultures around the world huddle underneath.
(02:56):
And we tend to think of the Godfather and then
this quaint group of men just playing checkers and their undershirts. Um.
But worldwide we'd see mafia doing different types of damage
in the way of human trafficking, legal wildlife trading, uh
drugs of course, to just to name a few. So
I want to put that out there. This is not
glorifying the mafia, but we just wanted to kind of
(03:18):
cover how they work in the world, so that we
have a better understanding of how animals may be doing
the same sort of strategies and tactics at the mafia
is indeed, Yeah, And I should add I love the
Guy Father movies. Those are some great films, and there
are a few other organized crime pieces here and there
that I've really enjoyed over the years. But I find
more and more I just cannot watch films or get
(03:40):
involved in in media that is about those sort of
stereotypical gangster character is one of the reasons I never
even could manage to watch The Sopranos, even though I
know The Sopranos is supposed to be brilliant. I know,
I know, but at the at heart, it's about these, uh,
these these criminal guys that I've seen are you know,
I'm sure less um artistically solid takes on them so
(04:02):
many times before, it's like I just don't have any
more room for it, Like I'm not convinced there's anything
new that I can gain from characters that are even
partially cast from this mold. All right, let's talk about
this mold. Because when we talk about in the mafe,
we are essentially talking about Kosa nostra, which is roughly
translated as our thing, which is kind of this closed
(04:23):
circuit within a criminal syndicate. And we talked about these
criminal syndicates we're really talking about, at least in this
old usage of that term um in southern Italy Sicily,
these different neighborhoods in which certain families lorded over those communities.
And I thought this was really interesting. I found this
(04:43):
little tidbit of John Gotti talking to some of his
subordinates about Kosa nostra and um. This was right before
he got ratted out by a bunch of people. And
he says, this is going to die. Okay, I'm gonna
quit doing that being an hour from now, or be
it tonight or a hundred years from now, when I'm
in jail. It's gonna be a cost some guys, some
(05:06):
people downstairs. He's referring to the nightclub below. Now, who
I know who's babe, stomach is rotten. I know who
stomach ain't rotten. You could I could smell it the
way a dog senses when a guy's got fear. Okay,
that's not just for local color to give you an
idea of what the mafia sounds like, because everybody probably
already knows that. Um, but I thought that that conversation,
(05:28):
just that little excerpts spoke volumes about the environment of
fear and implied violence that would come to those who
crossed the code. Yeah. There you see, um, the beginnings
of a system that's keeping everybody in check because it's hard.
It is a parasitic relationship. It is a parasite feeding
(05:50):
up on the host. But on top of that, we
have this layer of fear and intimidation, which and it
comes down to an economic model. I mean, did just
think of just your average mafia scenario from a thousand movies, right,
some guys running a shop and some uh you know
individual walks in, perhaps with a heavy behind him, and says, hey,
you've got a nice shop. Here. Would be a pity
(06:10):
if something happened to it. I can prevent things, bad
things from happening to it, if you give me X
amount of dollars, you know, per per month. So it
comes down to, all right, which if I'm gonna expend,
I'm gonna have to waste some energy, expend some energy
to pay this man, all right, so we we will
put how much we stack that money up on the counter.
(06:31):
But then if I were to resist this individual, I
would have to expend even more energy, right, I would
have to somehow fight him back physically or align with
those who would and and then that comes with inherent risks.
So it comes down to just an economic decision which
is easier and which entails less risk. And the interesting
thing about this is that within this code, this system,
(06:53):
there's a kind of justice that is doled out, particularly
if you are in the mafia landscape, right and you're
one of the enforcers. If the person doesn't pay up,
there's a justice. You know, you're not your restaurant's not
going to run very well pretty soon. Maybe your brother
won't get that promotion. You know, there are things that
benefit the person who's paying, not just um, just the
(07:16):
maintenance of their restaurant, but perhaps there's social stature right
and there, and I've been often there is some degree
of protection there, certainly from other nefarious individuals. Like you're
probably not going to be paying to protection rackets to
two different parasitic mafia dudes. You're gonna be paying one dude,
and that dude is going to keep you have to
(07:36):
dude off your back because you are now part of
his turf. So that's a great point. That's safety elements.
So that kind of comes down to this idea of
what is altruism and we should probably do another episode
UM that is completely dedicated to altruism because it's very interesting. UM.
But there's this idea of altruistic punishment versus selfish on
(07:58):
selfish punishment, which is what the mafia does write that
selfish unselfish and according to Princeton University and University of
Arizona researchers, society's rule against selfishness or rules rather are
rooted in the very exploitation that they condemn. And it
may be that the reason that some of the selfish
unselfish UM justice punishment comes down the pike is because
(08:24):
it's a resources issue. At the end of the day,
it's a little bit easier to seed control to a
couple of really influential UM peddlers out there in the
community and say rather than really be engaged civically and
try to meet out justice in a way that is
thoughtful and community minded. Yeah, because on one hand, with
(08:46):
the altruistic punishment model. You have the idea of you know,
like the wise, benevolent mayor of the town saying, oh, well,
if you break the rules, they're gonna be there. There's
gonna be a cost, or you know you're gonna you know,
you're gonna wind up in the jail cell. You're gonna
wind up with a with a fine, Are you gonna
be expelled? What have you? And then on the on
the selfish on selfish side of the the word, agin the
mafia punishment, that is one guy saying, hey, these people
(09:09):
on my turf, you can't mess with them, that's what
I do. You can't exploit them because I am exploiting
them to the degree that I can get away with it. Yeah,
And the system of altruism was actually reported in the
journal Evolution. And what they did is they they took
a simulation model that gauged tow community with Stanza system
(09:29):
built on altruistic punishment or selfish on selfish punishment, and
they did they found that that um, that kind of
altruistic punishment which the community comes together and is very
civic minded, does demand a lot of resources. And that
is perhaps why systems like the mafia tend to do
really well because as a result, there is a lower
(09:52):
instance of crime overall in that community against citizens. So
you may say, oh, hey, a couple of people become
fat cats and they're awful and they do some terrible things,
but as a whole, the community is protected. Yes. And
what was what's really fascinating about this, uh, this Princeton
University University at Arizona study, was how they draw in
(10:13):
that idea that not only does the simpler economic model
again is that is the fat cat model, the mafia
model as opposed to the altruistic ruler model, but their
idea that we get that that more altruistic version of
civilization and society emerges from the fat cat model. It
evolves over time. And you really see this if you
(10:34):
sort of squint your eyes and really think about the
systems of power in the world, Like, what is the
difference between the mafia boss who keeps things under wrap
but is getting plenty on the side, is living very
comfortable at the top. What is the difference between that dude,
that Joe Pesci sort of type cast character and a government.
What's the difference between that dude and a corporation what's
(10:56):
the difference between that dude and just a you know,
you're average local, nice guy employer, Like there are elements
of the same model everywhere you look. Well, yeah, and
talk about influence peddlers and fat cats if you're talking
about lobbyists. And I'm not saying that all lobbyists are
working outside of the margins, but we have a couple
of cases under our belt that we can point to
lobbyists having tremendous wealth and power and essentially some people,
(11:20):
looking at it this way, buying politicians, uh literally buying
them by offering them money or goods um or maybe
just even their influences so great that they have that
politician in their pocket. Now, let's get out of the
mafia model for a moment, and let's get into a
more medieval model, which actually, yeah, I mean this, this
(11:41):
predates the mafia right and medieval Knights basically a military
order created in nine to protect Christian pilgrims visiting Jerusalem.
I'm talking about the Knights Templar. They branched out over
time in Western Europe and they created a network of
banks that in the abled religious pilgrims to deposit assets
(12:03):
in their home countries and then withdrawal of the funds
in the Holy Land. Right, so what do you have
over time? You have the Nights Templar gaining huge amounts
of financial resources, and we still have that protection element
in there. So all of a sudden the threat becomes
and sometimes it's not even the threat is so pervasive
(12:24):
they don't have to say it. If you don't pay up,
if you don't give it to the Knights Templar, perhaps
something bad will befall you. It's in the Nights Templars
model is an interesting to want to look at too,
because of course the Knights Templars did reach that point
we're talking about, at what point do I say it's
actually worth the effort to break down this organization, And
that eventually occurred there would be Catholic Church, of course,
(12:45):
eradicated the Templars after a while. So and you can
definitely make the argument that this is a case of
one fat cat looking over the other fact at and
unim like, you know what used to be a smaller
cat in our feral community, but now you're a little
too big, a little too powerful, and uh and uh,
and we're gonna see that you go away and I
don't want to put it all on the the Catholic Church.
(13:07):
The King of France also played a substantial role in
that scenario as well. But that does go back to
um that mathematical model in which we're talking about two people,
those two fat cats that are trying to cancel each
other out and and say, at the end of the day,
their coda rules. Yeah, because everybody can't be a fat cat,
and you can only have so many parasites living off
(13:28):
the host. Uh and and so there's there's a careful
balance that has to be maintained. And again, you can
look to governmental models, you can look to big business,
and you see very similar things. There can only be
so many dominant players in the particular commercial market, and
what did they do that. There's a certain amount of
competition they will tolerate, and then there are certain certain
types of competition that they will readily feast upon or destroy.
(13:53):
All Right, we're gonna take a quick break, and when
we get back, we're gonna talk about Kuka birds, gonna
talk about their spaghetti dinners in their back room. All right,
we're back. Before we start talking about our fine feathered friends,
let's talk about tree wasps and cancer cells because they
(14:13):
do actually have something to do with this whole mafio.
So this system, indeed, we now wasps engage in UH
and some of the other practices. We're going to discuss
UH shortly. But tree wasps. UH haven't observed that police
hives to make sure that no member other than the
queen lays eggs. And the same police, though, will often
lay illicit eggs themselves. So that's the case where it's
(14:36):
my job to lay down the law. But since I'm
the one laying down the law, I'm the one that
can bend it a bit, indeed, and so it's kind
of interesting. I'll just slip in a couple of my eggs.
That's all right. I'm the influence peddler here exactly. And
then in terms of cancer cells, we know that mutations
and a cell's own DNA initiate the changes that put
(14:56):
it on a really destructive path. But it's a lot
more or nuanced than that, because the micro environment of
a tumor acts like a kind of co conspirator. And
we won't get way into this because we could dedicate
entire podcast to this, but essentially, what you see our
cancer cells that will prevent other tumors from forming, as
if to say, no, no, no, this is my my
(15:16):
tumor corner here, which you know, essentially at the same
time as kind of a good things. There's no more
tumors that are forming. But you see this again in
nature and you see it best and birds ah yes,
And that of course is why we call this episode
the Cuckoo Mafia, because we see some really fascinating birds
(15:37):
that are involved in brood paraticism also known as egg
dumping now egg dumping. When you just say that, it
brings to mind like just this idea of of a
bird that I know what to do with his eggs,
just like throwing them off a cliff or something. But
that's not not what's going on here. This is the
idea that that on one hand, you have the birds
that are are are laying their heads, they're raising their young,
(16:00):
uh and it's a nice, beautiful, wonderful thing that you
would see in a child's book about nature. And then
you have those other birds. Those birds don't care. They
don't want to look after that egg and raise that
that chick and and vomit food into its mouth. They
have other things to do. They have a different set
of values, but they have a genetic mission. Like all organisms,
they need their offspring to survive. So they've developed this
(16:23):
practice of dumping eggs on these other bird nests, on
these other more stable environments, with the intention that the
egg will hatch and the chick will be raised in
that environment. And ha ha ha on that that poor
bird in the nest, right, And we see this in
sea birds. But the thing about seabirds is that they
(16:43):
will deposit their eggs and then take off, and then
they won't know whether or not this actually came to
fruition there. They're young, broad right, and in some cases,
if the ag hatches, it's likely going to be eaten
by the very family that they were dumped upon. It's
not a good model, really, And they have to find
eggs that are species that are somewhat similar to them
(17:04):
so that the egg can maybe squeak in there and
go unnoticed at least for a while, right, Because eggs,
if you just looking at chicken eggs in the fridge,
you know, just the white kind that come from here supermarket.
You may miss out on this. But there is a
lot of difference among all the different types of bird
eggs out there. There's different colors, different patterns, and so
(17:24):
a bird is going to be able to tell if hey,
I I lay brown eggs and there is a blue
speckled one in here. Something is off. Somebody's trying to
pull one over on me, It's true. And so we
have birds that will do the sort of egg dumping,
but they're going to take these mafia like tactics and
ensure that that egg will be taken care of, that
it gets protected, and it does that vise of the
(17:47):
the own protection or destruction that it offers. Right. One
of the best examples of this, of course, is the
the cowbird. There are two species of cowbird. You'll find
both in North America, and they've they've managed to spread
out even more from their original territory due to the
way that we we treat our land as a as
a human species. But what's remarkable here is that they
(18:07):
are very much like that that scenario we're talking about earlier. Hey,
nice story, would it would be a pity if something
happened to it? And then if you don't pay up,
what happens, Well, suddenly the front window to your store
is broken, your your merchandise is thrown out in the street,
maybe something catches on fire. There's retribution if you do
not obey the laws. Now, these earlier models that these
(18:28):
these sea birds we're talking about, there's no retribution. They're
just they're just taking a risk. Maybe maybe they'll raise it,
maybe they won't. Maybe it'll hatch and the young, young
one will will be able to squirm away before it's
it's pecked off as as an interloper. But with a cowbird, uh,
there is retribution. Now this used to be just more
of a theory than anything. Believe. The original theory, the
(18:50):
mafia theory of the cowbird, came from evolutionary biologists uh
Amas Xavi and back in seventy nine. But eventually scientists
put all this to the test. That's right. Jeff Hoover
at the Illinois Natural History Survey in Champagne, Illinois, provided
artificial nests for one and eighty pair of profonetary warblers
(19:12):
and then waited for the cowbirds to cuckle them to
deposit their eggs. Then he selectively removed the cowbird eggs.
So what happened pretty soon the cowbirds swooped in, they retaliated,
They returned to the nest to eat or destroy the
remaining warbler eggs. And what's more, warblers that had laid
(19:32):
too early for the cowbirds to cuckle them, they also
suffered retrobration to their nests also got turned over and destroyed,
and the cowbirds would routinely eat or trash these more
developed eggs to force the warblers to rebuild their next
elsewhere and start over again and hopefully have it in
sync when with the cowbirds could swoop in and deposit
(19:55):
an egg. So, yeah, they came in and just totally
devastated things. They really drove home and we're again we're
gonna anthromorphize a little to layer that mafia understanding of
this on the behavior, but they really come in tear
everything up, murder with the strong message, Hey, do you
want to survive in this world? If you want to
carry out the genetic mission of passing on your own
(20:17):
genetic material and saying that your children exist into the
next generation generation behind it, the only way you're gonna
do it is by playing along with this little scheme
of ours. You're gonna have to accept it to a
agree because the cost is way too high for you
to pay. Yeah, and to put numbers behind that cost.
Hever says that, um, I get that this is what
you just described as an evolutionary state of acceptance, and
(20:41):
that the cost is that on average, the host birds
will raise three of their own chicks when they also
support a cowbird chick. Yet they raised just one of
their own if a cowbird egg has been rejected. And
I like this idea of it's an evolutionary state of acceptance,
like I gotta, I gotta accept this because of terms,
it's an offer I can't refuse. Yeah, and you can
(21:03):
extrapolate that to to human culture as well, that there's
sort of this built in mathematical reason for why we
will tolerate a certain amount of of corruption, a certain
amount of of criminal activity, in a certain amount of
just general awfulness on the part of people's and organizations
that rule over our world. Yeah. And speaking of mathematical models,
(21:26):
this mafia hypothesis, which had been really controversial, was finally
borne out uh Maria Abou Chakra, Arnie Charleston, and Christigian
hill Bay. They modeled this hypothesis with cuckoopers who were
ravaging I think they are magpie birds, and they found
that this theory does explain the behavior as long as
two conditions are met, one that the cuckoos visit the
(21:49):
same nest repeatedly, into that the host birds are capable
of learning. That's pretty important, right, because they also point
out that they never establish an equilibrium here. So they
are regular cycles, uh, in terms of the frequency of
mafia such as we're talking about with retribution and non
mafia no retribution parasites and host and the acceptance of
the egg. So it's so you will have periods where
(22:11):
it's kind of like did you ever read Fwick The
Big Hearted Moose by by Dr Seuss's fabulous story Moose
has antlers. He lets one animal live in his antlers,
then another one's living there, and then there are more
and more animals living in his antlers until he finally
says enough is enough and he takes the antlers off
and he's no longer supporting all of these freeloaders. So
you kind of so inevitably you see this this cycle,
(22:33):
like how is it builds up? How much criminal behavior
is a species going to accept before they retaliate? And
then it gets back down? And then which ones are
going to actually um come in and destroy your stuff
if you throw the parasites out. So it's the the
relationship has to continually um find itself. Yeah, it's interesting
(22:53):
because um there is as you say, there's no equilibrium
here and um when you see the host behavior here,
it's either one of two things. Conditionally they'll accept an
egg or completely unconditionally, And that conditionally only occurs when
there is not a large population of um, the parasitic birds,
the cuckoo parasitic birds exhibiting that mafia behavior. So in
(23:17):
other words, they tend to be the majority. But what
happens is that the pendulum begins to swing back the
other way, because then the parasitic birds go, hey, we
need to start tipping over some nust here. Let them know.
And as soon as they become the majority the birds
that are exhibiting that mafia tendency, then all of a
sudden you have absolutely, like unconditionally of course drop her
(23:40):
egg to do it. I'd love to host them great.
And why this is so important is that this means
that the cowbirds they don't have to specialize uh, their
their eggs. They don't have to change any of the
dynamics and try to you know, fit in with other species.
They don't have to worry about that that egg just
(24:02):
looking completely out of place, because it does. Because the
message is like, hey, if you know it's it's you know,
we're not trying to be a subtle here. You know,
if you if you don't pay me money, I'm going
to break your shop. If you don't raise this egg,
which looks sotly different from the other eggs, I'm gonna
come in and tear up your nest. And don't you
wish that dinosaur train had started with this modia parasite premise?
(24:23):
Oh man, you know, because isn't it The t rex
has been dropped in the nest and it's very obvious
to the mom turnded on like, oh, this is not
my kid here, Yeah, well it is her kid. Well, yes,
what I'm saying in in the mafia version that hasn't
come out yet, Yeah, yeah, it would be it would
be interesting to explore the certainly the the the animal
(24:45):
mafia side of that family dynamic. Indeed, although I guess
you know, historically wouldn't be necessarily accurate because we don't
have evidence during that period and then the fossil record
to say that we would have some parasitic well, they
have that character that marches out of the door and
uh and and explains to us what's real. Yeah, the
(25:06):
big downer, right, the debut downer who's like the dinosaurs
aren't actually purple and red and green spotted. Yeah. Alright,
So there you have it. The animal mafia, the cuckoo mafia,
the cowbird mafia. But let's turn back, just just one
last time, even away from dinosaur train, and discuss the
real world of human mafia, because you found a little
(25:27):
bit of interesting data about their renewable energy interests. Look, yeah,
because again, the mafia is a huge thing, right, It's
not just a bunch of you know, Italian in their
undershirt explain checkers. Um. But I will say it goes
back to the roots here in Sicily, because it turns
out that the mafia is very interested and renewable energy,
specifically wind farms. Because one, it fits the landscape of
(25:50):
southern Italy right where they have a lot of influence
and a lot of land under their sway. Too, it's
really easy for them to launder money for renewable energy
as you can you can make a lot of money
is renewable energy. I mean it's a fact. Yeah, because
it's not that there's not a lot of checks and
balances going on with that, and so as a result
you have this great robust alternative energy source going on
(26:13):
in Italy. So also government government money flowing into it
as well, you know, because ultimately that comes down to
it if if if money is to be made off
of it, the mafia is interested in it, if there's
blood to come out of the host, then the parasite
wants a taste, and they're being smart about their money.
Of course, now people will say that doesn't make things
right just because this is going on there. There are
(26:36):
terrible things that are being exacted upon humanity as a result,
But it does make it that the whole point about, um,
greater resources and protection for the community. Uh, pretty plain
and insight with this example of renewable energy making that
part of Italy, which historically has been poor flush with money. Yeah.
(26:58):
You know, Um, you watch Breaking Bad, correct, you reached
the point where you think it's early on in one
of the couple of seasons where you you encounter a
potential money laundering business, a laser tag establishment. Yes, that
is really colored the way I think about a lot
of businesses. Like if I go to do a business
and it's just a little too dream come true, then
(27:20):
I start to think about about the possibilities that it's
just a money laundering front. Like there are a few
different stores. I'm not gonna name any names, of course,
but there are few different stores in the Atlanta area,
you know, And maybe I go inside and they just
have a few many toys for sale, or it just
seems that it seems just like a like too much
of a dream store. And I started doing customers, right,
maybe there aren't that many customers, and I started I
(27:41):
started thinking, it's like, how is this staying afloat? This
has to be some sort of a money laundering scheme. Yeah,
that show has completely changed my, uh perspective of nearly
everything that I encounter. In fact, I was driving through
my neighborhood the other day and the house was being
tented for pest control, and I was like, oh, yeah,
I know what's going on in there. Uh oh, Walter White,
(28:02):
You've changed our lives. It really should have invested in
wind farms, So didn't you think that would have been
kind of a jam. That would have been an interesting place.
I can I mean that sounds very breaking bad. If
it were still going on, and I could, I could
easily imagine that point, and I a should have also
pointed out we discussed before that the wasps of course,
that the world of wasps includes a lot of vile behavior,
(28:25):
and that you'll see plenty of examples of parasitic wasp
laying their young inside of other nests, zombifying poor ladybugs,
but either bidding but also like hatching early in alien
nests and then eating all the other young. So so no,
no matter how bad you've got it, birds, just remember
it could be worse. You could have to put up
(28:45):
with the wasps. Alright, so well, we thank you for
putting up with us uh and joining us for the show.
And if you want more, then be sure to check
out stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That is
our our mothership. That's where you'll find all the episodes
of the podcast. You'll find all of our video products.
You'll find our blog posts as well as links out
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(29:06):
including Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler. I believe we even have a
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to Blow your Mind dot com and you will find
all of those roads leading out. In the meantime, if
you have any mafia tinged thoughts or strategies to share
with us, you can do so at blow the Mind
(29:26):
at discovery dot com. For more on this and thousands
of other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas.
I really thought you were going to go for a nickname.
There you something you're throwing up? Cool on topic. Nickname,
I can really think a nacking. It's really Dumpsy Douglas,
(00:25):
may Bagel Oranges Douglas. Yeah, he would be your your
mafia names. You're you're you're a monster personas. Yeah, Julie
bat in the corner, Douglas, bat in the corner baseball back.
I was thinking an actual bat since we just did
an episode on Vampire Back. Oh no, no, no, it's
like I got a bat in the corner. This this
guy might be rabbit. I'll just unleash ing at you
(00:47):
any moment you have to go get a raby shot
and everything going from the jugula. Yeah, all right, Or
maybe we can just call me Joe Pesci, Joe Phi okay,
forever associated with movie. That's right, very very typecast that man. Yeah. So,
if you haven't guessed already or bothered to read the
title of podcasts, we are of course talking about the
(01:10):
cuckoo mafia. We're talking about the animal mafia. We're talking
a little bit about the the human mafia as well,
and in the various forms one encounters it. Yeah, because
you do if you actually take this system, this organized system,
when you begin to really peel back the layers you
can see in all different places in society, right, Yeah,
you really begin to see mafia organized crime. And is
(01:33):
not this uh bunch of stereotypical looking guys. Uh, you know,
Joe Pesci's and uh and and their their ilk standing
in the corner and doing very stereotypical things. You see
it as kind of an economic model that is spread
not only through all human culture, but even into the
animal world. Well, I was gonna say, like even in
(01:54):
our break room, you have Jonathan Strickland there, who you know,
you gotta put money in a certain place in the
the break room right to get access to the coffee. Coffee, right,
or there's no more coffee. And that's just the way
it is, right if you want coffee supply fresh and
you want it every day, and then Stricklin gets his payment, right,
(02:14):
Or the way that when we bring our yogurts and
we always have to bring in that one extra yogurt
because one Christian conger insists on having quote just enough
to wetter beak otherwise, otherwise all the yogurt winds up
on the floor, all of it, and it's it's it's
discussing in it and it it really takes to that
because like that's delicious yogurt and it all went to waste.
(02:35):
And why because I wasn't willing to put up with
just a little yogurt loss in my diet each week.
That's right. Everybody loses the yogurt if you do not
supply it for Kristen alright, So we are not trying
to glorify the mafia, which is actually if you think
about mafia, that is a huge umbrella term under which
many different organizations from different cultures around the world huddle underneath.
(02:56):
And we tend to think of the Godfather and then
this quaint group of men just playing checkers and their undershirts. Um.
But worldwide we'd see mafia doing different types of damage
in the way of human trafficking, legal wildlife trading, uh
drugs of course, to just to name a few. So
I want to put that out there. This is not
glorifying the mafia, but we just wanted to kind of
(03:18):
cover how they work in the world, so that we
have a better understanding of how animals may be doing
the same sort of strategies and tactics at the mafia
is indeed, Yeah, And I should add I love the
Guy Father movies. Those are some great films, and there
are a few other organized crime pieces here and there
that I've really enjoyed over the years. But I find
more and more I just cannot watch films or get
(03:40):
involved in in media that is about those sort of
stereotypical gangster character is one of the reasons I never
even could manage to watch The Sopranos, even though I
know The Sopranos is supposed to be brilliant. I know,
I know, but at the at heart, it's about these, uh,
these these criminal guys that I've seen are you know,
I'm sure less um artistically solid takes on them so
(04:02):
many times before, it's like I just don't have any
more room for it, Like I'm not convinced there's anything
new that I can gain from characters that are even
partially cast from this mold. All right, let's talk about
this mold. Because when we talk about in the mafe,
we are essentially talking about Kosa nostra, which is roughly
translated as our thing, which is kind of this closed
(04:23):
circuit within a criminal syndicate. And we talked about these
criminal syndicates we're really talking about, at least in this
old usage of that term um in southern Italy Sicily,
these different neighborhoods in which certain families lorded over those communities.
And I thought this was really interesting. I found this
(04:43):
little tidbit of John Gotti talking to some of his
subordinates about Kosa nostra and um. This was right before
he got ratted out by a bunch of people. And
he says, this is going to die. Okay, I'm gonna
quit doing that being an hour from now, or be
it tonight or a hundred years from now, when I'm
in jail. It's gonna be a cost some guys, some
(05:06):
people downstairs. He's referring to the nightclub below. Now, who
I know who's babe, stomach is rotten. I know who
stomach ain't rotten. You could I could smell it the
way a dog senses when a guy's got fear. Okay,
that's not just for local color to give you an
idea of what the mafia sounds like, because everybody probably
already knows that. Um, but I thought that that conversation,
(05:28):
just that little excerpts spoke volumes about the environment of
fear and implied violence that would come to those who
crossed the code. Yeah. There you see, um, the beginnings
of a system that's keeping everybody in check because it's hard.
It is a parasitic relationship. It is a parasite feeding
(05:50):
up on the host. But on top of that, we
have this layer of fear and intimidation, which and it
comes down to an economic model. I mean, did just
think of just your average mafia scenario from a thousand movies, right,
some guys running a shop and some uh you know
individual walks in, perhaps with a heavy behind him, and says, hey,
you've got a nice shop. Here. Would be a pity
(06:10):
if something happened to it. I can prevent things, bad
things from happening to it, if you give me X
amount of dollars, you know, per per month. So it
comes down to, all right, which if I'm gonna expend,
I'm gonna have to waste some energy, expend some energy
to pay this man, all right, so we we will
put how much we stack that money up on the counter.
(06:31):
But then if I were to resist this individual, I
would have to expend even more energy, right, I would
have to somehow fight him back physically or align with
those who would and and then that comes with inherent risks.
So it comes down to just an economic decision which
is easier and which entails less risk. And the interesting
thing about this is that within this code, this system,
(06:53):
there's a kind of justice that is doled out, particularly
if you are in the mafia landscape, right and you're
one of the enforcers. If the person doesn't pay up,
there's a justice. You know, you're not your restaurant's not
going to run very well pretty soon. Maybe your brother
won't get that promotion. You know, there are things that
benefit the person who's paying, not just um, just the
(07:16):
maintenance of their restaurant, but perhaps there's social stature right
and there, and I've been often there is some degree
of protection there, certainly from other nefarious individuals. Like you're
probably not going to be paying to protection rackets to
two different parasitic mafia dudes. You're gonna be paying one dude,
and that dude is going to keep you have to
(07:36):
dude off your back because you are now part of
his turf. So that's a great point. That's safety elements.
So that kind of comes down to this idea of
what is altruism and we should probably do another episode
UM that is completely dedicated to altruism because it's very interesting. UM.
But there's this idea of altruistic punishment versus selfish on
(07:58):
selfish punishment, which is what the mafia does write that
selfish unselfish and according to Princeton University and University of
Arizona researchers, society's rule against selfishness or rules rather are
rooted in the very exploitation that they condemn. And it
may be that the reason that some of the selfish
unselfish UM justice punishment comes down the pike is because
(08:24):
it's a resources issue. At the end of the day,
it's a little bit easier to seed control to a
couple of really influential UM peddlers out there in the
community and say rather than really be engaged civically and
try to meet out justice in a way that is
thoughtful and community minded. Yeah, because on one hand, with
(08:46):
the altruistic punishment model. You have the idea of you know,
like the wise, benevolent mayor of the town saying, oh, well,
if you break the rules, they're gonna be there. There's
gonna be a cost, or you know you're gonna you know,
you're gonna wind up in the jail cell. You're gonna
wind up with a with a fine, Are you gonna
be expelled? What have you? And then on the on
the selfish on selfish side of the the word, agin the
mafia punishment, that is one guy saying, hey, these people
(09:09):
on my turf, you can't mess with them, that's what
I do. You can't exploit them because I am exploiting
them to the degree that I can get away with it. Yeah,
And the system of altruism was actually reported in the
journal Evolution. And what they did is they they took
a simulation model that gauged tow community with Stanza system
(09:29):
built on altruistic punishment or selfish on selfish punishment, and
they did they found that that um, that kind of
altruistic punishment which the community comes together and is very
civic minded, does demand a lot of resources. And that
is perhaps why systems like the mafia tend to do
really well because as a result, there is a lower
(09:52):
instance of crime overall in that community against citizens. So
you may say, oh, hey, a couple of people become
fat cats and they're awful and they do some terrible things,
but as a whole, the community is protected. Yes. And
what was what's really fascinating about this, uh, this Princeton
University University at Arizona study, was how they draw in
(10:13):
that idea that not only does the simpler economic model
again is that is the fat cat model, the mafia
model as opposed to the altruistic ruler model, but their
idea that we get that that more altruistic version of
civilization and society emerges from the fat cat model. It
evolves over time. And you really see this if you
(10:34):
sort of squint your eyes and really think about the
systems of power in the world, Like, what is the
difference between the mafia boss who keeps things under wrap
but is getting plenty on the side, is living very
comfortable at the top. What is the difference between that dude,
that Joe Pesci sort of type cast character and a government.
What's the difference between that dude and a corporation what's
(10:56):
the difference between that dude and just a you know,
you're average local, nice guy employer, Like there are elements
of the same model everywhere you look. Well, yeah, and
talk about influence peddlers and fat cats if you're talking
about lobbyists. And I'm not saying that all lobbyists are
working outside of the margins, but we have a couple
of cases under our belt that we can point to
lobbyists having tremendous wealth and power and essentially some people,
(11:20):
looking at it this way, buying politicians, uh literally buying
them by offering them money or goods um or maybe
just even their influences so great that they have that
politician in their pocket. Now, let's get out of the
mafia model for a moment, and let's get into a
more medieval model, which actually, yeah, I mean this, this
(11:41):
predates the mafia right and medieval Knights basically a military
order created in nine to protect Christian pilgrims visiting Jerusalem.
I'm talking about the Knights Templar. They branched out over
time in Western Europe and they created a network of
banks that in the abled religious pilgrims to deposit assets
(12:03):
in their home countries and then withdrawal of the funds
in the Holy Land. Right, so what do you have
over time? You have the Nights Templar gaining huge amounts
of financial resources, and we still have that protection element
in there. So all of a sudden the threat becomes
and sometimes it's not even the threat is so pervasive
(12:24):
they don't have to say it. If you don't pay up,
if you don't give it to the Knights Templar, perhaps
something bad will befall you. It's in the Nights Templars
model is an interesting to want to look at too,
because of course the Knights Templars did reach that point
we're talking about, at what point do I say it's
actually worth the effort to break down this organization, And
that eventually occurred there would be Catholic Church, of course,
(12:45):
eradicated the Templars after a while. So and you can
definitely make the argument that this is a case of
one fat cat looking over the other fact at and
unim like, you know what used to be a smaller
cat in our feral community, but now you're a little
too big, a little too powerful, and uh and uh,
and we're gonna see that you go away and I
don't want to put it all on the the Catholic Church.
(13:07):
The King of France also played a substantial role in
that scenario as well. But that does go back to
um that mathematical model in which we're talking about two people,
those two fat cats that are trying to cancel each
other out and and say, at the end of the day,
their coda rules. Yeah, because everybody can't be a fat cat,
and you can only have so many parasites living off
(13:28):
the host. Uh and and so there's there's a careful
balance that has to be maintained. And again, you can
look to governmental models, you can look to big business,
and you see very similar things. There can only be
so many dominant players in the particular commercial market, and
what did they do that. There's a certain amount of
competition they will tolerate, and then there are certain certain
types of competition that they will readily feast upon or destroy.
(13:53):
All Right, we're gonna take a quick break, and when
we get back, we're gonna talk about Kuka birds, gonna
talk about their spaghetti dinners in their back room. All right,
we're back. Before we start talking about our fine feathered friends,
let's talk about tree wasps and cancer cells because they
(14:13):
do actually have something to do with this whole mafio.
So this system, indeed, we now wasps engage in UH
and some of the other practices. We're going to discuss
UH shortly. But tree wasps. UH haven't observed that police
hives to make sure that no member other than the
queen lays eggs. And the same police, though, will often
lay illicit eggs themselves. So that's the case where it's
(14:36):
my job to lay down the law. But since I'm
the one laying down the law, I'm the one that
can bend it a bit, indeed, and so it's kind
of interesting. I'll just slip in a couple of my eggs.
That's all right. I'm the influence peddler here exactly. And
then in terms of cancer cells, we know that mutations
and a cell's own DNA initiate the changes that put
(14:56):
it on a really destructive path. But it's a lot
more or nuanced than that, because the micro environment of
a tumor acts like a kind of co conspirator. And
we won't get way into this because we could dedicate
entire podcast to this, but essentially, what you see our
cancer cells that will prevent other tumors from forming, as
if to say, no, no, no, this is my my
(15:16):
tumor corner here, which you know, essentially at the same
time as kind of a good things. There's no more
tumors that are forming. But you see this again in
nature and you see it best and birds ah yes,
And that of course is why we call this episode
the Cuckoo Mafia, because we see some really fascinating birds
(15:37):
that are involved in brood paraticism also known as egg
dumping now egg dumping. When you just say that, it
brings to mind like just this idea of of a
bird that I know what to do with his eggs,
just like throwing them off a cliff or something. But
that's not not what's going on here. This is the
idea that that on one hand, you have the birds
that are are are laying their heads, they're raising their young,
(16:00):
uh and it's a nice, beautiful, wonderful thing that you
would see in a child's book about nature. And then
you have those other birds. Those birds don't care. They
don't want to look after that egg and raise that
that chick and and vomit food into its mouth. They
have other things to do. They have a different set
of values, but they have a genetic mission. Like all organisms,
they need their offspring to survive. So they've developed this
(16:23):
practice of dumping eggs on these other bird nests, on
these other more stable environments, with the intention that the
egg will hatch and the chick will be raised in
that environment. And ha ha ha on that that poor
bird in the nest, right, And we see this in
sea birds. But the thing about seabirds is that they
(16:43):
will deposit their eggs and then take off, and then
they won't know whether or not this actually came to
fruition there. They're young, broad right, and in some cases,
if the ag hatches, it's likely going to be eaten
by the very family that they were dumped upon. It's
not a good model, really, And they have to find
eggs that are species that are somewhat similar to them
(17:04):
so that the egg can maybe squeak in there and
go unnoticed at least for a while, right, Because eggs,
if you just looking at chicken eggs in the fridge,
you know, just the white kind that come from here supermarket.
You may miss out on this. But there is a
lot of difference among all the different types of bird
eggs out there. There's different colors, different patterns, and so
(17:24):
a bird is going to be able to tell if hey,
I I lay brown eggs and there is a blue
speckled one in here. Something is off. Somebody's trying to
pull one over on me, It's true. And so we
have birds that will do the sort of egg dumping,
but they're going to take these mafia like tactics and
ensure that that egg will be taken care of, that
it gets protected, and it does that vise of the
(17:47):
the own protection or destruction that it offers. Right. One
of the best examples of this, of course, is the
the cowbird. There are two species of cowbird. You'll find
both in North America, and they've they've managed to spread
out even more from their original territory due to the
way that we we treat our land as a as
a human species. But what's remarkable here is that they
(18:07):
are very much like that that scenario we're talking about earlier. Hey,
nice story, would it would be a pity if something
happened to it? And then if you don't pay up,
what happens, Well, suddenly the front window to your store
is broken, your your merchandise is thrown out in the street,
maybe something catches on fire. There's retribution if you do
not obey the laws. Now, these earlier models that these
(18:28):
these sea birds we're talking about, there's no retribution. They're
just they're just taking a risk. Maybe maybe they'll raise it,
maybe they won't. Maybe it'll hatch and the young, young
one will will be able to squirm away before it's
it's pecked off as as an interloper. But with a cowbird, uh,
there is retribution. Now this used to be just more
of a theory than anything. Believe. The original theory, the
(18:50):
mafia theory of the cowbird, came from evolutionary biologists uh
Amas Xavi and back in seventy nine. But eventually scientists
put all this to the test. That's right. Jeff Hoover
at the Illinois Natural History Survey in Champagne, Illinois, provided
artificial nests for one and eighty pair of profonetary warblers
(19:12):
and then waited for the cowbirds to cuckle them to
deposit their eggs. Then he selectively removed the cowbird eggs.
So what happened pretty soon the cowbirds swooped in, they retaliated,
They returned to the nest to eat or destroy the
remaining warbler eggs. And what's more, warblers that had laid
(19:32):
too early for the cowbirds to cuckle them, they also
suffered retrobration to their nests also got turned over and destroyed,
and the cowbirds would routinely eat or trash these more
developed eggs to force the warblers to rebuild their next
elsewhere and start over again and hopefully have it in
sync when with the cowbirds could swoop in and deposit
(19:55):
an egg. So, yeah, they came in and just totally
devastated things. They really drove home and we're again we're
gonna anthromorphize a little to layer that mafia understanding of
this on the behavior, but they really come in tear
everything up, murder with the strong message, Hey, do you
want to survive in this world? If you want to
carry out the genetic mission of passing on your own
(20:17):
genetic material and saying that your children exist into the
next generation generation behind it, the only way you're gonna
do it is by playing along with this little scheme
of ours. You're gonna have to accept it to a
agree because the cost is way too high for you
to pay. Yeah, and to put numbers behind that cost.
Hever says that, um, I get that this is what
you just described as an evolutionary state of acceptance, and
(20:41):
that the cost is that on average, the host birds
will raise three of their own chicks when they also
support a cowbird chick. Yet they raised just one of
their own if a cowbird egg has been rejected. And
I like this idea of it's an evolutionary state of acceptance,
like I gotta, I gotta accept this because of terms,
it's an offer I can't refuse. Yeah, and you can
(21:03):
extrapolate that to to human culture as well, that there's
sort of this built in mathematical reason for why we
will tolerate a certain amount of of corruption, a certain
amount of of criminal activity, in a certain amount of
just general awfulness on the part of people's and organizations
that rule over our world. Yeah. And speaking of mathematical models,
(21:26):
this mafia hypothesis, which had been really controversial, was finally
borne out uh Maria Abou Chakra, Arnie Charleston, and Christigian
hill Bay. They modeled this hypothesis with cuckoopers who were
ravaging I think they are magpie birds, and they found
that this theory does explain the behavior as long as
two conditions are met, one that the cuckoos visit the
(21:49):
same nest repeatedly, into that the host birds are capable
of learning. That's pretty important, right, because they also point
out that they never establish an equilibrium here. So they
are regular cycles, uh, in terms of the frequency of
mafia such as we're talking about with retribution and non
mafia no retribution parasites and host and the acceptance of
the egg. So it's so you will have periods where
(22:11):
it's kind of like did you ever read Fwick The
Big Hearted Moose by by Dr Seuss's fabulous story Moose
has antlers. He lets one animal live in his antlers,
then another one's living there, and then there are more
and more animals living in his antlers until he finally
says enough is enough and he takes the antlers off
and he's no longer supporting all of these freeloaders. So
you kind of so inevitably you see this this cycle,
(22:33):
like how is it builds up? How much criminal behavior
is a species going to accept before they retaliate? And
then it gets back down? And then which ones are
going to actually um come in and destroy your stuff
if you throw the parasites out. So it's the the
relationship has to continually um find itself. Yeah, it's interesting
(22:53):
because um there is as you say, there's no equilibrium
here and um when you see the host behavior here,
it's either one of two things. Conditionally they'll accept an
egg or completely unconditionally, And that conditionally only occurs when
there is not a large population of um, the parasitic birds,
the cuckoo parasitic birds exhibiting that mafia behavior. So in
(23:17):
other words, they tend to be the majority. But what
happens is that the pendulum begins to swing back the
other way, because then the parasitic birds go, hey, we
need to start tipping over some nust here. Let them know.
And as soon as they become the majority the birds
that are exhibiting that mafia tendency, then all of a
sudden you have absolutely, like unconditionally of course drop her
(23:40):
egg to do it. I'd love to host them great.
And why this is so important is that this means
that the cowbirds they don't have to specialize uh, their
their eggs. They don't have to change any of the
dynamics and try to you know, fit in with other species.
They don't have to worry about that that egg just
(24:02):
looking completely out of place, because it does. Because the
message is like, hey, if you know it's it's you know,
we're not trying to be a subtle here. You know,
if you if you don't pay me money, I'm going
to break your shop. If you don't raise this egg,
which looks sotly different from the other eggs, I'm gonna
come in and tear up your nest. And don't you
wish that dinosaur train had started with this modia parasite premise?
(24:23):
Oh man, you know, because isn't it The t rex
has been dropped in the nest and it's very obvious
to the mom turnded on like, oh, this is not
my kid here, Yeah, well it is her kid. Well, yes,
what I'm saying in in the mafia version that hasn't
come out yet, Yeah, yeah, it would be it would
be interesting to explore the certainly the the the animal
(24:45):
mafia side of that family dynamic. Indeed, although I guess
you know, historically wouldn't be necessarily accurate because we don't
have evidence during that period and then the fossil record
to say that we would have some parasitic well, they
have that character that marches out of the door and
uh and and explains to us what's real. Yeah, the
(25:06):
big downer, right, the debut downer who's like the dinosaurs
aren't actually purple and red and green spotted. Yeah. Alright,
So there you have it. The animal mafia, the cuckoo mafia,
the cowbird mafia. But let's turn back, just just one
last time, even away from dinosaur train, and discuss the
real world of human mafia, because you found a little
(25:27):
bit of interesting data about their renewable energy interests. Look, yeah,
because again, the mafia is a huge thing, right, It's
not just a bunch of you know, Italian in their
undershirt explain checkers. Um. But I will say it goes
back to the roots here in Sicily, because it turns
out that the mafia is very interested and renewable energy,
specifically wind farms. Because one, it fits the landscape of
(25:50):
southern Italy right where they have a lot of influence
and a lot of land under their sway. Too, it's
really easy for them to launder money for renewable energy
as you can you can make a lot of money
is renewable energy. I mean it's a fact. Yeah, because
it's not that there's not a lot of checks and
balances going on with that, and so as a result
you have this great robust alternative energy source going on
(26:13):
in Italy. So also government government money flowing into it
as well, you know, because ultimately that comes down to
it if if if money is to be made off
of it, the mafia is interested in it, if there's
blood to come out of the host, then the parasite
wants a taste, and they're being smart about their money.
Of course, now people will say that doesn't make things
right just because this is going on there. There are
(26:36):
terrible things that are being exacted upon humanity as a result,
But it does make it that the whole point about, um,
greater resources and protection for the community. Uh, pretty plain
and insight with this example of renewable energy making that
part of Italy, which historically has been poor flush with money. Yeah.
(26:58):
You know, Um, you watch Breaking Bad, correct, you reached
the point where you think it's early on in one
of the couple of seasons where you you encounter a
potential money laundering business, a laser tag establishment. Yes, that
is really colored the way I think about a lot
of businesses. Like if I go to do a business
and it's just a little too dream come true, then
(27:20):
I start to think about about the possibilities that it's
just a money laundering front. Like there are a few
different stores. I'm not gonna name any names, of course,
but there are few different stores in the Atlanta area,
you know, And maybe I go inside and they just
have a few many toys for sale, or it just
seems that it seems just like a like too much
of a dream store. And I started doing customers, right,
maybe there aren't that many customers, and I started I
(27:41):
started thinking, it's like, how is this staying afloat? This
has to be some sort of a money laundering scheme. Yeah,
that show has completely changed my, uh perspective of nearly
everything that I encounter. In fact, I was driving through
my neighborhood the other day and the house was being
tented for pest control, and I was like, oh, yeah,
I know what's going on in there. Uh oh, Walter White,
(28:02):
You've changed our lives. It really should have invested in
wind farms, So didn't you think that would have been
kind of a jam. That would have been an interesting place.
I can I mean that sounds very breaking bad. If
it were still going on, and I could, I could
easily imagine that point, and I a should have also
pointed out we discussed before that the wasps of course,
that the world of wasps includes a lot of vile behavior,
(28:25):
and that you'll see plenty of examples of parasitic wasp
laying their young inside of other nests, zombifying poor ladybugs,
but either bidding but also like hatching early in alien
nests and then eating all the other young. So so no,
no matter how bad you've got it, birds, just remember
it could be worse. You could have to put up
(28:45):
with the wasps. Alright, so well, we thank you for
putting up with us uh and joining us for the show.
And if you want more, then be sure to check
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(29:06):
including Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler. I believe we even have a
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with us, you can do so at blow the Mind
(29:26):
at discovery dot com. For more on this and thousands
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