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SPEAKER_03: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
SPEAKER_06: Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And it's a good old-fashioned barn burner whiz banger of an episode. I ran out of weird colloquialisms. Oh yeah? Yeah, just now, didn't you hear?
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, but I just figured you were still doing them in your head.
SPEAKER_06: No, I was frantically grasping for another one in my head and it was just dust and a tumbleweed. So this is sort of continuing our underwater series, we'll call it.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, this is so Stuff You Should Know. We've done stuff that's much more specific about the general category that we're talking about and now we're finally doing the general category.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, we did the diving bell. We did the butterfly. We did cave diving. In fact, cave diving was released as a select just this year. Yes, such a good one.
SPEAKER_09: And do I need to remind you about the other related episode?
SPEAKER_06: I forgot about that. Oh my gosh. I'll give you a hint. Meow. I remember the scuba cat episode. Didn't you interview scuba cat?
SPEAKER_09: Oh yeah, I mean for those of you who don't know, the short version is many, many years ago in the very early days of the podcast, occasionally we were sort of told to do certain things as episodes. Unspeakable things.
SPEAKER_09: And two of them really stand out to me. One of them was scuba cat. I know what you're going to say for the other one. I know you do. Which was this guy who trained his cat to scuba dive and it's literally like a blurb or maybe a little fluffy news piece at the end of a news program. And they're like, do a stuff you should know episode on this cat and this guy. Why though? Do you remember? Did they just want page views or something?
SPEAKER_06: I guess or else that guy happened to be friends with whoever owned the company at the time.
SPEAKER_09: All right. I think there was an article on the website we worked for and they were probably just trying to drive people to that. So we did one on scuba cat. I would really love that just to be scrubbed from the archive.
SPEAKER_06: Well, way to go bringing it up then. What was I going to say, Chuck? Wasn't this thing in like a little submarine kind of? Isn't that what the scuba diving was?
SPEAKER_09: I don't think so. I think he built him a little outfit. Oh, okay. Wow. A little thing with like a big bubble mask. Okay, that's worth an episode.
SPEAKER_06: We should redo it. We should do a scuba cat redux.
SPEAKER_09: What's the other one? I know we're going to say it.
SPEAKER_06: We could say at the same time, I think it's going to be.
SPEAKER_09: Three, two, one. Tenovators.
SPEAKER_06: Tenovators.
SPEAKER_09: Yes. What can you do with an Altoids tin?
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, for real. Like I don't know how that one came up either, but we were instructed to do an episode on tenovators, and they were interesting, but not episode length interesting. Not even when they were six minutes long.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, and a tenovator, just for those of you who don't know, they take Altoid tins and
SPEAKER_06: they do things with them, like turn them into radios. Maybe they hold coins instead of Altoids. It's just repurposing. Tenovation. Yeah, exactly. It's repurposing an Altoid. Tenovation. Very well.
SPEAKER_09: Oh, boy. And we always talk about jackhammers in the sun. That's because we're literally too ashamed to even mention those other two, but here they are. Go listen to them. Just quickly wanted to say I got back from Mexico, and I did not scuba dive. I snorkeled. Oh, yeah, it's fun. And I didn't, I mean, I love the experience, but I learned that I, and especially my daughter, are free divers. Oh, yeah? She couldn't do it, man. We got her, I mean, she loves to swim more than anything, and we got her in all the gear, put her in the water, and she was pitched a fit, quite frankly. Oh, like she couldn't breathe through the tube?
SPEAKER_06: She does it in pools.
SPEAKER_09: Like, it just, you know, when you're eight, things happen, and you can't explain why a kid will dig in, but she wasn't into it. We were very frustrated, did not handle it well. She asked to get back on the boat. She got back on the boat and cried while we scuba, or sorry, snorkeled. We were like, we're out of here. We're going to do it. You know, you'll be okay. And then once we were done, she asked the scuba guys, or the snorkel guys, can I just get in with my mask and free dive? And it was in Mexico. They were like, sure. Right? And she did, and she turned into a dolphin. And I recounted this on Instagram. I took some great pictures of her just swimming like no kid has ever loved swimming before. And it was just a big lesson for everybody. I know what happened, though.
SPEAKER_06: I think, unless I'm misreading it, she got claustrophobic from having to breathe through that tube. No, she does it all the time in pools.
SPEAKER_09: What it was, I think, was wearing the life vest keeping her up on the surface. Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_06: Well, you left that little detail out. Well, I mean, that's part of snorkeling, is you got a vest on so it keeps you up top.
SPEAKER_09: And she was like, no, no, no, I belong down there. My home is the sea. I see. As Bonnie Principoli says.
SPEAKER_06: I got you. Okay. Well, that makes a lot more sense. I guess I was just projecting onto her because I used to get claustrophobic trying to breathe through a snorkel. Well, a lot of people on Instagram supported that and said, you know, I have a hard time
SPEAKER_09: with this equipment, too, and I love to swim. But it was really that life vest, I think. Okay.
SPEAKER_06: All right. Well, we finally established the root cause then.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. But here we go with scuba. Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_06: I guess. Okay. So what does scuba stand for, Chuck?
SPEAKER_09: Self-contained underwater breathing situation. Appomattox. Appomattox. Apparatus. That's right. Scuba. It's actually like an acronym, but it's so used, so widely used now, it's a lowercase
SPEAKER_06: word. I'm not sure. Oh, really? Yeah. I mean, like, it's not, nobody does it with capitals and periods or anything like that. It's just lower, it's a word. It's its own word now. It's almost lost its meaning as far as, like, the acronym goes. And yet it's gained so much meaning over the years because as scuba has been around for, over the decades, more and more people have found the joy of going underwater, and I heard you laugh at me, by the way, and breathe. If you breathe fully underwater, no snorkel, like, your head is nowhere near the surface of the water. And it doesn't need to be, like, significantly distant from the water. It can just be, like, a foot below the water. But you're breathing underwater. It's an amazing feeling for sure. And a lot of people have discovered that over the years and said, scuba's the life for me. Well, as of December 2019, you had scuba dived once.
SPEAKER_09: Yep. Have you done it since? No.
SPEAKER_06: And I'm actually a little troubled because I read that you're supposed to go, like, three or four open water dives. And I only went on one. So I've been under the impression that I've been certified to scuba dive all this time. And I'm like, is that true? I can't remember where my card is or anything. So I wonder if I actually wasn't fully certified. Hmm.
SPEAKER_09: Or satisfied.
SPEAKER_06: I would find it very dissatisfying if that were true.
SPEAKER_09: Well, do you want to do it again? Because I didn't get a good read on you in 2019. Maybe. I didn't know you then like I know you now. Maybe because I, before the reason I didn't like it is because I got, it made me seasick.
SPEAKER_06: Like, the air mixture did not sit well with me. Oh. And then getting on the boat in between dives made it even worse. Mm-hmm. So I was like, I don't feel like doing this ever again. But I think enough times past that it's possible I would try it again.
SPEAKER_09: Well, I want to get certified now for sure. I did anyway before, and we thought we'd wet our beaks with snorkeling. The big problem I had, man, was the fins. I mean, there were a lot of currents, and I just, I felt like I couldn't go and get anywhere. Yeah. And then at the end when Ruby was free diving, I did the same thing. I took off all my stuff except for my mask. Mm-hmm. And I went down there, and I was like, all right, well, this is, I feel like I can swim again. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06: It's all, it takes a lot of getting used to because it is, it's meant to help you, and it does if you are familiar with it and comfortable with it. But if not, it's all encumbrance. It makes everything difficult. Yeah. And like, yes, you just want to take it all off and just free dive, like you're saying. Yeah.
SPEAKER_09: Emily was cruising around. But, you know, we saw a little, my first like coral that I've ever seen, like live coral. Uh-huh. And it was beautiful. And, you know, the little stripey, bright fish, and I was in there with those guys for the first time. And it was remarkable and amazing. Was it a Dory or a Nemo that you saw?
SPEAKER_09: Oh, I don't know. It had, I think, yellow stripes. I don't think it was technically a clownfish, although maybe they're all types of clownfish. I'm not sure. What's a clownfish?
SPEAKER_06: I think like a Dory or a Nemo.
SPEAKER_09: I saw this one big thing that was like the size of a dinner plate, another big flat guy. Oh, wow. He was cool. And then Emily saw a sea turtle, which I did not see. Oh, neat. And then we also saw their efforts to, you know, with artificial reefs, with like these PVC sort of pyramids that they were building down there. Mm-hmm. God bless those people, right? Anyway, yeah.
SPEAKER_09: The squirrel wasn't in great shape. It was in parts, but other parts were not great. And that was sad. Yeah, you can thank the fossil fuel industry for that.
SPEAKER_06: That's right. So, Chuck, one thing that I had no idea about with researching the scuba episode is that it actually, the scuba phenomenon, I guess you could call it, dates back to the mid-19th century. Mm-hmm. And it's not like somebody had an idea and then 100 years later somebody actually created it. Someone in the 1860s actually created the first scuba equipment. That's right.
SPEAKER_09: Are you going to say his name? You're going to make me do it. I'll say the first name, Benoit. Okay.
SPEAKER_06: And it's a ruequerol, or rock and roll. Is that what that means? I don't think so, but it looks, and when you pronounce it, it sounds a lot like rock and roll. Yeah, ruec and or roll.
SPEAKER_09: Ruequerol. Yeah, rock and roll.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, so he's obviously French, and he was not trying to figure out a way to recreationally dive in the ocean.
SPEAKER_09: He was trying to figure out a way to help others, rescue workers, rescue people in collapsed mines, because these things would get filled up with nasty gases. And he was like, well, I think I can invent this system that allows these rescuers to go down there and breathe safely so they can save these people. And he called that first one a regulator for equalization of compressed gas. A little on the nose. A regulator. Sure.
SPEAKER_06: Sure. So I guess it was a little verbose. Yeah, or a demand regulator.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, and the reason it was a demand regulator, and this was the big deal.
SPEAKER_06: Like, you could feed somebody air continuously, but you're going to use up a lot of air. You might overinflate their lungs accidentally, which is a, it's, it couldn't be a problem with novices and scuba. But a demand regulator means that you're only sucking in that compressed air when you're breathing in. When you exhale, that air is no longer coming into your mouth, into your gullet.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, it's on demand, like the best movies. And this guy, along with a guy named Auguste Dennerouz, Dennerouz, Dennerouz.
SPEAKER_06: It was in there, that last one, I think, nailed it. I don't think so. Benoît Auguste, let's call him that. They got together and figured out how to turn this, not just into a mine safety equipment, piece of equipment, but actually to use it to breathe underwater. So they put the whole, like, compressed air thing in, like, a backpack. I get the impression it was, like, a fabric bag holding the compressed air. They put that demand regulator on, and they were working underwater, untethered from any boat, using the first genuine scuba in the 1860s.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, it was, it was like the first legit diving suit, essentially. They had lead-soled shoes, and they had weights hanging under your arms. At first, there was still no mask. They used a nose clip, but then a year later in 1866, they brought about the first mask, which was a copper helmet with a single window that they called the groin, because it was French for pig snout, and it kind of looks like a pig snout. Oh, okay. And they won, for their efforts, they won the gold medal at the 1867 World's Fair. Nice. It's called the Aerofor.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, they call it the Aerofor, right? So, but again, the thing about this is, like, you're like, yeah, I've seen those before. Like, there was a haunted one on Scooby-Doo. There was an air hose coming out of the helmet. No, that's the distinction. There's no air hose. They were untethered to anything. They could roam as free as they wanted on the sea floor. That's right.
SPEAKER_09: So, fast forward a few years.
SPEAKER_06: Geez, about 70, yeah, about 70 years. There was another person who had a very similar idea. What was his name? Christian Lamberton? Yeah, well, there was a guy in the 20s, Yves Lapriere.
SPEAKER_09: Okay. Who, and Dave helped us out with this. Dave took this guy up, and it was sort of one of the first sort of modern takes on a scuba system. But the air still wasn't on demand at that point. They adjusted the airflow, like, as they went along. And then Christian Lamberton came along in 1954 and did a couple of things. Well, actually, he came along in 1939 with the Lamberton Amphibious Respirator Unit, or the LARU. Didn't rename it Scuba until 1954. Okay. But he was a, this was a rebreather. It still wasn't the same thing. He had a CO2 filter, and he was trying to pitch it to the military. He's like, he was an American guy. He's like, look, this thing's got no bubbles. So he pitched it to the Navy. Like, you know, you can sneak up on people, in other words. Sure. And he pitched it to the Navy. They rejected it. And then the OSS, which the U.S. had at the time, the Office of Strategic Services would eventually become, not become the CIA, but sort of become the CIA. Yeah, morph. Yeah. So they, the OSS loved it, and like, their underwater unit, like, started using this Lamberton Scuba Unit, even though it still wasn't a, it was a rebreather, and we'll talk about all that stuff soon.
SPEAKER_08:
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, which is more advanced than Scuba. So this guy basically just created the more advanced version of Scuba out of the gate, you know? Yeah, interesting. Yeah, it is very interesting. And his invention was so successful that it was used from the 50s to the 80s by the U.S. military. Phew, not bad.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, unchanged. Kind of like, you know, you see like those mid to late 80s movies, and the cars are still, look like they're from the 70s, because nobody updated their stuff until that Ford Taurus came out in 1988 in Robocop.
SPEAKER_06: It's like that. What a great movie. You know?
SPEAKER_09: In the 80s, they were like, this is, this is an old timey rebreather.
SPEAKER_06: We need to update this. Yeah, exactly. So, there was a, that's almost like a separate track. Like, Christian Lamberson was very much dedicated to inventing this stuff for the military. He invented a more advanced version of Scuba called a rebreather, which we'll talk about, like you said. The much more familiar version of the Scuba story kind of went in parallel and started a few, oh, about the same time as Christian Lamberson. And it was a pair of French guys who, up to Christian Lamberson, they were running the Scuba world. And it was Jacques Cousteau and Emile Gagnon. And those two together are the ones who gave the world Scuba. That's right.
SPEAKER_09: I saw Gagnon, then I also saw he was French, and it was Gagnon. Yeah, I know.
SPEAKER_06: I didn't want to attempt it. I'm so tired of failing.
SPEAKER_09: Oh, no. So, they got together, like you said, and they kind of took Roquey Roll.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah?
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. They took his old on-demand regulator and said, all right, I think we can update this thing. Gagnon, in World War II, had invented a regulator that used cooking gas to feed into the carburetor of a car because the Germans said, we're taking all your gas, Paris. And so he sort of retrofitted a way to make a car work, and Cousteau was like, this is brilliant. We can use this for Scuba.
SPEAKER_06: And he's like, you want to huff cooking gas underwater? He's like, no, no, no, we're not going to use the cooking gas, Gagnon.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, and also, Scuba hasn't been so named yet. It was still probably about 10 years before that. So, they called it the Tejethro Tull's Delight, the Aqualung.
SPEAKER_06: I had an idea, and I don't know, maybe I can convince you right here, and we'll go back and edit this part out, of any time we said Aqualung, just playing that one little riff. Yeah, exactly. I think that we could get away with it. After hearing the intellectual property episode, I think we could get away with just that little bit.
SPEAKER_09: Well, at the very least, you could play my mouth version, because that's pretty clear. All right.
SPEAKER_06: We'll look into it in the edit. It's funny, our old pal, friend of the show, Paul F. Tompkins, every time the word Aqualung comes up, he gets upset, well, not upset, but makes a point of, why did Gethro Tull put that one line in there?
SPEAKER_09: Snot is running down his notes. That line really bugs him. Does it? Yeah, it's pretty funny. I've not heard that one. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06: Any time I think of Paul F. Tompkins, I think of, kick, kick, kick, kick, boss. It's good stuff.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah.
SPEAKER_06: So, they didn't call it Scuba yet, Cousteau didn't. They called it the Aqualung, like you say. Right. But it was the same thing. It was what you, if you go and take up the sport of Scuba now, it's essentially what you're doing, like what Cousteau was using. And the reason it caught on is because he made a movie called The Silent World that was released in, what, 1956? Yeah. And it won an Oscar. It was an amazing documentary. And I was watching it. I'm like, wow, there's some amazing wreck diving scenes in there. But it's also hilarious. One guy like pulls the door off of the hinges of a shipwreck to get into the shipwreck. They're just totally like vandalizing the ship. Yeah. But I was also at the same time thinking like, all the audiences have never seen something like this. That's it.
SPEAKER_09: That was the ticket with Silent World is that was, there had not been a lot of underwater photography. And it blew minds in 1956. Not only did it win the Oscar, it was the first golden palm winner it can for a documentary. And stayed that way until Michael Moore won for Fahrenheit 9-11. Oh, wow. And it grossed in today dollars 33 million bucks.
SPEAKER_06: Oh, not bad.
SPEAKER_09: It's a documentary. It's a theatrical doc. That's really, really good money. For sure. And also, just to finish up on Gagnon. Sure. He was not happy with that first version. So in 58, he finally released what was called the AquaMaster regulator. And sold a million of those up until like 1972. That was like the go-to regulator. Gotcha.
SPEAKER_06: So yeah, these guys essentially created the recreational version of Scuba. Introduced it to the world through the Silent World. And sat back and took kudos from that point on. And if you watch the Silent World, it bears a strong resemblance to the Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. No mistake.
SPEAKER_09: And one other thing about Jacques Cousteau, I didn't realize.
SPEAKER_06: He worked for the French Resistance, as a matter of fact, during World War II. Well, Dave, we're going to have to do one on him.
SPEAKER_09: Because Dave sent us this material. And was like, please, please, please let me do one on Jacques Cousteau. And we went, no. Speaking of Dave also, Chuck, you know, he has his podcast Bible Time Machine.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, it's about Bible stuff.
SPEAKER_09: But you don't have to like, you know, it's from like a historical perspective. It's highly accessible.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, that's what I was trying to say.
SPEAKER_09: I know.
SPEAKER_06: But he had a Blockbuster guest on the other day. Actually, I think it came out a couple weeks ago. He had John Cleese. And he interviewed him about the life of Brian. John Cleese. How did that happen?
SPEAKER_09: I couldn't get a John Cleese on Movie Crush. I don't know how.
SPEAKER_06: They must have, they're ministers or friends or something. Yeah, that was great.
SPEAKER_09: So, big congrats to Dave on the John Cleese app. Exactly. And if you like John Cleese and you like Dave, go listen to him talking to one another.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah. Shall we take a break?
SPEAKER_09: I think it's high time we finally made it through the first section.
SPEAKER_06: All right. We'll be right back.
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SPEAKER_04: A lot of people, very well meaning people who cared about me just thought that it was caused by diet or can be cured by diet and exercise, especially right after I was diagnosed. People saying, what, what was it that you ate or are you going to have to change your diet to get rid of this? There's still a lot of, you know, people see me pick up some kind of dessert and they're like, oh, should you really be eating that? Or thinking, you know, if they give sugar free things to people, if that's helpful.
SPEAKER_05: Listen to Health Discovered on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_09: All right. So we're back and we're going to talk a little bit about the different types of scuba diving that you can do. There's the aforementioned open water diving that you talked about that is, you know, it's the most common one. That's what you think about when you think about going on vacation, somebody taking you out in a boat, throwing that gear on you and saying, have a lot of fun everybody.
SPEAKER_06: But it can also, it doesn't have to take place on vacation or even in a tropical locale or even in like a sea or an ocean. It can take place in a lake. Sure. It can take place in a quarry. As long as I think, I'm not kidding, as long as there is no what they call ceiling over you, there's nothing between you and the surface of the water that's considered open water diving and that's the far and away the most common recreational diving.
SPEAKER_09: That's right. And you can go down if you're certified and we'll get to the certification, you can go down to 100 feet with your advanced open water certification. Yeah. Well, with the main one, the first one that you get, just the regular open water diving
SPEAKER_06: certification, it's 60 feet.
SPEAKER_09: Oh, okay. I wasn't sure if that was official.
SPEAKER_06: You got to go back for the extra 40 feet.
SPEAKER_09: You want an extra 40? It's going to cost you.
SPEAKER_06: So, there's also night diving is another one. Fun. Same thing, but at night. And there's apparently a whole different world out there in the ocean at night, which is pretty cool.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. I love swimming at night in the ocean, but...
SPEAKER_06: I can't do it. I just, I'm just, I'm scared of dark water.
SPEAKER_09: I get it, dude. Even an ocean swimming person like myself was out in this water last week at night and fine, having fun, but at a certain point I was like, huh. And then it's like, I'll just casually swim back in. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06: So, I would have started out with that, huh? Right. Yeah, it took me a little while. Yeah. But it does sound pretty cool. Like if you're not afraid of dark water, then of course, just that would be a great time to scuba dive. It's a little more dangerous though than regular open water diving because you can get lost very easily. So, most of the time you're tethered to the boat, so you can find your way back.
SPEAKER_08: That's right.
SPEAKER_06: What about drift diving? This sounds like you did the reverse of this snorkeling.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, drift diving is, you know, oceans have those strong currents, or certainly if you're in a river, and I think the point of drift diving is to get dropped into one of these currents and off you go.
SPEAKER_06: Like those sea turtles in Finding Nemo. Yeah, were they sea turtles? Yeah, they were riding like the underwater current. It was like a highway that you could get on and just zip off. I haven't seen that in a while.
SPEAKER_09:
SPEAKER_06: I haven't either, but apparently it made a really strong impression on me. It sounds like it. So, it's cool because you don't have to expend as much energy, which is like, whoa, who cares? Actually, scuba diving requires a lot of energy. It's really hard work. It does. So, to save yourself any effort or energy is pretty great. And then also, because you're working hard, you're breathing harder, so you're actually using more oxygen without a current than you are with a current, which means you can conceivably stay down longer because you have more air. Yeah, that sounds great. Sure it does. That's why people love it.
SPEAKER_09: You got technical diving, which is an umbrella term for most kinds of advanced diving that we're going to continue to talk about here. And maybe we should just talk about those because most of these next few fall under technical diving. The first of which is wreck diving. You can go out and swim around a legit sunken battleship or ship, either one that was naturally sunk or, well, nothing naturally sinks, I guess, like that, or not supposed to at least. But, you know, like one that was sunk in battle or one, you know, now they go out there and don't use PVC like I saw. I saw these little PVC pyramids. They will sink a full ship and say, all right, do your work, coral.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, exactly. They do it to form coral reefs, but at the same time also it's just something interesting for divers to come look at too. Yeah, but I don't think you're, I think you got to be pretty advanced actually if you
SPEAKER_09: want to swim through like the kitchen or something like that. Generally you're just sort of swimming around it.
SPEAKER_06: Right. You can do just regular basic open water certification diving around it, like you said, on top of it. When you want to go in it, you better add several years to your diving experience. It's extraordinarily dangerous because there's all, in a shipwreck, there's all sorts of things you get caught on, you get stuck on, you can get lost if the ship's big enough and dark enough. No, thank you. Exactly. And like all of the other technical diving, it has a ceiling. There's something between you and the surface that would impede you from going up to the surface if you needed to. That's what really makes it so dangerous.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I mean, that sounds interesting and fun, but I'm going to stick to no ceiling.
SPEAKER_06: I like watching videos of it. It makes my toes curl because it used to be above the surface. But I don't think I would want to wreck dive either, but I like watching wreck diving videos.
SPEAKER_09: You got your deep diving, which requires deep dive certification. And I believe you can go down to 131 feet and beyond if you really get those certifications in order and you've got the wherewithal. Yeah, I think when you go and get your first deep diver certification, the most they want
SPEAKER_06: you to go down is 130 feet, 40 meters, right? But then I think with experience and you hook up with other deep divers, then you start going further and further down. Once they make fun of you at dinner. Exactly. But the extra thought and preparation and all the extra things that can go wrong with a deep dive, it's amazing. Even if there's nothing over you, between you and the surface, just being down that deep is, it can be very dangerous. In 40 meters, you're like, I mean, that doesn't seem like that deep. There's like the Titanic's at like 12,000 feet or something crazy like that. That's significant because your body's not designed to be down 40 meters, that many atmospheres below sea level.
SPEAKER_09: No. And we'll get to decompression sickness and all coming up.
SPEAKER_06: Well, let's talk about it here. How about that?
SPEAKER_09: Oh, that sounds like a great idea. Actually, that sounds exactly as how we discussed it. Sure. So, you've probably heard of the bins. That's sort of the common name for decompression sickness. And that is a, it can be pretty rough, apparently. It can be very painful. It can be fatal. And it's caused by nitrogen bubbles. Nitrogen? Nitrogen bubbles in your bloodstream. That's the problem with the bins.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, because the air we breathe has like 78, 72% nitrogen. 78. 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, the rest is trace stuff, right? And that nitrogen typically at sea level, or even, you know, higher than sea level, but whatever. I think I just made this more complicated than I needed to. But the nitrogen typically goes through our body and we expire it, breathe it out, it does nothing. It doesn't react with anything. It's too hard to chemically deconstruct and use for something else. It requires too much energy, so we just pass it through. But when we're down breathing, the nitrogen that stays in our body at any given time and we're below surface, below sea level, it turns into a gas and permeates our bloodstream. But as we go up, if that gas isn't absorbed slowly into our tissues, it will form bubbles. Just like when you open a pop, a soda, a Coke, whatever you want to call it. Inside there's no bubbles, but when you open it up and introduce air and change the air pressure, the atmospheric pressure inside the can, all that gas turns into bubbles, carbonation, CO2 carbonation, and that would be the same thing that happened in your tissues and joints. And that is not something that you want to happen.
SPEAKER_09: No. If you want a Topo Chico or a soda or a nice frothy beer, you want that thing carbonated. You don't want your insides of your body carbonated.
SPEAKER_06: No, you definitely don't because it's agonizing. Apparently sailors named it the Benz because you'd be doubled over in agony. That does not sound great. And then on top of it just being extraordinarily painful, it can kill you in some circumstances. So they figured out that you actually can stay down at a certain depth for a certain amount of time and then if you do, you're going to have to do what are known as decompression stops on the way back up.
SPEAKER_09: That's right. You got to know how deep you are. You got to stop when you're supposed to. You got to hang out for a little body, give your body a chance to equalize the pressure, and then you go up a little bit more and then do it again. And obviously this is all completely regulated by your dive instructor. They're telling you what to do unless you're out there on your own and you're like super experienced. You know how to do all this stuff. But they're telling you how much time you need to spend, at what depth to ascend safely. Just to give you, Dave dug up this kind of fun fact about the, I think the deepest scuba dive on record was over a thousand feet by an Egyptian diver named Ahmed Gebber. And 14 minutes down, I imagine you just, you've seen the videos of those deep divers where they just put on the gear and they have some sort of a weight and they just get dragged to like the bottom of the ocean. Very quickly, it took 14 minutes to get down that deep, but it took 14 hours to safely decompress on the way back up.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, just slowly. I mean, that's crazy. It's a long time. So yeah, a lot of the deeper dives, you spend way more time doing decompression stops than you do actually doing your dive, right? So you have to like calculate this stuff. There's tables, there's dive computers that we'll talk about, but you have to, before you go into the water, you need to know exactly how long you're going to be down there, exactly what depth you're going to be at, and then you have to know based on those two factors, how many decompression stops you have to make and at what depth on the way back up that you need to stop at.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, two words you're never going to hear scuba diving are wing it. That's right. You don't want to wing it.
SPEAKER_06: No, you definitely don't.
SPEAKER_09: You got altitude diving, so if all this talk of going down, down, down and different pressures and things make sense, then it would make sense that if you're diving in a lake super, super high above sea level that that would change things too. And it does. If you're more than a thousand feet above sea level, it's going to be a different experience. So they're going to know what they're doing there too as far as how you're going to decompress going down when you're actually high up.
SPEAKER_06: Right. It's strange. You're like, okay, you're actually high up, but because you're underwater and all that extra water pressure, apparently you're more exposed to decompression sickness at high altitude dives than you are below sea level. You remember very famously in the firm, two things the firm introduced the world to, red striped beer and the awareness that you can't scuba dive and fly in the same 24-hour period.
SPEAKER_09: And my cousin and my uncle who lived in Memphis at the time and were very briefly in that movie.
SPEAKER_06: Oh, really? Were they the person on the beach?
SPEAKER_09: No, my cousin was a little girl at the time, my cousin Autumn, and she was like a full screen shot of her and another kid like at the big company party early on. And then my uncle Steve, who you've met, that lives out near San Francisco, he had like a, he was trying to be an actor at the time. He had a speaking line. I think he, if I'm not mistaken, he came into an office and said something about, you know.
SPEAKER_06: These pretzels are making me thirsty. I think that was it. Anyway, I didn't know red stripe was in the firm.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, definitely.
SPEAKER_06: No one knew what red stripe was until then and all of a sudden it was like the hippest beer on the planet because the 80s were so shallow. Okay.
SPEAKER_06: So that's altitude diving and our little side trip on the firm. There's also cavern diving and cave diving, which are usually put hand in hand.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, we covered those. They definitely do connect, but really cavern diving is just not really going all the way
SPEAKER_06: into a cave. Once you are out of the light, you are now cave diving. If you're in the light, you're cavern diving. And so that means things like cenotes and springs qualify as cavern diving. There's easy access to the surface. Whereas with cave diving, if you've gone and listened to that episode, there is no access to the surface and you are completely out of your mind to even try it once.
SPEAKER_09: That's right. It's our episode from December 2019, cave diving colon totally nuts. Yep, appropriately named. You got ice diving? Yeah. You can actually go dive in the cold, cold water under thick ice and go see those animals like penguins and seals and things.
SPEAKER_06: Yep. And apparently there's a place called Rumu Quarry in Estonia that has good ice diving. But in the summer, the big draw is there's a sunken underwater prison there in the quarry. Cool. Yeah. Like you can swim around, there's bars on the windows and stuff like that. It's pretty neat. Sounds spooky.
SPEAKER_09: It does. So what about the gear, Chuck?
SPEAKER_06: If you say, okay, I like this. I want to go ice diving. I want to go cave diving. I want to do it all. What do I need to get, Josh and Chuck? Well, I say we tell everybody what to get. What do you say?
SPEAKER_09: Well, you got to get an oxygen tank. No, no, no. You're not supposed to say oxygen tank because it's not oxygen. It's a scuba tank or it's a cylinder. And like we said, it's filled not with just oxygen. It's air that you breathe. You got to breathe like you normally breathe. So it's going to be 21 percent oxygen, 78 percent nitrogen. And those trace gases, they want to give you an experience like you're used to as far as breathing goes. Unless you do something called enriched air diving, that's got 32 percent oxygen and less nitrogen, which they called nitrox 32. And this lets you stay down there a little bit longer and you don't apparently at all have to make those decompression stops?
SPEAKER_06: No, I'm sure that there's a depth and a time at depth that you would have to make decompression stops, but it's much deeper and much more time before you would have to. That's my impression. OK. All right. There's also a BCD. And a BCD in addition to your tank, your cylinder, is probably the second most important piece of equipment for scuba diving. The reason why is because this is a little inflatable or very importantly deflatable vest that you wear that if you use it properly allows you to hover completely motionless like during your dive. And if you're really good at it, you can use it to like back out of a place upward or downward. There's just a lot of really neat things you can do using this buoyancy control device. And if you can't do it, then you might start going up to the surface. You might be stuck on the bottom. It takes a lot of practice, but when you get it right, you can really gracefully and really smoothly move through the ocean.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. I mean, that's the videos you see. No one does videos of you in snorkel fins going, I can't swim in these things or my daughter crying on a boat or somebody floating, bobbing up and down with their BCD being a PIA. Yeah, exactly. You know?
SPEAKER_06: A PIA? Oh, I see. I got you.
SPEAKER_09: It all just looks like all you do is just jump in that water and you're just immediately perfectly floating and meeting Nemo. Yeah, and I think that's a really great point, Chuck, because it takes a lot of practice
SPEAKER_06: at this. Nobody goes into scuba diving and it's just a natural at it because we're not naturals at scuba diving. It's something you have to learn and you have to practice at, but once you do, it's very rewarding.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I look forward to it. You got your regulator, which we talked about, that different people help perfect over the years and that is going to regulate that flow of the pressurized air into your mouth. They differ a little bit, but generally you have the first stage part. That's the one that actually attaches to the scuba tank and is going to do that first sort of pressure reduction to make sure you're not getting blasted out. Then you've got your demand valve or the second stage that goes into the mouthpiece that you're using to breathe and you're going to have a second mouthpiece. This is almost like a backup parachute, right?
SPEAKER_06: Yes, that's a really great way to put it. If you are out on a dive with a buddy, which you always want to be out on a dive with a buddy, and your buddy's air runs out, you have a second mouthpiece that accesses your air that you both can use as you start going back up. You can save your buddy's life with the additional hose.
SPEAKER_09: Pretty good. Or I'd imagine if something went wrong with your own, right?
SPEAKER_06: Well, I guess, but that would mean that your mouthpiece or something broke and you could use the other one. Sure, if that happened. If something went wrong with your air, no, it'd be just as useless as your other one.
SPEAKER_09: You know what happened when I was snorkeling? What? I snorkeled for a few minutes and I went to put that thing back in my mouth and it wasn't there. It fell off? I was like, hey dude, I'm not feeling one. I can't, is there a, do I have a mouthpiece and a snorkel? And then he went, no. And then he went, I see it, it's on the bottom, let me go get it. I guess it just became a glip or something. Yeah, I forgot they are, I think they do come in pieces then.
SPEAKER_09: Well, no, this was the tube, the whole thing.
SPEAKER_06: Oh, I see. So you just had it attached to your mask and it just fell away? I see. Fell away. Speaking of masks, Chuck, by the way, you can have a single lens mask or a dual lens mask, did you know that?
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I've also got for, and I was going to take it down there, one of those full face snorkel deals, which I have used in swimming pools and they're quite fun, but I did not take it. But I do like the idea of sort of the old school single lens.
SPEAKER_06: I do too, but the great thing about a dual lens is if you wear glasses and you have two different prescriptions for your eyes, you can get prescription lenses for your mask, which I had one of those. It's really neat. It's helpful. Although you can also just wear contacts like a normal person.
SPEAKER_06: Do you still have those? I don't know where it is. I don't have it handy, so I'm not sure where it is.
SPEAKER_09: Well, your prescription might've changed anyway. You should just get a new one. It's true. I just wear contacts now.
SPEAKER_06: I could use any mask. Oh, that's true. What else?
SPEAKER_09: Well, we got those fins. You don't call them flippers because they're going to make fun of you. So you got those fins and they are pretty standard. The ones that I saw mostly were split fins and there's no getting around it. Those things are awkward to swim in if you're not used to them. I felt just like I was stepping on my... It's kind of like wearing snow skis. I just felt very awkward.
SPEAKER_06: Well, also in addition to being awkward, you can really accidentally tear up coral or do all sorts of stuff if you're not adept at using your fins or you're not aware of where your body is. So it's not just you that had trouble with fins.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, my left foot kept cramping up too. It was not comfortable. Man, this sounds like a terrible experience. It was great once I took those things off.
SPEAKER_06: So scuba diving is a very expensive hobby. It's expensive up front. It's expensive during. It's expensive after. It's just an expensive hobby. And one of the things that has the most expense is a one-time, well, expense, is your dive computer. It's essentially a giant watch that gives you all the data you need for your dive. And I saw, I did not know this, but Apple has one coming out called the Oceanic Plus, which looks pretty awesome. It's probably going to be a million dollars. There's much more affordable dive computers slash watches available. And they're all going to basically tell you the same stuff, right?
SPEAKER_09: I hope so. I mean, they're going to tell you how deep you are, how deep it gets below you, how much air you've got in that tank, how cold or hot the water is, your decompression status. It says the water is cold. Yeah, it just says chilly. All the stuff that you need to know about your ascension when you're going back up to the top is going to be there. And as far as whether or not to invest as a purchase with all this stuff, it's up to you. You can say, go out and give it a shot. And if you really, really love it, and it's the kind of thing where you're like, well, hey, I know every year we go to this island and it might be worth it to go ahead and invest in buying your own stuff. Probably not the tanks and all that, but the mask and the snorkel and the fins and maybe a dive watch and stuff like that. Yeah, and the dive watch also, I mean, like if you're going on a dive that's led by somebody,
SPEAKER_06: Divemaster is probably going to have the dive computer and you don't really need your own because the Divemaster is going to tell you where to go and when. But I mean, they're pretty slick. Apparently they'll tell you to slow down if you're ascending too fast, where to stop, when to stop. It's just pretty neat. I can't imagine what they did before dive computers. It just must have been exponentially more dangerous than it is today with dive computers.
SPEAKER_09: I would imagine. And as far as investment goes, the same goes for your wetsuit. Even if it's, you know, if you're going down and even if it's a hot day and the water feels warm, it can, you know, the water's going to get colder and you may want that wetsuit and wetsuits are awkward and weird too. But they work. If you find a good wetsuit that fits and you know you're going to be doing it a lot, maybe buy your wetsuit. Yes. Or if you don't like putting your stuff in things that other people's stuff has been in.
SPEAKER_06: Exactly. And that's very tight fitting for a reason. You let a little water in there and then your body warms the water and the warm water keeps your body warm in return. They work really well. There's also the dry suit for water below 50 degrees. And you might say, well, then when do you need a wetsuit? Apparently water as warm as 80 degrees Fahrenheit can give you hypothermia if you're in there long enough. Wow. Yeah. So even if the water feels warm and you get in, you still probably want a wetsuit while you're scuba diving.
SPEAKER_09: We mentioned the rebreather earlier that was sort of invented early on by Lambertson but then perfected later. But this is what you do if you don't, well, for a few reasons. But one reason, if you don't want those bubbles coming out, you can get a rebreather that is exactly what it sounds like. It's going to capture that air that you're exhaling, scrub that CO2 off of it, and then add back in the oxygen to make it breathable air again. And the military uses these. If you're an underwater photographer, you might want to use these. And it allows you to dive longer. And if you want to stay down there for a while, rebreather might be for you. Yeah, apparently the record of staying down using a rebreather is 145 hours by a guy named
SPEAKER_06: Saddam Al-Khalini. Yeah, pretty impressive. So I say we take our second break and come back and talk a little bit more about scuba.
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SPEAKER_09: That's false and it kind of surprised me that there are no laws per se, or not even per se, there are no laws that you have to have a license. It's just sort of one of those things where A, it's really, really, really, really smart to do that so you know what you're doing safely. And B, I would dare say almost any dive outfit in the world will require that you have that. Maybe there's some super janky ones and I don't know if I'd get on one of those boats if they're like, nah, you don't need a card, who cares? You don't want it. I wouldn't go with that. So they're going to ask you for your card because there are risks.
SPEAKER_06: Even to fill up your tank. If you show up, they'll ask to see your certification, your card.
SPEAKER_09: Oh, so you don't just run off and do your own solo dive?
SPEAKER_06: I guess. I guess. I think it's just like they just want to make sure that nobody who isn't trained is scuba diving and that's a good way to do it.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah.
SPEAKER_06: So if you want to get certified, there's a few ways to do it. One of the most popular ways to do it is called Discover Scuba. And it's a very shortened, abbreviated version of the certification process where you go to like a resort and you take like less than an hour of classroom time. You go into the pool, you do a test dive, and then you go down to the beach and get in the water and scuba around. It's probably where other people are snorkeling. It's very low risk and you're not fully certified after that. But it's enough for you to go enjoy scuba on vacation without having to go get certified first.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. You're not going to be super deep. You're probably not going to be out with like a good coral reef or anything either.
SPEAKER_06: You never know.
SPEAKER_09: I guess you never know. It depends on where it is. But you know, we were on a boat for 12, 13 minutes like kind of hauling out into the ocean to get to this one. Neat. Or are they right off the beach sometimes? Sometimes, yeah.
SPEAKER_06: They can be. What do I know? I mean surfers will get tangled up in coral sometimes. It can be a real hazard.
SPEAKER_09: Well, those are deep water surfers.
SPEAKER_06: So that's the most basic way to get certified. And again, you're not actually certified. The basic certification, the open water certification usually takes a few days to complete, at least just even the first part. There's classroom time. They call it theoretical where you're learning. The thing the guy who I took lessons from said that you spend the first hour learning how to scuba dive and the rest of the time learning how to stay alive while you scuba dive. Because it's actually not that hard to scuba dive. A lot of it requires practice like inflating your BCD and achieving neutral buoyancy. But it's really just, it's not hard to understand. It's hard to remember what to do when you're panicking underwater so that you don't do the wrong thing. And that's really the bulk of the classroom time.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. It's going to cost you. It depends. It's generally around 500 bucks. You, again, you know, you can do it whenever you want. If you want to go down on your vacation and spend time doing this, you can do that. But you're on vacation. Like it's probably smart to go ahead and get it done before you get down there so you can just hit the water. And in every state in the country, like the least water-like state in the country has scuba classes you can take.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah because again you can be certified in like a quarry. And basically any state has at least a flooded quarry if not a lake you could be certified in for open water. You only have to be 10 years old. There's no maximum age. But this is really important. If you have a pre-existing condition, you want to talk to your doctor about whether or not you should scuba dive. Because again, you're exerting yourself way more than you think you're going to. And if you say have a heart condition or something like that, it can actually trigger a heart attack in you. And even without the exertion, just the difference in atmospheric pressure on your insides can accidentally trigger a heart attack in you too. So it's definitely not something that you want to just take lightly if you have a pre-existing condition.
SPEAKER_09: No, I can't imagine anything more terrifying than cardiac arrest under the ocean.
SPEAKER_06: That's pretty bad for sure. Yeah, or you guys in the ocean.
SPEAKER_09: You're not under the ocean. Under the sea. So you have to know how to swim though. I mean, I think that's a given, but we should say it. You're going to be certified for life, which is kind of cool. You're going to get your little card for you to misplace. And generally these days, you can have that stuff online on apps and things like that through PADI, P-A-D-I, Professional Association of Diving Instructors. That's kind of the big daddy. The big PADI, rather. But there's also N-A-U-I, NAUI, the National Association of Underwater Instructors, and also SSI, SCUBA Schools International. And they can all certify you. But like I said, PADI is sort of the biggest one. And you're going to spend a lot of time early on with this course learning this stuff, like you've talked about. Like most of this is done, you can do online at your house and over the course of, you know, five to ten hours, learn all the stuff, learn the hand signals, learn the terminology, learn the equipment and kind of all the basics that don't involve actually getting in the water.
SPEAKER_06: Yes, but if you have the time and the wherewithal to go take classroom instruction for the first part, like in the classroom, you should take that opportunity because you will be hanging around the local SCUBA community. You'll be immersed in it rather than showing up the first time for what's called your confined water dive, which is essentially where you put all the stuff you learned in the classroom to use in a swimming pool in the back of the SCUBA shop.
SPEAKER_09: So you'll know them and they can say, go Josh, you got this, bro.
SPEAKER_06: Exactly. If they don't know you, they'll be like, you probably have this. We can't really say either way.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I have no emotional attachment to you, though, so either fail or pass. I don't care.
SPEAKER_06: So I told you early on that having like just even a little bit of water over your head while you're breathing underwater is amazing. And that's your first experience in that confined water dive in the swimming pool. It's amazing. It's also kind of boring because they're like, what does this hand signal mean? Or show me how you can inflate or deflate your BCD, that kind of stuff. You're just showing that you know what to do as a novice. And then after that, after you pass that part, you go do your open water dives, which is the real deal.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. And like you said, at the very beginning, you need to get four to six of those under your belt, depending on the certification program. You've only done the one, but they don't all have to be in the ocean. You don't have to wait till you go to the Bahamas or whatever. You can do that at a nearby lake or that, what do you keep talking about? Reservoir, quarry. The quarries. You can do it there if, you know, if they have it set up there. And basically, you're just going to practice with someone there, learning how to get that ear pressure equalized and like you said, the buoyancy and just kind of getting it all down pat because what you're really looking to do when you finally go out to that coral reef is not be hassled and feel very comfortable and at ease and know what you're doing. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06: And a lot of people do the classroom and the confined water dive at home and then go do their open water dives on vacation. So you can start at the coral reef if you want, but what you're saying makes a lot of sense as well too, for sure. There's a big question about all this and from what I read, the certifying companies or agencies or whatever they're called, the bodies, they don't like to talk about the inherent risks of scuba. Like they acknowledge it is a risky activity. It's riskier than staying at home knitting, but it's probably even riskier than is generally thought of. It's a dangerous thing to do and you should know that going into it for sure.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. I mean, not to scare anyone off. Oh, I'm trying to scare people off.
SPEAKER_09: Danger is relative term. It's a relative term, but about 100 people in North America die annually scuba diving compared to 46 people last ski season in the U.S. But there are a lot more skiers than scuba divers. So that's about 100, I'm sorry, another 100 internationally scuba diving. So that's a fatality every 200,000 dives compared to a fatality per one million skiers. But a scarier way to look at it is that fatality rate is 3.4 to 4.2 per 100,000 divers because
SPEAKER_06: many divers go on more than one dive a year.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah.
SPEAKER_06: So I mean, that's a low number to me still, but like I said, everyone has their own risk
SPEAKER_09: tolerance.
SPEAKER_06: It is. If you go scuba diving and you aren't alone, you're with somebody who knows what they're doing and that person that's taking you, the dive master, is not a risk taker, you're probably going to be totally fine. The foolishness is what skews those numbers because something like 40% of scuba fatalities came after a diver got separated from their buddy and an additional 14% came from people who were on solo dives. They purposely didn't go with anybody. They just went and scuba dived by themselves. That is a very dumb, reckless thing to do, going diving by yourself. So it's 54%. Yeah, 54% was these people didn't have a buddy with them. So if you have a buddy with you scuba diving, which they say you always should have, that just completely changes your risk exposure just based on those statistics.
SPEAKER_09: And they don't even have to be your buddy.
SPEAKER_06: No, they're just called that. You can really dislike each other. As long as they don't want to actively harm you, you're probably going to be safe with them.
SPEAKER_09: I mean, I would want someone to like me at least. We don't have to be best friends. At least pretend, right? Yeah, I want to know that they care about me. All right.
SPEAKER_06: That's a lot to ask. Okay. You got anything else? I do have one more thing before we go. I know we've gone really, really long. One of the things that is a common cause of death or at least injury is something you wouldn't think of. If you're panicking and you, like say your air runs out, you're triggered, you start swimming upward. First of all, you can get the bends, but you're probably holding your breath because you're underwater. That's what your body and your brain tells you to do. That's a terrible thing to do because as you get closer to the surface, your lungs are filled with air and the air is now expanding beyond the capacity of your lungs. So you can pop your lungs. You can also create bubbles that go into your arteries and create embolisms. And it's just a bad jam. So there's actually something called the SISA, which is a controlled emergency swimming ascent, where you basically swim upward slowly as your panic mind can do while you're exhaling the whole way so that when you reach the surface, you don't have a lung full of air. Pretty neat.
SPEAKER_09: Pretty neat. The Bends. That's a great album name.
SPEAKER_06: Well, think Radiohead. Yeah, Baby's Got the Bends. It was the EP that followed OK Computer.
SPEAKER_09: No, The Bends was their full length LP. I know. This is the EP that they were testing all the material out on.
SPEAKER_09: Oh, OK. I got you. OK. So I just couldn't figure out if you knew it was an actual song. I did, but I'd forgotten when I was making the joke.
SPEAKER_06: So for all intents and purposes, I didn't know. You got anything else?
SPEAKER_09: Just one more Radiohead test. Let's hear it? No, I got nothing else.
SPEAKER_06: OK. That means then it's time for listener mail.
SPEAKER_09: Just a couple of kombucha corrections for us. This is someone named Frederick Overby Peterson. Overby. Overby? Mm-hmm. OK.
SPEAKER_06: How do you know that? Because there's a really great reporter named Peter Overby, and I think there's also his brother Dennis Overby, maybe? And they spell it that way. B-Y-E?
SPEAKER_09: OK. Well, and also probably so people don't say overbite. Right.
SPEAKER_06: I'm sure kids say it anyway, but you know. I'm sure they do.
SPEAKER_09: So Frederick bruised kombucha for friends and family and wanted to share a few things that we got wrong, but very sweetly, Frederick just says are worth adding. You don't need a scoby to start, guys. Store-bought kombucha is actually enough. If you brew your sweet tea and let it cool down and then add a little bit of store-bought kombucha drink to the tea, the kombucha you add will start eating the sugar and form a scoby seemingly from nowhere. So nice because it makes it super easy to get started, and you don't have to seek out that scoby from your neighborhood social media page. That's pretty cool. And not all kombucha is related, unfortunately. I don't like this part. As beautiful as it might have been, guys, they are not. A scoby's form when making some kinds of vinegar, when making homemade apple cider vinegar, for example, a scoby can form on the top. Now, I never managed to make my own scoby from scratch, but I've seen it several places and many guides on how to do it. But it's not as easy as making kombucha.
SPEAKER_09: And that is Frederick Overby Peterson.
SPEAKER_06: Thanks a lot, Frederick. First of all, great name. Very stately. Finally, thank you for all the information. That was great info too. If you want to be like Frederick Overby Peterson, then you can get in touch with us like they did by email. Send us an email to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com.
SPEAKER_03: Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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