May 31, 2011 • 33 mins
Sure, nicotine doesn't cause cancer, but it does rearrange the brain's reward system. Humans have been ingesting this plant for more than 6,000 years, but we generally understood little of it. Join Chuck and Josh as they explain how nicotine works.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you Should Know
from house Stuff Works dot Com? Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant
that makes this stuff you should know? The podcast. How's
(00:24):
it going? Man? Podcast intro Version Version one? Okay, point one?
How you doing? I'm well, sir, and you're enjoying I
guess we can't say a whole lot of beverage not anymore.
Remember we used to just blatantly say stuff, you're enjoying
a sparkling water. I can say that out of a can. Yep, frenchie, Yeah,
(00:46):
it's good stuff. Yeah. Why are we just determined to
push it to the envelope? I don't know saying in
Brandon it uh it rhymes with the boy? Uh so Chuck? Yeah,
you know, I was a smoker for a while. Yeah,
and uh, one could make a pretty good argument that
(01:09):
I started out at an unreasonably young aide. No, you
weren't young. I was young. You weren't young. No, I
was young. How old were you? Let me paint you
a picture? Okay, so first time I tried a cigarette.
It's in the mall. I'm young enough so that the
the guy who owns the pub in the mall that
(01:30):
has the cigarette machine that I'm buying cigarettes from, it
comes out and it's like, well, you could do it.
But we made off with our cigarettes and smoked one,
and like the mall started spinning and everything was just crazy, right,
you could smoke in the mall. Yeah, it was a
while ago. Um, that was the first time. The second
time was a few months later eighth grade, and um,
(01:54):
my friends and I all decided that it was high
time we started smoking. So we pull all of our
mind together and ended up with enough. We figured for
ten packs of cigarettes, so everybody gave me the money.
I got on my bike and rode to the gas station.
Rode up on my bike. Like the cashier saw me,
this kid who's thirteen right up on his bike. No. Fourteen,
(02:16):
just turned put his bike down and walk in and go,
I want ten packs of cigarettes. Brands exactly. I bought
like Cools, I bought Marlbro's, I bought Kent's draws like
anything else. I like that. And I remember the cash
here just like okay, here you go. Kidding and sent
me off with a bag of ten packs of cigarettes
(02:38):
dangling from the handlebars of my bike. It's probably like
ten bucks too. It was about ten bucks back in
the day. And we get back, I get back to
the woods, everybody's like, oh my god, we just started smoking,
and like right off the bat, I started smoking tons
of cigarettes. Yeah, And I turned green, got sick, and
still was like I like this a lot and smoked
(03:00):
for twenty years and chuck. Today is April, and how
many days are there in April, thirty or thirty one.
I'm gonna guess thirty one. I'm gonna go with thirty
one too, and I'm going to say no, thirty In
three days, I may first it will be one year
since i've really, wow a long time kicked it. Congratulations,
(03:23):
I smoked too. You'd probably never even shared that with
You had no idea that you smoked. Yeah. I smoked
in college like everyone does here and there when I
hands Yeah, but it wasn't ever anything that got its uh.
Nicotine never took a hold of meat to where I
needed a cigarette. It was always very much a social thing.
And then when I traveled around Europe, of course I
(03:44):
rolled my own cigarettes and thought it was just super cool. Yeah,
but you know what, kids, I was not cool. I
was dumb. No, I want to I want to add
that to there was absolutely nothing cool about what I did.
There's nothing adventurous. And many, many, many times over the
course of my life, I cursed myself. I cursed that
cashier and then cursed my bike for allowing me to
(04:07):
make one of the worst decisions of my entire life
that I regretted time and time and time again. You
cursed Abraham Lincoln because he was on the two five
dollar bills that you have to pay for it now,
I think they're probably he was on the pennies that
we used to pay for ten packs of cigarettes. So, um,
nicotine got under my skin, chuck as it were, which
(04:28):
is one of a few ways it can diffuse into
the human body. Huh, that's right. Uh. Should we talk
about tobacco just for a second here, let's at the beginning. Um,
it was cultivated as early as six thousand BC. People
were chewing on or inhaling tobacco. They realize, hey, this
is pretty good. Yeah. Native Americans. I'm not sure what
(04:50):
tribes they used to roll um like cigars that were
several feet long, and somebody would hold it at the end,
maybe another one in the middle, and you'd walk up
in you puff on them like really hard and inhale
until you started coughing, and then from the coughing you
get light headed and supposed that you had a vision. Interesting, Well,
I do know that as early as the sixteen hundreds
(05:12):
people actually thought, you know what, this might be bad
for you. And I bet you there's a link here
to some of these diseases that are killing people and
the smoke that we're inhaling. Yes, and I didn't know that.
I had no idea it went back that far. I
didn't either concerns about smoking right, and and cancer. Apparently
they were aware of the cancer back then as well. Yeah,
they probably call it like spirit intrusion or something instead,
(05:35):
but yeah, they they knew that there was something too smoking.
They also thought it was medicinal, which, as we'll see
towards the end of this podcast, um has actually made
something of a resurgence that the medicinal properties of nicotine.
So this is nicotine go uh Nicotiana tobaccum. Yes, nicotine,
(05:57):
uh Nicotiana tobaccum. What did I say no. I think
that's right. Okay, I like your Latin chuck. Thank you.
It's making a big comeback these days. It is so nicotine, Josh,
is a liquid alkaloid. Yeah, it's the only one. Most
alkaloids are white solids, really clean caffeine. Okay. I saw
(06:19):
on a page that that nicotine is the only liquid
all right, well I believe it then. Uh. It is
an organic compound. Alkaloid is and it's made of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen,
and sometimes a little oxygen in there and sometimes why.
And nicotine makes up about five per cent of a
tobacco plant if you're talking weight. But cigarettes contain between
(06:41):
eight and twenty milligrams of nicotine per cigarette. But here's
an important distinction. You only ingest about one milligram of
that into your body when you smoke a cigarette. It's
absorbed you ingest more, but only about a milligrams. Good point,
um say it in Latin chuck absorbed um nicotine. So,
(07:01):
like I said, nicotine got under my skin, which is
one of three ways that it can be absorbed right, Yeah,
through the skin, uh, into the lungs and mucus membranes
like the landing of your nose and gums. And if
you think who would snort tobacco, that's what snuff was
and is done that too, you sniff snuff. They they
(07:22):
still make that stuff. They do. It's a real old
timy like I think. You can only find it at
a like the customer service counter at a Piggy Wiggly
and it's still there from the night. My grandfather's company
actually made snuff in Tennessee. Your grandfather R. J. Reynolds. No,
he didn't own the company, but he was like a
(07:43):
manager of the of the workers on the floor, I think,
so he exploited people. Yes, And they also made like candy,
popcorn and stuff. It was weird, one of those companies
that made all kinds of crazy things. It was not
our gameral. So. Uh, nicotine, and we're talking about how
it how it gets into your body. It's absorbed. It
moves into the blood vessels that line these tissues, straight
(08:06):
into the blood stream and then pretty much directly to
the brain where it does its WAMO effects. That's right, um.
Out of the ways that you can ingest nicotine into
the body, the lungs are the most efficient, right, which
is why their cigarettes the little right, exactly. The inhaling
um nicotine through smoking tobacco, UM introduces this this drug,
(08:29):
this alkaloid to the alveola, which are the little tiny
air sacks where gas exchange occurs. And this is the
fact of the podcast for me, the the alveola, right,
little millions of tiny little gas bags, cute little gas bags. Um.
If you combine their their surface area, the total surface area,
(08:54):
they have ninety times more surface area than the human skin. Wow,
and I imagine that's like an average size person. But
still it's pretty impressive. Yeah, which again is why people
smoke it. And we we're gonna say cigarettes a lot,
but obviously this includes cigars and pipe smoke in any way.
You're gonna ingest tobacco dip snuff if you're still doing
the snuff the snuff, yeah uh so, but we're gonna
(09:17):
say cigarettes mainly. That's fine. Okay, that's the most popular way.
I believe that's right. So Josh, we said, um, here's
here's an interesting thing too about the half life? Is
that right? Is that how half life works? It said
that nicotine has a half life of sixty minutes, so
six hours after a cigarette, that one milligram that was
(09:38):
in your body is now point oh three one. That
didn't seem quite right, but I guess that is I
don't know, Chuck. Well, that's what it says. So that's
what we're gonna go with. Um, but how does your
body get rid of this stuff? How does it process
it for removal? Well? Um, several ways. Of it is
broken down by your liver, right, okay, Um, some is
(10:00):
habitalized by your lungs too and turned into uh, codine
and nicotine oxide. Yeah and coddina look that up. It's
an alkaloid as well, and also an anagram for nicotine. Huh.
And it does pretty much the same thing as nicotine,
just at a much lower potency. And alkaloids, by the way,
tend to really mess with humans. Like of there's different
(10:23):
types of alkaloids, but the under the large umbrella alkaloids
you have strychnine, night shade, opium, psilocybin, hemlock or got
anything that can get you wasted or kill you is
an alkaloid basis right. Um. You can also get rid
of cotonine um through your urine. So it takes about
(10:45):
twenty four hours to get rid of cotonine that way,
so you can actually do a nicotine p test a
day after or within a day. You can also do
a smell test that works too, with the breath or
the clothes or the hair or whatever. Here's the fact
of the podcast for me, Josh is that, Uh, some
people have a genetic defect and the enzymes in their
(11:06):
liver that the mutant enzyme is less effective at metabolizing nicotine.
So some people are born able to smoke less yet
retain the feeling they get from smoking longer. There's a
time in my life when I would have called those
people lucky. Uh yeah, well, I mean, I guess if
(11:26):
you're gonna smoke, it's better to smoke less. But I
still wouldn't should mess with it at all. Agreed, Chuck. Agreed.
It's so good to hear you say these things because
he used to say how much you loved cigarettes. I know,
but I still I think in this one, even if
I did still smoke, I would I would advise never
to take it up. Um, Chuck, let's talk about the
(11:46):
effects of nicotine. It is an alkaloid, which means it's
a drug basically, um, which means it has an effect
on a couple of parts of the brain, right yes, um,
and not just the brain of the body. One of
the first responses the body has um to nicotine is
the release of adrenaline, which kicks in our dear old
(12:09):
friend the fight or flight response, right yes, And that's initially,
but can also what they call it biphasic. Yeah, it
can invigorate and relax. Yeah, and that sounds a little
odd until you think about like something like alcohol, which
has the same qualities many times, which is why you
know the girl at the bar is all fired up
(12:30):
at first, and then later on it's why did it means?
Or you know, I can't hold my head up right um?
The last couple of shows, the last couple of comedy
shows I've been too. There have been chatty drunk girls
who have just been overly courageous in expressing what was
on their mind loudly at any given moment, heckling or
(12:53):
just too loud, but heckling but not not heckling like
you're a bad meeting, just like you know, the guy
would tell a joke and should be like I work
at home depot and it was that like you're you're
talking Bob Gold tweet right now and no idea what
he's gonna do. Za Galafernakis has some classic YouTube bits
dealing with hecklers. Yeah yeah, this one girl will take
(13:14):
a slate. It's really good. Everyone I've seen, though, has
done a pretty good job with these people. It's the
worst part of the job, I would imagine. Um, So, chuck,
you've got the release of adrenaline. Um. You. Also, we
have an explanation for why people who smoke tend to
eat less. Yeah, you hear oral fixation, and I imagine
(13:37):
that that probably has a lot to do with people
putting on the weight after they quit smoking. Um. But
if you smoke, you can go fairly long without food.
And now we understand why nicotine send some signals to
your brain. Right here, let me do a little dramatic creani.
(13:59):
So nicotine into the body. Hey, body, go ahead and
dump a lot of the glucost stores in your cells
into the blood stream. Okay. The body says, okay, and
the nicotine says, and by the way, I don't want
you releasing any insulin. Insulin absorbs glucost in the bloodstream,
and the body's like okay, And then the nicotine goes Okay, Well,
(14:21):
now that you have a bunch of glucose in your
blood stream, don't you think that you've just eaten and
are full and the body goes you know, I do,
and the insulin exactly, And yeah, so that's called hyperglycemic
And like you said, basically, it makes you feel like
you're not hungry, and um, it also increases your basal
(14:44):
metabolic rate. So you're gonna burn more calories sitting around
smoking than you would if you were just sitting around.
And this all sounds awesome. What I eat less and
I just burn calories sitting around? It sounds awesome, but
unfortunately it's not like, oh, I can lose weight smoking,
and that's like exercise, because what you're actually doing is
(15:05):
killing yourself over the long haul. And speaking of basil
or basil metabolic rate, um, that is something that apparently
is very overlooked when with people who exercise and count
calories and things like that. How did that? I just
sounded like Silvester the cat person. Um. You if you
(15:27):
exercise and you burn five hundred calories, people are like, well,
that's pretty awesome. I just burned five hundred calories. But
they're not taking too account the basil metabolic rate, which is,
had you just not gone to the gym and stay
at home, you would have burned a hundred and fifty calories.
So really you only burned three d and fifty calories.
You have to take your net calorie burn to really
figure out how much weight you lose exercising. Yeah, well,
(15:50):
I don't ever look at the like on a treadmill.
I don't ever pay attention to like, can you burn
this many calories? Like? You know what, I gave my
hard to work out for forty five minutes exactly, and
I didn't fall over dead exactly. And I never weighed
myself either, do you really? Yeah? I just fixed my
scale actually the batteries, I'll fix it up, put a
battery in it, and it had been out for like
(16:11):
four or five months, and I didn't, you know, I
felt myself getting fatter, and I weighed myself and I
was actually like a pound less than I was six
months ago. So it was all in my head. Well
it's not great. Ideally, I'm twenty pounds less than I
went six months ago. I've just been reintroduced to my
hip bones lately. Yeah, that's good. You can start wearing
(16:32):
the hip huggers you haven't noticed. Sorry, Okay, So chuck.
Cigarettes will kill you is where we left off, because
they will raise your bad cholesterol level, damage your arteries,
and eventually you are in line for a heart attacker stroke. Yes,
and that, and while we'll get into it later, let's
(16:52):
talk about the brain. Yeah, and I don't think that's
much of a spoiler. Now, cigarettes kill you. The the
the irony of it is is the nicotine won't kill you.
I mean, the nicotine can kill you, but you literally
have to overdose on it, and it takes more than
you could get from cigarettes. It's other chemicals, the thousands
of other chemicals in a cigarette that kill you. Well,
(17:14):
I'm glad you said that because that's a huge point. Um.
The other chemicals are killing you. The nicotine is what
makes you smoke over and over and over again. So
it's a it's a one two punch of death. Well,
let's talk about that. Let's talk about what happens in
the brain that gets you basically addicted. Um. First up,
as with anything, is the reward pathway is manipulated. Right, So,
(17:38):
just like with cocaine or alcohol or anything like that,
dopaminees released, which is how we learn how to eat
and reproduce and do anything that that causes our own
or our species survival. Were rewarded, right, Well, nicotine unlocks
the release of dopamine, which teaches us to smoke again. Rights, right,
(17:59):
But even more than that, a smarter neurotransmitter. And I
do kind of think that dopamine is kind of a
in fact, Chris Farley kind of neurotransmitter. You know, it's
just kind of like out for a good time kind
of thing. A setal colin. That guy is slick. That's
like a Patrick Bateman kind of neurotransmitter. That's right. And
nicotine docks to this uh that binds to this neurotransmitter,
(18:24):
and that's where that's where it all happens basically, And
may I interject r I P Chris Farley. I know
for a fact that he was not dumb. He was
a very smart guy. I was talking more about his
buffoon like characters that played, not him specific. We don't
want to speak ill of the dead, especially not Chris Farler.
That's right. So we just mentioned the set to colleen,
(18:45):
which the nicotine binds to this neurotransmitter. It's gonna end
when you smoke, it's gonna increase the release of setal colleen.
And the problem is that the set colin is great
and the body, everybody loves the body regulates the release
of it in the proper way, but when nicotine gets involved,
it's just out of control. Willy nilly, cetoclin going crazy
(19:08):
in your body, right, um, one of the and it's
a bunch of a seal colin being released means a
bunch of activity in the cholinergic neurons. Right, So the
cholinergic neurons basically tell your body like, hey, you wake up,
bub Let's go do something right, Let's go roller skate
or something like that. Um. Cholinergic neurons also promote dopamine release,
(19:31):
so you're up and at them. You're feeling good, you're
feeling you forhork Um. You endorphins are released, which is
the body's natural painkiller. You've heard of the runners high.
That is h endorphins going crazy at the end of
your long jog, exactly. Um. And then lastly, the thing
that cements at all is the release of glutamate, which
(19:51):
glutamate has been shown to enhance neural connections, connections between
the neural pathways, which enhances memory. We talked about memory
that we didn't talk about glutamate. Yeah, how do we
miss that? I don't know. Well, what can happen here
is if you when you ingest nicotine, glutamate can create
a memory loop of how awesome it is. So now
(20:12):
you've got this recurring film playing in your head like
smoking is great, smoking is great. Have another cigarette over
and over and over a deadly concoction. Yes, so that's
what happens. You're you lose weight, you feel great, right, Uh,
like you said, but you're slowly dying. Yes, But we
(20:32):
mentioned earlier, Um that there there there are medicinal there's
medicinal value to nicotine specifically, right, because it has this
effect on your cholinergic pathways. Um, it could help with Alzheimer's.
They're finding Alzheimer's is a loss of cholinergic neurons, that's right, right,
(20:53):
which leads to memory loss, that kind of thing. You're
not quite as active, You are angry and you don't
know why. That's right. Um, they're finding that nicotine can
help replace these or it can at the very least
stop the loss of cholinergic neurons and promote the activity
of the ones that are still around. That's right, hence
reversing the effects of Alzheimer's or forestalling it. That's right.
(21:15):
And Tourette syndrome is another thing they're looking into now
with nicotine patches. Slowly delivering nicotine can reduce the episodes
of Tourette's ticks and outbursts. So did we come? I
don't even know if we covered that in turetts. This
may be news to us. Do you anyone who hasn't
heard Tourette sint him yet? Go back illicito. It's a
(21:36):
good one, um, but chuck again. We want to specify
that you are much more likely to die from ingesting
nicotine via the current ways that we have it. We
have to ingest it then you are to gain any
kind of benefit, right, that's right. Cancer obviously, emphysema, heart disease, stroke,
(21:58):
and uh, the nicotine is what gets you addicted, and
all the thousands of chemicals and the cigarette is what
kills you. And it will kill you. I mean, if
you smoke your whole life, you're very much a rarity.
If you're one of those people that's like smoking for
fifty years and not suffering any effects. That's that's really rare.
(22:20):
Sometimes I feel death over my shoulder. Really now you're healing, man.
You can you can reverse the effects. That's what's so
good about it. Yeah, you can reverse the effects, but
you can also do lasting damage well, all sorts of
time bombs in your body after smoking thousands and thousands
of cigarettes over twenty years. True, but you're you're doing good, buddy,
um So, Chuck, we talked about it being psychologically addictive, right,
(22:43):
very much. You do it compulsively. The definition of this
is you are compulsively engaging in an activity that you
know will harm you. Yes, you're still doing it. Yes,
And it is physiologically anything. Neuroscientists basically say anything that
that uh synthetically turns on your reward pathway is addictive,
(23:04):
and that's cigarettes for sure. Um or nicotine specifically. And
we also mentioned chuckers that um nicotine itself is harmful
if you overdose on it. Yeah, but it's very difficult
to overdose on it because we remember there's eight to
twenty milligrams with nicotine and a cigarette, but your body
only jests about one. It's very difficult to overdose by
(23:26):
way of smoking inhalation. It is, but if you're a
baby and you're dumb, you can eat cigarettes or cigarette
butts and overdose on it. It doesn't take very much.
It can take eating one cigarette can send a baby
to the hospital with a lot of problems. Yes, and
I looked this up and it says so in this article,
but I double checked the adults. If you eat like
(23:49):
three to seven cigarettes as an adult, you will likely die.
So don't do that. Don't ever eat a cigarette for
any reason. No, But I remember we talked about um
ambient people on and in Waking Up and cigarettes, and
I was surprised. I thought it was like, oh, eat
like three packs of cigarettes and you might get really sick.
But if you eat four or five six cigarettes, you
(24:09):
will likely die if you don't get to a hospital.
So there. This all reminds me of a story of
I hope somebody out there can help me with this.
It was in a feature article in g Q sometime
between probably nineteen nine and n okay, okay. It was
about a bank robber may I. He was one of
(24:32):
the more successful bank robbers of all time because he
figured out if you put a clown wig on glasses
and then dangle ribbons from the glasses. No one will
ever be able to give a good description of you, ever.
So here's a very successful bank robber for a while.
What about his wearing a mask? I don't know that
was his though. This guy finally gets napped, right, and
(24:54):
he's in prison, and he decides he needs to get out,
so he takes a pack of cigarettes, right that I
imagine he traded a few honeybutons for um. He unrolls
the cigarettes and puts him in a cup of water.
Let's a couple of water sit overnight, goes around out
into the prison yard during like exercise time, runs around
a couple of times. It comes back in and immediately
(25:14):
chugs this cup of nicotine water of tobacco water and
falls right over right. So the hospitals like we are
the prisons like we gotta get this guy at the hospital. Well,
the ambulance that shows up is full of paramedics who
pulled guns on the prison guards. Get the guy into
the back of the ambulance. It's his gang posing his paramedics.
They take him to an underground doctor who revives him
(25:37):
and he lives is that that really happened According to
this g Q article and my memory of the g
Q article, that's what happened. We could find that out
of bet but we can explain exactly what they would
have treated him with to to overcome this nicotine overdose
which he was surely suffering. We can now, well, what
would they treat him with? Well, there's a couple of
(25:58):
things you could do. You could get the You could
get the nicotine out by giving them ipcac something to
induce vomiting. Yeah, um, which you would probably want to do.
You can also give them activated charcoal, which the carbon
will attract the nicotine the alkaloids, and it will keep
the body from absorbing more of it. But that's basically
what you want to do is to get out whatever
(26:18):
you can and make sure nobody eats any more nicotine. Yeah,
and I guess the only scenario no one would want
to do that is the the sleepy, hungover morning after
when you reach over and grab what you think is
that cup of soda and it's really the thing that
all your cigarette butts were there into. I knew a
kid who would still drink beer with cigarette butts in it. Yeah,
(26:40):
smart guy. Uh so I'm not talking about of course
you're not. Um so nicotine, Like we said, it gets
in your body. Like any drug, your body will adapt adapt,
adapt to that drug and start behaving differently. So that's
why when you quit, just like any drug, your body's
gonna say, wait a minute, Like I was functioning on
(27:03):
a certain level here. Uh, and now you just took
the nicotine away. So I don't know what to do right.
I'm used to a certain amount of color colinergic activity.
Give it to me. So I'm gonna be really messed
up for a while, and you're gonna be really irritable. Um,
Mr person who who has my body? And uh, you're
gonna be anxious, and you're gonna be depressed, and you're
(27:23):
gonna crave me a lot for about a month and beyond.
But a month physically, they say, is when it kind
of will leave your system. But the psychological part. I
know some people that quit smoking for a decade and
they still craved that cigarette on occasion. I used to.
I would meet people here there who would you know
(27:44):
who saw me smoking? Like I quit thirty years ago
and I still want a cigarette every day, And it
scared me because I'm kind of like, I think I'd
rather die than go like live like that, you know,
And now I understand what they're talking about. Where it's
like you, it's so manageable. It's such a passing thought
that I don't I don't have it every day, but
(28:04):
I mean I have had it where I'm like, it
would be really greattte probably having a drink that for
a lot of people alcohol in cigarettes you would think. So, No,
I haven't noticed any actual triggers. Um, there is a
lot of it is association, like yes, if you if
you drink, you want it. You want a cigarette that
doesn't it's fleeting. It's more kind of out of the blue,
(28:26):
not like stress related, not necessarily interesting. It's just kind
of they're like and like underneath a certain part of
your brain and it just kind of floats to the
service every once a while, but you just kind of
batted away. It's completely manage about you. Yeah, well that's good.
It's different for everybody, and um, the way it reacts
in your body is different for everyone. Your tolerance level
(28:46):
is going to be different, uh for everybody. That's why
some people smoke three packs a day is because they
need to keep recharging that hit of dopamine. And some
people can get by with smoking the occasional cigarette, and
our advice is to not ever start, avoid the whole mess. Yeah,
and this is coming from a dude who love to smoke.
And now you're just like, no, no, no, no, that's great.
(29:08):
I love it, Thanks, Chuck. Um. If you love nicotine
and you want to learn more about it, if you
love it at an intellectual level, I guess that is
what I mean. If you can learn more by typing
in nicotine, right, Yes, I imagine you could also type
in coded nine if you wanted to in in the
search bar at how stuff works dot com, which will
(29:30):
bring up this article on nicotine, and search bar brings
up listener mail. That's right, you almost caught me off guard.
That was so slick, Uh, Josh, I'm gonna call this
uh follow up on wacky Wills. Yes, we asked for
wacky will stories and this was a good one. This
is from Nate in Galesburg, Illinois. Dear Josh and Chuck
(29:55):
and Jerry, guys have been a big fan for years.
I heard how wills work. I was hoping you would
mention my favorite story of strange will stipulations. But you
didn't so here it is uh And he included a
link to Snopes because it's uh true. Yeah, he wasn't
the only one to send this one into Oh did
more than one of these come in? So? A Toronto
(30:16):
lawyer named Charles vance Millar died in with a hefty estate.
Left a number of strange clauses in his will, most
of which are described in the link, the strangest of
which is came to be known as the Great stork
derby wacky Canadians. He left a significant portion of his
money investment that would turn out to be worth up
(30:36):
to seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars to the woman
who gave birth to the most children in Toronto. And
it's in years following his death. Oh this guy to
do that? I don't know. I'm really trying to think
of a reason he was. Um, he was a big
fan of coitus maybe or just trying to populate Canada.
(30:57):
I guess take over the US once and for all?
Is it toront that's what he says. Uh. There were
a number of interesting legal challenges highlighted in the link,
such as whether or not illegitimate or deceased children counted.
It's awful, and ultimately the purse was split among six
women in total, the most money going to four women
with nine legitimate live burse during the time frame, each
(31:19):
of whom received the hundred and twenty five grand I
hope you guys have a chance to mention this uncommon
and capreaches equipment from Nate in Galesburg and uh quickly.
We also wanted to mention Chris uh is a marine.
Was a marine and then later a Naval reserve officer,
and they were required to have a will, so we
(31:40):
mentioned the on the battlefield type of holographic will or
oral will and apparently now you have to prove that
you have a will to get into the armed services.
So that's that's the information we got from Chris. Thanks Chris.
And I can't remember the name of the person who
sent us an email and uttered dis the leap that
we failed to mention Brewster's millions, but my apologies to
(32:04):
that person and anyone else who thought the same thing. Yeah,
we totally overlooked that. That's Lesser Prior's good. But Lesser
Prior and John Candy, Yeah, God, Resistledig exactly do you
want to say hi to Chuckers or me, You can
do so by going on our Facebook page Facebook dot
com slash stuff you Should Know UM. You can also
(32:25):
tweet high to us that's at s y s K
podcast uh. And then you can always just send us
a good old fashioned email at stuff Podcasts at how
stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. To
(32:45):
learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon
in the upper right corner of our homepage. The how
Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived down at it today
on iTunes, brought to you by the reinvented tooth thousand
and twelve Camry. It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you Should Know
from house Stuff Works dot Com? Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant
that makes this stuff you should know? The podcast. How's
(00:24):
it going? Man? Podcast intro Version Version one? Okay, point one?
How you doing? I'm well, sir, and you're enjoying I
guess we can't say a whole lot of beverage not anymore.
Remember we used to just blatantly say stuff, you're enjoying
a sparkling water. I can say that out of a can. Yep, frenchie, Yeah,
(00:46):
it's good stuff. Yeah. Why are we just determined to
push it to the envelope? I don't know saying in
Brandon it uh it rhymes with the boy? Uh so Chuck? Yeah,
you know, I was a smoker for a while. Yeah,
and uh, one could make a pretty good argument that
(01:09):
I started out at an unreasonably young aide. No, you
weren't young. I was young. You weren't young. No, I
was young. How old were you? Let me paint you
a picture? Okay, so first time I tried a cigarette.
It's in the mall. I'm young enough so that the
the guy who owns the pub in the mall that
(01:30):
has the cigarette machine that I'm buying cigarettes from, it
comes out and it's like, well, you could do it.
But we made off with our cigarettes and smoked one,
and like the mall started spinning and everything was just crazy, right,
you could smoke in the mall. Yeah, it was a
while ago. Um, that was the first time. The second
time was a few months later eighth grade, and um,
(01:54):
my friends and I all decided that it was high
time we started smoking. So we pull all of our
mind together and ended up with enough. We figured for
ten packs of cigarettes, so everybody gave me the money.
I got on my bike and rode to the gas station.
Rode up on my bike. Like the cashier saw me,
this kid who's thirteen right up on his bike. No. Fourteen,
(02:16):
just turned put his bike down and walk in and go,
I want ten packs of cigarettes. Brands exactly. I bought
like Cools, I bought Marlbro's, I bought Kent's draws like
anything else. I like that. And I remember the cash
here just like okay, here you go. Kidding and sent
me off with a bag of ten packs of cigarettes
(02:38):
dangling from the handlebars of my bike. It's probably like
ten bucks too. It was about ten bucks back in
the day. And we get back, I get back to
the woods, everybody's like, oh my god, we just started smoking,
and like right off the bat, I started smoking tons
of cigarettes. Yeah, And I turned green, got sick, and
still was like I like this a lot and smoked
(03:00):
for twenty years and chuck. Today is April, and how
many days are there in April, thirty or thirty one.
I'm gonna guess thirty one. I'm gonna go with thirty
one too, and I'm going to say no, thirty In
three days, I may first it will be one year
since i've really, wow a long time kicked it. Congratulations,
(03:23):
I smoked too. You'd probably never even shared that with
You had no idea that you smoked. Yeah. I smoked
in college like everyone does here and there when I
hands Yeah, but it wasn't ever anything that got its uh.
Nicotine never took a hold of meat to where I
needed a cigarette. It was always very much a social thing.
And then when I traveled around Europe, of course I
(03:44):
rolled my own cigarettes and thought it was just super cool. Yeah,
but you know what, kids, I was not cool. I
was dumb. No, I want to I want to add
that to there was absolutely nothing cool about what I did.
There's nothing adventurous. And many, many, many times over the
course of my life, I cursed myself. I cursed that
cashier and then cursed my bike for allowing me to
(04:07):
make one of the worst decisions of my entire life
that I regretted time and time and time again. You
cursed Abraham Lincoln because he was on the two five
dollar bills that you have to pay for it now,
I think they're probably he was on the pennies that
we used to pay for ten packs of cigarettes. So, um,
nicotine got under my skin, chuck as it were, which
(04:28):
is one of a few ways it can diffuse into
the human body. Huh, that's right. Uh. Should we talk
about tobacco just for a second here, let's at the beginning. Um,
it was cultivated as early as six thousand BC. People
were chewing on or inhaling tobacco. They realize, hey, this
is pretty good. Yeah. Native Americans. I'm not sure what
(04:50):
tribes they used to roll um like cigars that were
several feet long, and somebody would hold it at the end,
maybe another one in the middle, and you'd walk up
in you puff on them like really hard and inhale
until you started coughing, and then from the coughing you
get light headed and supposed that you had a vision. Interesting, Well,
I do know that as early as the sixteen hundreds
(05:12):
people actually thought, you know what, this might be bad
for you. And I bet you there's a link here
to some of these diseases that are killing people and
the smoke that we're inhaling. Yes, and I didn't know that.
I had no idea it went back that far. I
didn't either concerns about smoking right, and and cancer. Apparently
they were aware of the cancer back then as well. Yeah,
they probably call it like spirit intrusion or something instead,
(05:35):
but yeah, they they knew that there was something too smoking.
They also thought it was medicinal, which, as we'll see
towards the end of this podcast, um has actually made
something of a resurgence that the medicinal properties of nicotine.
So this is nicotine go uh Nicotiana tobaccum. Yes, nicotine,
(05:57):
uh Nicotiana tobaccum. What did I say no. I think
that's right. Okay, I like your Latin chuck. Thank you.
It's making a big comeback these days. It is so nicotine, Josh,
is a liquid alkaloid. Yeah, it's the only one. Most
alkaloids are white solids, really clean caffeine. Okay. I saw
(06:19):
on a page that that nicotine is the only liquid
all right, well I believe it then. Uh. It is
an organic compound. Alkaloid is and it's made of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen,
and sometimes a little oxygen in there and sometimes why.
And nicotine makes up about five per cent of a
tobacco plant if you're talking weight. But cigarettes contain between
(06:41):
eight and twenty milligrams of nicotine per cigarette. But here's
an important distinction. You only ingest about one milligram of
that into your body when you smoke a cigarette. It's
absorbed you ingest more, but only about a milligrams. Good point,
um say it in Latin chuck absorbed um nicotine. So,
(07:01):
like I said, nicotine got under my skin, which is
one of three ways that it can be absorbed right, Yeah,
through the skin, uh, into the lungs and mucus membranes
like the landing of your nose and gums. And if
you think who would snort tobacco, that's what snuff was
and is done that too, you sniff snuff. They they
(07:22):
still make that stuff. They do. It's a real old
timy like I think. You can only find it at
a like the customer service counter at a Piggy Wiggly
and it's still there from the night. My grandfather's company
actually made snuff in Tennessee. Your grandfather R. J. Reynolds. No,
he didn't own the company, but he was like a
(07:43):
manager of the of the workers on the floor, I think,
so he exploited people. Yes, And they also made like candy,
popcorn and stuff. It was weird, one of those companies
that made all kinds of crazy things. It was not
our gameral. So. Uh, nicotine, and we're talking about how
it how it gets into your body. It's absorbed. It
moves into the blood vessels that line these tissues, straight
(08:06):
into the blood stream and then pretty much directly to
the brain where it does its WAMO effects. That's right, um.
Out of the ways that you can ingest nicotine into
the body, the lungs are the most efficient, right, which
is why their cigarettes the little right, exactly. The inhaling
um nicotine through smoking tobacco, UM introduces this this drug,
(08:29):
this alkaloid to the alveola, which are the little tiny
air sacks where gas exchange occurs. And this is the
fact of the podcast for me, the the alveola, right,
little millions of tiny little gas bags, cute little gas bags. Um.
If you combine their their surface area, the total surface area,
(08:54):
they have ninety times more surface area than the human skin. Wow,
and I imagine that's like an average size person. But
still it's pretty impressive. Yeah, which again is why people
smoke it. And we we're gonna say cigarettes a lot,
but obviously this includes cigars and pipe smoke in any way.
You're gonna ingest tobacco dip snuff if you're still doing
the snuff the snuff, yeah uh so, but we're gonna
(09:17):
say cigarettes mainly. That's fine. Okay, that's the most popular way.
I believe that's right. So Josh, we said, um, here's
here's an interesting thing too about the half life? Is
that right? Is that how half life works? It said
that nicotine has a half life of sixty minutes, so
six hours after a cigarette, that one milligram that was
(09:38):
in your body is now point oh three one. That
didn't seem quite right, but I guess that is I
don't know, Chuck. Well, that's what it says. So that's
what we're gonna go with. Um, but how does your
body get rid of this stuff? How does it process
it for removal? Well? Um, several ways. Of it is
broken down by your liver, right, okay, Um, some is
(10:00):
habitalized by your lungs too and turned into uh, codine
and nicotine oxide. Yeah and coddina look that up. It's
an alkaloid as well, and also an anagram for nicotine. Huh.
And it does pretty much the same thing as nicotine,
just at a much lower potency. And alkaloids, by the way,
tend to really mess with humans. Like of there's different
(10:23):
types of alkaloids, but the under the large umbrella alkaloids
you have strychnine, night shade, opium, psilocybin, hemlock or got
anything that can get you wasted or kill you is
an alkaloid basis right. Um. You can also get rid
of cotonine um through your urine. So it takes about
(10:45):
twenty four hours to get rid of cotonine that way,
so you can actually do a nicotine p test a
day after or within a day. You can also do
a smell test that works too, with the breath or
the clothes or the hair or whatever. Here's the fact
of the podcast for me, Josh is that, Uh, some
people have a genetic defect and the enzymes in their
(11:06):
liver that the mutant enzyme is less effective at metabolizing nicotine.
So some people are born able to smoke less yet
retain the feeling they get from smoking longer. There's a
time in my life when I would have called those
people lucky. Uh yeah, well, I mean, I guess if
(11:26):
you're gonna smoke, it's better to smoke less. But I
still wouldn't should mess with it at all. Agreed, Chuck. Agreed.
It's so good to hear you say these things because
he used to say how much you loved cigarettes. I know,
but I still I think in this one, even if
I did still smoke, I would I would advise never
to take it up. Um, Chuck, let's talk about the
(11:46):
effects of nicotine. It is an alkaloid, which means it's
a drug basically, um, which means it has an effect
on a couple of parts of the brain, right yes, um,
and not just the brain of the body. One of
the first responses the body has um to nicotine is
the release of adrenaline, which kicks in our dear old
(12:09):
friend the fight or flight response, right yes, And that's initially,
but can also what they call it biphasic. Yeah, it
can invigorate and relax. Yeah, and that sounds a little
odd until you think about like something like alcohol, which
has the same qualities many times, which is why you
know the girl at the bar is all fired up
(12:30):
at first, and then later on it's why did it means?
Or you know, I can't hold my head up right um?
The last couple of shows, the last couple of comedy
shows I've been too. There have been chatty drunk girls
who have just been overly courageous in expressing what was
on their mind loudly at any given moment, heckling or
(12:53):
just too loud, but heckling but not not heckling like
you're a bad meeting, just like you know, the guy
would tell a joke and should be like I work
at home depot and it was that like you're you're
talking Bob Gold tweet right now and no idea what
he's gonna do. Za Galafernakis has some classic YouTube bits
dealing with hecklers. Yeah yeah, this one girl will take
(13:14):
a slate. It's really good. Everyone I've seen, though, has
done a pretty good job with these people. It's the
worst part of the job, I would imagine. Um, So, chuck,
you've got the release of adrenaline. Um. You. Also, we
have an explanation for why people who smoke tend to
eat less. Yeah, you hear oral fixation, and I imagine
(13:37):
that that probably has a lot to do with people
putting on the weight after they quit smoking. Um. But
if you smoke, you can go fairly long without food.
And now we understand why nicotine send some signals to
your brain. Right here, let me do a little dramatic creani.
(13:59):
So nicotine into the body. Hey, body, go ahead and
dump a lot of the glucost stores in your cells
into the blood stream. Okay. The body says, okay, and
the nicotine says, and by the way, I don't want
you releasing any insulin. Insulin absorbs glucost in the bloodstream,
and the body's like okay, And then the nicotine goes Okay, Well,
(14:21):
now that you have a bunch of glucose in your
blood stream, don't you think that you've just eaten and
are full and the body goes you know, I do,
and the insulin exactly, And yeah, so that's called hyperglycemic
And like you said, basically, it makes you feel like
you're not hungry, and um, it also increases your basal
(14:44):
metabolic rate. So you're gonna burn more calories sitting around
smoking than you would if you were just sitting around.
And this all sounds awesome. What I eat less and
I just burn calories sitting around? It sounds awesome, but
unfortunately it's not like, oh, I can lose weight smoking,
and that's like exercise, because what you're actually doing is
(15:05):
killing yourself over the long haul. And speaking of basil
or basil metabolic rate, um, that is something that apparently
is very overlooked when with people who exercise and count
calories and things like that. How did that? I just
sounded like Silvester the cat person. Um. You if you
(15:27):
exercise and you burn five hundred calories, people are like, well,
that's pretty awesome. I just burned five hundred calories. But
they're not taking too account the basil metabolic rate, which is,
had you just not gone to the gym and stay
at home, you would have burned a hundred and fifty calories.
So really you only burned three d and fifty calories.
You have to take your net calorie burn to really
figure out how much weight you lose exercising. Yeah, well,
(15:50):
I don't ever look at the like on a treadmill.
I don't ever pay attention to like, can you burn
this many calories? Like? You know what, I gave my
hard to work out for forty five minutes exactly, and
I didn't fall over dead exactly. And I never weighed
myself either, do you really? Yeah? I just fixed my
scale actually the batteries, I'll fix it up, put a
battery in it, and it had been out for like
(16:11):
four or five months, and I didn't, you know, I
felt myself getting fatter, and I weighed myself and I
was actually like a pound less than I was six
months ago. So it was all in my head. Well
it's not great. Ideally, I'm twenty pounds less than I
went six months ago. I've just been reintroduced to my
hip bones lately. Yeah, that's good. You can start wearing
(16:32):
the hip huggers you haven't noticed. Sorry, Okay, So chuck.
Cigarettes will kill you is where we left off, because
they will raise your bad cholesterol level, damage your arteries,
and eventually you are in line for a heart attacker stroke. Yes,
and that, and while we'll get into it later, let's
(16:52):
talk about the brain. Yeah, and I don't think that's
much of a spoiler. Now, cigarettes kill you. The the
the irony of it is is the nicotine won't kill you.
I mean, the nicotine can kill you, but you literally
have to overdose on it, and it takes more than
you could get from cigarettes. It's other chemicals, the thousands
of other chemicals in a cigarette that kill you. Well,
(17:14):
I'm glad you said that because that's a huge point. Um.
The other chemicals are killing you. The nicotine is what
makes you smoke over and over and over again. So
it's a it's a one two punch of death. Well,
let's talk about that. Let's talk about what happens in
the brain that gets you basically addicted. Um. First up,
as with anything, is the reward pathway is manipulated. Right, So,
(17:38):
just like with cocaine or alcohol or anything like that,
dopaminees released, which is how we learn how to eat
and reproduce and do anything that that causes our own
or our species survival. Were rewarded, right, Well, nicotine unlocks
the release of dopamine, which teaches us to smoke again. Rights, right,
(17:59):
But even more than that, a smarter neurotransmitter. And I
do kind of think that dopamine is kind of a
in fact, Chris Farley kind of neurotransmitter. You know, it's
just kind of like out for a good time kind
of thing. A setal colin. That guy is slick. That's
like a Patrick Bateman kind of neurotransmitter. That's right. And
nicotine docks to this uh that binds to this neurotransmitter,
(18:24):
and that's where that's where it all happens basically, And
may I interject r I P Chris Farley. I know
for a fact that he was not dumb. He was
a very smart guy. I was talking more about his
buffoon like characters that played, not him specific. We don't
want to speak ill of the dead, especially not Chris Farler.
That's right. So we just mentioned the set to colleen,
(18:45):
which the nicotine binds to this neurotransmitter. It's gonna end
when you smoke, it's gonna increase the release of setal colleen.
And the problem is that the set colin is great
and the body, everybody loves the body regulates the release
of it in the proper way, but when nicotine gets involved,
it's just out of control. Willy nilly, cetoclin going crazy
(19:08):
in your body, right, um, one of the and it's
a bunch of a seal colin being released means a
bunch of activity in the cholinergic neurons. Right, So the
cholinergic neurons basically tell your body like, hey, you wake up,
bub Let's go do something right, Let's go roller skate
or something like that. Um. Cholinergic neurons also promote dopamine release,
(19:31):
so you're up and at them. You're feeling good, you're
feeling you forhork Um. You endorphins are released, which is
the body's natural painkiller. You've heard of the runners high.
That is h endorphins going crazy at the end of
your long jog, exactly. Um. And then lastly, the thing
that cements at all is the release of glutamate, which
(19:51):
glutamate has been shown to enhance neural connections, connections between
the neural pathways, which enhances memory. We talked about memory
that we didn't talk about glutamate. Yeah, how do we
miss that? I don't know. Well, what can happen here
is if you when you ingest nicotine, glutamate can create
a memory loop of how awesome it is. So now
(20:12):
you've got this recurring film playing in your head like
smoking is great, smoking is great. Have another cigarette over
and over and over a deadly concoction. Yes, so that's
what happens. You're you lose weight, you feel great, right, Uh,
like you said, but you're slowly dying. Yes, But we
(20:32):
mentioned earlier, Um that there there there are medicinal there's
medicinal value to nicotine specifically, right, because it has this
effect on your cholinergic pathways. Um, it could help with Alzheimer's.
They're finding Alzheimer's is a loss of cholinergic neurons, that's right, right,
(20:53):
which leads to memory loss, that kind of thing. You're
not quite as active, You are angry and you don't
know why. That's right. Um, they're finding that nicotine can
help replace these or it can at the very least
stop the loss of cholinergic neurons and promote the activity
of the ones that are still around. That's right, hence
reversing the effects of Alzheimer's or forestalling it. That's right.
(21:15):
And Tourette syndrome is another thing they're looking into now
with nicotine patches. Slowly delivering nicotine can reduce the episodes
of Tourette's ticks and outbursts. So did we come? I
don't even know if we covered that in turetts. This
may be news to us. Do you anyone who hasn't
heard Tourette sint him yet? Go back illicito. It's a
(21:36):
good one, um, but chuck again. We want to specify
that you are much more likely to die from ingesting
nicotine via the current ways that we have it. We
have to ingest it then you are to gain any
kind of benefit, right, that's right. Cancer obviously, emphysema, heart disease, stroke,
(21:58):
and uh, the nicotine is what gets you addicted, and
all the thousands of chemicals and the cigarette is what
kills you. And it will kill you. I mean, if
you smoke your whole life, you're very much a rarity.
If you're one of those people that's like smoking for
fifty years and not suffering any effects. That's that's really rare.
(22:20):
Sometimes I feel death over my shoulder. Really now you're healing, man.
You can you can reverse the effects. That's what's so
good about it. Yeah, you can reverse the effects, but
you can also do lasting damage well, all sorts of
time bombs in your body after smoking thousands and thousands
of cigarettes over twenty years. True, but you're you're doing good, buddy,
um So, Chuck, we talked about it being psychologically addictive, right,
(22:43):
very much. You do it compulsively. The definition of this
is you are compulsively engaging in an activity that you
know will harm you. Yes, you're still doing it. Yes,
And it is physiologically anything. Neuroscientists basically say anything that
that uh synthetically turns on your reward pathway is addictive,
(23:04):
and that's cigarettes for sure. Um or nicotine specifically. And
we also mentioned chuckers that um nicotine itself is harmful
if you overdose on it. Yeah, but it's very difficult
to overdose on it because we remember there's eight to
twenty milligrams with nicotine and a cigarette, but your body
only jests about one. It's very difficult to overdose by
(23:26):
way of smoking inhalation. It is, but if you're a
baby and you're dumb, you can eat cigarettes or cigarette
butts and overdose on it. It doesn't take very much.
It can take eating one cigarette can send a baby
to the hospital with a lot of problems. Yes, and
I looked this up and it says so in this article,
but I double checked the adults. If you eat like
(23:49):
three to seven cigarettes as an adult, you will likely die.
So don't do that. Don't ever eat a cigarette for
any reason. No, But I remember we talked about um
ambient people on and in Waking Up and cigarettes, and
I was surprised. I thought it was like, oh, eat
like three packs of cigarettes and you might get really sick.
But if you eat four or five six cigarettes, you
(24:09):
will likely die if you don't get to a hospital.
So there. This all reminds me of a story of
I hope somebody out there can help me with this.
It was in a feature article in g Q sometime
between probably nineteen nine and n okay, okay. It was
about a bank robber may I. He was one of
(24:32):
the more successful bank robbers of all time because he
figured out if you put a clown wig on glasses
and then dangle ribbons from the glasses. No one will
ever be able to give a good description of you, ever.
So here's a very successful bank robber for a while.
What about his wearing a mask? I don't know that
was his though. This guy finally gets napped, right, and
(24:54):
he's in prison, and he decides he needs to get out,
so he takes a pack of cigarettes, right that I
imagine he traded a few honeybutons for um. He unrolls
the cigarettes and puts him in a cup of water.
Let's a couple of water sit overnight, goes around out
into the prison yard during like exercise time, runs around
a couple of times. It comes back in and immediately
(25:14):
chugs this cup of nicotine water of tobacco water and
falls right over right. So the hospitals like we are
the prisons like we gotta get this guy at the hospital. Well,
the ambulance that shows up is full of paramedics who
pulled guns on the prison guards. Get the guy into
the back of the ambulance. It's his gang posing his paramedics.
They take him to an underground doctor who revives him
(25:37):
and he lives is that that really happened According to
this g Q article and my memory of the g
Q article, that's what happened. We could find that out
of bet but we can explain exactly what they would
have treated him with to to overcome this nicotine overdose
which he was surely suffering. We can now, well, what
would they treat him with? Well, there's a couple of
(25:58):
things you could do. You could get the You could
get the nicotine out by giving them ipcac something to
induce vomiting. Yeah, um, which you would probably want to do.
You can also give them activated charcoal, which the carbon
will attract the nicotine the alkaloids, and it will keep
the body from absorbing more of it. But that's basically
what you want to do is to get out whatever
(26:18):
you can and make sure nobody eats any more nicotine. Yeah,
and I guess the only scenario no one would want
to do that is the the sleepy, hungover morning after
when you reach over and grab what you think is
that cup of soda and it's really the thing that
all your cigarette butts were there into. I knew a
kid who would still drink beer with cigarette butts in it. Yeah,
(26:40):
smart guy. Uh so I'm not talking about of course
you're not. Um so nicotine, Like we said, it gets
in your body. Like any drug, your body will adapt adapt,
adapt to that drug and start behaving differently. So that's
why when you quit, just like any drug, your body's
gonna say, wait a minute, Like I was functioning on
(27:03):
a certain level here. Uh, and now you just took
the nicotine away. So I don't know what to do right.
I'm used to a certain amount of color colinergic activity.
Give it to me. So I'm gonna be really messed
up for a while, and you're gonna be really irritable. Um,
Mr person who who has my body? And uh, you're
gonna be anxious, and you're gonna be depressed, and you're
(27:23):
gonna crave me a lot for about a month and beyond.
But a month physically, they say, is when it kind
of will leave your system. But the psychological part. I
know some people that quit smoking for a decade and
they still craved that cigarette on occasion. I used to.
I would meet people here there who would you know
(27:44):
who saw me smoking? Like I quit thirty years ago
and I still want a cigarette every day, And it
scared me because I'm kind of like, I think I'd
rather die than go like live like that, you know,
And now I understand what they're talking about. Where it's
like you, it's so manageable. It's such a passing thought
that I don't I don't have it every day, but
(28:04):
I mean I have had it where I'm like, it
would be really greattte probably having a drink that for
a lot of people alcohol in cigarettes you would think. So, No,
I haven't noticed any actual triggers. Um, there is a
lot of it is association, like yes, if you if
you drink, you want it. You want a cigarette that
doesn't it's fleeting. It's more kind of out of the blue,
(28:26):
not like stress related, not necessarily interesting. It's just kind
of they're like and like underneath a certain part of
your brain and it just kind of floats to the
service every once a while, but you just kind of
batted away. It's completely manage about you. Yeah, well that's good.
It's different for everybody, and um, the way it reacts
in your body is different for everyone. Your tolerance level
(28:46):
is going to be different, uh for everybody. That's why
some people smoke three packs a day is because they
need to keep recharging that hit of dopamine. And some
people can get by with smoking the occasional cigarette, and
our advice is to not ever start, avoid the whole mess. Yeah,
and this is coming from a dude who love to smoke.
And now you're just like, no, no, no, no, that's great.
(29:08):
I love it, Thanks, Chuck. Um. If you love nicotine
and you want to learn more about it, if you
love it at an intellectual level, I guess that is
what I mean. If you can learn more by typing
in nicotine, right, Yes, I imagine you could also type
in coded nine if you wanted to in in the
search bar at how stuff works dot com, which will
(29:30):
bring up this article on nicotine, and search bar brings
up listener mail. That's right, you almost caught me off guard.
That was so slick, Uh, Josh, I'm gonna call this
uh follow up on wacky Wills. Yes, we asked for
wacky will stories and this was a good one. This
is from Nate in Galesburg, Illinois. Dear Josh and Chuck
(29:55):
and Jerry, guys have been a big fan for years.
I heard how wills work. I was hoping you would
mention my favorite story of strange will stipulations. But you
didn't so here it is uh And he included a
link to Snopes because it's uh true. Yeah, he wasn't
the only one to send this one into Oh did
more than one of these come in? So? A Toronto
(30:16):
lawyer named Charles vance Millar died in with a hefty estate.
Left a number of strange clauses in his will, most
of which are described in the link, the strangest of
which is came to be known as the Great stork
derby wacky Canadians. He left a significant portion of his
money investment that would turn out to be worth up
(30:36):
to seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars to the woman
who gave birth to the most children in Toronto. And
it's in years following his death. Oh this guy to
do that? I don't know. I'm really trying to think
of a reason he was. Um, he was a big
fan of coitus maybe or just trying to populate Canada.
(30:57):
I guess take over the US once and for all?
Is it toront that's what he says. Uh. There were
a number of interesting legal challenges highlighted in the link,
such as whether or not illegitimate or deceased children counted.
It's awful, and ultimately the purse was split among six
women in total, the most money going to four women
with nine legitimate live burse during the time frame, each
(31:19):
of whom received the hundred and twenty five grand I
hope you guys have a chance to mention this uncommon
and capreaches equipment from Nate in Galesburg and uh quickly.
We also wanted to mention Chris uh is a marine.
Was a marine and then later a Naval reserve officer,
and they were required to have a will, so we
(31:40):
mentioned the on the battlefield type of holographic will or
oral will and apparently now you have to prove that
you have a will to get into the armed services.
So that's that's the information we got from Chris. Thanks Chris.
And I can't remember the name of the person who
sent us an email and uttered dis the leap that
we failed to mention Brewster's millions, but my apologies to
(32:04):
that person and anyone else who thought the same thing. Yeah,
we totally overlooked that. That's Lesser Prior's good. But Lesser
Prior and John Candy, Yeah, God, Resistledig exactly do you
want to say hi to Chuckers or me, You can
do so by going on our Facebook page Facebook dot
com slash stuff you Should Know UM. You can also
(32:25):
tweet high to us that's at s y s K
podcast uh. And then you can always just send us
a good old fashioned email at stuff Podcasts at how
stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. To
(32:45):
learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon
in the upper right corner of our homepage. The how
Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived down at it today
on iTunes, brought to you by the reinvented tooth thousand
and twelve Camry. It's ready, are you
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