How Weather Modification Works

It began with old-timey guys dropping dry ice on clouds. Since then weather modification was used to keep the 2008 opening ceremonies dry and flood the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but does it work? Learn about weather control plans, diabolical or otherwise.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Stuff you Should Know Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W. Chuff Bryant,
and it's You Should Know Rainy Edition is the Rainy

(00:25):
How appropriate that we're doing this one today because it
has been raining in Atlanta for forty days and forty nights.
It seems like it really has been. I've been breaking
up the duck boots. Man, it's almost never wear those
because it's not that rain. But well, yeah, sure it
is as well, dude, we're in the midst of like
a ten year drought. You know, we're still in drought
level conditions. Yeah, and then tomorrow it says maybe even

(00:48):
snow in the northern suburbs. That would be nice chance
of rain or snow. Um. You know, despite all this rame,
we still learn a drought condition and we haven't for
a while. You remember we're back in two thousand seven, Yeah,
when Sonny Purdue was the governor. They held in an
official state prayer for rain, where Governor Purdue led a

(01:11):
prayer for rain, saying like God, please rain, for the
love of God, for the love of you please make
your rain. Yeah, and it rained. Um. I think a
lot of that had to do with the fact that
he held that prayer on the night before it was
calling for chance of rain. I don't remember it raining
the next day. Yeah, rain the next day, and people

(01:32):
were said, Oh, my goodness, God made it rain, Sonny
produce the magic rain. Yeah, Mother Nature at work. So, um,
you've got people praying for rain. You have the rain dance, um. Yeah,
which is really hard to find any information on these days,
but apparently the Pueblo had a pretty cool rain dance

(01:53):
because you know, they lived in the southwest for it
was very dry, so they knew what they were doing. Um.
And then there's something that I discovered today called the
Papa ruta, which is from um Romania, and basically, a
girl from a village would run around wearing like a
skirt with um made of like vines and branches, and

(02:14):
she would go um dancing through the streets of the
village and then go house to house and then when
she was greeted at the door of each house, people
would pour water on her and she would just continue
dancing and people would be playing music and um. Eventually
it would hopefully rain. Eventually that would evolve into the
wet t shirt contest at the Animal City Beach. I

(02:35):
guess that's probably where it came from. Who knew. Yeah, which,
of course you referenced the fact that Panama City Beach
was settled by Romanian settlers. Uh so Yeah, for a change,
we're talking about the weather and it's not uh, some
little boring chit chat. You know what I'm saying. You

(02:57):
don't think this was boring chit chat. It's legit is.
You know, usually when you're like, oh, you know, it's
raining here, it's just a very boring way to say.
I have not much to say what I'm saying. Let's
see what this is actual. Yeah, it is. Uh, we're
saying that. Um. Because we're talking about weather modification. You
could say that rain dance was an early attempt at
it um and then in the early twentieth century people

(03:22):
started to try to apply science to it. And there
were some pretty cool attempts early on by very smart
guys from like Harvard and M I. T. And a
Dutch guy um to basically either make it rain, to
make it stop raining, or to deter some other kind
of weather phenomenon like fog or hurricanes were tornadoes. Actually

(03:44):
those came along a little later. But fog, I think
you have down in They were trying to dispad fog. Yeah,
a guy named Professor Henry G. Houghton of m I
T Yeah. I think my favorite is the Harvard guy,
Professor Emory Leon Chaffe. It sounds like he's be from
the University of the South. Yeah. Well, he was flying
around in a plane in nine um with charge sand

(04:07):
whatever the heck that is. Well, I think it's saying
that you apply an electrical current too. Ye, you'd do
something through its eons, right, And he was dumping into
the clouds and actually he was definitely onto something. I
don't know where he figured that out, but he um was.
I guess you could say the grandfather of cloud seating then, yeah,
grand Grandpa Chaffee, all right, And things were kind of

(04:31):
humming along a little bit until um, Kurt Vonnie gets
older brother Bernie Bernard, Doctor Bernard really took it by
the horns and made some headway as far as cloud
seating and actually controlling the weather in the mid nine right.
I guess he was researching that for ge and he
figured out that silver iodide has virtually the same distance

(04:53):
between um points and its crystal lattice structure as ice.
So he said, you know what, all bet, this would
be a really good stand in for ice formation. So
if you put it into clouds, maybe it would make
ice form. Yeah, and he even figured out how to
generate it, right, yeah, Yeah, He's like, not only that,
this is an all theoretical I'm a Vonn again, So

(05:13):
I'm gonna just go the extra mile. You don't know,
my little brother yet dreaming knocked out by his book
and people are going to try to band t shirts
with his quotes on it during Bamned Books Week. The
irony is going to be lousing. So what's what's the process. Uh.
While the process of creating it, he dissolves a mixture

(05:35):
of or we're gonna call it a g I. Yeah,
of a g I um an acetone, which is also
id out is that right? Oh? Another with acetone? Yeah,
the acetone is flammable. You can spray that through a nozzle,
make the tiny little droplets. They burn those droplets up,
and then that really makes it more efficient. One gram

(05:55):
of a g I can then produce one hundred quadrillion
nuclei for the ice crystals. So you take that stuff,
you put it up in the clouds, it goes up.
That's right. And it actually, according to Vonnegut's theories, um
has a number of effects. Uh, and here's how it works. Yeah,
this is regular confuse. Okay, this is what the segments

(06:18):
we like to call Josh teaches Chuck in addition to
the world Okay, you're ready. So you think that zero
degrees celsius or thirty two degrees fahrenheit is where ice freezes.
It is, That's what they always say. This is actually
the melting point of ice. So ice ice um freezes
between zero and negative thirty nine degrees celsius um. And

(06:42):
it depends on the number of impurities, which will call nuclei.
And when we're talking nuclei, when you're talking about cloud seating,
you're talking about any particle that can attract water to
become a rain drop, that can attract water, vapor and
turning into ice through sublimation um and become snow or
leat or anything like that. So a nuclei is anything

(07:03):
that you introduced into a cloud that becomes the center
of this precipitation right, See that already makes more sense. Okay,
So with there's two types of clouds as far as
Vonne Gets concerned, um or as technique is concerned, there
is a super cool cloud which has water um that
is less than zero degrees celsius present, and that's the

(07:25):
ideal cloud for cloud seating, correct for one type of
cloud seating for using silver iodide, Because what you're trying
to do there is create ice. And if you're using
silver idide, which has a similar structure to ice crystals, UM,
you're going to use that in the super cool one,
because if you use it in the other type, the
warm cloud, it's not going to do anything because it's

(07:46):
not going to form ice no matter what. The temperature
is too high. But you can still see the warm
cloud Correctly, you can't. So you use a silver iodide
vonne Gets method is still in use today UM. Where
you're burning silver eyedide mixed an acid tone. You create
quadrillions of nuclei that float up into the cloud, create
um an updraft. Because check this out, this is even

(08:07):
more beautiful. When the silver iodide nuclei enter the cloud,
they start to attract the water vapor and as the
water vapor converts from vapor, not turning back into liquid
because it's sublimation, that's right. Converts from liquid or vapor
into ice. It creates heat energy as a result. It
doesn't create it. It heat energy. It comes about right. Uh.

(08:33):
And as that happens, that creates a convective current going
up in the cloud, which creates a swirl and updraft,
which makes the cloud bigger, which means that the stuff,
the particles that happened at the top have longer to
fall through to create more ice, accumulate more ice, and
have a better chance of becoming snow. So that's the
super cool cloud using silver iodide, so the cloud is

(08:53):
literally pregnant with precipitation. Yeah, that not only creates snow
and ice, but actually makes a cloud bigger to increase
the likelihood that it will produce snow and ice. Just
by introducing silver iodide bonding. It was a genius. The
other way is to do to use a warm cloud,
which is a cloud where the water temperature the air

(09:15):
temperature is over zero decreased celsius. That's right, And then
that is pretty simple. Is use table salt really or
sand charge otherwise, but you want to dump that into
the top of the cloud, right, and it requires dumping
a lot of it too. Is that one of the
problems with it. Yeah, I mean, it's just there's more

(09:37):
to it. If you're doing UM, if you're using bonning
its method, you can use the seating station on the ground.
If you're if you're using static cloud seating where you're
flying overhead and dropping stuff into the clouds. UM, you
have to have a plane, you have to have a
lot more of it. But what you're using is called
a high high groscopic solution, which attracts water create rain

(09:58):
drops which fall through the cloud, becoming bigger and bigger
on the way and then bam, you have a rain.
You've just seated a cloud. That's amazing. So ge did
have a plane UM in nine or at least the
articles as they rented an airplane because it did ano
their own and they said we should try this out,
and they released dry ice into these clouds for four
days UH in November December, and on the last day

(10:23):
they received the heaviest snowfall of that winter. UM and
the Arab New York's Schenectady, New York. But there's been
a lot of well, we'll get to whether or not
the stuff works at the very end. But it seems
like every time it happens, people are saying, I think
we might have caused that, and other people think, yeah,
but did we really? Were you guys just cloud seating

(10:44):
enough so that over enough days that it was bound
rain anyway, like the government Georgia praying for rain the
night before it's supposed to rain exactly. Um. So GE
was convinced enough that this was working that it's it
was like, we can't do this anymore. And the Army said, hey,
we have a bunch of money on don't you let
us in on this. And we have a bunch of
money and low scruples because we're about to start testing

(11:06):
acid on people whether they like it or not. So
cloud seating is like nothing to us. And GE said, Okay,
as long as you guys are totally liable, sure we'll
do it with you. So they partnered up for Project
syrus Um and seven. In October forty seven, they dumped
a hundred and eighty pounds of dry eyes into a
hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean and possibly changed the direction

(11:30):
of that hurricane to make landfall right here in Georgia
UH and end up killing several people. So that was
sort of an oops. Although again they're like, did we
really cause that? Well, the guy who was Bernard vonne
gets boss Irving Langmuir, he's a Nobel winning chemist. He
was totally convinced. According to him, there's a probability that

(11:52):
they had caused this hurricane to change um direction. I
think he felt a lot about himself, didn't he He did.
He was always like, no, that was us, and he
would publish papers like that and the government would step
in and be like, you, this paper doesn't exist anymore.
Do you want us to like grease you? Are you
trying to push our buttons? Um? But there was another
scientists who pointed out that that same that a hurricane

(12:15):
followed the exact same path caused about the same amount
of damage in nineteen o six. So was it the
dry ice? Was it not? Who knows? So he just
compared it to an older hurricane, said this could have
happened naturally. They did the same thing in UH in Albuquerque,
New Mexico, in nineteen forty eight. In July nineteen and

(12:35):
apparently it rained all over the state of New Mexico
and as far away as Kansas, causing oh actually that
was later, but the same deal from New Mexico. They
think they made it rain in Kansas to the point
where like the great floods of Kansas in adjacent states
they thought, man, could it have traveled that far? Well,

(12:57):
that was another things Langmuir was convinced about that, like
they had impregnated clouds that traveled the thousand kilometers away. Yeah,
and enough that he was like, we have to stop
doing this. And Bernard vonne Get testified to Congress like
nobody should be doing this except maybe a federal government. Right.
But then other expert medialogist came out and said, you

(13:17):
know what, this whole thing in Kansas, if there was
any effect at all, it might have been just slightly enhanced.
So it's really not all your fault. So the the U.
S Government is is very much interested in this. They're
very much entrenched in this, even as there not sure
whether or not it's working, or the scientific community is
at odds over whether or not it was working. But
the US government was convinced enough that they were basically

(13:39):
weaponizing the weather. They're doing all this to figure out
how to screw with other countries, troops, economies, the whole shebang,
and as the US for carrying out tests. So were
the Brits right, yeah, the Royal Air Force of course,
if we had our project serious, they had operational cumulus.
Very clever to think of all these cloud names. Uh.

(14:00):
And this was going on recently in two thousand one,
the BBC investigated these rumors and um apparently or actually
were they investigating the old rumors? Yeah? Okay, well I
guess that makes more sense. I thought they did it
recently too, though No, I don't know the Brits alright,
Uh soo the the Royal Air Force did fly above

(14:22):
the cloud line, dropped a bunch of this stuff and
thirty minutes later it started to rain, and it rained
and rained and rained, and by the end of the
month North Devon and North of England was um basically
got two fifty times the amount of rain they ever get,
which is a pretty spectacularly convincing two d and fifty times. Yeah,

(14:44):
it's like a flood time. And there there was actually
huge flood too, um in a village Lynmouth, UM where
basically ninety million tons of water converged on the village
at once. Unbelievable. On the day that they started seating,
when it started raining, um and thirty five people lost

(15:05):
their lives. They were carried out to sea, they were
crushed by bowlders. Entire houses were taken out by bowlers
that were brought down by the water. Um. But of
course they said this wasn't US, and the Royal Air
Force pretended it never happened, So who knows. We did
our own little experiments here in the US and uh,
as far as weaponization goes. In Vietnam, we tried to

(15:26):
extend the monsoon season on the Ho Chi Minh trail
and apparently it worked by like thirty to forty five days.
Supposedly we extended monsoon season that year in nine at
a cost of like twenty one million dollars and um
over the course of missions. And they said it like
it's they look at it now as a semi successful mission,

(15:48):
whatever that means. It was it was good enough. Yeah,
they're like things were slippery um. And that was actually
called Operation Popeye, no cloud names. And the whole reason
and we have an awareness of Operation Popeye is because
a reporter named Jack Anderson uh he uh, he got

(16:09):
his hands on a secret memo from the Joints Chiefs
of Staff to President Johnson that made reference to weather
modification techniques in Laos, And he started digging around and
found out that the government had done that, and he
when this article came out, I was had a really
good time because the US government was or Congress was
not in a mood to uh weaponized weather, and so

(16:32):
they kind of took this article. They took the publicity
from it. They took a Senate Committees recommendation that like,
this is way too big for us to be messing with,
and went and had a summit with the Soviets about
banning weather modification. Yeah, they said it was a laussy idea.
Did you practice that well? I thought too much time

(16:52):
had gone by it. I was like, you know what,
I'm gonna say it anyway, it was a good time.
It doesn't matter when you throw the pun down, it's
always bad. Was a lossy idea, and they did. They
got together with the Soviets and they said the big
deal breaker I guess between them making a deal right
then was they couldn't decide between the distinctions of tactical

(17:13):
versus strategic. They thought, hey, if it's tactical. That's cool,
because we're just trying to benefit from the weather, um
and make stuff harder on you to get around. UM.
Strategic uses would like try and like flood a major city,
ruined crops, ruined crops, destroy the economy. Yeah. Um. And
so the summit dissolved. But um, the fact that they

(17:37):
were even talking about the strategic ones suggests that the
the US and the Soviets both thought that one or
both were on the verge of being able to do
weather modification at that level. UM. So the the talks
fell apart. But UM, the U N basically stepped in
and said, hey, we'll take over from here, and they

(17:57):
created UM and MAUD, which is the Environmental Environmental Modification Convention,
which basically bands weaponizing weather, and the US and the
Soviets ratified it came into effect the night. So you
can't weaponize weather, but you can still do like weather
modification as long as it's not what's called geophysical warfare,

(18:19):
like you're trying to dissipate a storm or change the
course of a hurricane for good for good and that
kind of stuff. Uh. For instance, China, they've been at
this for a long time. Uh, since the late nineteen fifties,
and they have a program that employs between thirty and
thirty people called the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences, and

(18:41):
that is they have a department, the Weather Modification Department,
and they use that. And you probably remember in the
news even seeing this at the Beijing Olympics, they busted
clouds to try and prevent rain from happening because they
didn't want to rain out their their opening ceremony in
their games. Yes, so any cloud that they saw, they
would shoot rocket propelled grenades filled with silver eyed eye

(19:04):
um or anti aircraft artillery phil with silver eyed die.
They were just shooting clouds. And there's like thirty thousand people.
A lot of them are farmers who are armed with
government issue rocket launchers. Yeah, because they're on the right place. Yeah,
to shoot at clouds. Get that cloud. Yeah, I did
that like a Southern redneck. That was weird. Get that cloud.

(19:25):
Mant's they sound like China. Jerry just left it that.
Uh So. Then hale is the next thing that we've
tried to conquer. N the National Hail Research Experiment was
started and basically to suppress hail along what's known as

(19:46):
Hale Alley in Colorado, h some state called Kansas, Northwest Kansas,
Southeast Wyoming in northwest Nebraska, and UM. It was scheduled
the last five years, but it did not. I think
it was shut down in yeah, two years ahead of
time and not necessarily through any fault of its own.
The seventies turn out to be like the driest decade

(20:07):
ever in Hale Alley. UM. But their their whole goal
was to seed clouds to basically hurry up the process
of them precipitating so that it wouldn't have a chance
to become hal to keep them warm clouds to UM,
and just to if it is going to hail, they
would be smaller pieces of hail and it would just

(20:27):
accelerate the process. UM. But there was some funny things
that came out of it, like we learned that farmers
don't like clouds eating. Yeah, and they tried in Maryland
and Virginia, and there were farmers like shooting at the aircraft.
And then in the San Luis Valley, Uh, there were
somebody blew up with dynamite a radar truck for a
private weather modification company. All in the seventies. So the seventies,

(20:51):
weather mood was not very popular, and in some states
now because of farmers concerns, um weather modification is banned. Yeah. Yeah,
people are afraid that you're gonna take the cloud that
was destined for their field and use it over your field.
That was my cloud. Well that's we might as well
talk about it. Then that's a big issue. Um. As

(21:13):
far as our next topic, thwarting hurricanes, it seems like
a great idea, but one leading scientist, what's his name,
Moche Alamorrow, He's from m i t. He says, you know,
only a handful of hurricanes ever developed out of like
a hundred tropical storms, let's say, and very few of

(21:34):
those hurricanes calls landfall that do like lots of damage.
So this rainfall is vital to South America. And what
are we gonna start just trying to thwart every tropical
storm we see? Like we're playing god here a little
too much. That's stuff happens for a reason, right exactly,
despite the fact that hurricanes can be very dangerous and
costly take lives. I get the feeling he's like, you know,

(21:57):
we might just want to live with that every couple
of years rather than try to mess with the thermodynamics
of an ocean current exactly. Well, and that's kind of
what some of the ideas for um dissipating or moving hurricanes.
A couple of ideas are shooting dropping hydrogen bombs on
a hurricane to dissipated, which I don't know what the
fact they would happen, um, But Bill Gates is in

(22:19):
on a patent for um dissipating hurricanes, which apparently uses
fleets of vehicles to pump cold water from lower depths
of the ocean to the surface to mix with the
warm surface temperatures are comparatively warmer surface temperatures, so that
the convective currents that those warm surface temperatures creating hurricanes

(22:40):
that make them more and more powerful are dissipated, so
the hurricanes forces reduced because hurricanes draw their strength from
that heat, and uh, you can cool it down. The
idea is that you might then dissipated again, messing with
the thermodynamics. Is that a good thing? And then there's
one that's really routined. Um, you've probably looked right past

(23:02):
it at your local airport, which is fog dissipation. Yeah,
they do this regularly with below freezing temperature fog R
not too hard. They can do it from the ground. Yeah,
but aren't they trying to do it above temperature as well? Yeah,
they try cloud seating to dissipate it as well. But
they also um will heat the landing areas, which dissipates fog,

(23:23):
but it is weather modification. Uh. And then they'll also
um inject propane gas, which apparently dissipates below freezing fog
as well. Airports. Have you ever been on a plane
that had to be the ice before takeoff? That happened
to me for the first time this Christmas and Akron.
It takes a really long time. It took a long time,
and I was right there by the window by the wing,

(23:43):
and I was I watched the whole thing. It was
fascinating but also a little bit terrifying. Um. I was
just like, did you get it all? Yeah? Did you
miss the spot? Did you see that whould go over
it again? Yeah? I wish I knew exactly what they
were doing. I'll have to look into that because I
always like to know that stuff. Well, I'm sure we
could just go ahead and suggested ourselves with the apologian
d I think we should actually they're they were spraying

(24:06):
the wings. I know that, but I don't think it
was just like hot water. No, it's not. It's some
sort of crazy solution. Yeah, that's what I think, crazy
cucku solution de icing. Yeah. Uh so does this stuff work, Josh,
that is a great question, Chucker's Um, No one really knows.
There's actually you know, we said Irving Langmuir and Bernard
Vonnegut were definite true believers, but then there's plenty of

(24:29):
other people who are like, you don't know that that happened.
It could have just been coincidence. Um. And there's actually
a split among American um scientific groups over whether it
has any effect or not. Here's what I think. Okay,
here's my immature opinion. I think it possibly works, but
it's such a haphazard result and so not easily so

(24:52):
difficult to control that does that really work? Like, you
may have an effect, but unless you can really pinpoint
control it, I don't know if you can say that works.
And part of the problem is carrying out rigorous scientific experiments, right,
Like if you you can't control where the wind is
going to take the silver iodide, So if you're trying
to impregnant one cloud and keep another as a control cloud.

(25:15):
How do you know that the control clouds not infected
with with UM silver iodide and that it's going to
rain as well as a result of your experiment. So
it's a very tough thing to experiment on. Well, and
didn't they find out when they tried to do the
UM ice crystals in the hurricane? Didn't they find out
that there are already ice crystals there? Yeah, that didn't
have much an effect, right, noah, UM National Oceanic Atmospheric

(25:39):
Administration UM. They carried something out which was pretty cool.
It's called Project storm Fury for like thirty years trying
to seed hurricanes, and yeah, they found that, oh there's ice.
They're all right, this isn't gonna have an effect. Well,
they learned more about hurricanes, so that way, at least
they did by being crazy and flying into it. UM.
And then so the National Academy of Sciences said, thirty

(26:00):
years of study has produced no solid evidence that the
stuff works. The American Meteorological Society said, you know, we
think there's probably about a ten percent effect that this has.
It increases precipitation by ten percent, and uh, everybody else's
who knows? Does it hurt this cloud seating? I can
understand trying to mess with a hurricane, but I mean

(26:22):
just shooting silver Eye died in the air. If the
Chinese want to do that with the rocket propelled grenades, girl,
I don't have their fun. I think you and I should.
They got these biplanes here in Atlanta. I think we
should get some dry ice. We should chop it up,
and we should go take on these biplane rides on
a cloudy day, dump it out and see what happens.
That's a great idea. Let's do it, Okay, let's try.

(26:44):
Can we charge that on the on the company guard?
We probably could go as long as we documented it somehow.
That's right. If you want to know more about things
like dry ice by planes, weather modification, um, flying into
hurricane people have actually done that. I wrote a cool
article on it, Bill Gates, Bill Gates, Um. You can

(27:05):
type all those things into the search bar how stuff
works dot com and it will bring up some pretty
cool articles. And we also worked off with some need
articles that we found online all over the place. So
just search weather modification and have a great time with him. Uh.
Since I said have a great time, and I mean
it's time for the listening. Then. Uh, before we do

(27:28):
listener mail, a couple of quick shoutouts. One, we want
to shout out our Kiva team with a new goal. Yes. Uh,
if you don't know, if you go to k I
v a dot org slash teams slash stuff, you should know.
We set up a microblout lending team. How long ago now,
October two thousand eight, Yes, and it took thousand nine.

(27:50):
It began with little Stephen Colbert challenge, but we quickly
dusted him. Two. Yeah, we wanted to see who could
get to a hundred thousand first. I'm not sure as
teams even there yet. Darl Uh they didn't pay attention
to us, but it doesn't matter. Um. The plant is
our team is doing great and we have a new goal.
Thanks to our our de facto captains, glinted Sonia. They
put together the numbers for us and our goal as

(28:13):
of June twenty one this year is two million dollars loan. Yes,
by the summer solstice. Summer Solstice, two million bucks is
our goal for our team. We're well on our way
and uh, jump on board. It's a lot of fun. Yeah,
and loan twenty five bucks and if it gets paid
back and he said, you know what, that's the only
loan ever want to make. You can actually get that

(28:34):
money back. Yeah, if it feels dirty to you, just
wait like about a month, maybe a little longer, I
don't know. And once he's paid back, you can take
it out. Yeah. And Josh has written some great blog
post on micro lending and the controversies around it and
why we still support it. Yeah, so we're well aware. Uh,
and we also want to shout out our buddy Bill Wadman. Yeah.
We met Bill in Brooklyn and he's a very talented

(28:54):
portrait photographer and he said, you know, I'd love to
shoot you guys here on my list of people I'd
like to work with. Came out to the Bellhouse, took
some great pictures. One of them is now our avatar
on our Facebook page, and uh, it was it was
a good experience for us, for two guys who really
don't like having your pictures made. Yeah, he was very gentle.
He was very gentle and they turned out great. And uh,

(29:15):
you can see his work at Bill Wadman dot com
or he has a podcast about photography that is not
about This is what lends you should get. It's about
it's called on taking pictures, and it's more about the
philosophy and science. So they're taking pictures. Did you see
the post on us? He was like, I think it
was titled like look at these two schmows. I got
to sit for me. He didn't find that on at

(29:36):
www dot on taking pictures dot com and imagine a iTunes.
I didn't look. But if it's a podcast, it's probably
on iTunes right anyway, Thanks Bill Wadman and good luck
to you, sir. We'll see you as soon. Yeah, thanks everybody,
all right, and now on the listener mail. This is
a nice little Christmas homeless shout out to our good

(29:57):
friend Martin. Love this email. We love our Scottish friends. Guys,
you asked for a Christmas story while I was listening
to your homelessness podcast. Anyway, last year a friend of
mine was going to catch a bus and saw a
homeless man outside the bus station a freezing night, and
in Scotland you know that it's gold, so he decided
to give the guy twenty pounds. The homeless man began

(30:18):
to cry, thanked my friends and explained that he was
on the street doing a drug problem and after running
away from his family. Um. However, that day he had
been thinking of going home to his family for Christmas
and cleaning up his life. Now that he had the money,
he was going to do just that. He took my
friends address, so he insisted on paying him back. So

(30:39):
my family gave him the address and caught a bus.
This summer he received a letter from the man explaining
that he did in fact go home. He went to
rehab and he is now working for his father. The
family is extremely happy and he not only included the
twenty pounds as payback, but a picture of him and
his dad's workshop with his dad and his two brothers.

(31:00):
This just goes to show what a little can do
for some people, especially around the holidays. Love the show, guys,
how about a show on the Scottish Wars Independence and
that has funden? Oh that's pretty good. And then an
awesome letter. Yeah that was great. I just love that one. Um,
thanks a lot, Martin, Thanks a lot to all of
our people in Scotland. How's it going. I didn't see

(31:24):
it right. It gets worse with already truck. You sound
like Truman, Componi and the last years you could do
a bit of a Scottish accent. It left me. Don't
do Scottish accent? Do Sean Connery trying Sean connedy often
see there it is right there. Uh. If you want
to hear Chuck to a certain kind of accent, send
us a suggestion. He takes all comers, right, Chuck. Uh.

(31:46):
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(32:08):
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