SYSK Live in Nashville: The Biosphere II Experiment

Hello, friends! Join us today for our annual live show release, recorded in beautiful Nashville. On the docket? The Biosphere II Experiment!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's
Charles w Chuck Bryant. Jerry's not here with us, but
all of these beautiful people are at the Sherman Horne
Symphony Center in Nashville, Tennessee. Man a lot. That was great.

(00:45):
Like I literally can't hear right now? What?

Speaker 1 (00:51):
Oh, all right, everyone I want to talk about I
can't believe, by the way, that this was earlier this year.
Doesn't it seem like eight years ago?

Speaker 2 (00:59):
It seems like that Blue Oyster Roads.

Speaker 1 (01:02):
In fact, it was earlier this year. On the morning
of January fifth, I met Josh at the airport in
Atlanta at Hartsfield at a departure gate for what would
be our very first ever research field trip after fifteen years,
and we had a great time. By the way, spoiler,
the flight was booked for Tucson, Arizona because Tucson is

(01:23):
very close to Oracle, Arizona, specifically thirty two Biosphere Road
in Oracle, Arizona.

Speaker 2 (01:33):
Nothing, okay, that's cool, we can work with that.

Speaker 1 (01:37):
If you don't know what happened at Biosphere Road, then
strap in because you're about to hear the story of
the biosphere to experiment. Yes, raise your hand if you
have heard of this at all, Oh, a.

Speaker 2 (01:51):
Couple of people.

Speaker 1 (01:52):
That's good. That's about what we like. Has anyone seen
the documentary Spaceship Earth. It's good you, Oh right, isn't
it great?

Speaker 2 (02:00):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (02:01):
Highly recommend the documentary. And I'll say this about twenty
more times. Highly recommend you going to visit the biosphere today.
It was really really great.

Speaker 2 (02:10):
If you haven't seen the documentary, most of the show
probably won't make any sense to you, so we probably
should have thought that through.

Speaker 1 (02:17):
We'll just talk to you.

Speaker 2 (02:19):
Yeah, so Biosphere two might make you think, like, wait
a minute, what was Biosphere one? Hadn't heard of it?
I missed it. Don't worry. You're actually on Biosphere one
right now, because Biosphere one is planet Earth. Biosphere two
was a highly ambitious project to seal off a little

(02:40):
piece of Earth from the rest of it and see
what happened. Basically, Yeah, and.

Speaker 1 (02:45):
It could have been a great many things, right depending
on who you ask.

Speaker 2 (02:48):
Oh, yes, I have that list right here. It could
have been an incredibly expensive piece of performance.

Speaker 1 (02:54):
Art sort of.

Speaker 2 (02:56):
Okay, we'll take that, a massive hub for gathering scientific.

Speaker 1 (02:59):
Day, not as massive as they intended.

Speaker 2 (03:03):
Right, an audaciously ambitious attempt to replicate Earth for sure. Okay,
the project that created the modern environmental movement.

Speaker 1 (03:15):
I like that. I'm the judge of all this. In
part I will say, Okay, a fraud.

Speaker 2 (03:20):
No, that wasn't a fraud, A failure, sort of failure,
a spectacular success.

Speaker 1 (03:27):
Not that either. No, definitely somewhere somewhere in the middle
of those two.

Speaker 2 (03:30):
You guys can be the judge of all that yourselves,
because we're going to tell you all about the Biosphere
two project, which was born in the eighties. It debuted
in the early nineties, but the whole thing was rooted
in the sixties. And you will see that it was
super duper rooted in the sixties. Because the people involved,
we should just say out front they weren't a cult.

(03:50):
It's going to seem at various turns that, yeah, guys,
these people are a cult. They were not a cult.
We did as much research as we possibly could. Yeah,
and they weren't a cult. It just seems like they
were a cult.

Speaker 1 (04:03):
They were culty.

Speaker 2 (04:04):
Yeah, cult adjacent, cult adjacent.

Speaker 1 (04:09):
It's like when you're reading the real estate ads. It's
like they're not in the cult neighborhood, but they're pretty close. So,
like you said, it was rooted in the sixties, in
particular in a city called San Francisco, California. And this
was during one of their many summers of love that
they've had over the years. A very charismatic hippie named

(04:30):
John Allen. He went by the name Johnny Dolphin. I
refuse to say that. Twice I call him John Allen.
They had nicknames. I was about to say cute, but
they really weren't that cute. But John Allen was kind
of a magnet. He was a genius depending on who
you talked to. Very smart guy, obviously, but he was
a magnet for kind of like minded people at the

(04:52):
time in sixties San Francisco, which is to say, super creative,
very very smart, and as it turns out, also very ambitious,
which could find the face of other sort of hippie
dippy ish types out there at the time.

Speaker 2 (05:05):
Right. And like you said, he was essentially a certified genius.
He had a master's degree in business from Harvard. Not
too shabby he had. If you don't mind, I have
to read this, a certificate in Advanced Physiological Systems for
Engineers from University of Michigan. Sounds made up, but apparently
it's legit, and he had a four A driven.

Speaker 1 (05:30):
I thought you were going to say he had a
certificate in Advanced Physiological Systems for engineers from the back
of his cereal, because that's what it owns.

Speaker 2 (05:38):
It definitely sounds like the kind of thing you would
get at a strip mall university, you know what I mean.

Speaker 1 (05:44):
He was also trained as a metallurgist. He was a
management consultant. He was, like I said, super smart guy.

Speaker 2 (05:51):
He was.

Speaker 1 (05:52):
He had a lot of kind of famous hippi dippy
creative smart friends like Williams Burrows, Buckminster Fuller in particular,
who had he would have a pretty outsized influence on
John Allen and this project that we're going to talk
about in a couple of ways. One was the idea
of synergy that Bucky Fuller was really into, and as

(06:12):
you will learn with Biosphere too, synergy was a big,
big part of things, or that was supposed to be
at least and the geodesic dome, which everyone knows is
Bucky Fuller's sort of you know, pet design pipe dream
that became a reality.

Speaker 2 (06:28):
Yeah, for sure, they incorporated it into the biosphere, that's right.
So this group that formed around John Allen, that was
not a cult. They were hanging out in San Francisco.
They were into creating art and doing performance pieces, and
they would put on these odd plays under the name
the Theater of All Possibilities. And I don't mean odd

(06:49):
like as an occasional I mean like odd plays really
tough to watch because you're watching adults use their imagination
and that is just uncomfortable to watch. And they did
it a lot like that was kind of their thing,
so much so they took it on the road. The
touring company was called the Caravan of Dreams. And you

(07:09):
can't say either of those names without going like.

Speaker 1 (07:12):
This, I know, because they're written in an arc on
every poster of So they were they were doing these
little and some of these are in the documentaries that
show some of their little performance art pieces, and it's
really something they really they say things like free movement
and stuff like that, you know. But they were in
San Francisco in the sixties and then left San Francisco, California,

(07:36):
and like nineteen sixty eight because it had gotten too commercial.
They were a hard core Okay that these are how
sort of out there that these people were. And they
moved to New Mexico out in the middle of nowhere
and formed a little not a cult, they formed a
sort of a communeish kind of thing called the Synergia Ranch.

Speaker 2 (07:58):
Yeah, and so they're they kind of expanded their horizons.
They still put on odd performance pieces and plays.

Speaker 1 (08:05):
They also not.

Speaker 2 (08:06):
Do that, No, they it was really in their stay.

Speaker 1 (08:09):
They felt the call.

Speaker 2 (08:10):
Yeah. They also started building things too, like they got
interested in just making things with their own hands. And
a really good example of what they could do is
called the research vessel Heraclitis.

Speaker 1 (08:22):
Yeah. So here's the thing with the synergy Ins. They
were all really smart. But it's not like they took
an old boat to make this research vessel and they
sand it down the deck and restained it and kind
of spruced it up a bit like I could. Well
I couldn't do that either, Actually I could try to.
They built from scratch a ship, not a boat like

(08:46):
a ship, and they weren't shipbuilders, they weren't architects. They
figured out how to do it like this is kind
of how ambitious and smart they were. There was a
woman there who led the I guess architectural side of things,
who was not an architect, named Margaret Augustine, who's going
to come come back to not haunts, but she'll come
back a couple of times. Is she the one back there?

(09:11):
But they were super smart and they built this ship
that is like still sailing today.

Speaker 2 (09:16):
Yeah, I mean it has been for fifty years basically,
and they again they built it from scratch, no knowledge
of shipbuilding. And it was in that kind of like
can do spirit that the biosphere project was born. And
the whole idea was to build this self sustaining habitat
that was closed off from the rest of Earth that
could sustain human life, very important, and to use it

(09:38):
to study this new field called biospherics, which is creating
closed systems to study Earth's ecosystems in kind of minute detail.
And it was new because they had essentially made it up,
but the whole thing had merit because at this time,
in like the early eighties, scientists around the world were

(09:58):
starting to notice that Earth was getting out of whack
in a lot of unsettling ways and had kind of
concluded that if we didn't figure out what to do
about that, things would be very bad for life on
Earth very soon. And spoiler alert, we did figure out
what to do about it, we didn't do it, and
now we're all doomed. Just FYI.

Speaker 1 (10:20):
So to study something like Earth's ecosystem, like very complex stuff,
there's a couple of ways you can go about it.
You can get in a lab and you can bring
stuff in and you can study it there, and in
that case you're going to get really precise measurements and
really precise data, but it's not out in the real world,
so it's you sort of get what you get. The

(10:41):
other way to do is to go out in the
real world and study stuff, and people had been doing
both for a very long time, and it's always been
that trade off for science, Like you go out in
the real world and you're going to get real, like
more natural results, but the data is not going to
be as accurate because you don't have all your toys
out there necessarily sure, And what bios sphere offered was
basically the chance to kind of take the best of

(11:04):
both worlds and do both all that once.

Speaker 2 (11:06):
Yeah, and also because it was kind of compact in size,
stuff that happened out on biosphere one over the course
of very long time scales happened much shorter in biosphere
two because it was tiny, so you could actually track
carbon isotopes as it made it through the carbon cycle,
which is kind of useful, and it would make a
bitch and test bed for offerth habitation on Mars. Yeah,

(11:30):
which they predicted what happen by two thousand and five.

Speaker 1 (11:35):
A little bit off right there yet, but like here's
one example of sort of the ideas that they think
could spring from this was they thought those and we'll
meet all the biospherians soon enough. Spoiler alert, that's what
they were called. They went from synergi ins to biospherians,
but one was named Linda Lee. She was a botanist
and what she wanted to accomplish there one of the things,

(11:55):
at least was to figure out how little tissue that
you could get, like how cells that you could collect
and still yield a viable plant. And the idea being like,
one day maybe we can have like a jungle in
the size of a shoebox that like jets and stuff
like add water and you get a jungle kind of thing.

Speaker 2 (12:13):
Yeah, she even brought her own shoebox inside it. Being
nineteen ninety one, it was an La Gear shoebox.

Speaker 1 (12:22):
Did you okay, Gear? That was a nice surprise. I
thought I thought that was off the dome. It's still great, thanks, okay.

Speaker 2 (12:34):
So if you put all this stuff together, this is
like a really good idea that the Synergians had, and
they were just the kind of people to do it,
as we've seen. But you can really argue that the
project would not have happened had a guy named Ed
Bass not been a member of the group, and he
had been since I think his early twenty because he
joined in nineteen seventy four. And the reason he was

(12:55):
so important is because he was a billionaire.

Speaker 1 (12:58):
Yeah, specifically because you know, this sing was going to
require a lot of money, as we'll learn. But he
was the son of a guy named Perry Bass, and
Perry Bass was at the time one of the richest
dudes in the United States. He was a billionaire. He
was a Texas oil tycoon, and somehow had one son
that became an environmentalist. I don't know if he was

(13:21):
like the shame of the family. I do know that
that Thanksgiving was probably a little awkward when he brought
up this idea to Pops. I think Perry was probably like, son,
you're going to do what you're going to get? How
many millions for a bios something? Why can't you start
a minor league baseball team like your brother Bobby? And

(13:44):
that's Perry Mass.

Speaker 2 (13:45):
That was a great Perry Bass.

Speaker 1 (13:46):
Everybody indeed, but Ed Bass was in and he funded
the thing to the tune of between one hundred and
fifty and two hundred million dollars nineteen what eighty something dollars. Yeah,
well it's like you're double that now, yeah, all right,
double So we're usually more accurate in our updated inflation conversion.

Speaker 2 (14:11):
So he was. Actually he'd financed a lot of projects
for the group. They had this thing where he would
buy like a plot of land somewhere in the world
and they would like build something on it or improve
it somehow, And there's still stuff around today. There's the
Hotel Veyra in Katmandu. It's a hotel they own. There's

(14:31):
the October Gallery in London.

Speaker 1 (14:33):
Our gallery, yep.

Speaker 2 (14:34):
And so they called it the ecopreneurial spirit, so like
they were hippies, but they weren't shy about making money too,
and that's what this whole biosphere project was in part
to Ed bass.

Speaker 1 (14:47):
For sure, Yeah, because he thought, all right, here's what
we're gonna do. We're gonna launch this massive science project,
which I think ended up being at the time the
single largest privately funded science project in human history. And
he said, but here's how we can make a little
scratch off this, A little little cheese. What do you
kids say these days?

Speaker 2 (15:05):
What else? Bread? I think they say bread.

Speaker 1 (15:07):
Is bread back, little bread, Little Sosamolians. Sure, little Nashi, Yeah, nashtag, nashtag, nashtag,
ecopreneurial nice, all right, nailed it. Jerry cut that out,
did not nail it. So his idea was, here's what

(15:28):
we're gonna do. We're gonna start this big project and
we're gonna eventually come up with all these all this
great data and these science ideas that we can patent,
and then one day when we need to live on Mars,
NASA is going to go, hey, guys, how much to
license that jungle in a box you came up with?
And Ed bassa just sit back and cackle and make
a ton of money. So that was one way to

(15:49):
make money. And then they had another great idea to
make money.

Speaker 2 (15:53):
Right, Yeah, they were going to charge tourists twelve ninety
five to come gawk at the people who are sealed
off in the Biosphere facility. And they did.

Speaker 1 (16:00):
It's right, it's all glass. You can just peer in
and make fun of them all day long. Kids.

Speaker 2 (16:05):
So they formed a venture or an LLC I guess,
called Space Biosphere Ventures, And in true Synergian fashion, all
these hippies who had no experience being CEOs and directors
of a large, multi million dollar corporation were now exactly
that that's right, and they set about getting to work

(16:25):
like there was an architect named Phil Hawes, and I
believe he pulled out every techie style he could think
of to create this place. Chuck likes it.

Speaker 1 (16:35):
It's amazing.

Speaker 2 (16:35):
It looks like the headquarters to Heaven from a movie
in the eighties. It's it's what it always struck me,
as you know, that's exactly what it's like. There's like
barrel roofs, there's that geodesic dome. The thing that really
gets it for me is everything is made out of
this like shiny powder coated aluminum tubing that really locks

(16:56):
it into like nineteen ninety and that's exactly what it
looks like still to It's.

Speaker 1 (17:00):
Like Buck Rogers in the twentieth century or their Disney's
vision of you know, of tomorrow Land, basically.

Speaker 2 (17:09):
Very much so it's very much like that. That stuff moldy.

Speaker 1 (17:13):
Yeah, put a pin in that. So the plan, the
original plan was for Biosphere two to run for one
hundred years, and like every couple of years or so,
just cycling a new team of Biasparians to take the
place of the old They would go into some like airlock,
they would swap places. They would keep it sealed because
we'll stress out a bunch. The whole point was to

(17:35):
keep this thing sealed, like if the problem happened, they
couldn't be like, well, let's just open up the doors
and bring some stuff in to help us along. They
really wanted to see what it would be like, and
the only way to do that was to seal it
up tight. So one hundred years was the original goal.
News spread around the world. People were seriously jazzed. I
have no idea how I missed this because I was
like early college at the time. I knew nothing about

(17:57):
it somehow, except my only thing I can think. As
I was in early college at the time, I wasn't
center around watching the news. You know what I'm saying? Yeah,
how do you think it's going good?

Speaker 2 (18:08):
I think he's going quite well so far. Oh yeah, okay,
Well then that means we have to take a message break,
so please bear with us. That's right, because we'll be
right back.

Speaker 3 (18:22):
Sish, stuffy jaws, shop soft your s.

Speaker 1 (18:40):
We're back, everybody.

Speaker 2 (18:44):
You guys can thank Jerry for that.

Speaker 4 (18:47):
You go to don't buy your stuff at the post office,
sleep on this mattress or buy the was it the
twenty twelve Camra?

Speaker 2 (18:58):
Yes?

Speaker 1 (18:59):
Oh oh you guys still hear that one?

Speaker 2 (19:01):
Anyone? Some of the old ones? Are you?

Speaker 1 (19:04):
I don't know what salesperson made that forever deal?

Speaker 2 (19:07):
That was quite a deal.

Speaker 1 (19:09):
Yeah, that won't go away, all right? So finally we're
back everyone, Thanks for coming. Finally, finally, finally, On September
twenty sixth, nineteen ninety one, eight people, four men and
four women who we will meet very shortly called the Biospherians,
began their first what was to be a two year
mission of the one hundred year Experiment and were sealed

(19:33):
off this big press thing they wore, these Mork from
Orc spacesuit.

Speaker 2 (19:39):
Jumpsuit things, very very weird.

Speaker 1 (19:41):
For real, like broad shoulders, cinched at the waist.

Speaker 2 (19:44):
They're like, don't forget we left San Francisco for New
Mexico in the late sixties. That's how hardcore we are.
That's right. I just want to drive that home. And
I think also somebody who's playing the flute.

Speaker 1 (19:55):
As these so floutist if I'm not mistaken, the kind
of when you watch the it's kind of funny because
they couldn't get the door to seal it first, and
everyone was like, oh, that's the whole point now, that
they couldn't open it. That's what it was. Yeah, it
was two sealed and they were all just standing there
kind of like this. But they got in. They sealed
themselves in, and here were the eight biosperians.

Speaker 2 (20:18):
Oh me, uh, I knew it was me. I'm just teething.
First up is Mark Nelson. We mentioned him first because
he was, I guess considered the captain of the team,
mostly because he was the truest believer of this group
of true believers, because they had selected from the group
of synergians they didn't like go find the greatest scientists

(20:40):
in the world or like astronauts or anything. They just said, Hey,
you seem enthusiastic. I like the way you do the
free body movement stuff. Get in there, Get in this
red jumpsuit. That is seriously, who this group of eight
people were.

Speaker 1 (20:55):
That's right, you could be our Ryan Tannehill. He's not here,
There's no way, no, he's got football to play this weekend.
Abigail Alling was the next person we're gonna mention. She
was a marine biologist. Jane Pointer is next. She was
in charge of the farm and the farm equipment and

(21:16):
stuff like that, and she was in the documentary. You
will see. It's very controversial because Jane Pointer actually is
the only Bisparian to leave what you weren't supposed to do.
During the experiment. She had an accident where she cut
off part of her finger in a rice huller.

Speaker 2 (21:32):
I think I'll do it.

Speaker 1 (21:33):
Whatever that is apparently got a whole rice and I
just thought it came in a.

Speaker 2 (21:38):
Bag with a little piece of finger in it.

Speaker 1 (21:41):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (21:41):
It's the lucky bag. That means you get a million dollars.

Speaker 1 (21:45):
Don't add too much water because that thing becomes a
full finger.

Speaker 2 (21:48):
It turns into a Dinosaurs preface.

Speaker 1 (21:51):
But it was very controversial when it happened, because you know,
she had to leave because she needed, you know, a
hospital to take care of her briefly. But here's the deal.
She came back in carrying these two large Duffel bags
that she didn't leave with, and they weren't supposed to do, like, oh,
by the way, we forgot all these things, go get them.
The whole point of this whole thing, once again was

(22:13):
this seal yourself in to see if it was possible
not to cheat a little bit, because it would render
the results kind of moot. So she comes in these
Duffel bags will come back later. I don't know what
was in them. I don't even think they ever found out.
I think it was probably fifteen pounds a weed. That's
what I might have brought back in. I'm just saying.

Speaker 2 (22:34):
The upshot is there's no hospitals or Duffel bags on Mars.
So people weren't really super happy.

Speaker 1 (22:39):
About it, you know, like the old song goes sure.

Speaker 2 (22:43):
So the next guy's Roy Walford. He was the crew physician,
who's the oldest one, super old. He was like sixty five, right,
But he was in great shape because his scientific interest
was at the intersection of anti aging and nutrition, and
he had come up with his own diet, called it
the calorie restricted optimal nutrition diet or Krone diet. Terrible

(23:07):
name for a diet.

Speaker 1 (23:08):
They're like, you know, that's the same name as a
bowel disease.

Speaker 2 (23:13):
He said, oh, I know. So he really wanted to
get his chance at like experimenting with these people with
the Krone diet, and my goodness, he got his chance,
as we'll see.

Speaker 1 (23:23):
That's right. Next up we have Mark van Fillow. He
was a Belgian scientist and he operated the life support equipment,
including what you'll hear a little bit more about this
giant lung in the bottom of this facility that breathes
for the facility. And here's a little tip. If you
ever go to buy a Sphere two again, you can
still go there. It's amazing. Take the time to take

(23:48):
the tour, sort of the underneath tour. It's like twelve
twelve bucks extra, which Josh sprang for by the way,
paid my way in like a like a good date.

Speaker 2 (23:59):
Never even asked for it back.

Speaker 1 (24:00):
Appreciate that yet at the end of everything, At the
end of stuff, you should know you're gonna be like,
and here's this twelve dollars please, plus inflation. So he
was dating Abigail Auling. There were two couples among this
group of eight, which can get a little thorny. The
reason we know that they were a couple was a

(24:21):
couple of reasons. One they mentioned it in the documentary,
but two, even if they headn't have said that. There
is a shot sort of in the background at one
point where he feeds her a banana on camera and
not like peel a banana and like, would you like,
here's how I would do it with you. Would you
like to break off a piece of banana Josh? Why no,
he stuck it in her mouth with his hand.

Speaker 2 (24:44):
Thank you for not demonstrating that on me too.

Speaker 1 (24:47):
Yeah, I mean things have changed. I know the workplace
has changed, but even in nineteen ninety one, you don't
do that to a female coworker. You don't do that.
It's never been okay the first office you did not
feed did someone a banana like that?

Speaker 2 (25:01):
For sure? That's true. That's what it says on the
T shirt. There was Sally Silverstone who was the most
widely liked of the group. We get the impression she
got along with everyone. She was an English social studies teacher,
and I think she was in charge of the food basically, right.

Speaker 1 (25:20):
Yeah, she was the chef. I mean she made banana
everything out of bananas. We'll see. She ended up writing
a book afterward called Eating In Thank You Colan From
the Field to the Kitchen the Recipes from Visca too.
She originally called it eating in Colon guys, I mean

(25:42):
really eating in, but they changed the title.

Speaker 2 (25:47):
He's next Tavera mccallums. Next, he was in charge of
the analytical chemistry lab. He was one half of the
other couple with Jane Pointer. And they're actually still involved
in this kind of stuff today. They're like, that's right.
They formed some company that is exploring how to live
off of earth.

Speaker 1 (26:04):
That's cool, you know why because he never fed her
a banana on camera, That's right. And then there's where
was he from? He was from? He was European too,
I think, No, okay, he was from US a all
right music city. Sure, he was a little Nashian. So
the last person is Linda Lee, and Linda Lee was

(26:26):
the biome design manager of the Desert Rainforest in Savannah,
and she was the one who was looking for that
jungle in a box idea, right, all right, So that's
the eight.

Speaker 2 (26:35):
Of them, that's the eight people. There are also thirty
eight hundred species of plants and animals in there. They
put in everything from cockroaches to kind of till the
soil and make it even richer. They put in these
these little primates that look kind of cat like, they
have huge eyes. They're adorable. They're called bush babies. Anyone

(26:57):
ever seen a bush baby? Super cute. We want to
take out your phone right now and look, we won't
be mad. They're so cute that we're pretty sure that
they were just put in there just because they're so cute.

Speaker 1 (27:08):
They had to have something, right sure. And here was
the idea, is you know, they were gonna it was
all about synergy. And we talked a lot about synergy
on our show, how in nature, like everything is working
together ideally to help everyone out. And that was the
idea here in a shrunken version of Earth, is you're
gonna have plants that are pollinated by these specific very

(27:30):
specific because it can bring in everything. It's not Noah's
Ark for goodness sakes, because you know that was real.
I'm not sure if you knew that they brought in
things to pollinate those specific plants, like here, we need
these insects, We need these plants because they're going to
maximize oxygen for us, and we're going to breed stuff
out and they're going to breed stuff in and it's

(27:52):
going to be a beautiful exchange of CO two and
oxygen and everything's going to be working in synergy with
each other to make this a grand success.

Speaker 2 (27:59):
Exactly. Because it was a sealed facility, everything had to
be recycled, Like you said, their breaths were recycled with
the plants, their wastewater was put through this marsh, and
then they ended up drinking their own pea. Essentially. It
was and that's the appropriate response to that. It was
pretty amazing. It was like the whole design was pretty great,

(28:22):
and all of this was in five different biomes. And
a biome is a type of ecosystem that is a
really specific type of ecosystem that's made up from the
interactions of all like the every rock and rain drop
and rubber tree and reindeer all interacting and all sorts

(28:43):
of difficult to be a weird, weird biome, but they're
all interacting in all sorts of complex ways, and all
of those complexities formed the characteristics of that biome.

Speaker 1 (28:54):
In elementary school, when they said, Josh, what are the
four ours? And you should have? I said, well, blurted
out eating writing, arithmetic. You said, rainbows, reindeer, and what else.

Speaker 2 (29:03):
I like yours? I said, rain drops, rocks, rubber trees,
and reindeers. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (29:11):
Thanks, man, Man, that's a That's a Carpenter song if
I've ever heard one. You know, she was a hell
of a drummer, Karen Carpentery.

Speaker 2 (29:24):
That right.

Speaker 1 (29:25):
There are videos of Karen Carpenter just get singing down
on the drums, which I never knew.

Speaker 2 (29:30):
Great, she was the Neil Pert of your day.

Speaker 1 (29:33):
All right, where are we here? Should I put on
my glasses? Now? I shouldn't put on my glasses? All right,
let's talk about these biomes. There were five of them
in total. Each, like you said, each ecosystem had a
very specific set of interactions supposedly within it. But as
we'll see, there were variables that didn't let that happen.

(29:54):
One was the and we walked through each of these.
They're still there today. The tropical Amazonian rainforest has a
twenty foot waterfall. Pretty cool, it's amazing. There was a savannah,
very useful. There was a coastal fog desert, kind of
like the west coast of Mexico, like south of California.

(30:14):
What else was there? There was a freshwater marsh and
get this, you guys, there was a mangrove marsh. They
had saltwater mangroves there, my favorite plant on planet Earth.
They had on little Earth out there, and that flowed
into the showstopper, which was a nearly seven hundred thousand
gallon ocean. It had a coral reef, It had a

(30:37):
one hundred and fifty foot stretch of beach, and it
was operated by vacuum pumps. And we know this because
we were in the Underneath tour and I was like, Josh,
look of this. They're just a random pole that had
a button that said Ocean on, Ocean off. And I've
never wanted to press something more in my life.

Speaker 2 (31:01):
Then the humans they lived in their own little biome,
the anthropogenic biome wing and for some reason, they decked
it out in the purplest purple you've ever seen.

Speaker 1 (31:10):
It's so cool.

Speaker 2 (31:10):
I suspect it was some sort of emotional experiment. They
wanted to crack them because there's no explanation where I
was like, was purple big in nineteen ninety I was like, no, no,
it's never been big because.

Speaker 1 (31:23):
It's tied to print somehow. But I can't.

Speaker 2 (31:26):
Only Prince could pull off purple, you know what I mean.
So in the alongside that, the purple wing that they
lived in was a agro forestry plot where they grew
their food and for a short time it was probably
the most productive quarter acre of crop land in the
entire world.

Speaker 1 (31:45):
Short time. It's just a hint of where things going.
And then beneath it all, like we said, was the
tour that you can take now. Had all the computers
and stuff, which if you go, it's kind of funny
to laugh at the stuff now, these you know, late
eighties computer systems, But they did the job back then.
At this giant lung that you can still stand over.
It's very intense, very cool.

Speaker 2 (32:07):
So the whole thing was put together in a three
acre facility. It sounds pretty big until you stop and
think about it. And because this is nineteen ninety one.
The best measurement that we can put it in is
SMU's standard mall units. So if you had gone to
Rivergate Mall in nineteen ninety one and walked around the

(32:27):
seers there, you would be walking around a Sears that
was a little less than four acres in size, which
means that these people were stuck for two years inside
a facility smaller than a sears as. I'm sorry, are

(32:53):
they still around at all?

Speaker 1 (32:54):
Is there still seiers or that completely go away? Now?

Speaker 2 (32:56):
I don't think so.

Speaker 1 (32:58):
I got it maybe from front rogue. That doesn't tell
me much, by the way. No, all right, so life
inside the biosphere was pretty interesting. They're sealed off again, smaller.

Speaker 2 (33:13):
Than a what sears.

Speaker 1 (33:16):
Oh, and anger management is really paying off. That was
such a quick twitch.

Speaker 2 (33:22):
It slips out here or there. Good.

Speaker 1 (33:25):
So obviously, you know, all this stuff is very obvious,
but we just want to kind of drive it home.
You're not going out for coffee, you're not ordering a pizza,
You're not there's there's nothing you can bring in. It's
just you. You can't go have a drink at the bar
if you want one, like you were in there with
what you got, what you can grow. There's a lot
of small animals. There's a lot of insects, there's cockroaches.

(33:48):
There's a bunch of hippie tippy science types all living
together and more for more. Actually, they didn't wear those jumps.
It's like, you know, because they had to work really hard.
As soon as they left that that press conference the beginning,
they're like, let me get out.

Speaker 3 (34:01):
Of this stuff.

Speaker 1 (34:02):
Of course it was all glass. So they all saw
them change clothes.

Speaker 2 (34:04):
Right, but no Chinese food.

Speaker 1 (34:08):
They couldn't get ramen delivered. None of that stuff. I
would not be. All they had was what they had,
what they could grow, and that the fourteen pounds of
weed in those duffies.

Speaker 2 (34:16):
And don't forget the tour bus after tour bus of
gawkers and school kids who paid thirteen dollars to come
look at them. So, in addition to being sealed off
from the rest of earth for two years, they were
exhibits in a human zoo essentially. And there's a there's
a little shot in the documentary where some guy is
like trying to take a picture of one of them,

(34:37):
and he stops and he's like he did that and
it's documented, and I think he's a jerk.

Speaker 1 (34:46):
So if all this sounds awesome, and it does to
you in the audience, and you don't know what happens next,
you're thinking, guys, this is amazing, is ambitious. They're trying
to do real science. They put all this money into it.
They got a geodesic dome, they got those duffies full
of whatever. You're right, it sounds amazing, And if you're
wondering did it go wrong? It did. There were a

(35:09):
number of real design flaws in this thing. And I
don't think it was necessarily because they weren't. I hadn't
done this kind of thing before. Because they had, besides
themselves figuring all this out, they had teams and teams
of you know, legit scientists from all over the world
like contributing, so everyone was kind of pitching in and
involving themselves with their expertise. So I don't think it

(35:30):
was a lack of that. It was just maybe not
the most thought out thing to begin with, like the
whole idea that you could I mean, the biggest problem
was it couldn't carry out the science they wanted to
because Earth doesn't have five biomes in a three acre space.
They didn't seal them off from each other. Now, and
you go and visit their doors. Between all these they

(35:52):
built walls and stuff, and you go from the rainforest
and shut the door behind you and you go into
the desert. And that, you know, kind of works in
a way. When it's all right next to each other.
It's not natural and nothing is going to work. And
they just didn't think of that, I guess.

Speaker 2 (36:05):
So pretty much any like actual science they were trying
to do as far as BIOSPHERICX went, was moot from
the beginning, because again they didn't seal the biomes off
from one another. You had an Amazon rainforest thirty feet
away from a coastal fog, right And as a result,
the desert actually didn't stay desert because the more rain

(36:25):
you made in the jungle to increase plant production and
then you know, boost oxygen, it meant more fog roll
than every day in the desert, and so the cacti
got choked off by all the moisture and it turned
into like scrub land. And Linda Lee came in at
one point, I was like, what the hell.

Speaker 1 (36:47):
This place is very moist by the way, if you
go to visit. I know that word triggers some people.
I'm sorry, No, the way to describe it it is moist,
not cool, moist, moist moist moist, moist, so moist, like
you've been to greenhouses and stuff that kind of moisture.

(37:07):
Amplify this because there's waterfalls and jungles and stuff.

Speaker 2 (37:11):
So moist.

Speaker 1 (37:13):
Sorry. What else happened? There was a massive influx of
nutrients from that mangrove marsh that I love, right into
the ocean, such that you know, there's these great shots
at the beginning of them, like scuba diving next to
the reef, like this is amazing, and you know, a
year later, it's just so choked with algae because it's
so nutrient dense that scuba diving dried up pretty quickly.

Speaker 2 (37:36):
Yeah, it turned into a green, slimy ocean. And we
keep using the word nutrients, but you could also replace
that with poop, right, that's true. And then the trees, hmm,
the tree it's just weird. So they grew really really tall,
but they were too weak to stand up under their
own power, their own structure. And they figured out that

(37:57):
that was because there was no wind inside of the bikeiosphere.
Outside on biosphere one, the wind pushes on trees and
in response, trees grow something called stress wood, which gives
it a lot of structure. The trees inside a biosphere too,
didn't have any winds, so they didn't grow that stress wood,
which meant they had to be lashed to the inside

(38:18):
of the geodesic dome eighty feet up like a giant
piece of cooked asparagus. Just sad to see.

Speaker 1 (38:28):
I didn't know about this part, and in fact, I
went out when I went in January, I had purposely,
I think I watched the documentary, but I purposely didn't
look at the stuff you put together because I just
kind of wanted to experience it for the first time.
But on the plane, Josh was like, you know, I
heard that they lashed these trees to the tube because
they're so weak, and he was really kind of not obsessed,
but you were really sort of into this idea, like

(38:50):
a like an encyclopedia Brown Sleuth. And we got there
and Josh was so funny. He was like, look, look
they're still lashed. And he looked up there and sure enough,
there's like you know, vinyl chord tying these you know,
what is it again, Yeah, it's week Dresa, and you
were just you were so discussed.

Speaker 2 (39:08):
I cracked the case.

Speaker 1 (39:12):
Uh so we mentioned they start out with thirty one
hundred species of plants and animals forty percent when extinct,
which I know that sounds like a lot, but that
was actually better than they thought they were gonna do.

Speaker 2 (39:22):
Right, yeah, let me put that in a background extinction
rate real quick though, Right, according to background extinction rates,
they should have expected to lose point zero five to
one to two species out of thirty eight hundred over
two years. They lost one five hundred and twenty species
over two years.

Speaker 1 (39:40):
That's on biosphere one, is what you would expect.

Speaker 2 (39:42):
Yeah, okay, yeah, but like Chuck said, it was still
better than what they predicted, which was seventy percent extinction rate.
So forty percent is like a triumph compared to that.

Speaker 1 (39:53):
That's true. And here's the weird thing that happened in
Biosphere two was that some of the things back, many
of the things ended up really really thriving, were things
that they didn't even bring in and intend to thrive.
For instance, morning glory vines. They can be lovely, We
all love them. They grew so extensively. They basically, and

(40:15):
this will become a recurring theme, is they had to
spend so much of their time doing other stuff rather
than what each of them had their own little expertise in.
They didn't get to do the things that they had expertise.
And so they're out there, as we will see later,
farming all day, weeding all day, chopping this morning glory vine.
And that's going to build resentment when you can't do
your little chrone projects.

Speaker 2 (40:37):
Or Linda Lee didn't even get to take the stuffing
out of her La Gear shoe box.

Speaker 1 (40:42):
She didn't because he's chopping back those morning glory vine.

Speaker 2 (40:46):
Right. There was a species of ant called the crazy
ant that took over the place. It actually out competed
the eleven species of ants that were introduced purposely. No
one knows how the crazy ant got.

Speaker 1 (40:59):
In, but not show probably probably.

Speaker 2 (41:02):
Yeah, it took over though, and they're still there today.
When we were sitting there looking out over the ocean,
kind of holding on this railing, our hands were just
covered and unfortunately don't bite or anything, but we were like,
oh my god, we've heard about you guys. Yeah, I
can't believe if we were a little starstruck. Actually it
was pretty neat.

Speaker 1 (41:20):
It made up for the last trees I think for sure,
a little bit all. I mean not all, but most
of the pollinating things they brought in to pollinate these
specific plants died off, so they ended up having to
hand pollinate crops, which I don't know why that sounds
dirty to me, but that's what they did. And to
top it all off, well I'm not gonna talk about

(41:41):
the bush babies.

Speaker 2 (41:42):
You talk about they're.

Speaker 1 (41:42):
Gonna make me do this, I can't do it.

Speaker 2 (41:46):
So remember the bush baby's, the super super cute little primates. Well,
one of them got into a wiring panel and was electrocuting,
which is just that's got to be a bummer day
in biosphere too, you know, Like, I'm sure you could
smell it throughout the whole facility.

Speaker 1 (42:04):
I bet they're like, hmm, I'll bet they ate hell
out of that bush baby.

Speaker 2 (42:10):
Right, They did make lemonades out of lemons, though. For example,
they found that salamanders played a disproportionate role in trapping
carbon and soil because it eats a lot of the
leaf eating insects that released the carbon. They hadn't introduced salamanders.
But they made the observation all the same.

Speaker 1 (42:31):
So that's all well, and good. Things aren't going great.
There's a domino effect happening in nature because things aren't,
you know, helping each other out. S yenergy wasn't happening,
you guys. But there were two really big giant hurdles
that would affect the entire outcome of this experiment. Both
things they didn't count on. Both things are very important.

(42:53):
And they are eating and breathing.

Speaker 2 (42:57):
Yeah, going pretty good.

Speaker 1 (43:01):
Still going pretty.

Speaker 2 (43:01):
Good, I think so, you guys, still enjoying ourself. Well,
if I'm not mistaken, Chuck just set us up with
a cliffhanger, which means we're gonna take one more message break.

Speaker 5 (43:14):
That's right, stuffish, softy jawsh shop, soft.

Speaker 1 (43:29):
Your shal We're back, everybody, Hi, Nashville. All right, never
gets old. All right, We're gonna take these one in time.

(43:51):
Hunger number one. They initially calculated that we're gonna live
on about twenty five hundred calories a day. Not too bad.
They never got very close to that. They had to
farm their own food, like we said. They had farm
some on the ranch in New Mexico, like sort of
like we farm. Actually, there may be some lechit farmers here,
God bless you, that's right. But like I farm in

(44:16):
my backyard a little bit. I farm. Yeah, this is
a kind of farming they did. They weren't like professional farmers,
so they did an okay job growing stuff.

Speaker 2 (44:23):
Well in true synergy and fashion. None of them had
any experience with subsistence farming, and I guess they hadn't
thought that through when they sealed themselves off for two
years tried to grow their own crops.

Speaker 1 (44:35):
At first they got about eighteen hundred calories a day,
not terrible, you're pretty hungry, but you're living. That rose
to about two thousand at one point when the farm
was going pretty good. Again, you're fine, you're probably hungry
on two thousand galleries. But again, these people are working really,
really hard every day, so they're burning through those calories
very very quickly. And again they have to spend all

(44:57):
their time now weeding and farming and doing all these
things that they thought that Linda Lee was probably primarily doing.
And they're not able to run their experiment. So again
tension is increasing as they go.

Speaker 2 (45:07):
But doctor Walford was like, yes, yeah, that God because
he had a captive sample for two years to study
his chron diet, and he actually was vindicated. Everybody dropped
a shocking amount of weight. I think the average was
twenty one percent of their body weight for men, fourteen
percent for the women. And the thing is, their blood

(45:30):
markers started to show improvement, like their cholesterol levels were
actually good, and their weight finally stabilized, and they actually
got to this weird level of healthy from that calorie
restricted optimal nutrition diet. And Walford was he was pretty
happy about that.

Speaker 1 (45:45):
He's like, isn't as great? Everyone screw you, Walford. They
did the cartoon thing where they look he's like taking
a nap and they look at him and he's like
a he turns into a roasted turkey in his bed.
The point is, everyone they were hungry all the time.
They were hungry. They lost the enzymes that they formerly

(46:08):
had to digest meat. They didn't have a lot of
meat to begin with, but they certainly couldn't digest it
anymore in their guts. They ate peanut shells just you know,
like let's just just eat that whole peanut. Weren't even
showing these things to get more calories. They ate things
that grew. They ate tons of sweet potatoes because they
grew sweet potatoes pretty successfully, so their skin turned to orange. Yeah,

(46:31):
they ate ut beats. They grew a lot of beats.
They grew a lot of bananas. You know what happens
to beats the next day in the bathroom. So can
you imagine these people are all subsisting. They've got orange skin.
Their bathrooms look like a crime scene, and they are
eating so many bananas. They made banana wine, and in

(46:52):
the documentary they talk about how awful it tasted and
how quickly they drank it.

Speaker 2 (46:59):
But I just just a second, like, let's all get
in the mindset of living for two years on sweet
potatoes and beats. That is cruel. Yeah, that's like somebody
saying moist over and over each.

Speaker 1 (47:12):
What about the coffee? Though they thought of coffee ahead.

Speaker 2 (47:15):
Of time, This is where I would have signed out.
I would been like missions over for me. They were planning.
They actually did grow coffee upland in the rainforest, but
they miscalculated, and it turns out they could put together
one cup of coffee every two weeks, which meant everybody
got to six cups over the entire two years.

Speaker 1 (47:33):
Yeah, not one cup each, Like that's even bad. Yeah,
they got three cups of coffee per year each.

Speaker 2 (47:39):
It took four months to make a pizza because they
had to start by growing the wheat. They harvested their
salt from the ocean, and then their only source of
milk came from three goats stardust division and milky way okay, beats,
sweet potatoes and goat milk. Yeah, yeah, I don't understand

(48:01):
why you guys aren't more grossed out by that. Do
you guys eat a lot of beets and sweet potatoes
and go milk together.

Speaker 1 (48:07):
I mean, like they're.

Speaker 2 (48:09):
Fine on their own and you know, normal amounts, but
you put them all together for two years.

Speaker 1 (48:15):
Guys, this is Nashville. They're back to the land. They're
real American.

Speaker 2 (48:20):
Hey, I'm a real American. I can get back to
the land, but I don't want to live on sweet
potatoes and beats and goats milk for two years. Can
we not all agree on that?

Speaker 1 (48:29):
All right?

Speaker 2 (48:30):
Okay, thank you? We can finally move on from that part.

Speaker 1 (48:34):
Whatever socialist fascist communists, because those are all the same thing.
I wasn't gonna get political. Sorry, hangriness is a real
situation here though, like it became a real problem. The
group starts to divide a little bit. There is one
faction because you know, things aren't going well. So there's

(48:56):
one faction that's still very much following Becausejohn Allen was
kind of running the show from the outside. They were
following John Allen's word still and sort of John Allen Knight's.
And then there was another faction that we're like, I
don't think we should listen to this guy anymore, Like
he's not even in here, and they went, he's right
on the other side of the glass. He can now

(49:16):
looked in right outside the glass. John Allen's like I
had a burrito and was like, oh me. So like
a real division grew within the ranks, and it got
kind of ugly interpersonally between them.

Speaker 2 (49:28):
Yeah, Abigail Allen said she was spit at twice, and
Roy Walford later said, that's that's.

Speaker 1 (49:34):
How I thought it's a new one too.

Speaker 2 (49:41):
That's good, thank you, thank you man well man. Poor Roy.

Speaker 1 (49:48):
Things got worse for him by the way. Game Night
dried up pretty quickly, though. Is the upshot of all that?

Speaker 2 (49:55):
For sure?

Speaker 1 (49:55):
I'm sorry you're the upshot guy.

Speaker 2 (49:57):
That's okay, you can use it once in a while.

Speaker 1 (49:59):
I thank you. I appreciate that the anger management is
really working. So that's the hungriness. Number two is the
breathing trouble.

Speaker 2 (50:08):
Yes. So about a year I guess into the mission,
they started to notice that their oxygen levels were going down,
their CO two levels were going up, and either one
of those is bad, but them working in conjunction, that's
really not good. And it turned out that the atmosphere
grew to about a level somewhere around Cousco Peru, which

(50:30):
is way up in the andes An. In true synergy
and fashion, none of them had any experience living in
Cusco Peru, so they were suffering like big time. They
reported having to take breaks walking up the one flight
of stairs. They were hurting for sure. And they looked
around and they figured out that at least part of
the problem was that the soil was about five times

(50:52):
richer than you'd find out on biosphere one, which meant
there were tons of little microbes that were sucking up
the oxygen as they did their thing and releasing a
lot of CO two. That was problem one.

Speaker 1 (51:04):
Yeah, and that one's a little frustrating because you know,
at the beginning, they're like, we really need to grow stuff,
so let's get the best soil and bring that stuff in.
And no one ever was like, but wait a minute,
that's not how it is, like, we should bring in
realistic soil. Great band name, by the way.

Speaker 2 (51:20):
Realistic soil.

Speaker 1 (51:21):
Sure, I don't know, No, I'm not sure. Yeah, this
is Nashville, they know. Yeah, okay, oh you know what,
that's my band with a nine other guys.

Speaker 2 (51:30):
Oh that's funny you say that because I had thought
of when the dimes a dozens.

Speaker 1 (51:35):
Oh that's the name of our band.

Speaker 2 (51:36):
Yeah, you thought of that.

Speaker 1 (51:38):
When I was saying that, Wow, oh wait just now, no, no, no, earlier.

Speaker 2 (51:42):
Yeah, I was gonna say, it's like an hour ago.

Speaker 1 (51:44):
I just still the way your brain works always surprises me.
Thanks man for all these years. Is being the dime
a Dozens? Yeah, that's probably a real band here.

Speaker 2 (51:54):
Probably they're backstage right now.

Speaker 1 (51:59):
So the soil, Yes, we did this soil. So normally
the plant life and biosphere two would have sort of
reckoned with this and they would have worked over time.
They would have stepped up and sucked that CO two
out of the air and burped up oxygen and everyone
it would have been tenable at least, but that wasn't happening.
The plants were working hard and the levels just weren't changing,

(52:21):
and they could not figure out why.

Speaker 2 (52:22):
No, because there's a lot of CO two that should
have been in the atmosphere that was mysteriously missing. So
they looked around again, they said, what is going on?
And they discovered that concrete is an excellent carbon sink.
It just sucks it right out of the air faster
than plants, and Biosphere two happened to have one hundred
and ten thousand square feet of exposed concrete, and that

(52:44):
concrete was out competing the plants for that CO two,
So the plants couldn't pump out oxygen. And yet the
CO two levels were still higher than they should be,
which meant the biospheres were in trouble, and it wasn't
immediately apparent what they should do about the whole thing.

Speaker 1 (52:58):
Yeah, they weren't sure. I mean, they were basically two decisions.
They were like, well, listen, we can sort of blow
the spirit of this whole thing, and we can bring
in oxygen and pump in oxygen and stay in here
and probably risk the scorn of the media and the
scientific community and stuff like that render most of the
science mood, or we can leave, and they didn't want

(53:18):
to leave. So in the end they decided they're going
to bring in oxygen.

Speaker 2 (53:22):
Yeah, and they did. It saved the day. Initially, when
the biosphere project got underway, the media was super duper
on board. Somebody actually wrote that it was the greatest
scientific endeavor since humans landed on the Moon. It's a
pretty amazing thing to call it right. Just a few
years later, Time magazine named it as one of its

(53:43):
hundred worst ideas of the twentieth century, alongside the Titanic
DDT and sailing the exon Valdi's into Prince William sound Man.
Bad stuff.

Speaker 1 (53:57):
They really turned on them in the press. Not only
that reports start to come out of some other things.
They had a CO two scrubber in there to help
out that they didn't tell anyone about it. Obviously wasn't
enough to and that was kind of how they talk
about it later, was like it wasn't even enough to
solve our problem. So it's not like we were cheating
that much, just a little bit. We were still in

(54:19):
really bad shape, if that makes you feel any better.
But they didn't tell anyone, They didn't disclose this, so
that was a problem. Those two duffies that she brought
back in from the hospital, those came back up put
in the press. They were like, what was in those duffies?
We had the camera footage. You left with nothing, you
came back with these two big duffies. And she was like,
I don't know, I'm not really sure whether that was
It's cool. Man, like, don't be.

Speaker 2 (54:40):
A drag man. You sold that. I was like, oh,
goo choking.

Speaker 1 (54:45):
So sentiment started to turn publicly on them, and then
the very scientists that helped them started to turn on them.

Speaker 2 (54:53):
Yeah, because word got out that the trees were like
lashed to the geodesic dome in the ocean, like a
sea of green slime. So these mainstream scientists that had
helped design the place really started to distance themselves, and
they figured out that if they criticized the way it
was executed, they could kind of give themselves an alibi.

(55:14):
And so the media turned on it, the scientific community
turned on it, and so the public turned on it
as well.

Speaker 1 (55:21):
Yeah, it was not a good scene. Years later, a
few years later, in nineteen ninety six, that original og
Synergy and biospherian Mark Nelson, he came out and wrote
about it and said, listen, the whole purpose of this thing,
it was like a beta test. We were supposed to
go in there, see what didn't work as you would expect,
and then the second team would come in in year

(55:41):
three and rectify some of these and then see what
worked and one didn't. And it's one hundred year experience,
you guys. It's a long game. The problem was they
painted it like it wasn't a beta test, like it
was kind of this perfect, amazing thing out of the box.
And they had chances. And that's what's so frustrating about
this whole thing, as they had chances time and time

(56:02):
again to come out and with pr basically that talked
about the stuff and was up front, and they would
have had a much better time selling it to the
public when things started going bad than if they stood
their ground, which is what they did and were like, nah,
I know what you're talking about, that everything's going great.

Speaker 2 (56:19):
Yeah, Because anytime something came up, like the Duffel bags
or the CO two scover or whatever. John Allen and
his inner circle decided the best route was to cover
it up or lie or obfuse skate. And it was
very obvious because, in true synergy and fashion, none of
them had any experience lying to the press, so it

(56:39):
was really kind of obvious that they were full of full.

Speaker 1 (56:43):
Of yes, saltwater marsh poo pooh.

Speaker 2 (56:48):
Sure, So the whole there was like this two year
ongoing pr disaster, and really, more than anything, that's probably
what sunk the project.

Speaker 1 (56:57):
That's right. But regardless of what the world thought and
what the press thought, they brought in that oxygen. It
sustain them. Is actually kind of a fun moment because
they were very despondent at this point in the documentary.
They're weak, they can't breathe, They're walking around just like
slugging around, and then that oxygen gets pumped in and
they're like almost dancing around in this place. Yes, pretty great,

(57:20):
brought in some house music, and you know, they brought
it in for better or for worse, and finished the experiment.
They did stay in there, to their credit, for the
entire two years, and emerged on September twenty third, nineteen
ninety three. As Mark Nelson would say, profoundly changed.

Speaker 2 (57:37):
Right, and then as scheduled, Mission two went in after
Mission one, I think like a few months afterward Mission
I was slated to just stay in for a year,
but it didn't last nearly as long.

Speaker 1 (57:50):
Well. Also, Mission two only had three people, Polly Shore,
Brendan Fraser, and Stephen Baldwin.

Speaker 2 (57:57):
So has anyone seen Biote? WHOA that is A It's
a genuinely good movie.

Speaker 1 (58:05):
This is my takeaway from Nashville beats Sweet Potatoes. Biodome. Yeah,
huge town for that stuff, right, it's I watched it
for research. Seriously, I still didn't. I saw him to
watch it, and may be.

Speaker 2 (58:19):
The only person on the planet who's ever watched Biodome
for reach purposes. But it paid off because they actually
captured a lot of the spirit of everything that went
wrong in there. It just never went right like Polly
Shore got it to in the end.

Speaker 1 (58:35):
So Ed Bass you remember Ed he was the billionaire
son who funded this thing. He sort of fed up
with all this bad press, the divided factions. It has
really become pretty ugly at this point. So he said,
all right, you know what, I'm going to stage a
hostile takeover of my own company. And John Allen you're
out of here. I'm sorry. I love you, man. I
love all the preform dancing we did over the years,

(58:57):
all the crazy creative kids stuff that we dreamed up.
Apparently not under the influence of drugs, which was highly surprising.

Speaker 3 (59:05):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (59:05):
They were kind of straight, straight edge, right.

Speaker 2 (59:07):
Supposedly, just weirder and weirder.

Speaker 1 (59:09):
I just don't believe it. And uh, it became way
more preneur and less eco after this point. I went
in a more twisted direction when they brought in a
new board and a new CEO named Steve Bannon. Yes, really,
And in the documentary they said the name Steve Bannon.

(59:29):
I went, well, that's a coincidence. And then Waltz's in
Younger Steve Bannon. I was like, really, yeah, they put
a villain to introduce in that three exactly.

Speaker 2 (59:41):
It was very surprising. The guy used to be able
to buy coke off of on air Force one. That's
who they put in charge a Biosphere two at the end.

Speaker 1 (59:50):
That's right, he was only wearing one collared shirt at
the time.

Speaker 2 (59:53):
You're right, did not.

Speaker 1 (59:55):
Get into that. Whatever that look is where you wear two,
it's I don't know what we have seen that all right,
I'm wearing this shirt. Imagine if I had like like
an eyesod polo underneath it with another collar that's up.
That's Steve Bannon's look. Sure, he's the only guy that
does that, so maybe credit to him.

Speaker 2 (01:00:16):
No, okay, no.

Speaker 1 (01:00:19):
Two collar shirts anyway.

Speaker 2 (01:00:21):
So Mark van Pillow and Abigail Alling were rightfully concerned
about this new direction. They were worried about the safety
of the Mission two crew, so they went in and
broke the seal to the facility. They gave it a
bunch of beer until it pete and then opened up,
then opened up the air and let it in.

Speaker 1 (01:00:43):
Really beats sweet potatoes, biodome and breaking the seal.

Speaker 6 (01:00:51):
Breaking the seal at the bar, Little Nashy, Little Nashy trends. Yeah,
that's what I'm hoping You ever nicknamed the city and
it worked?

Speaker 2 (01:01:03):
No? Not in all the times I've tried.

Speaker 1 (01:01:06):
I'm pretty good at it. You ever heard of the
Big Apple?

Speaker 2 (01:01:09):
Holy Cow?

Speaker 1 (01:01:10):
Is it?

Speaker 2 (01:01:10):
That was a mean wow? I called it the old
cow Pasture.

Speaker 1 (01:01:18):
Just didn't take, so they busted them out. I like
to think it happened like in the dead of night.
I'm not sure if it was that dramatic, but that's
how it plays out of my head at least. And
that was the end of Biosphere too, as far as
that project goes, No. One hundred years. That one hundred
and fifty to two hundred million dollars closed system lasted

(01:01:39):
for less than three years total, and it would never
be a closed system again. Like you can visit it now,
so it's obviously not a closed system. It's very cool.
But you can walk in that door and through lots
of other doors now, yeah, and then visit all those
biomes and it is still legitimately amazing.

Speaker 2 (01:01:54):
Yeah, it is amazing. But because it was never closed
off again, the spirit of the project was really lost forever.
And because the press turned on it and scientific community
turned on it, we still today have this idea of
Biosphere two just being a complete clue g mess, kind
of a laughing stock that some hippies tried that really
didn't work out. And that's all true, but there's a

(01:02:18):
lot of stuff that gets overlooked too. Apparently hundreds of
papers came out of the Biosphere project and some genuine
scientific discoveries did as well. That low tech wastewater system
that didn't really work for them because of their ocean
turning slimy actually has worked in other developing parts of
the world.

Speaker 1 (01:02:37):
It's used all over, that's right, which is great.

Speaker 2 (01:02:40):
Yeah, there's also the discovery that ocean acidification bleaches coral
and kills it off. That came out of biosphere too
as well.

Speaker 1 (01:02:50):
That's right. That's a big problem these days. And then
all started there. Well the bush babies, Sure, what happened
to them? They became extinct.

Speaker 2 (01:02:58):
Yes, they went extinct. The bush babies went extinct. Everybody,
I don't know why you keep giving these This is
a silver lining. At least there is a silver lining
is that while they were there before they went extinct,
they actually managed to reproduce. And if you were creating
this test bed for off earth habitation, like, that's a
really big deal. They got some mammals to reproduce and

(01:03:21):
a closed off system, so good things did actually happen.
But probably the biggest contribution that Biosphere two gave us
was it reinvigorated humanity's love of Earth. I guess it
kind of peaked previously in about nineteen seventy with the
First Earth Day. Then everybody was like, oh, I hadn't

(01:03:42):
heard of cocaine before, let me start doing that. Instead
went that way for a couple of decades, and then
the biosperience came back and like blue, everybody's coke right
off their table and got them focused again on on
thebandon jumped on the floor right.

Speaker 1 (01:04:00):
So yeah, I mean it fascinated the world with environmentalism again,
and it kind of kickstarted that next wave of environmentalism
in a real way. It really jumps started things on
the welfare of the planet and for a little while least.
And the thing that's frustrating is to think about, like,
where would we be if it hadn't gone that way?
Like we would be I think last year would have

(01:04:21):
been year thirty of this amazing experiment. How much further
and we've made some pretty great strides, but how much
further would we have been along in terms of caring
for our planet had Biosphere to just really solved everything
to begin with and just kicked as much ass as
everyone thought I was going to kick. Sure, it's sad

(01:04:41):
to think about.

Speaker 2 (01:04:41):
It's also possible that it was just too it actually
was too clue you to produce any scientific value. But
we'll never know ed.

Speaker 1 (01:04:49):
Bask got Columbia University to take it on as an
annex at one point for their science departments. That dissolved eventually,
and now when you go and visit, you will see
a University of Arizona and a branding everywhere because they
run it now and that's one of their research facilities
and they still carry out science there, real science. If
you ever decide to go, and again I recommend you do,

(01:05:11):
you're gonna be staying there. In Tucson, not too far away,
there's a great Mexican restaurant downtown Tucson called Pinka that
we ate and it is delicious and wonderful. It really
is great cocktails.

Speaker 2 (01:05:23):
And then today they say that if you do go
take the tour, there's a legend that goes that you
should hang back and get out of sight of the
tour guide, especially in the rainforest biome, and just duck
behind some bushes and hide there for the rest of
the night after they lock up. If you're really really quiet,
you look around, you might just catch the ghosts of

(01:05:44):
the bush babies. And if you look really really closely,
you'll see that one of them has its hair standing
on end.

Speaker 1 (01:05:53):
And that's the story by his fear too, everybody. Thank you, Nashville,
thank you very much. Stuff you Should Know is a

(01:06:22):
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
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