Stuff You Should Know - Carbon Monoxide: Please Just Listen Anyway

Episode Date: April 27, 2023

It might not be the sexiest topic we’ve ever covered (and by “might”, we mean “definitely”), but there are some things you just need to learn about and this deadly and undetectable gas that���s part of our everyday lives is one of them. So buck up.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Amber Ruffin, and I'm her gorgeous sister, Lacey Lamar, and in fact Lacey is not that gorgeous. Amber, get on with it. Okay everybody, we have exciting news to share. We're teaming up with Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network to bring you our brand new podcast called The Amber and Lacey Lacey & Amber Show. We did it. We sold a bunch of books, we conquered late night, and now we'll play fun quizzes and games with friends and take you along for the ride. Listen to the Amber and Lacey Lacey & Amber Show on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Attention everyone, this is a public service announcement that you should hear. That's right. We have mentioned it before quite a few times, but this is what we would call the last call for our live shows coming up May 4th in Washington, D.C., May 5th in Greater Boston and Medford, Mass.

And Saturday the 6th in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. There are still tickets left. We are not going to do any other shows in the Northeast this year for this topic. So aside from a few shows in the Southeast this fall, this is your chance. Yeah, so come see us. If you want to, you can go get your tickets at linktree.sysk.nlanktr.ee.sysk. And it will take you to all of the various ticket sites to buy those tickets and come see us. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff You Should Know, the PSA edition. Yeah, we haven't done a good old PSA in a while.

Do you remember some of our other ones? I can't bring any to mind. Sure, don't play in the street. Yeah, that's one. Don't jump out of a hot air balloon without a parachute. Yeah, cellophane bags in you. Yeah, boy, that was a good one. Sure was. Yeah, and then this one, carbon monoxide.

I wonder if there's a few people out there that are searching for our cellophane bags episode now. Well, here's the short version. Don't put them over your head. That was it. That was our first short stuff. So, yeah, I probably shouldn't have laughed at that because that exchange wasn't funny at all. And Chuck, we should not be jokie at all. This is a very serious episode. Right, carbon monoxide. Not dioxide, monoxide. I know.

I already said CO2 when I was talking the offline. And if you search for carbon monoxide or CO, carbon dioxide still comes up, page one. Yeah. If I were carbon monoxide, I'd be seething with rage. Yeah. Put CO in the limelight for a change. The reason that this is... Well, that's what we're doing right now. And the reason that this is a PSA, everybody, is that carbon monoxide is a deadly gas,

deadly poison toxic gas to humans. But you can't tell that you're being poisoned until it's potentially too late. And you're either very, very sick or very, very dead. And the reason why this is a PSA further is because we live among carbon monoxide quite a bit or else potential carbon monoxide sources all over the place. Our whole world is laden with them. Yeah. And if I can pull a little piece from later in this great article from Libya. Let me spring this one on you.

It's also, it's a silent killer known as the silent killer. Yeah. But it's not the same thing as like a gas leak. So a gas leak is a completely different thing. They make a gas leak smell bad on purpose. So you can detect a gas leak. They don't do that with CO because it's a smell that's produced as a result of something. So it's not like they can say, hey, let's add a farty smell to CO.

So everyone knows when it's around. Right. Because a gas leak is like the actual fuel that hasn't made it to the combustion process yet. So they can add something. But carbon monoxide is 100% produced by combustion. Right. And in particular, a specific kind of a combustion, which would be incomplete combustion. Yeah.

Boy, I'd never knew this at all in my life. And I've heard of carbon monoxide that have carbon monoxide detectors. I knew a little bit about it here and there. But I never knew that combustion like is generally almost always inefficient. And there is a apparently a perfect combustion called a stoichiometric combustion, which it's the most efficient way something can burn releasing water, nitrogen and carbon dioxide full stop. But apparently that's just that never happens. There's always an inefficiency and that's where the carbon monoxide comes from.

Yeah, I saw another another term for that kind of combustion is theoretical combustion. Like it just doesn't exist. There's no such thing as perfect combustion, but I'm sure there's people out there trying to crack that egg. Sure. So with because like just about any time we burn a fuel, it's incomplete or imperfect combustion. Those byproducts I could release with complete combustion are joined or replaced by some much less desirable ones like carbon monoxide, which again is the silent killer. That's right.

Silent but deadly. And there's a few reasons why combustion is typically incomplete, at least as far as stuff that you and I would mess around with, right? Yeah. I mean, there may not be enough. It's got to have the right mix of air kind of like and we'll get into car into car engines a little bit later, but the mix of like air to fuel as far as a car burning lean or burning rich or a fuel burning lean or rich. It's the same thing with just a fire.

If there's not enough air there or the air doesn't mix with the fuel like it should, maybe if it is extinguished too quickly or the temperature cools down before the fuel has burned up, this is where you can get those inefficiencies. Yeah. And like whether you have too much or too little air, it's not not a good thing. So it's really, really difficult to get it just perfect. Actually, it's impossible, but even to get close is really, really difficult. So there's always going to be some carbon monoxide, right?

And we've known for quite a while that it's a real problem at least as far back as the 13th century. There was an alchemist in Spain named Arnaud Villanova. Yeah. And he said that, I don't know how he figured this out. I looked, I couldn't find it, that burning wood, incomplete combustion of wood produces some poisonous gas that he didn't attempt to name, but he did identify it first. Yeah. I mean, there you have it, 13th century.

Yep. They knew something was out there and could kill you. A little bit later in 1644, there was a scientist from France named Johann Baptista von Helmont. Very French name. Names used to be so much better. For sure. They have like curly cues on them, you know. Oh my God, it's amazing.

He described dying basically or coming close to dying from inhaling what he called gas carbonum, which was probably a mixture of things, but carbon monoxide was definitely in there. Right. And Joseph Priestley came along, right? Not Jason Joseph. You took the Jason right out of my mouth. Do you remember him? He showed up in our nitrous oxide episode.

Okay. I knew he had heard of him before because I knew he had made a Jason Priestley joke before. Yes, for sure. There's no way you can't. Yeah. So he was a chemist from England and he's the one that they point to as sort of the true discoverer of carbon monoxide, even though he had a really bad name for it too. He was doing experimentation in the 1770s.

And he's the guy that basically said, hey, you know what? Air isn't just one thing. Like air has a lot of gases in it. And this one thing is really important. We should pay attention to it. I'm going to call it deflogit. Oh man. I had it so good earlier.

Deflogisticated air. Yeah. And everyone else said, call it oxygen. He said, fine. I like mine more. It's got curly cues on it. Deflogicated. Wow.

That's mouthful. That's an old-timey word. If that's not, I've never heard an old-timey word. Yeah. So he also found carbon monoxide, which he called heavy inflammable air. And I finally just caved and looked up why inflammable, inflammable are the same. Yeah. Inflammable was original, but apparently it just confused everybody so much.

And because it describes such a dangerous thing, they dropped the in and just went with flammable from that point on. Where did we talk about this before? Oh, I don't know. It sounded new to me. No, we've talked about this before. For once I remember something. Okay.

In my little feeble brain. Well, what was it? Well, I don't remember the topic, but I definitely remember us talking about this. But you know what? I don't think you had that little tidbit. Okay. We're good. We just wondered about it maybe.

I think so. That was back in our days of just like complaining about not knowing something. Well, here at the advent of year 15, we have finally solved that mystery, Chuck. Oh yeah. Happy anniversary. Happy anniversary. Happy anniversary to Jerry. Oh, she could speak through the tape on her mouth.

So, wow, Jerry just threw me off. That's why we don't let her talk, Chuck. I know. Quiet you. And by the way, people that think we're being mean to Jerry, just pipe down. We've had to go through that before, haven't we? I think people thought we were genuinely mean to Jerry about this stuff. But we're family.

We're siblings. So we poke fun at each other. Exactly. And we haven't for a while. No, we don't poke. You and I don't poke fun at each other on the air generally. No. But boy, off the air.

Oh, it's a poking fist. Yeah. You're always poking my belly. You're doing mine. And I say, hmm. Oh man, kids did that when I was a kid. To you? Occasionally.

Yeah. That happened to you, right? Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I was such a people pleaser. I just went along with it like it was hilarious. Yeah. I had a little chubby belly and then I got skinny.

And then I got chubby. So I'm thinking I'm going to get skinny again. Nice. That's the cycle. It's going to happen that way. Yeah. It's the circle of life. Yeah.

We should get back to it though, eh? Yeah. So you might say, why? Okay. Guys, I get it. Carbon monoxide, the silent killer. And you have to make air quotes every time you say that, everybody, by the way. I get it.

It's deadly. I don't want to be around it. But exactly how is it deadly? And that is one of the reasons we are here. We're here to explain why it's deadly. Because if you look at the chemical makeup of a carbon monoxide molecule. One carbon atom, one oxygen atom, right? But they are bound really tightly.

They have a triple covalent bond, which means that they don't react with stuff very easily. So plants are safe from it. Basically, anything that doesn't breathe has no problems with carbon monoxide. But we breathe, and carbon monoxide tricks our bodies into substituting oxygen for carbon monoxide. Because it binds to our hemoglobin, which transports oxygen throughout the body and the blood, right? Right. And one of the reasons why it takes oxygen places, because it's 210 times more attractive to hemoglobin than oxygen is. That's right.

And just quickly, you and me and Jerry, we have also a triple covalent bond. That's right. It just occurred to me. And we're very non-reactive. That's right. But what you were saying was hemoglobin is like hubba-hubba when it comes to that CO, and oxygen is like, no, you're supposed to be bonding with me. Right.

And hemoglobin says, but I'm so much more attracted to the carbon monoxide. And it's just one of those weird things that happens in the body. It's like that meme where the guy is walking with this girlfriend, but he's turned around looking at another girl. The other girl is carbon monoxide. His girlfriend's oxygen, he is hemoglobin. I've actually seen that one. I'm not the biggest meme guy, but I know exactly what you're talking about. Good.

And it's really apt if you ask me. It actually fits a lot of stuff. But one thing that we have to point out, and this is a reason why carbon monoxide is so deadly, it's deadly in very, very small amounts because it can so quickly replace the oxygen in your bloodstream. And your tissues, your organs, they need oxygen. So if instead they're getting carbon monoxide delivered to them, they're going to enter hypoxia. And you become oxygen deprived. Your organs become oxygen deprived.

Maybe your heart's going to stop. You might suffer brain damage. If you survive at the very least, you're probably going to faint, maybe throw up. And again, it's because it's 210 times more attractive to hemoglobin. So I saw this stat, Chuck. Yeah. If there's a concentration of 0.05% carbon monoxide in the air you're breathing. That's nothing.

Nothing. And 15%, 15% of the air is oxygen. When the amount of carbon monoxide in your blood reaches equilibrium, 41% of your blood is going to be carbon monoxide. Just from that, that's the disparity. Just that little amount to overwhelm the oxygen in your body and all of a sudden you're in big trouble. Yeah. I mean, it depends on who you are and what's going on if you're one of our senior friends.

If you're a little baby friend, you're going to have bigger trouble with CO, obviously. If you're like exercising really heavily and like, you know, breathing a lot more and your heart rate's really high, then it's going to be a little more dangerous if it's in the air. But here's some parts per million stats for you. 16,000 parts per million, which is a lot. Yeah. So, I mean, we're not saying like, and this could happen, you know, just walking around and breathing air. Yeah, but 16,000 parts per million, you're basically taking rips off of a tailpipe of a 1970 Buick.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. It's a ton. But, you know, as evidence, that will kill you off in like a few minutes. Right. So, don't do that, PSA. No. Let's cut it down to like 400, like 350 to 400. Should be fine, right?

No. You will die in three to five hours. You're going to, you know, feel like symptoms coming on. So, hopefully, it's kind of thing that you recognize is going on like bad headaches, you know, probably nausea, dizziness, stuff like that. Well, that's one of the problems is it's like, you could be nauseous or dizzy from anything, you know? Well, exactly. Most people don't go carbon monoxide poisoning. Well, and they do say like if, I mean, there's something, this is the acute kind of poisoning, but there's also the, what's the other kind?

Chronic. Yeah, the chronic kind. They say if like, if everyone in your house gets sick at the same time, you know, it's not always a cold, like you might want to check for carbon monoxide in your house. Right. So, the carbon monoxide in your blood mixing with hemoglobin creates a molecule called carboxy hemoglobin. And it sticks around for four hours. And as long as you have a bunch of carbon monoxide streaming through your blood and in your tissues, even though you stepped out into like fresh air, you figured it out, you realized, you've listened to this episode, you know that you have carbon monoxide poisoning, you've left your house, you're breathing fresh air. You still got four hours of working that stuff out.

And during that four hours, it's going to be a very, it's going to be very dangerous for you. So, you want to go to the hospital, when you get to the hospital, they're probably going to stick you in a hyperbaric chamber and start pumping you full of oxygen. Yeah, at the very least, put you on oxygen in some fashion, just with a mask even while you're waiting probably. Yeah. Although this seems like one of those emergency situations to where hopefully it's recognized and they get you in like very quickly. Sure. And the other thing, if you, I mean, eventually when you flush it out, you can be okay, but you can also relapse. Like a few weeks later, you can get relapse symptoms and all of a sudden you've got a brain fog or fatigue or that headache or nausea or dizziness or something coming back on.

And, you know, you can get permanent damage if it's severe enough. Yeah, and we talked about chronic poisoning. You can get chronic carbon monoxide poisoning if you're exposed to something as little as nine parts per million for longer than eight hours, which is well below the OSHA standard. Yeah. 50 parts per million. Days in a row. Yeah. I mean, this basically wants to be part of your life, right?

Right. And actually, if you go to the hospital and you're like, I've got all these weird unexplained symptoms, but I'm not fainting or anything like that. There's not, you know, I haven't been sucking off a Buick tailpipe or anything. Right. They're going to start asking you questions about your lifestyle, like where do you live? What do you do? And if it turns out that you like live above a Greyhound bus terminal. Right.

And make those phone calls, obscene phone calls where you're breathing heavily a lot. They might say, I think you have carbon monoxide poisoning of the chronic variety. We should do one on bus trips. I thought you were going to say obscene phone calls. No. We should do that too. Okay. The jerky boys.

Yeah. I've been wanting to do one on the history of prank calling. There's actually a pretty rich history there. Yeah. That'd be fun, actually. All right. I remember, we'll take a break here in a sec, but very quickly. I was one of those guys who got the jerky boys from a friend on a cassette, like years

before it was, you know, the internet obviously or any kind of like, I think they did like a movie even, didn't they? Yes, they did. Yeah. This is when like the cassette was being passed around the school yard kind of thing. Nice. And I thought it was a funny thing I'd ever heard. It was funny. Even just saying the name makes me laugh.

Yeah. Jerky boys. Yeah. They didn't laugh. I laughed inside. Okay. Should we take that break? Yeah.

I think we should. All right. Hey everybody, I'm Amber Ruffin and I'm her beautiful sister, Lacey Lamar. Fun fact about Lacey, she's not as beautiful as I am. You guys, we have a brand new podcast on Will Ferrell's big money players network called The Amber and Lacey Lacey and Amber Show. We are New York Times bestselling authors and we've written two books on everyday racism that made you gasp and laugh at the same time.

We done did it. We sold a bunch of books. We were on Lay down with Seth Meyers and the Amber Ruffin show. And now we only have one frontier to conquer. That's podcast. Podcast, baby. This quiz show is going to be fun. We're going to have celebrities.

We're going to quiz them about things that they are experts at and we'll see who wins. And who loses. You got to watch us. No, you have to listen to us. I mean, you can still watch us, but you got to listen. But like, if you're watching us, you have to tell us. You can't just be watching us. Listen to the Amber and Lacey Lacey and Amber show on Will Ferrell's big money players network

on the I Heart Radio Apple podcast over ever you get your podcasts. All right, Chuck. So, um, oh, I know, I think you could say the Beverly Hills supper club fire had some PSA qualities to it. Right. Sure. We're talking to supper clubs. Right.

We're talking about, especially in northern Kentucky, Chuck. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, flammable curtains probably too. We're in flammable. Um, the, but death by fire is not a good way to die. Um, but very few people die from burning to death. You usually are dead long before you really start burning up through smoke inhalation.

And although apparently they don't quantify statistics as to this smoke, this type of smoke or this compound in the smoke killed the person like carbon monoxide. You can make a pretty safe assumption that carbon monoxide poisoning, um, has killed people in fires pretty frequently. I'm sure. Sure. It's part of that deadly cocktail that you're inhaling. Exactly.

Uh, it's also part of a deadly cocktail you're inhaling if you're a cigarette smoker. Uh, you are willingly ingesting, uh, carbon monoxide into your body when you smoke a cigarette. Uh, there's a stat for you, um, that carboxy hemoglobin we were talking about, uh, which is what happens when hemoglobin binds with the, the CO. Right. A typical level if you're just walking around on the street is under 1%. If you smoke a pack a day, you're living at about three to 6%. Yeah.

Uh, if you smoke a hookah, uh, especially in the traditional way where you're actually burning the tobacco on, on coal or charcoal, uh, gonna be a lot more CO than that even, almost a CO2. Um, and incense is another offender. Uh, that can bring, uh, if you're burning incense in your house a lot, like all day long, you can get up to 9.6 parts per million in your home. Uh, and I used to burn, I used to burn incense in college. I was into it for a little while.

Yeah, me too. But now when I smell it, I'm so turned off, it's weird cause it's a little bit of a nostalgia hit. Like, oh yeah, sandalwood. Okay. I was going to say, are you talking specifically about Nag Champa? I don't remember Nag Champa. It's like the quintessential hippie, not patchouli, like the hippie incense stick would be Nag

Champa. Was it black or brown? Brown. Like a light brown. Oh, I usually liked most of the browns. Not like the blacks. They were way too pungent for me. But, uh, then I just, you know, that was, it was a very short phase that kind of overlapped

with my, uh, listening to the doors phase probably. But, uh, once I was done with incense, I was done such that if I walk into like some hippie-dippy crystal shop and it's got incense going, I got to get out of there. Yeah, I know what you mean. I don't like it. When I was in college, I got so into incense, so hardcore into incense, I, I moved past the stick incense and had little brass burners, not even little brass burners with little charcoal discs that you would put like resin, like frankincense on.

And I would sit around and burn that all day long. And when I read this, I was like, oh, that's not good. But it does explain a lot. For sure. Yep. Smoking indoors too. Well, you've cleaned up your acne. Not a good champ.

Yes. So, you know, I used to faint a lot for no good reason and throw up on myself and now I understand why. That's not funny at all. Is it not? Well, then maybe I'll just retract that statement. No, I mean, I'm laughing, but I didn't want to laugh at your expense. Oh, I didn't actually faint and throw up on myself.

Are you laughing because I was such a hippie, I burned frankincense. No, I thought you were serious that you fainted and threw up on yourself. No, no, no, no. No, I didn't. I didn't. I have a friend who fainted occasionally, so, you know, it could be a thing. You should ask that friend if they live above a Greyhound bus terminal. No, he doesn't live over there.

So like I said before, if you're a little baby or if you're a senior citizen, it's going to, if you have chronic heart disease even, if you have anemia, if you have asthma, like obviously all of this stuff is going to exacerbate any kind of effects from carbon monoxide getting into your body. But about 400 Americans die from, and this doesn't include fires. This is just accidental CO poisoning every year, which isn't a lot, but about 100,000 go to the ER because of this and 14,000 are hospitalized overnight. So those aren't negligible.

No, and I mean, 400 people dying is, I mean, this is all very preventable too, as we'll see because when carbon monoxide gets in your house, it's not supposed to be there. There's something wrong with something you're using. Usually some sort of fossil fuel burning appliance is the culprit. And we talked about incomplete combustion. That basically is what's to blame across the board. One of the big ones that kills people, or at least makes them sick and sends them to the hospital is unvented space heaters, which if you say those words together, you're like,

this sounds like a bad idea. And in fact, unvented space heaters are number 15 on a consumer product safety commission list of 350 of the most dangerous household products. Yeah. And to be clear, these are natural gas or kerosene burning heaters, not electric heaters. Yeah, but like the kind that's maybe the size of like a old timey suitcase, like an old Samsonite that get really bright that you might have in your house, especially in the south, where a lot of people in the south-south don't have central heat because it doesn't

get that coal very often, it's not worth the investment, especially back in the day. So they might have an unvented, just a portable space heater basically that runs on kerosene. And the problem is, if you don't open your windows while you're running that thing, there's a good chance you're going to accidentally poison yourself with carbon monoxide. And that's counterintuitive because people use those because it's cold outside and you don't usually open your windows when it's cold outside. So it actually does lead to a lot of problems for people. Yeah.

My grandmother, Bryant, my dad's mom, Opal, who lived to be 100 plus had, and these weren't gas-fired or anything, but she had to call them chill chasers in the wall. Oh. Did you ever see those? And I'm sure they were all over the place, but I saw them a lot in the south in older houses where they're just, they're built in space heaters in the wall, like recessed into the wall. Oh yeah.

I guess I know what you're talking about. Sure. Just a little timer switch on it. It was super, super cool, like in her bathroom and stuff. Yeah. I love those like old timey details of old houses like that. Yeah. Or like a cut out in the hallway for a phone.

Yeah. Like a telephone. Like a tile toothbrush holder that matches the rest of the tile, it just sticks out and holds your toothbrushes. Love that. Good stuff. Speaking of those kerosene or natural gas heaters though, if you get a new one, they almost always now have a sensor on it, an oxygen sensor that will read the air and shut

that thing off. But if you've got an older one, and it doesn't have to be like 40 years old, you know, I'm not sure when those oxygen sensors came along, but I feel like it's semi-recent. Yeah. 2022 probably. Yeah. How did that reach? Okay.

Boy, I'm really getting you left and right today. Oh God. This is gullible day for me. Okay. Well, that's good to know. Noted. But cooking appliances, obviously, furnaces, fireplaces, car exhaust is a big one. Chuck, I've got to stop you there because this is why we're here right now.

BSA time. We have an attached garage that leads right to the kitchen the door does, and I stopped our car and got out and went inside and just went about my day, but I left the car running with the garage door closed. Just I've never done it before in my life, never even come close. It just happened because in my defense, it's a hybrid, so it's easy to forget to turn it off because there's really not a lot going on when you turn it on or off when it's in electric mode.

Yeah. And of course, it's like, oh, I better start charging myself and the gas burning part kicked in and you open the door and it's like, oh my God, the car's running. So we started researching carbon monoxide and found that it's actually kind of a problem. Luckily, we were fine. Oh, wow. Momo was fine. I'm glad she didn't get suspicious.

But what do you mean? You know, like bring you up on charges? Like I was trying to poison a lot of us. Maybe. Sure. No, she knows me a little better than that. Momo, that's the danger there. I'm glad Momo was okay.

Yes. And that is why we were most freaked out because she's tiny. So if you like, it's a little bit of carbon monoxide can really screw up somebody with a 10 pound frame, you know? Yeah. Why don't those hybrids just say, car on, car off? I don't know. It'd be very easy to do that.

Yeah. Or just keep beeping or something. Like the car's still on, dummy. Mine doesn't do that. Yeah. Or just do the car on, car off. And then you could get celebrity reads. You could have like Samuel L. Jackson do it.

Right. Or Matthew McConaughey. Car on, babe. That's not mine. It would be Sammy Davis Jr. But do Christopher Walken doing it? I don't do Walken that well. Yes, you do.

Car off. That was pretty good. You could also pass that off as a shatner. Yeah, probably so. Car off. Goodness me. Kevin Pollock, he should have been on. He should have done a very quick little guest two word read for us.

Oh, well, it's not too late. This episode hasn't been edited yet. He probably would. Well, let's find out. Speaking of bad decisions, if you lived in Texas in 2021 when they had that terrible frozen storm that came through and their power grid failed, a lot of people were like, hey, let's bring in this Weber grill and load it full of charcoal and keep ourselves warm. It sounds like a very not smart thing to do, but not everyone understands this.

Not everyone knows that Cia would be admitted. I think people get desperate when they're in danger of freezing to death, maybe. And that kind of thing can happen. 11 people died, about 1400 people went to the emergency room for CO poisoning in Texas that year. Yeah. That storm, not just the whole year, I think, and that was almost a year's worth of statistics right there.

And it was in basically a few days. And one of the worst things I saw, I read a pro-publica article about this, is that afterward, Texas considered and then rejected requiring carbon monoxide detectors and houses. It's like, what are you talking about? Yeah. And people from all over the world cook with live fires in their homes, in their huts, in their small spaces. About a third of the people of the world use open fires.

Some of them run on kerosene and stuff. But as we saw in Guatemala, a lot of times these things are just wood-burning fires in your home that they're cooking with, and they ventilate things as well as they can. But it's a big problem. The World Health Organization says that household air pollution, and this is everything combined, but a portion of this is obviously going to be due to carbon monoxide, but it killed more than 3 million people in 2020. Do you remember we did that thing for Toyota about the Carnegie Mellon invention off, like

dance off? Yeah. One of the entrants invented a portable, basically an oven vent hood to be used indoors. I remember that. And you could, it was super cheap and easy to use. I mean, imagine, like that was a high school kid too, if I'm not mistaken, or at least a college student, and this was back in like 2008, so hats off to that person's foresight and insight.

Totally. Should we take our hats off and take a break too? Yes, let's. All right. Let's go get them. All right. Let's go. Let's go.

Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go.

Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Hey, everybody. I'm Amber Ruffin. And I'm her beautiful sister, Lacey Lamar. Fun fact about Lacey.

She's not as beautiful as I am. You guys, we have a brand new podcast on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network called The Amber and Lacey, Lacey and Amber Show. We are New York Times bestselling authors, and we've written two books on everyday racism that made you gasp and laugh at the same time. We done did it. We sold a bunch of books. We were on Lay down with Seth Meyers and The Amber Ruffin Show, and now we only have

one frontier to conquer. That's podcasts. Podcasts, baby. This quiz show is going to be fun. We're going to have celebrities. We're going to quiz them about things that they are experts at, and we'll see who wins. And who loses. You gotta watch us.

Oh, no. You have to listen to us. I mean, you can still watch us, but you gotta listen. But like, if you're watching us, you have to tell us. You can't just be watching us. Listen to the Amber and Lacey, Lacey and Amber Show on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, over wherever you get your podcasts. All right.

We're back. We did talk about all the dangers of like home appliances and fires and all that kind of stuff. There's one more that we didn't talk about, and that happens very frequently after a disaster, like say a hurricane, where people use a portable generator too close to their house. Sure. And the fumes, while the carbon monoxide ends up drifting in and killing people. Yeah.

You need to get that thing away from your window. At least 20 feet. Yeah. Especially if it's open. All right. I love it. Another little PSA tidbit. PSA within a PSA chuck.

That's like seconds per second. Yeah. Which I think even physics people were like, yeah, it's a real bonehead term. Yeah. But like I said, we were talking about all these dangers of things that you can use that will increase the carbon monoxide in your life. But you're also going to experience it just walking around the world in urban areas is going to be higher, usually about 10 parts per million.

If it's a very heavy traffic city, it can be as high as 50 parts per million. Just in the air that you're breathing, walking around. And this is just from humans, driving cars mainly, or burning fuel of any type. Your old nemesis, the leaf blower, and this is a hard to believe stat. But Livia found this estimate from this one source that said, a gas powered leaf blower for half an hour has the same amount of hydrocarbon emissions as a 3,900 mile drive and an F-150 Raptor. Yeah.

We talked about that stat in the noise pollution episode about leaf blowers that they were that that also put out that much emissions too. So all this to say that it doesn't have to be some big gigando car. Like your small two stroke engines are putting a lot of this in the air as well. Right. All the cars together, all the little bits of CO that they put out are going to combine and be problematic, especially if you live in places like Fairbanks, Alaska, where there's something called an atmospheric inversion that typically happens there where the warm

air gets on top of the cold air and traps that cold air, which is one reason Fairbanks is so cold, I'm quite sure. But it also traps all that pollution that would normally drift off into the atmosphere in town. And so Fairbanks was legendary for having really bad air quality. I believe still has issues with particulate matter, but they kind of tackled the carbon monoxide problem that they had, I think back in the 70s. Yeah.

That wouldn't surprise me. You just think of Alaska as this sort of pristine, unpolluted place. But it's just because the way the land is in Fairbanks. Well, they built a city underneath an atmospheric inversion. It's going to invert. Yeah. Inverter is going to invert. NASA has something cool that they launched 24 years ago-ish called the Terra satellite.

And it has a sensor on it called the Moppet, measurements of pollution in the troposphere. So this is measuring way above the earth, about 12,000 feet above the ground, measuring carbon monoxide. And I would guess other things as well. But this allows NASA to sort of find hotspots all over the world. Obviously, when there's like over a big city, it's going to be hotter if there's a big forest fire or something like that. But it will show just hot zones in the world of maybe like, hey, something's going on down

there. And if your forest isn't on fire, maybe you should look at, check it out. Well, look into why your whole population is feigning and vomiting on themselves. Right. But the numbers are going down, which is great news. Their Moppet map, and that's with two T's, which is a little redundant, usually don't do the T. I find it very satisfying that they gave a letter to every single word.

Yeah. And it wasn't like a wedge. You know those wedge acronyms we dislike? This is the opposite of that. No, I agree. And Moppet's a fun word. Sure. They have found that the concentration of gas has declined since 2000, from 0.125 to

under 0.105. Which is great news. Sure. One of the other things they figured out from the Terra satellite and its Moppet software, and then some other satellites that have been launched since then that do similar things. A lot of countries just outright lie, and a lot of companies lie about their emissions. They say that they're much lower than they are, and these satellites are so sensitive they can pinpoint basically a factory's output, or at least a city's output, and say that

country's fudging their numbers about their CO2 or CO emissions or whatever kind of emissions. That satellite feels like testing that day. Nice. I mean, it's dropped in America, certainly. The Clean Air Act did a lot in 1971 to help clean the air. And I think in 1971, or when they enacted it, 90% of the locations that they were monitoring the CO were in violation of what would become those new rules. Yeah, for sure.

There's one other thing about carbon monoxide that's problematic for it being an outdoor pollutant. We said it's not reactive. It just kind of bounces off of other stuff, but the problem is it indirectly contributes to climate change in that it does hook up with hydroxyl radicals, which are so reactive they'll even react with carbon monoxide. And normally those molecules are running around hooking up with methane and turning it into other stuff besides methane, which actually removes that greenhouse gas from the atmosphere.

But when there's a lot of carbon monoxide up there, it keeps the hydroxyl busy and methane is allowed to just accumulate and go on. Hooray. We need to come up with the opposite cheer of hooray. Right. Let me think on that. Yeah, this is a very important thing for us. The catalytic converter was a big deal for reducing CO output in cars.

It was invented by a French engineer named Eugene Udri. How would you pronounce that? I think that was pretty close. This was in 1950, but leaded gas was still a big thing back then. And leaded gas does not mix well with catalytic converters. So when they finally got rid of leaded gas in the mid-70s and the EPA said, hey, you got to start putting these catalytic converters on your cars, that was a huge deal. It's really interesting.

I actually wrote the article on the Old House of Works website on catalytic converters. Oh, neat. They are interesting. They are. It's a bit of a, because it's not my thing at all. So it was a bit of a slog to get through that article, but it is interesting how they work. They use metals, like palladium and platinum and rhodium, like expensive metals, which is why people will cut and steal a catalytic converter out from underneath your car.

Kind of like they'll steal copper from a house being built or something. Same deal. Those metals are very valuable, and they trigger chemical reactions that use free oxygen to turn that CO and CO2 and H2O. Yeah. And then also other stuff, like nitrogen dioxide and hydrocarbons, all those products of incomplete combustion, catalytic converter says, I got this before that stuff comes out of the tailpipe.

Nice. Pretty cool. So catalytic converter is actually coming along using Audrey, that's how I'm going to say it. He kind of saved the world in a lot of ways. Like he really helped get those emissions down. He's basically the reason why the F-150 truck driving from Texas to, say, Fairbanks puts out less emissions than a leaf blower running for a half an hour.

That's why. So I mean, we've been taking our hats off here there in this episode. I'm taking it off and leaving it off for Eugene. Taking that beret off? Mm-hmm. Well, good for you. Yeah. As far as what you can do in your own home, obviously, you're going to want to inspect

that furnace. One of the problems that can happen with that inefficient burning is when you don't... Just something simple, like not having your filter changed right. That means it's not... Your furnace isn't getting the air that it needs. It's deadly. It is deadly. So you got to keep that furnace filter clean.

You got to have all your exhaust fans for all your appliances. If you have gas appliances, make sure those exhaust fans are working. You could make a switch from gas to electric or to what are those called? Induction. Inductions. Have you ever used one of those? Yeah, I'm not a fan, but you know, I could get used to it, I guess. I love them.

You love them? Yeah. I'm a gas guy and I know that they're problematic, but I got to figure this out. Well, if you have a gas range and you're using it or a gas cooktop in particular, you should have somebody come out every once in a while and tune it up. There's a tune-up process they can do and they'll test your combustion, your flame to make sure that it's burning as close to not rich or not lean, but in the middle of the tube.

Wait, do you mean a guy just comes out and lights a fart? Basically, but he has a very expensive little device that he sticks by and tests how much carbon monoxide is in it. All right, I'd pay for that. Yeah, you should pay for it. And then one other thing you can do, Chuck, and I know you'll probably go do this right after we finish. You get yourself a wire brush and some electrical contact cleaner and you take off all those

little plates on the burner on your cooktop and scrub them until they're totally free of corrosion and buildup. I will do that. You should. It'll help a lot, actually. Okay. Yeah, but the guy who comes out to do the tune-up, he's actually adjusting the amount of gas and air that's going to your stuff.

It's not something you can really do because you don't have that expensive device. Right, I got you. Okay. I definitely want carbon monoxide detectors in your home. And if you have, I mean, I think most of the new smoke detectors are also CO detectors. I haven't looked into it, but I feel like they're kind of all that dual-purpose now, aren't they? Yeah.

Okay, I figured they were. But if you do have an old-school smoke detector, it may not be also a carbon monoxide detector. So check on that. Yeah, and you can get those pretty easy, pretty cheap. I'm going to buzz-market one, I was doing some research. The Kitty, you know, they make the fire extinguishers, they're Nighthawk, which is $35. It plugs in, has a 9-volt battery backup, and it tests the air every 15 seconds, and has a digital readout of what your carbon monoxide levels are in the immediate area.

35 bucks, it's everything you need right there, and just put one in every single outlet in your house. Right. Oh, it just plugs right in? Yeah. Okay, so it's not something that goes in the ceiling? Nope, it doesn't hardwire, like I said, it's battery, but it's a battery backup. So it's actually really helpful, and one other thing you're probably going to hear if you

start to research this is that you should put your carbon monoxide detector either up very high or down low, because someone will tell you that it's either heavier or lighter than air. It's actually not true either way. It's almost the same weight as air, so it mixes really well, and it goes wherever air goes. So you can put it pretty much anywhere you got air, and it'll detect the carbon monoxide, because it disperses pretty evenly, easily in the air.

So we can close by talking about some of the beneficial uses of carbon monoxide, because they do use it for things, whether or not they should be for all these purposes is debatable sometimes. Sure. I'd like to do a short stuff sometime on the fact that carbon monoxide is used to keep meat looking red, not the myth that it is a food additive that makes meat look red. It supposedly just preserves the red color that's already there, and supposedly is not dangerous, but I started digging in and I was like, oh boy, this is a big rat's nest,

so... Oh, I can't wait. We're going to have to punt on that one. The one that stuck out to me that I thought was so awesome is that it has medical uses. Paradoxically, they figured out that they can use carbon monoxide at relatively high concentrations, like 400 parts per million, because remember, 9 parts per million can give you chronic poisoning, so 400 is a lot, but they use it to treat acute respiratory distress syndrome, because somehow they found out that carbon monoxide has a protective

effect on your lungs that protects it from injury or sepsis. That's just nutty. And I look to see how that happened. I could not find it. I think that they actually don't quite know yet it's that new of a finding. That groundbreaking. I love it. I do too.

That's very good. It's the bleeding edge of technology. Yeah. You got anything else? I have nothing else other than a listener mail. We did some good work here, Chuck, if I do say so myself. Yeah, I'm going to get one of them kitty hawks. Close enough.

I think you'll stumble upon it if you search that. Kitty kitty night hawks? Right. Okay. If you want to know more about carbon monoxide and kitty night hawks, then start looking around the internet, and you'll probably find quite a bit about it, because we did. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. I'm just picturing you and Yumi now, like the day after your mishap, leaving with a

cart full of kitty hawks and all sorts of other products. In our defense, it was two days after. Okay. You had a day where you just laid around thinking, oh my God. Yeah, we ordered them online, and it took that long for them to show up. I got you. All right. Here's a listener mail.

This is a very cute one. This is my mom and I are longtime listeners and huge fans. I live overseas in Germany, so my mom and I only get to see each other about once a year. Your podcast, though, is a great way for us to share something together despite the distance. We talk on the phone almost every day, things we've learned on stuff you should know come up often as talking points. Love this stuff.

My great grandma, a German immigrant, used to end phone calls by saying, and cute old grandma voice, well, I don't know anything, which is really great. And she says, this is Hannah, by the way, says, I don't know, kind of meant I don't know anything new or we're talking about, so I guess I'll get off the phone. Since she died, I've been using that a lot. However, we got inventive a few months ago and now have incorporated something Josh says every episode into our conversations. Now when I wanted to get off the phone, I will always say, and since I said blah, blah,

blah, that means it's time for listener mail. We both get a kick out of it, and we thought you might too. Pick up the good work guys and Jerry. Best regards that is Hannah and mom, Amber. Very nice. Thanks, Hannah and Amber. Thanks for letting us know. It's like your jerky voice makes you laugh every time.

If you want to be like Hannah and tangentially Amber and get in touch with us to let us know something cute about your family, we would love to hear that. You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to StuffPodcasts at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Amber Ruffin. And I'm her gorgeous sister, Lacey Lamar.

And if, in fact, Lacey is not that gorgeous. Amber, get on with it. Okay, everybody, we have exciting news to share. We're teaming up with Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network to bring you our brand new podcast called The Amber and Lacey, Lacey and Amber Show. We did it. We sold a bunch of books, we conquered late night, and now we'll play fun quizzes and games with friends and take you along for the ride.

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