Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How Gold Works

Episode Date: March 7, 2020

As of early 2013, only 161,00 metric tons of gold had been mined in the entire history of the world. Considering about 85 percent of it is recycled, there's a decent chance your jewelry may once have been part of an Incan headdress or Mycenaean face mask. Dive in to gold in this classic episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Good afternoon, folks. Happy weekend. You ever wanted to know how gold works? You're thinking, how does gold work? It's just gold.

It just is. Well, there's a lot more that goes into it. And we talk about all the history of gold. Very, very fascinating stuff. From February 1st, 2013, how gold works. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. We're doing this again. It's been a little while. Been a little while. But it's still Step You Should Know. I thought the name had changed since we took our little Christmas break.

Now, don't you remember our race to the Patent Office to trademark it again at the 11th hour? Yeah. That was a close one. Boom, and they stamped it. Yeah. SYSK. Actually, they said SNSK.

Right. No, wait. SYSN is what we get from people a lot. Sometimes. And I'm like, you know, no, starts with a K, people. One of them does. One of the, yes. It's not stuff you should know as you know.

You're right, because that doesn't make any sense. How you doing? Oh, I'm great, man. Are you? Uh-huh. OK, good. You want to do this one? We're talking about gold.

Yeah, man. I've got a little bit of an intro. It might be a stretch. We'll find out, OK? Let's hear. Today's January 15th. OK. Tomorrow's January 16th.

Fig Newton Day. It is Fig Newton Day. And also, on this day in history, in 378, the Mayan general, Fyre is born, conquered the Mayan city Tikal, which was recently rediscovered. OK. Well, not recently. It's been rediscovered, they rediscovered anyone.

And what this did was it enlarged the kingdom of King Spearthrower Owl. The Mayans had the best names. That's a pretty great name. And all of this was going on in the heart of the Yucatan Peninsula. If you went just a little to the north, you would run into another group of people called the Aztecs,

which were actually the triple federation, is what they're really called. But if you were to stumble northward and run into the Aztec Empire and ask for gold, what they would give you is what they would call excrement of the gods. Do you want to try to pronounce it? I'm going to go with Teo-kyu-ta-ta-da-la-la. I think that was pretty close.

I think you may have done it, Chuck. Teo-kyu-ta-la-ta-la. Yeah, I think the last part is laudal. I love that language. It's similar to some of the native languages we heard in Guatemala. That's because they're Mayan. Yeah, exactly.

But it's got that same, I don't know, it's very staccato. It's kind of cool to hear, I think. Right, like the Mayan city, the heart of King Spearthrow or Owl's empire is Teo-to-ak-tan, which sounds pretty close to Teo-kyu-laudal, which means excrement of the gods. And that's what the Aztecs considered gold. It was a holy metal, a very, very precious metal,

in every sense of the word. And by 378 AD, they weren't the only ones to have loved gold for a very long time. No, Egyptians were all over it. They thought it was also divine. Wait, hold on. How would you rate that intro? I would say that was on a scale of what, 1 to 10?

Let's see 1 to 20. OK, 1 to 20. I would give it a solid like 16. Wow, thanks, Chuck. Higher than you thought? Way higher. I thought I was going to get a 10. That's why I extended it to 20.

No, no, no. So the Egyptians, like I said, they also thought it was divine of the gods, indestructible. And they called it, I guess, Nub, N-U-B. And if you'd know of the African region in Northeast Africa, Nubia. Or if you're a fan of the rap group, Brand Nubians, you would have heard of this.

I was, actually. Yeah, they were good. Yeah, they were. And that name still holds today because of the original Egyptian word for gold. And Africa, of course, has always been a major supplier of this stuff. Yeah, one of the first.

Well, Nubia was, I guess. Like the first heavily mined area for gold. And then on the periodic table, the shorthand for gold is AU, which I've never understood until I realized that it's Latin, which makes a lot of sense. I thought it would be G-O-G-D. Right, or you had something like that. No, no, we had to go with the Latin,

orum, which means shining dawn. That's nice. Yeah, and we say all this to say that people have loved gold for a very, very, very, very long time. Can I drop one of the stats of the show for me? Right when I saw this, I was like, Chuck's going to say this is the fact. I think it's pretty good.

I told Emily this last night, and she was not as impressed as I would hope she would have been. Forever and ever, all the gold we've ever mined from the beginning of time is only 161,000 tons. Yeah. Which sounds like a lot. Yeah, that's a lot of gold, right? For all of time, that's not a lot of gold.

They compare it to something like aluminium. We get 5.6 million tons a year in the United States alone of aluminum. And again, 161,000 tons of gold is all that's ever been mined. Yeah, and the secondary stat that comes later, which I'll go ahead and ruin now, is that 85% of all the gold we've ever found is still around.

We've only lost or cannot account for 15% of the gold since the beginning of time. It's pretty good. It is pretty good, and it suggests two things that William Harris points out. One, that means that if you are wearing a piece of gold jewelry, it may have belonged to somebody else a very, very long time ago.

And two, where exactly did they get that? Where are they getting these gold masks and headpieces and stuff from each time and then melting them down and reselling them? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's efficient, and it's good, because gold is really bad for the environment, as we'll see later on.

But it's really recyclable, though. Yeah, it makes me wonder, how are they acquiring that? Yeah, what is your wedding ring, sir? My wedding ring is platinum. Platinum. It's lovely, isn't it? It's very nice. What is yours?

Mine is, I think, titanium. It's very cheap. It looks like $50. You could take a tooth out with that thing. I could, and this is actually my second one. I lost my first one. And inside of a turtle? Inside of a turtle?

I have no idea where it is. Maybe it's inside of a turtle. But luckily, I had the old email, and I just sent the same order for the same ring. And boom, I'm married all over again for the second time. Did you guys have another mini ceremony? No. Emily's just like, you need to buy another damn ring.

Right, yeah. All right, so that's a lot of gold stats. And as we've been trying to hammer out people of gold for a really long time, let's talk about the history of gold, shall we? Speaking of hammering out, though. Man, I knew it. One more cool little fact.

Gold, one ounce of gold, one ounce of gold can be drawn out into a 50-mile wire or hammered into a sheet, five millionths of an inch thick. So it's really, we'll get to all this, but it's not only a beautiful thing for jewelry, but it's super handy and malleable and chemically inert and all these great things you can do with gold because of its properties.

It also makes it kind of ironic that the Egyptians considered it indestructible because it's one of the more malleable metals around. And it's so malleable that it has like almost no practical purposes as far as like hammering things go. Like you make a gold hammer, you're a dummy. You know? Yeah.

All right, so element number 79, let's get in it. OK, so gold, again, people go back to the Egyptians because they were the first ones to have like gold fever. But we've actually found evidence of gold being smithed, I guess. During the transition from the Stone Age, the Neolithic Age, to the Bronze Age, which is the first metal age. Yeah, like before bronze, even.

Right, some places that had easy access to gold, like Bulgaria, I believe, in 4000 BC, were already working with gold, long before the Egyptians ever got their hands on it. Yeah, and the Egyptians, like you said, they really had an appetite for the stuff. Hieroglyphs as early as 2600 shed gold, and by 1500 BC, they were, it was like currency, basically, in Egypt.

Yeah, very much so. I don't know, did they actually mint it as currency? The Egyptians? Yeah. I don't know if they minted it. I don't think the minting came until the Greeks and Romans. Actually, King Crocius, the ruler of ancient Lydia, which is a lost civilization.

Really? He was the first to mint gold currencies, gold coins, in widespread use in 640 BC. Wow, OK. But it was the Greeks and then the Romans that really started to mint gold. About 100 years later, though. So that's a pretty nice jump on things he got.

Yeah, he was like, hey, I like the look of this stuff. I'm going to put my face on it. Exactly, and you guys are going to use it. Yeah, by 550, the Greeks were doing it. And then the Romans, of course, with their more sophisticated ways, followed suit. The Aureus coins. Is that what they were called?

Yeah, they produced millions of them. Those are the ones that they find to some farmer in Devonshire in England. We'll still find one of these. We'll dig up a chest filled with these things. Wow. Yeah, because the Romans were everywhere. They were.

And they minted a lot of these coins. So as they're doing this, the same thing is going on about the same time in South America, because they have a lot of gold there as well. And what's it called, the middle Sikon era? Yeah, I couldn't tell if it was Sikon or Cishon. I bet it's Cishon. Cicin.

I bet it's not Cicin. AD 900 to 1100. And this is modern day Peru. They, there has been a lot of gold artifacts found in their region. So they were usually crazy. For sure. The Peruvians were crazy about it, the Inca.

Like masks, ornaments, chalices, all that good stuff. And their specialty was hammering gold into sheets and wrapping stuff in it. Oh, really? Like creating gold leaf. Interesting. Yeah, they were pretty good at that kind of thing. And then there was already a certain amount of gold fever

over in Europe. I think the English minted their first gold coin in the mid-13th century. The same with the Florentine duket. Yeah, yeah. Those were both about the middle of the 13th century. That was a popular coin. It was.

Still is. Is it? Among collectors, sure. Oh, I bet. So there was, people in Europe were exposed to gold. They liked gold. They wanted gold. Over in Central and South America, over in Asia,

they also had a thing for gold. But the Europeans were one of the first to say, hey, let's see where the edge of the earth is. And if there's gold there. And one of the first people to do that was Marco Polo. And strangely, a lot of people hate Christopher Columbus or think he was one of the more evil characters in history, possibly rightfully so.

But you can actually trace the infection that Columbus released, literally and metaphorically, back to Marco Polo. Because apparently, there's evidence that Marco Polo directly inspired Christopher Columbus to set sail in search of gold. Yeah, growing up in history class, you always learned about the great explorers.

And the more you learn about it, like the real histories as you get older, the more you learn that many times they weren't just sailing upon the shore with a bouquet of flowers to deliver. Most of the time, I would say. It was usually, and they were in conquer mode. For one reason, to spread Christianity, as the Spaniards really wanted to do.

Yeah, that was the cover story. The cover story, but King Ferdinand in 1511 also sent word, quote, while you're there, well, I added that part. While you're there, then start, quote, get gold humanely if you can, but at all hazards, get the gold. So I mean, that was definitely a charge. And thanks to the travels of Marco Polo, the book that he wrote, where he talked about palaces of silver

and gold, people thought it was just like the streets were lined with this stuff in the New World. And I mean, imagine, though, if you were one of the conquistadors who started sailing west, and you ran into the Maya, or the Aztecs, or the Inca, and you saw that they had all this gold. You would think, well, this is all very much true in this place's gold city.

So let's kill all these people and take their gold. And there was actually a famed gold city, El Dorado. Sure, that's what they're all looking for. Exactly, like everyone was looking for El Dorado. And apparently, every time a conquistador would find a significant seam of gold, they found El Dorado. And everybody else would come, and it become like a boom area.

But of course, it was a mythical city, right? Yeah. It was just like legend. Yeah, and probably the closest thing to it, obviously not a city built of gold, but the closest thing to it was in Brazil, in the Minas Gerais region. OK. Minas Gerais?

That looks good. Freaky gerais. Oh, we've been doing this like five years, and our pronunciation is maybe even worse rather than better. Actually, we have a listener mail today where someone lauds us just for taking a chance and being willing to be corrected. Thank you.

I'm glad to hear that. I'll read that one at the end of this one. Yeah, that was in 1700 in Brazil. And there was a lot of gold there, and they were the largest gold producer by 1720. Yeah, 20 years. They became the world's largest gold producer in Brazil because of this area.

Using, of course, slave labor, panning for gold in sort of rudimentary ways. Yeah. Not good. No. We're not too far removed from that now. No, we're not. We're not.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts

flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it, and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast,

Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place

because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yeah, we know that, Michael, and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast

and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So on to America, North America, California, the gold rush, like the point here is, is that gold has rewritten history and how we form societies because of the search for gold. Yeah, it's like spread people out over the world and intermixed

and intermarried and interdid it. And, you know, like we have entire groups of people, ethnicities who are the result of gold. Yeah, the gold rushes. Yeah. California gets a lot of press, obviously, because by the end of the first year of the gold rush, afterwards discovered in 1848, 5,000 people were mining there.

By the end of the second year, 40,000 people were mining there. But North Carolina actually was the first American gold rush. Yeah, and like you're saying, California gets all the attention. San Francisco 49ers are named after the gold rush. There was that great Scooby-Doo episode with the minor 49er, remember him? Yes, I do. Big scary guy.

Yeah, when you think of gold rush, you think of California. Or I also think of DeLoniga. Yeah, he was in Georgia. Yeah, the mayor of DeLoniga was the one who said, there's gold in them, our hills. Oh, really? Yeah, it was the mayor of DeLoniga. I had no idea.

It was Todd something, I think. Have you ever panned up there in DeLoniga? I did that when I was a kid. And, you know, it's fun if you're a little kid. You think you're going to find a little gold flak? Exactly, and be rich. Yeah, or you just might find a little gold flak. And if you do, you won't be rich.

Yeah, you're going to find it doesn't buy you virtually anything. But you were saying North Carolina doesn't usually get much attention, and that was the first gold rush? Yeah, up until the 1830s, in fact, they supplied all of the domestic gold that was coined here at the US Mint in Philly, came from North Carolina. Or at North Kaka'laki, as we like to call it.

Who calls it that? You never called it that? Have you ever heard it called that? I have. There's a tribe called Questtongue. Oh, really? I can't remember what it is, but somebody calls it North Kaka'laki and Compton.

Check it, check it, check it out. No, I didn't make that up. Well, I just wrapped. You did? You're J-Tip. So, yeah, we talked about the gold rushes in the US. There was also a big one in Oz. Yeah, we can't leave out our Aussie mates.

No, hello, Australia. Yeah, they're like, we got tons of gold. They're like, it's so hot. I watched Mad Max the other day, by the way, all the way through. The original. Yeah, that was a good one. It was, and it was, I don't know, Road Warrior got most of the attention because it was bigger and more

of an action adventure. But Mad Max was a really dark kind of a revengey exploitation movie. Yeah. It was really good. Osploitation. Osploitation. So was that the one where the guy's

in the personal helicopter? Is that Road Warrior or Mad Max? That's Road Warrior. Oh, the nuts. I don't think I've seen Mad Max then. It's like, I mean, it was when Mel Gibson was still a cop, and he was, you know, there was this biker gang led by the toe cutter.

And you know what, something cool? You know, Justin, my friend? Yeah. His uncle was the toe cutter. In Mad Max? Wow. His, man, I can't remember his name now. Uncle.

Uncle Toe Cutter. No, he didn't call him that. That's what it says on his Christmas stocking. Oh, no, he just sends toes every year in a little card. Oh, man, I can't remember his name now. Uncle, yeah, Uncle Toe Cutter. I think that's the better name. Yeah, it's pretty cool.

Yeah. So Australia has this huge gold rush in the, what, 1850s? Yes, 1850. Edward Hammond Hargraves found gold in New South Wales. Bam, gold rush. A few years later, South Africa steps onto the scene, 1868. George Harrison, he uncovered gold in South Africa. And how many contributions has that man

made to humanity in his 160 years? I mean, he wrote, here comes the sun. He discovered gold like 100 years before he was born. Not 100, but 100 years before he was famous. Right, about the same time, about a full century. But now South Africa is the leading gold producer in the world. Oh, today it is?

Oh, wow. Followed by the United States. That surprises me. In the United States, Nevada is the number one gold producer these days. You mean Nevada? Nevada. OK.

All right, so let's talk about how you get gold onto your finger. It's not as easy as you would think. But it's, well, it's at times rudimentary, and at times a little more sophisticated, the whole process. Yeah, and complex to say the least. I mean, it really shows how much we want gold. Yeah.

It's sort of like fracking in a way, too, the one method. All right, so what you got to do, there's different, you got to start by prospecting, which is the act of looking for gold. Right, and that's what you would call an old grizzled dude with a pack mule up in the hills in California, a prospector. Yeah. That's what you call a geologist who finds gold today, too.

They're still called prospectors. And I guess the idea is that what are the prospects for finding gold? I'm sure that's where it came from, right? Maybe. So they're prospecting. That makes a lot of sense. I never thought about that.

So back in the day, there was a lot of luck involved, looking around for it, basically, where you think it might be. These days, it is way more precise. They have equipment that can tell you if there is likely gold there. And then, well, here's the thing, is there's gold everywhere. But it's just not concentrated enough to be worth mining.

Yeah, that's an excellent point. In most cases, it's invisible, but it's still present in the soil. Isn't that crazy? Invisible gold in dirt and rocks. Yeah. Or it's in gold slogger. That's crazy, too.

It's like they're just throwing it away. No, they're throwing away. You're drinking it for a premium price. That's crazy. That stuff's gross. That was like a college thing. Oh, yeah. Oh, give me a gold slogger.

Gold slogger, Jagermeister. Anything that sounded vaguely Germanic, that was a college thing. Meisterbrow. Right. So where they find gold in heaviest concentration is when they will say, all right, you know what? It's worth setting up a mining operation here.

There may be other metals there, like silver, which is great. Yeah, a lot of times gold is combined with silver and an ore, which I'm sure you're just like, OK. Great. That's fine with me. That's twice the value. Well, not twice the value, but. One and three quarters times the value.

We could figure it out. So they drill down to obtain samples, analyze it, see if there's enough gold. If there is, they're going to set up a mining operation there. If there's not, they're going to move on and look at another place that they think they might have a lot of gold. And then depending on how the gold is present in the area, there's basically two ways.

One is the load, a load deposit, which is it's combined with rock or ore. And it can be at the surface or underground. Yes. And with a load deposit, basically, you just want to blow things up when you find gold like that. If it's at the surface, you're going to use what's called an open pit method, which is basically

just drill a bunch of holes into the ore, the gold ore, put some explosives in there, and blow it up, and then haul the ore out. Yeah, I mean, your goal here is just to make, I mean, if they could load up that huge boulder and take it and do it neat or somewhere else, they might. But they're just trying to make smaller rocks. Excellent point.

For transport. Yeah. And then if it's underground, if the load is underground, they'll dig a shaft down to it and add it. Yeah. They go down to it. And this is a big shaft. I'm sure.

They go down to it and drill holes all the way through that ore rock, and those holes are called stoves. And they pack those full of explosives and blow it up. So it's basically like the open pit method, but underground, because then they just truck that ore out and off to the extractor. That's right. If you're in Delano, Georgia, or maybe at a river in Utah.

Why not? Why not give a Utah shout out? You might look for something called a placer deposit. And that is when you find the loose gold in a stream bed, the little flakes or the little chunks or the little nuggets in a mountain stream or a beach. And this is where you would pan. And you scoop it up in a pan, and you shake it in the gold.

There's a lot of water. Yeah, a lot of water, because gold is more dense. So it's going to sink and collect at the bottom, every little screen that separates everything. And then you got a little bit of gold, hopefully. And then the sixth graders are all very happy. That's right. Or I imagine if you were a prospector in California

back in the day, you could do quite well as a paner. Yeah, you'd look around and be like, it's mine. It's my gold. All right, so then you have to extract it. That's the next step. Right, so you've got all these big rocks that you've blown up. Yeah, I guess this is mostly the first couple steps are from load deposits.

You have a bunch of rocks. You put them on a conveyor belt, and they go into a machine that's appropriately called the crusher, which breaks the ore into gravel. Then you take that gravel and you put them into drums with a bunch of little steel balls. Spin it around real quick, and those steel balls collide with that gravel.

And they turn it into basically like a powder. And you add water to that powder. You form a slurry, add cyanide to that slurry, and expose it to oxygen. And all of a sudden, you're starting to extract gold from ore. Yeah, the pulp basically, the gold in the pulp dissolves with that chemical reaction, the cyanide and O2.

And throw a little carbon in there, like tiny little carbon grains. And the gold is going to adhere to it. They like each other very much, so they're going to get together and party for a little while. Then you filter that, and you have gold-bearing carbon at this point, still not pure gold. So it's gold with carbon.

Then you move that to something called a stripping vessel. They put another solution, a caustic solution, to separate the gold from the carbon, have more filters to filter out the carbon. And so now you have actual gold-bearing solution, but you're still not done. No, and this is my favorite part. Yeah, this is pretty cool.

It's called electro-winning, which thank god Charlie Sheen never heard of this, because this whole thing would be even more annoying. But you put gold into a cell with positive and negative terminals, pass an electrical current over it, and the gold separates from the carbon solution, or the gold-bearing solution, and is attracted to the negative terminal,

so much so that I get the impression that it basically becomes embedded in the negative terminal. Yeah, I kind of wondered, because the next step is to actually melt that negative terminal along with the gold. Right, and then you begin to separate the two. Basically, you pour off the negative terminal metal,

maybe steel or something like that. It's called smelting, by the way. Right, exactly. So when you smelt, and I thought smelt was just melting. I'm like, why did they add the S? Because it's not melting, it's smelting. Exactly, so when you pour off the steel, I guess maybe that comes off first,

and then what you have left is relatively impure gold, but as close as you're going to get it in the extracting process, you pour that into bars called d'oré bars, and then you ship them off to the refiner. Yeah, and that's not the bar that you will see in Die Hard 3. Oh, man, this is a more impure d'oré bar. Right.

So you're still nice to have one. Yeah, I'm sure you can be like, look at me. That's right. OK, and then you need to refine gold from that point. Once you have it in its purest, impure form. Right, so imagine the process that we just went through. It was like, add this, subtract this, remove that, but add this, and then like the gold adhere to this,

and let's burn the whole thing up until it gets melty, and it's still impure, it still has to be refined. So when refineries get gold d'oré bars, they also frequently, when you sell your gold to JD Wentworth or whoever, they take all this gold scrap and send that off also to these refineries, which also serve as recycling centers too, basically. That's like the saddest shipment.

Yeah, it's just full of people's lost hopes and dreams and memories, wedding rings and gold bracelets, anniversary bracelets, all just sent back to be melted down. Because of the economy. So when they throw all this into the same pot, they add a little bit of soda ash, a little bit of borax. And honestly, what can't borax do? And the soda ash and borax basically filters out impurities.

And then what you have left, most of the time, and they use assay tests to figure out the purity. But you have about 99.9% pure gold. And that's usually what they stamp on the bar that they pour. And those bars are called ingots. Yeah, those are the ones you'll see in the heist movies. Yes. And if you have ever seen Die Hard 3

and you see them loading up these ingots into big gym bags and then throwing them over their shoulder and running out, that is not possible. Because each one of those bars weighs 27 pounds. So if you have 50 of those in a bag, like Jeremy Irons might. Jeremy Irons is not a strong man. No, you're not going to throw that on your back, like 300 pounds of gold, and go running up a bunch of stairs

and out of the New York, where is it? The New York. The Federal Reserve Bank. Federal Reserve Bank, yeah. Supposedly there in Fort Knox is where they have all the gold. Yeah, Emily was talking last night about that. She was like, well, that didn't sound very safe to have all this gold in one place.

I was like, well, that's why they say it's built like Fort Knox. It's super secure. She's like, yeah, but what if some terrorist just bombed it? She's like, you could just bomb it and then sneak out of there with the gold. And I went, you just wrote die hard three. She's like, is that what happened? That's exactly what happened.

But I think she makes a good point. I was thinking last night, too, like if we have all this gold and if it is all there, just keeping it in two places, it seems, I don't know, it seems unusually tempting fate. I think I agree with Emily. Yeah, $6 billion worth of gold at Fort Knox. No, no, my friend. How's that more now?

So when Harris wrote this one, gold was $0.42 an ounce, $0.42 and $0.22 an ounce. Right now, it's $1,667.49 an ounce. What? So that means that if Fort Knox holds $147.3 million ounces of gold, the gold is worth $245.6 billion. Wow, just sitting there in Fort Knox. When did he write this article, like 1935?

No, I think gold went up like that much in the last couple of years because of the economy. Everybody flocked to gold, demand increased, and so the price did. It's so amazing to me after all these years, gold is still like, people hoard it. Yeah, when gold prices are low, you are very smart to invest in gold because there's

always going to be another economic downturn and the prices are always just going to skyrocket. You got a couple of ingots in your closet? I have them strapped to my leg. That's why I have a limp. Is that why you walk funny? All right, so during the refining stage, we should point out that a lot of times they will,

because gold is so soft, pure gold is, they will combine it with other metals to form alloys. And that's why you will get something like white gold, which is gold combined with nickel or silver or palladium. Red gold is gold and copper. That's pretty. And I've never seen red gold on anything. You've seen rose gold, surely.

Have I? Sure. At all my fancy parties. I mean, it has like a slight pink hue to it. It's very pretty stuff. I'm not big into gold, like as far as jewelry. Yeah, no, I'm with you. And then, of course, you have to talk about carats,

caratage, and that is how much gold is in the object compared to silver, nickel, or whatever else is in that alloy. And interestingly, different countries have different preferences. Here, you always hear about 14 carat gold in the United States, which is only 58.5% gold. Apparently in India, they are partial to the 22 carat, which is 91.75% gold.

And the Europeans like to take that middle road and hit 18 carats. Yeah, that's very strange. I don't understand what it is. I can understand price being a factor, but it's very odd to me that cultures prefer it. So 24 carats is 100% gold, obviously. Yeah, and 12 carat is 50% gold.

Yeah, and about 2 thirds of all the gold is jewelry. Yeah, which makes sense. Sure. And what's interesting about the jewelry is that it's still basically produced as it has been for hundreds or thousands of years, using the same techniques, virtually the same tools. I mean, I'm sure they're manufactured much differently,

but they are kind of the same thing. Yeah. And while jewelry accounts for, what did you say, 2 thirds of all the gold in use? Yeah, nearly 2 thirds. There's a lot of other pretty interesting uses for gold, too. Electronics use a lot of gold and a lot

of other rare earth minerals. Like, apparently, gold is very, very conductive. It's more conductive than any metal, except for copper and silver. But it has a leg up on copper and silver in that it corrodes. It's very difficult for gold to corrode. So that means that if you want something that's going to last a very long time and be

conductive, you might as well use some gold. So they do, and things like processors and hard drives and that kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean, you might see gold on your headphone plug. Your headphone jack might be gold plated, because if it's higher end, they might use gold. Yeah. Conducts electricity and it gets, therefore, sound better.

I have seen that. I just thought it was like, high end or something. Here's a cool stat, because they use it so much in electronics and microelectronics. NASA used more than 40 kilograms, 90 pounds of gold in the construction of the Spatial Columbia. That's pretty cool fact. Electronics, and they used it as a reflective surface.

They used gold film. Remember, you can pound gold into a 0.15 millimeter thin sheet. It's amazing. So it's light at that point, highly reflective, effective against radiation. So that's pretty awesome. You also use it for crowns. Yeah, they still use gold crowns, don't they?

I guess. I imagine because it's not reactive. Because when things are reactive, especially with cooking, it'll make things taste terribly. Yeah, that's true. Like there was something called a fish fork. And it was made of silver. And apparently, if you had this thing,

it was like a status symbol or whatever in the Victorian era. But it also did have a practical use in that silver didn't react with lemon juice, which is often used to serve with fish, so it didn't affect the taste. I imagine that's probably one of the reasons why they use gold and crowns so that everything doesn't just taste bad, because it's not reactive with anything, because it's chemically inert.

That's a good point. Because you don't want to be eating something and think, oh man, my new gold tooth makes this tilapia taste like squid or poop. Tastes like squid. I don't know. That's not so bad. No, I like squid.

But if you eat tilapia, you don't want to eat squid. Do you eat squid? Will you eat octopus? I mean, I'll eat all that stuff to a certain degree. I mean, like Emily, when it comes to calamari, she will only eat the things that look like little onion rings. As soon as it looks like the little miniature creature,

she's like, that's for you. And I pop that in my mouth. I will eat both. I'll especially eat squid. You and me won't eat octopus because of, remember, one of our friends had a friend. They told us a story that their friend was a cook for some couple down in the Caribbean.

And the couple called an octopus and was going to cook it. Or they gave it to their cook to cook. And the cook was going to put it in the pot alive. And the octopus was wrapping its tentacles around the woman, like, please don't kill me. And she said it was like one of the worst things that ever happened to her because she did it anyway. When you literally have to fight to put the animal to their

death, that's like. And then so that, combined with, I think, being inspired to go research octopi and finding that they were very intelligent, he was like, I just can't eat those anymore. Which is sad because they pop up in some pretty delicious dishes. I imagine. But they're a very smart animal.

So he's like, I'm just going to eat dumb animals. Just stupid ones. Yeah, I could see that. I would be traumatized. Oh my god. Yeah, because it was like, no. Yeah, I would just walk slowly into the ocean until it released itself and swam away.

Yeah, you'd be like the woodsman in Snow White. Like, I don't know what happened to it. But then you start to walk back and the octopus reaches up with one hand and holds your hand. He's like, I want to be your pet. I don't want to go back to the sea. Just don't cook me. Don't cook me.

Hey, dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor stars of the cult classic show, Hey, Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey, Dude as our jumping off point. But we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up

sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey, Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this

situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

All right, where did we leave off, food and beverage? You can get it in Goldschlager and certain jellies. Gold, by the way, not octopus. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's all just for marketing and making things look fancy. It really is. You know, they have the world's most expensive Sunday or

the world's most expensive salad wherever. It's always got gold flakes. It does, so much so that I think we've talked about this. They have another category for world's most expensive non-gold. Because it's like any smoke can spit out a hot dog and relish and then put gold flakes on it and be like, world's most expensive hot dog.

And that doesn't really count. So then that means some of the gold that we've lost, that 15%, has been pooped out. Yeah, I guess so. That's sad. Is it? I think so, since it's so limited in supply and bad for the environment to get.

Well, I guess we should talk about that. Yeah, we probably should, because I was very surprised. I mean, I'd heard that gold was bad for the environment, but I didn't realize this. You want to tell one of the facts of the podcast? Yes, it is like most mining operations. Not great for the environment. In order to get just one ounce of gold, you have to get out

250 tons of the rock and ore. And a lot of times, well, of course, there's the cyanide, which is never great when you're introducing those kind of chemicals. No, and apparently they take this affluent, right? Yeah. Or affluent, and they dump it out in the ocean. Oh, really?

Which probably affects octopi. Yeah. It's like, hey, here's a bunch of cyanide water, and I'm sure the ocean will eventually like even things out, but for that local area where it gets dumped, that can't be good. Of course not. And that's why there's a group, a nonprofit called Earthworks that runs a campaign called No Dirty Gold.

So I imagine if you have a gold wedding band and a blood diamond on your finger, then you're just like, that's a double whammy against the world. That's the hat trick. Yeah, well, no hat trick would be three. Not in this case. That's as good as you can get, or as bad as it gets. So we should talk a little bit about gold.

Although I think we should do a full podcast on the gold standard at some point. I know we've touched on it. I agree. At some point. Let's do it. But the gold standard was, wasn't it like every dollar amount that you could print?

There was a certain amount of gold that had to be in reserve that matched that? Yes. Is that what it was? Yes, exactly. And if you had enough money, you could go up to the Federal Reserve and say, I want to cash this money out for gold, and they had to give it to you by federal law.

And that was from 1900 to 1971, when didn't we just start printing more money than gold and said we should abandon the gold standard? Yeah, and I think when you detach your currency from gold, it becomes a fiat currency to the whims of the market. I seem to remember discussing this some in one of our Econ podcasts way back when.

Maybe even the audio book, maybe. How the economy worked, or the super stuff got into the economy. That's what it's called. It was a good one. It was a good one. So 236 tons of gold are being so-called hoarded by people and governments.

Is that all 236 tons? Yeah, it seemed like if there was still 85% of the 161,000 tons, that doesn't seem like much. It doesn't. It's a lot of jewelry being worn. Yeah, but they think there is actually gold out in outer space in some of these big asteroids flying by that are chock full of minerals and other metals.

There was a, in 1998, the near-Earth asteroid rendezvous spacecraft passed close enough to the asteroid Eros to actually send back data. And they think the Eros might have as much as 20 billion tons of gold. Which would probably really drop the value of gold here on Earth if anyone ever got their hands on that. How do you go about capturing an asteroid, I wonder?

We did a podcast on asteroid mining, remember? Is that the same thing? OK. That's what they would do. Well, I retreat then. We should just do that. Could do that. I thought it would send Bruce Willis up with a golden

lasso to just- Riding a jackalope. Yeah, and attach it to the jackalope's tail and just ride it back to Earth. You got anything else? No, I don't. Well, that's a, oh, I have one more thing. I want to recommend, Harris didn't mention this, one of

the other really bad environmental impacts of gold is illegal gold mining. Apparently, Guyana has a lot of illegal gold mining. Oh, really? And one of the things that you, if you're an illegal underground gold miner, you're not going through this elaborate extraction and refining process. You are basically taking your ore and you're refining or

extracting on site using mercury. Mercury is what they use. So there's not only a lot of illegal, horrible for the environment gold mining going on, there's also a lot of mercury mining and a lot of mercury runoff. So there's mercury poisoning all over Guyana right now. And there's a really great article. It may have one at Pielitzer.

I found it on Pielitzer.org, but it was originally in Harpers. That's where I read it. Gold guns and garampieros. That is G-A-R-I-M-P-E-I-R-O-S. And it's by Damon Tabour. Good stuff. Awesome article.

It's so engrossing. One of those that makes you want to not ever use gold for anything? It has that effect a little bit, but it's more just completely fascinating. You just can't believe that people are doing this. And child labor too, right? Isn't that a big problem?

I think that was part of it, but more, it's just you really risk death in these, they're called wildcat camps, these illegal gold mining operations. Because I mean, if somebody's. The cyanide and explosives. And the mercury and the guns and people staking other people's claims, bad news. Wow.

So there you go. Gold. Gold. If you want to learn more about gold, you can type that word into the handysearchbar at HowStuffWorks.com. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. Josh, I'm going to call this the 10 Commandments of Chuck and Josh, although there's only eight.

And this is from Professor Tom. Guys, I teach a communications course in an area, community college, and in universities. I often recommend your podcast in my classes, especially to students that seem to love learning, but may have not been encouraged by family or friends. I'm hoping that they may pick up a few important life lessons from you guys, as well as interesting facts.

Here are a few life lesson highlights that I think you guys displayed. Number one, normal guys can talk about something other than sports. It's true. I know I like sports. Number two, good presentations begin with an attention-getting introduction.

Josh will tell you that this is sometimes easier said than done. Yes, no, that's absolutely correct. If you don't know something, look it up. And if you're looking it up on the internet, check more than one source. Life lessons. This guy's really paying attention to what we're doing.

He is. Learning involves mistakes. Number four, take a shot at pronouncing a new word. Get it wrong. Venture a guess, share a new hypothesis, then invite feedback, which is the important part. Jeremy Piero. Number five, you don't have to make fun of people to be

funny if you absolutely must mock someone mock yourself. You're good at that. Number six, it's OK for guys to have a variety of emotions. There's nothing unmanly with being sensitive or expressing emotions other than anger. It's even healthy for guys to talk about their emotions. Thank you, Chuck. You're like the new Rosie Greer.

Yeah. Number seven, it's worth the effort to be respectful of others. Sometimes you have to stop yourself before you make an off-hand joke, which we do. Sometimes you have to use a term that is more accurate or up-to-date, which we try and do. Sometimes you have to remember what it feels like to be

seen as different and see if your language can be more inclusive or encouraging, even if only one person in your audience notices the efforts. It's worth it. Man, is this my conscience writing in? Number eight, curiosity can last a lifetime, and that was the last one. And he said, guys, there's a lot to be said for teaching by

example, whether you realize it or not, you're doing it every week. And he goes on with an interesting PS from Professor Tom. PS, if you have my gay male friends, and I got to talking about your show, we tried to figure out which type you would be if you had been born gay. It was unanimous.

Chuck is clearly a bear. If you have a gay brother, Chuck, I have a few friends who would like to meet him. I do have a brother, but he's not gay. And he would not be a bear. He's prettier than me. He is very pretty. He would actually love my brother.

Yeah, he's got great hair. I thought you guys would like knowing that you were being stereotype by a bunch of gay guys standing around drinking beer at a bar called The Hole performing Stuff You Should Know podcast analysis. What a world. Thanks, Professor Tom. Yeah, that's a great email.

That was a great email. We got to print that one out, frame it. If you ever do analysis of Stuff You Should Know, we want to hear what you've concluded. You can tweet to us if it's a short conclusion at S-Y-S-K podcast. You can join us at facebook.com slash Stuff You Should Know.

You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, StuffYouShouldKnow.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite

shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lacher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.