The Man with the Golden Arm

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and it's just us, and that's okay, because we're going to get bloody here on this episode of Stuff You Should Know.

I just had a cockroach crawl over my barefoot.

I've got a cockroach story for you.

First of all, how are you doing?

Do you okay with that cockroach experience you just had?

It's

not my favorite thing.

Secondly, why are you barefoot?

We're working.

You know, I don't put on shoes unless I have to.

Thirdly, you want to hear my cockroach story?

Yes, although I will quickly say that's not the worst.

The worst cockroach story I've ever had is when I I saw one as I was turning out the light fall from a ceiling above my bed.

Yikes.

And then the light went off.

And then you heard the cockroach go 99.

What's yours?

It just happened today.

I don't know if this is my worst or not.

It's pretty bad.

I went to go pour coffee from our coffee pot and a roach spilled out along with the coffee into my mug.

He was like in the port, the top that you can take off.

He was in the little spout, apparently.

I just remembered I had the worst one because I think this top's yours.

I drank a cockroach in some red wine one time.

That's the worst one.

There you go.

Could you feel it crawling around in your gullet?

Swimming through the red wine in my mouth, and I just spit it out.

And I'm sure everyone just heard me stomping in the background.

Tell me you didn't.

Dude, you want me to get up in the middle of a recording and save a cockroach?

I'd wait, wait, yeah.

No, I don't save cockroaches.

I don't feel bad about it either.

We've talked about this before.

Fleas, fleas, ticks, mosquitoes, cockroaches.

Everything's with you on fleas, ticks, and mosquitoes.

I know.

Cockroaches, I'll leave alone.

I know.

You've claimed that many times.

We all know you're better.

I saw a cartoon.

It was the annual meeting of insects people like, and they switched to the next panel, and it was just a butterfly sitting alone at a conference table.

That's cute.

But you know,

you can't save a cockroach.

If they just crawled into the cup, I might think about it, but they don't.

Okay, I disagree.

I try to get them with a paper towel, lightly pick them up, throw them outside, and say, Sayonara.

I'm sure they suffer no damage.

Probably not.

They're pretty tough.

Okay.

This one will be.

All right.

Let's get.

It's terrible.

Let's get to this episode because this is a profile in courage courage and heroism of an everyday guy who found out he was a little more special than the rest of us, and he put it to good use.

And his name is

James Harrison.

Am I saying that correctly?

I think so.

Australia's own James Harrison, who is

probably the most prolific blood donor in maybe human history.

He donated blood 1,173 times over a 60-year period

and is credited with saving the lives of 2.4 million babies.

Yeah.

Referred to as the man with a golden arm.

And we need to back up a second.

You can either pause and go listen to our episode on blood types.

That was a live one, right?

I think so.

Or you can listen to a quick explanation of what Rh disease is and what Rh incompatibility is.

Because when you have a blood type,

you've heard now we know that you can be like positive or negative, like, oh, positive, oh, negative.

That negative or positive is your Rh factor,

so named after the Rh rhesus monkey,

inadvertently, not correctly named.

And so that's a Rh factor, it's a protein found on the outside of your red blood cells, and you either have it or you don't.

It's an inherited thing.

85% of babies that are born are RH positive, which means they have that protein.

But you either have it or you don't.

And that becomes incompatible when it doesn't match up with

what

your mom has.

Right.

Yeah, that's a real problem because if your mom is RH negative, meaning she doesn't have those proteins, her body's never been exposed to those proteins.

So when she has a baby developing in her stomach, her womb, I guess you'd call it,

and some of those red blood cells cross the placental barrier, her body flips out.

It's like, what is this?

We need to create some antibodies to attack this.

And those antibodies attack the red blood cells, the protein on the red blood cells, the RH vector, and tear them apart.

And that is not what you want happening to your fetus while it's developing in your womb.

No, it's not.

And just to be clear, it's not a problem at all to have a negative blood type.

It's just this incompatibility in pregnancy is a problem.

And on the first pregnancy, this can happen and everything is likely going to be okay.

It's the subsequent pregnancies that are the issue.

And so to prevent this from happening,

the pregnant person is giving immunoglobulin.

I have such a hard time saying that.

And that prevents those antibodies from forming and attacking.

And it's done in the way of a plasma injection called anti-D.

Right.

And the reason why the first birth is okay is because the mom's body is still generating antibodies.

Because again, these are brand spanking new for her immune system and so when the their the first baby comes out her immune system's like yeah that's right walk away walk away and then when the second baby comes it's ready and that's when it really becomes a problem and uh it can result in and very frequently results in uh stillborn um babies and uh newborn deaths as well so if it if it wasn't bad enough just add dying babies to it and it suddenly becomes much more urgent.

And it's not that rare either, is the thing.

Yeah, I mean, they didn't even know about this until 1939, the RH factor.

Before that, it was just the ABO system.

But there was a woman who had given birth to a stillborn baby, was given a transfusion from her husband, and had an averse reaction despite having a matching blood type.

So that's when scientists figured out, like, oh, hey, there's another factor here, and it's this negative and positive RH factor.

And another Australian, a guy named John Gorman, a doctor, was working in blood banking.

And this was in 1958.

He said, hey, I think that if we give these mothers an RH antibody, they wouldn't make any of that antibody themselves.

So it's kind of like a weird reverse treatment.

Right.

Yeah.

And it's really worth saying it's weird because they don't know still to this day exactly how it happens or how it protects developing fetuses, infants.

They think the best guess is that these antibodies that they consider passive antibodies, they don't attack the red blood cells of the developing child.

Instead, they actually attach to it an active protective

layer, essentially like Obi-Wan saying to the mom's immune system, these are not the red blood cells that you seek.

This is not the factor that you're interested in.

Beat it.

In the words of Obi-Wan, like I said.

So Dr.

Gorman and his research partner, they tested this idea out

on prisoners, on male prisoners at Sing Sing Prison in New York, injecting that Rh negative into them with antibodies and then measuring the response.

And they found that it worked and that it was safe.

Obviously, not the most ethical thing.

Theoretically, I guess these were volunteers, but you know how that goes.

But the question still remained, like, will it save a baby?

And it turns out that his sister-in-law, Kath, was a nurse and was RH negative.

And his brother, her husband, was RH positive.

And they were like, hey, we'll be the guinea pigs in this one.

Let's do it.

Yeah.

So the problem was, is that John Gorman's brother and sister-in-law, Kath and Frank, lived in London at the time.

And Gorman, like you said, was in America, even though he was Australian.

It's a brain buster, I know.

But the upshot of it is that Gorman sent this anti-D

inoculation, essentially, that he was testing out to the Gormans in London.

They had to go to Heathrow to pick it up.

John Gorman

had to get it to them so quickly, he didn't even fill out paperwork.

He just sent it like it was,

I don't know, like a

push-pop or something like that.

Yeah, deodorant.

Great.

And they had to go to Heathrow to pick it up.

That's how time-urgent this was.

And

if it wasn't urgent before, it was when they got to Heathrow because Kath went into labor when they were picking up this injection.

Yeah.

So they were somehow managed to talk this doctor into administering this treatment, which that's probably the most surprising thing that this doctor went along with it.

But that doctor did.

And Kath Gorman had a healthy son.

And then she had another healthy son a year later after giving this injection.

And they were like, hey, it worked.

And

now it's given to women in the 28th week of pregnancy.

And if the baby is found out to be RH positive, given again within 72 hours of giving birth.

Yeah.

I think one of the other things that stood out to me about Kath and Frank Gorman's story is

that the doctor who gave them the injection was persuaded to do so also by a team of a rival team from Liverpool who were also working on some sort of antidote to Rh factor disease.

So they basically said, like, this is actually going to launch John Gorman into the lead here, even though we're competing to come up with this.

But seriously, you should inject her with this.

It's going to be great.

So they put saving babies before their own career.

That's great.

Yeah.

I think Gorman ended up saying that it was the most cost-effective drug ever produced.

In 50 years, there have been no fatalities from this treatment.

And he said it saves about a billion dollars every year by preventing high-risk RH pregnancies.

Yeah, so it was really something.

The thing is,

you still need, to this day, human blood to make the anti-D

immunoglobin,

globulin.

It is hard to say, Chuck.

Yeah.

Inoculation.

Yeah.

Plasma, technically, yeah.

Yes.

And this is where James Harrison comes in, but he doesn't come in yet, dear people, because you are going to have to pay through the nose to get to him by listening to these commercials.

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Let's talk about something you probably haven't thought about.

Your couch.

Yeah, that thing you nap on, geek it on, cry on.

Turns out that most sofas are basically bacteria playgrounds.

It's true.

We looked it up.

It's not good.

But Anibay changes that.

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Okay, everybody, thanks for listening to those commercials.

We're back, and it's time that we really introduce you to James Harrison.

He was an amazing guy, but I feel like we should go back to before he was a full guy when he was just a 14-year-old because he underwent a really big-time surgery and I could not find out why, but he had to have an entire lung removed again at age 14.

Yeah, there's not a lot about the guy.

Even when you read his obituary, the just details are scant and I'm sort of feel like he probably wanted it that way

as a kind of a low-key, awesome dude.

But yeah, at 14, he had a lung removed.

He was in the hospital for three months.

And during that time, he required almost two gallons of blood, 13 units of donor blood.

A human adult has about 10 units of blood.

So a 14-year-old wouldn't even have that much.

So basically

a full plus transfusion of his blood that saved his life and comes out of it as a 14-year-old.

And his dad explains what happened.

And he's like, I know my calling.

Like when I come out of this and I'm able to be old enough to give blood and plasma, like that's what I'm going to do with my life.

Yeah.

His dad was already a blood donor too.

So I'm sure it was gratifying for him.

And James Harrison, I guess he had to wait a few years before he was eligible to donate blood.

But once he did, he started doing it

right off the bat, right when he could.

But it took another 11 years, I guess when he was in his early 30s.

He has something like that, or about to be 30, before the doctors were like, hey, hey, this guy's something special.

He's got some dynamite plasma because

they think when he got all of that blood, he was Rh negative, but he got a lot of Rh positive blood.

And his body started making Rh positive antibodies that can just knock your socks off.

So this guy, James Harrison, when he was 14, essentially acted inadvertently as a human test tube or Petri dish, where they put together Rh negative and Rh positive, shook it up, and this guy started making antibodies for the rest of his life that would go on to save babies.

Yeah.

I mean,

his stuff was so good, and he was so prolific and dedicated, and we'll talk more about that.

There was a doctor that said in the Sydney Morning Herald in 2018 that every ampoule of anti-D ever made in Australia has James in it.

Yeah, Primo stuff.

Pretty cool.

So the 2.4 million babies he saved, not an exact number, obviously, but they basically did a calculation where they analyzed birth data from 1964 moving forward, accounted for the people who got this anti-D treatment, and then weighed overall

mortality risk from RH disease and came up with that number, 2.5 million babies.

Yeah, because I mean...

When you donate blood, you do save lives, but you don't necessarily save babies' lives.

Like James Harrison was a baby-saving machine.

That's right.

They tried a synthetic version,

they're still not there yet.

So

they're still reliant on people donating their blood and plasma.

But the synthetic that they've been working on it, they call it James in a Jar, which is kind of cute as well.

Right, for sure.

So like you said, it is kind of tough to

find much about James Harrison's life other than his blood donation.

Laura Clausen, Dr.

Claw, helped us with this one.

And she found out that he was a clerk in the Regional Railway Authority, and his wife, his beloved wife Barbara, who died in 2005, was a teacher.

And Harrison's dedication was such that

when they went on vacation, whenever they went on vacation, they would putz around Australia in a camper.

He would find the closest blood donation clinic and go donate blood.

And the reason why he did that so often was because with plasma donations, your body

regenerates the plasma so quickly, I think within 48 hours, that in some cases, in some countries, you can donate plasma a couple of times a week rather than the, I don't know, I can't remember, it's several weeks, if not a month or more, that you have to wait to donate whole blood, like the regular kind.

Yeah, I mean, you have to wait two weeks for plasma, even, but

he wanted to donate so frequently, they would bend the rules.

And like, they said that he would come in at day like 10 and 11 sometimes and be like, come on, just take my plasma.

I'll be fine.

And they did oftentimes.

And they don't get paid for it.

You can get paid.

It's a sort of a, I don't know how common it is, but it's an old trick if you're really broke and can't make rent to sell plasma in the United States because you can get paid for donating plasma.

But he didn't get paid for any of this either.

No, we should also say if you've never donated plasma, but you've donated blood, it's slightly different.

Donating blood can take 15 minutes maybe.

Donating plasma is a whole thing where they take your blood out just like they do with whole blood, and then they run it through a machine that separates the plasma from the platelets and the red and white blood cells and returns the red and white blood cells to you.

And the whole process takes about an hour rather than a quarter of an hour.

And it has all the other stuff, the lead-up and the recovery that a whole blood donation takes.

So, when you take that into account, James Harrison making these donations

is just even that much more hat removal-worthy.

Yeah.

Like, I mean, one of these guys said it's like a half a day, basically, when you count in travel and all that.

Yeah.

So if he donated, you know, let's say that's like four hours.

And if he donated, you know, 11, I mean, how many times was it?

1,100 plus.

Yeah.

Like, that's just thousands and thousands of hours of his life where he's trying to donate even more frequently.

Like, hey, it's been 10 days.

Give me in there.

I'm ready.

For sure.

I'm sure his coworkers are like, oh, James gets to take a four-hour lunch lunch break every couple weeks.

And his supervisor is like, let me tell you about James and what he's doing with this four-hour lunch.

Exactly.

You like saving babies?

Right.

So he and his wife, Barbara, had a daughter and two grandchildren.

And the daughter was an anti-D recipient herself.

And she made a big statement after he died.

As an anti-D recipient myself, he has left a family behind that may not have existed without his precious donations.

And I believe a granddaughter-in-law, Rebecca Meliship, also got the anti-D treatment.

So he even furthered his own family by helping out his daughter and granddaughter-in-law.

Yeah, I guess he had four great-grandchildren when he died this past February in 2025.

Yeah.

And yeah, like she said, like you can make a really good case that these people would not necessarily exist without him donating his very special plasma.

And this was like not,

it's not like his family wasn't aware of this.

Like, this was a big celebrated thing, not just with his family, but in Australia.

And so, his grandson, Scott, turned 16 and said, I want to join the family racket and start donating blood too.

So, the first time he gave blood, he went with his grandfather, and took him with him.

And so, Scott's first time was his grandfather's 1,000th donation too.

And apparently, the whole family donates blood, which, I mean, imagine being the one family member who's like, No, I I don't feel like it.

And everybody is

donating it, but you know, there's one.

You know, there's one.

Family shame.

Yeah.

He, uh, his wife passed away, Barbara, in 2005.

So very dark times for him.

And he pressed through and did not let that disrupt his donation schedule.

So for the last 20 years of his life as a widower, he,

you know, kept kept giving that stuff, even though he hated needles, he hated the sight of blood, and he had a very low threshold for pain.

Yep, there it is, our O.

Henry style ironic twist.

Yeah.

The man who gave blood 1,173 times to save 2.4 million babies was afraid of needles.

That's right.

And he had a favorite arm, too, right?

Yeah, his right arm.

He said at some point that he feels like, and he even admitted it could be placebo effect, but he can feel them injecting the IV into his left arm, but he doesn't feel it in his right arm so out of those 1173 times only about 10 were in his left arm yeah

should we take a break we should all right we'll take a break and finish up right after this

Let's talk about something you probably haven't thought about.

Your couch.

Yeah, that thing you nap on, eat on, cry on.

Turns out that most sofas are basically bacteria playgrounds.

It's true.

We looked it up.

It's not good.

But Anibay changes that.

It's washable, like fully washable.

Take the covers off, throw them in the machine, boom, clean.

Also, it's actually affordable, which is surprisingly rare.

So yeah, if you're going to sit on something every day, maybe you don't make it a biohazard.

And here's the kicker.

It's not just practical, it's affordable.

Starting at just $699, you can make your sofa as clean as it is comfy.

Right now, you can even get up to 60% off your antibay sofa.

Because let's be real, you deserve better than a germ factory for a place to rest your head.

Check out washablesofas.com now and give your couch the upgrade it's begging for.

That's washable sofas.com.

Wayfair, they've got just what you need.

And as your trusted destination for all things home, home, Wayfair's got everything you need to cosify your space this fall.

From comfy recliners to warm bedding and autumn decor.

That's right, the weather's starting to cool down a little.

And get this.

Wayfair even has espresso makers, so you can make that latte at home.

You know the one I'm talking about.

Yeah, and why not stock up on warm linens, cozy throw blankets, autumn-themed throw pillows, and storage for every space.

You gotta put your outdoor furniture up.

You need a place to store it?

Wayfair's got you covered.

That's right.

There's something for every style and every home.

No matter what your space or your budget, Wayfair is going to make it easy to tackle your home goals with room ideas and curated collections.

So, cosify your space with Wayfair's curated collection of easy, affordable fall updates.

From comfy recliners to cozy bedding and autumn decor, find it all for way less at Wayfair.com.

That's w-a-y-f-a-i-r.com.

Wayfair, every style, every home.

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All right, so we're back to talk a little bit more about the dedication of James Harrison, the most prolific blood donor and plasma donor in history.

Even in his older years, because

he gave until he was 81 in 2018, they finally said, you got to stop.

And he didn't want to stop, but they were like, you know, for your own health, you can't keep doing this.

But up into that point, he would ride the train an hour each way to go to this donation center.

That was the closest one, or at least that was the regular one that he became accustomed to.

And he was really broken up.

He said, it's a sad day for me, the end of a long run.

I'd keep going on if they let me.

And

this is just, I have a hard time even getting through the sentence, but the last time he gave the blood, he was surrounded by moms and babies that he had saved.

Yeah.

Incredible.

Pretty amazing.

Yeah.

Apparently, even though he was something of a celebrity, at least at Blood Banks in Australia, I think well beyond that too.

He was very unassuming in that he never walked in, you know, wearing sunglasses and a scarf.

The man with the golden arm is here.

Exactly.

I mean, just wearing his jacket over his shoulders.

Right.

Yeah.

He instead would just kind of chit-chat other people who were giving donations and kind of telling them, like, hey, you're doing something great.

But he didn't say, and I should know because I've saved 2.4 million babies.

He was not that kind of person.

I feel like this would be a different episode if he had been that kind of person.

It'd still be worth talking about, but maybe less celebratory.

I don't know.

But this guy doesn't seem to have really been bad at all in any way, shape, or form.

And we really looked.

Well, here's a couple of quotes.

It becomes quite humbling when they say, oh, you've done this or you've done that or you're a hero.

It's something I can do.

It's one of my talents, probably my only talent, is that I can be a blood donor.

And that saving one baby is good.

Saving two million is hard to get your head around.

But if they claim that's what it is, I'm glad to have done it.

And like, you just imagine every one of these quotes, he's got his hands in his pockets and he's just kind of kicking around some pebbles with his feet, looking down.

Yeah, I'm going to get a shirt that says, what would James Harrison do?

Right.

Man, one of my favorite shirts of all time is

that what would Jason do?

It's like a hockey mask instead of a J.

That's funny.

Just the implications behind the whole thing make it even funnier, too, you know?

Yeah, what would Jason do?

He'd kill.

He'd just slaughter everybody with the machine.

Did you shave a baby?

No.

I love that t-shirt, I guess, is what I'm trying to say.

Do you have it?

No, I've looked before, and I can't find the exact one.

There was a guy who we worked with who wore one to work once, and I was like, that shirt's awesome, but also unsettling in the office setting.

Who was it, do you know?

I can't remember his name.

He was a big guy,

and he looked like the kind who would wear that shirt.

He looked like he was clearly into horror movies.

Okay.

He was strapping, large dude.

I cannot remember his name.

He was a good guy.

Okay.

Was this way back in the day?

Was this Buckhead?

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Way back in the day.

Yeah, that was back in the times where there were so many people working in our office.

I didn't know half of them were.

You would have interacted with this guy.

He was one of the writers.

Oh, no, no, I remember that guy.

Yeah, that guy.

Yeah, the big dude.

Yes.

Like, just very tall, big guy.

Yes.

Yeah.

Do you remember?

He looked like a football player.

Yeah, kind of.

Do you remember that shirt?

No, but

man, what a vague memory of that guy.

I totally remember Jerry would know, but she's not here.

No, she's not here, as usual.

So, back to James Harrison.

What would he do?

Sadly, he would eventually pass, but he lived to be 88.

And, like you mentioned, he just died recently in February of this year.

But before he passed in 1999,

which means his wife Barbara got to see this, who was also a blood donor, by the way, quite regular.

Sure.

He received the Medal of Order in Australia for his efforts.

That's amazing.

Again, almost two and a half million babies just saved by this guy.

And he's not the only one.

He's one of just a small number of people, it turns out, who are able to donate blood because they produce the antibody needed to create the anti-D inoculation.

When this first was realized, I guess shortly after 1958,

A group of women in Winnipeg in Canada got together and they became known as the RH Ladies of Winnipeg.

And they started donating plasma to make the Canadian version of Anti-D Winro.

And one of them was a woman named Mary Taliu who had lost three different babies to RH incompatibility.

And she went on to donate for 15 years.

And again, this is not normal blood.

These people's blood is incredibly special and it saves babies.

Yeah.

There's less than 200 anti-D donors in Australia.

One of those is a woman named Kieran Froze.

I don't know how you pronounce that.

Froes?

Freeze?

Fries, maybe?

It's either the O-silent or the E-O silent.

But Kieran is a midwife and benefited from the anti-D drug during her own pregnancies.

And she learned that people who had the right kind of blood could donate for this.

And she advocated to be allowed to do so and apparently had to like kind of lobby to be able to do it, right?

Yeah, because she didn't naturally make the antibodies herself like other people, like James Harrison, does.

There's a way that you can actually sensitize people by exposing them to the antibodies.

And then over time, their body will start making the antibodies themselves, these protective ones.

And that's what she did.

She's like, I want to volunteer to be inoculated with this stuff so that I can start producing this plasma.

And she had to prove that she was no longer able to have children.

She had to send her medical records showing her hysterectomy to Lifeblood, the Australian blood donation people,

before they would even let her

get into this program.

Yeah.

And we can't forget about the people who also allow that to happen by contributing to that program despite not having that RH negative blood.

Right.

Like she gets those

sensitization boosters.

from people donating their blood to be transfused into her and others like her.

Yeah.

And from what I saw, there is only one, there's one match donor that donates when they go in to give blood, and they're anonymous, when they go in to give blood, their blood is taken and given specifically to Kieran Froze or Freeze.

So like this person is,

it's just cool that they're anonymous too, and that that's what they're doing.

Like that's some pretty niche blood donation, if you think about it, you know?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

And, you know, they're, they're doing the right thing in Australia.

Wealthier countries obviously have a better time with this.

But very sadly, as you guessed it, studies estimate that half the women in the world who need treatment don't get it.

In developing countries, obviously, most acutely, 50,000 fetuses and 114,000 newborns die every year as a result of this RH incompatibility who can't get this treatment.

And the United States, we don't do a great job donating blood.

So I'm calling people out and asking you to step up to the table and to that needle.

62%

of the population is eligible to donate, but 3%

do so compared to 57% in Australia that are eligible and 14% do so.

So they could kick it up a bit too, but that 3% is shameful.

Yeah.

It's not totally out of bounds, though, with other industrialized Western countries.

The UK, 2.6% of the population donates,

4% in France, and then somewhere between 5% and 6% for Denmark, Germany, Greece, and Cyprus.

So yeah, we could definitely do a lot better.

It seems like from what I can tell, I look to find what country has the most blood donors.

From what I can tell, Australia far and away leads the pack in the whole world.

That's my own research.

Take it or leave it.

I didn't do any math, so it is possible it's accurate.

But that seems to be the highest percentage I could find was Australia's.

I bet you anything, old James Harrison, has something to do with that and the news and stories surrounding

his efforts.

For sure.

I would think so, too.

This has spurred me to get out there and do this on the reg too, so I'm going to donate some blood next week.

Good for you, buddy.

I'm going to get back to it, too.

Yumi introduced me to it, and I've definitely fallen off.

So let's go together.

We can hold hands while we donate.

Oh.

It'd be pretty cute.

That would be cute.

And you know what?

I'm going to get us matching blankets with James Harrison's picture on it.

Very nice.

Okay, well Chuck said very nice, which is what I was fishing for, which means also he just triggered listener mail.

Yeah, this is, I guess, a bit of a correction for the heavy metal episode.

Hey guys, there were a few mistakes that I won't hassle you about.

After all, I didn't catch anything too significant.

However, I should tell you that Rob Halford's leather infatuation did not come from his time in S ⁇ M clubs and bars.

In his own book, Biblical Heavy Metal Scriptures, is a chapter called Denim and Leather, where he speaks about how, although it did spawn a leather fetish, his love for denim and leather came from bands, other bands like Saxon, who wore the combination and turned it into a heavy metal uniform of sorts.

He's even quoting him, others reckon that I started wearing my studs and leather as a means to express my repressed homosexuality.

No, I effing didn't.

Denim and leather has been part of metal basically from the beginning.

It was a visual display of how the originators felt on the inside, the way the music sounded, the the way they felt.

Rebellious.

His book is great, by the way.

I recommend it if you're into ancient metal gods speaking on the topic.

Again, thank you so much for the three-part episode, guys.

That has to be a record, right?

Including the Horns episode.

I call that a triple.

Much love to you all.

That is from Joshua Ernsberger of Ogden, Utah.

Very nice.

Thanks, Joshua.

Thanks for setting us straight.

We appreciate that.

Especially from another Josh.

You know what I'm saying?

That's right.

And you know what?

In your defense, that sounds like the kind of thing that is just everywhere on the internet.

I saw it everywhere.

And I had no reason to doubt it.

Sure.

Because I hadn't read Rob Halford's autobiography, which was just stupid of me.

Yeah, you didn't have time.

Sorry I fell for it, everybody.

If you want to get in touch with us like Joshua did and set us straight, you too can send us an email.

Send it off to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

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