Selects: How Extinction Works

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Speaker 25 CryptoTrading provided by ZeroHash.

Speaker 27 Complete disclosures available at public.com/slash disclosures.

Speaker 32 Living with a rare autoimmune condition comes with challenges, but also incredible strength, especially for those living with conditions like myasthenia gravis or MG and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, otherwise known as CIDP.

Speaker 29 Finding empowerment in the community is critical.

Speaker 37 Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production, and partnership with Argenix explores people discovering strength in the most unexpected places.

Speaker 14 Listen to Untold Stories on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 40 Hello friends, it's Josh and I'm back with The Select. And this week I've selected our 2014 episode on extinction.

Speaker 40 In this episode, we go over all the big extinctions and what probably caused them, including the one we're most likely in right now, which is probably caused by humans.

Speaker 40 And if you pay attention, you can start to notice a little glimmers, a little beginnings of what would become my side podcast, The End of the World, with Josh Clark.

Speaker 40 And although we don't talk about any movies, I'm betting there's some glimmers of Chuck's long-running side podcast, Movie Crush, in here, too.

Speaker 40 Hope you enjoy this episode. It's a good one.

Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 19 Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles W. Chuckers Bryant.
Jerry is over there. I almost said your last name, Jerry.
How weird. And then today we have a fourth character in

Speaker 19 the studio with us, Chuck. This is scent.
Yeah.

Speaker 19 Scent.

Speaker 19 Coming together to make like a tangible human being. So you are wearing patchouli.

Speaker 19 Not wearing. Well, you have patchouli on you as a result of one of Emily's sugar scrubs, right? Yeah.

Speaker 19 Mama? Yeah. And it's loveyourmama.com.
Yeah. Okay.
And then Jerry is contributing to that with an enchilada.

Speaker 19 So

Speaker 19 all of them combined, I would say there's like there's an extra person in this seat right here.

Speaker 41 What kind of person is that?

Speaker 19 Just another person.

Speaker 41 Okay.

Speaker 19 A viable living organism. One that when we leave the studio will probably become extinct.

Speaker 19 That's a good one. Did you like that? Yeah.
I've had that plan since probably two weeks ago. Nice.

Speaker 19 How are you doing, man?

Speaker 41 I'm good. I've been thinking of Buster Rhymes all day.

Speaker 19 Why? Did he have a song about extinction?

Speaker 41 He had an album called Extinction Level Event.

Speaker 19 Oh, yeah? Yeah.

Speaker 41 And that was in one of the songs.

Speaker 19 That sounds super 90s.

Speaker 41 Well, it's Buster Rhymes, so it has to be 90s.

Speaker 19 But I mean, even those words, extinction-level event. People were worried about stuff because of the turn of the millennium.
You remember?

Speaker 19 X-Files was a huge hit. Sure.
Deep Impact and Armageddon

Speaker 19 came out on the same day, basically, and both were hits.

Speaker 19 People were just nervous. Yeah.

Speaker 19 And as a result, Buster Rhymes was very popular.

Speaker 41 That's right. Although he's not anymore.

Speaker 19 He's still good, though.

Speaker 41 He hadn't been doing much.

Speaker 19 No, but his body of work is. Oh, sure.

Speaker 41 Yeah. Leaders of the New School.

Speaker 19 And his early work with Tribe Called Quest?

Speaker 41 Oh, yeah. He guested on one of my favorite songs.

Speaker 19 Yeah.

Speaker 19 What's the scenario?

Speaker 41 Was that the one?

Speaker 19 I think so. I mean, he was definitely on that one.
Yeah. But that was the one also where I think.

Speaker 19 Yeah, he makes fun of people with saggy pants because it was so new. Right.
Apparently, Buster Rhonds wasn't down with it yet. Yeah.
Which is pretty ironic because he got hardcore into that.

Speaker 41 That was Raw, Raw, like a Dungeon Dragon, right?

Speaker 19 Right, right.

Speaker 41 That was pretty awesome.

Speaker 19 It's a good song. Yeah.

Speaker 19 So Extinction is clearly what we're talking about

Speaker 19 today.

Speaker 19 And I guess we should probably give a shout-out to some of the extra reading material

Speaker 19 we picked up on. There's a woman named Elizabeth Colbert or Colbert, depending on if you watch the Colbert Rapport.
Yeah.

Speaker 19 And she is basically

Speaker 19 a leading expert as far as journalists go on extinction. She wrote a book called The Sixth Extinction.

Speaker 41 It's a good article.

Speaker 19 Yeah, and like she wrote an article in the New Yorker, she's a New Yorker journalist, that was basically the predecessor to the book. You know how they do? Sure.

Speaker 19 They're like, oh, I need an extra 20 grand, so I'll just write a synopsis of the book I'm writing.

Speaker 19 And it's a good article, and we work from that. There's another one one from the New York Review of Books called They're Taking Over about the Explosion of Jellyfish

Speaker 19 on how stuff works. There's one that I wrote years back called Will We Soon Be Extinct? Yeah.

Speaker 19 And there's another How Stuff Works one that we've done an episode on called Why is Biodiversity Important?

Speaker 41 Yeah, and I found one in I09

Speaker 41 for animals that we thought were extinct, but

Speaker 41 miraculously popped back up.

Speaker 19 Nice.

Speaker 41 Which is always a good story.

Speaker 19 Oh, yeah, it's a heartwarming story of triumph over adversity and coming back when everybody thought you were down.

Speaker 41 Yeah, some of them like basically rocky. Hundreds of millions of years later, even.

Speaker 19 Yeah. It's crazy.
Like the silicant?

Speaker 41 I think that's one of those. Was that the big fish?

Speaker 19 Yeah.

Speaker 41 They just caught that thing one day.

Speaker 19 Yeah. And said, hey, wait a minute.
Yeah.

Speaker 41 This thing's extinct.

Speaker 19 It's supposed to be. And

Speaker 19 we'll talk about how and why

Speaker 19 things fall off, but things do fall off. And it seems that there is a

Speaker 19 that the whole thing is a very natural process, extinctionists. But for a very long time,

Speaker 19 I guess scientists

Speaker 19 believed that

Speaker 19 God created all of the animals on earth, and that his will was too perfect, his creation was too divine to even allow for extinction.

Speaker 19 So, because they were aware of the fossil record, they rationalized these huge bones of animals they didn't see anywhere as, we just haven't found them yet.

Speaker 41 Well, yeah, and this was all the way up into the 19th century, and some really smart people like Thomas Jefferson thought, for instance, when he sent Lewis and Clark out west that they might come across the great mastodon.

Speaker 41 He's like, it's bound to be out there somewhere, guys, so be careful. But there were some other smarter people,

Speaker 41 like George Cuvier in 1812. He was pretty ahead of his time.
In fact, in 1812, he was way ahead of his time because he published an essay called Revolutions on the Surface of the Globe. Yeah.

Speaker 41 And he kind of asserted that, no, things can go extinct. And he called them especies per duce, lost species.

Speaker 19 Right.

Speaker 41 And basically hypothesized that there have been cataclysmic events that have caused extinctions. Right.
In so many words.

Speaker 19 This

Speaker 19 basically flew in the face of this, that not only was there extinction, but

Speaker 19 there were huge events that caused it. And so the religious thinkers of the day said, okay, wait, wait, wait.
We can work with this. Because, buddy, what you're talking about is like Noah's flood.

Speaker 19 So you, my friend, just proved the Bible correct using science.

Speaker 41 Yeah, Darwin wasn't on board, though. Although he did believe in extinction, he thought

Speaker 41 the only way it could happen is the gradual extinction. Right.
That is also true. And we'll talk about that as well.

Speaker 19 And of course, Darwin is this huge hero of biology. So everybody's like, well, Darwin's right about just about everything.

Speaker 19 So literally until the 1990s, Darwin's view that extinction happens extremely slowly,

Speaker 19 slower than speciation events. So ultimately, you should always have more species, new species coming up than you have going extinct.

Speaker 19 Until the 1990s, that's the way that it was, that's the way it seemed.

Speaker 19 So, Chuck, like I said, all of this stayed around until 1991 yeah and it was a result of like think about it think about how you think of mass extinctions now you think of an asteroid hitting earth destroying everything and it wasn't until 1991 that that view became widely accepted and it was because of this dude named Alvarez he was a geologist I believe Walter Alvarez and in the 70s he started studying this clay layer that was basically in the fossil record right at the time the dinosaurs suddenly died out.

Speaker 19 Right.

Speaker 19 And no one could quite explain what was going on here. They just knew that this must have happened gradually.
So it must be a problem with the actual fossil record, not our way of thinking.

Speaker 41 Yeah, and there are plenty of problems with the fossil record, which we'll get into as well.

Speaker 19 Right. But Walter Alvarez said,

Speaker 19 let me look at this in a little more detail. And he looked at the iridium and found that the iridium levels were off the charts, which shouldn't be because it's very, very rare.

Speaker 19 And we associate iridium on Earth as being brought here by, say, like an asteroid or whatever.

Speaker 41 Yeah, it's super abundant in asteroids.

Speaker 19 So all of a sudden, this guy goes, oh, wait a minute. Maybe we can explain this dying out of dinosaurs, where the dinosaurs went 65 million years ago by an asteroid.

Speaker 19 And that was in 1980 that they proposed this hypothesis, and they ran into a lot of resistance. Sure.

Speaker 19 And then finally, in 1991,

Speaker 19 a year after a crater was discovered under the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico,

Speaker 19 they dated it and said, yeah, it just so happens that this crater was formed just at the moment the dinosaurs died out.

Speaker 19 So the Alvarez hypothesis is probably right, and extinction can happen on a mass sudden scale, just as it can also happen on a very long-term scale, too.

Speaker 41 Yeah, that crater was 112 miles wide, so it fit the profile. And basically ended the Cretaceous period and the Mesozoic era.

Speaker 41 And for a while they called it the Cretaceous-Tertiary event, but now they call it the Cretaceous-Paleogene event.

Speaker 19 And did you notice that the K-Pg? Right. They noticed the that, did you notice the Cretaceous, which is spelled with a C, is denoted with a K? Yeah, it did.
Did you see why? It's just German.

Speaker 19 It's just a German translation for it.

Speaker 41 I figured it was something like that. Yeah.

Speaker 19 It was just bugging me.

Speaker 41 So now we now believe an asteroid brought us into the Cenozoic era that

Speaker 41 we enjoy today.

Speaker 19 Love the Cenozoic.

Speaker 19 It's pretty awesome. It's a good era.

Speaker 41 I mean, it's our era. Yeah.

Speaker 19 So you got to love it.

Speaker 41 You got to love it.

Speaker 19 So, Chuck,

Speaker 19 like I said, the

Speaker 19 extinction can happen, and it does happen, and it's a natural process.

Speaker 19 If you talk to people about extinction today, though, they say, yeah,

Speaker 41 we're kind of in a huge extinction event yeah and it makes sense I mean when you look at the the our past they estimate maybe up to five billion species have lived on earth and more than 99% of those are gone and I love how the New Yorker put it I think that it there's an old joke that all of life on earth today could be accounted for with a simple rounding error yeah like everything we know

Speaker 19 so yeah we've lost 99% of things that have ever lived on this planet due to extinction right which again again is like it has such a terrible connotation these days, extinction, extinction.

Speaker 19 But it happens naturally. Apparently, what they've found from looking at the fossil record and from studying life on Earth is that a species tends to have about a 10 million year lifespan.

Speaker 19 And a speciation event occurs where it branches off from one species and produces an entirely new species. And that species, on average, will stick around for about 10 million years.

Speaker 19 And then something happens and it dies out, and other species

Speaker 19 take its place.

Speaker 19 This is the natural course of life, from what we can tell. The thing is, it normally happens on a very slow time scale, like when it's what's called background extinction, right?

Speaker 41 Yeah, the background rate is supposed to be between one and five species per year, but they think that now it could be like a hundred times that.

Speaker 19 I've seen up to a thousand times the normal rate, and I saw another study from 2014, so it's fresh.

Speaker 19 And it said that these researchers calculated the normal rates and they found that there's between 0.023 and 0.135 extinct species per million species per year.

Speaker 41 That doesn't really mean much.

Speaker 19 It means so much that it boggles the mind. Yeah.
You know, like that's a really strange way of putting it.

Speaker 19 But basically, they're saying like for every million species on Earth at any given point in time during a year, as low as 0.023 species will die out.

Speaker 19 So in a year, you shouldn't necessarily have that many species.

Speaker 19 In current times, though, like you said, between 100 and 1,000 times that rate is what we're seeing right now, which is, you could say, alarming.

Speaker 41 It is alarming. The reason they don't have hard numbers on this stuff is because, like we said, it's a tough thing to study because the fossil record is, well, there's a lot of problems.

Speaker 41 One is it's incomplete. We don't really know how many fossil species there have been on Earth since the beginning of Earth.
It's just impossible to tell.

Speaker 41 Fossils form under really specific conditions. So

Speaker 41 you may think something is gone because it has disappeared from the fossil record, but all that means is there wasn't a fossil. It doesn't necessarily mean it's gone.

Speaker 41 So that's why things will pop back up. That they'll think, hey, we haven't seen a fossil of this guy in 2,000 years, but here it is all of a sudden.

Speaker 19 And even if it has gone extinct, just where it stopped showing up in the fossil record doesn't mean, like you said, that's when it went extinct right then. It could have been millions of years later.

Speaker 41 Well,'cause then you're supposing that the last thing of that species happened to make a fossil.

Speaker 19 Yes.

Speaker 41 Which is just silly. Yeah.

Speaker 19 Um, and also it makes you wonder how many species have lived and died on earth that just never showed up in the fossil record.

Speaker 41 Yeah, just weren't fossils at all.

Speaker 19 Right. Yeah.

Speaker 41 Well, if it never crawled into amber or, you know,

Speaker 19 was buried by ash or something,

Speaker 41 that's luck.

Speaker 19 Or got trapped in bronosaurus poop.

Speaker 41 I don't know if that's good luck or bad luck.

Speaker 19 It's just, it is what it is.

Speaker 41 It's nature. So because of all these gaps in the fossil record,

Speaker 41 these researchers that love this topic tend to do a lot of math

Speaker 41 and a lot of speculating with algorithms and mathematical formulas.

Speaker 19 They love to figure this stuff out.

Speaker 41 Sure. And that's the only way to do do it, really, is to speculate with numbers.

Speaker 41 It also helps them define things like the minimum viable population, which if you go below that, then it's bad news for the species.

Speaker 41 It's the minimum amount you can have to still be considered to have a bright future. Right.
As a thing.

Speaker 19 Or to just survive as a species, right? Yeah, that's what I mean. Yeah.

Speaker 41 Dim future if you're not surviving.

Speaker 19 Yeah, math is pretty grim.

Speaker 41 It can be, in this case, for sure.

Speaker 19 So we'll talk about exactly what makes an extinction and then what makes up mass extinctions.

Speaker 19 But first, let's do a little breakage, huh?

Speaker 2 Support for the show today comes from public.com.

Speaker 4 You're thoughtful about where your money goes.

Speaker 5 You've got core holdings, some recurring crypto buys, maybe even a few strategic options plays on the side.

Speaker 8 The point is, you're engaged with your investments, and public gets that.

Speaker 10 Yeah, that's why they built an investing platform for those who take it seriously. On public, you can put together a multi-asset portfolio for the long haul.

Speaker 12 Stocks, bonds, options, crypto, it's all there.

Speaker 13 Plus an industry-leading 3.6% APY high-yield cash account.

Speaker 8 Switch to the platform built for those who take investing seriously.

Speaker 18 Go to public.com slash SYSK and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio.

Speaker 3 That's public.com slash SYSK.

Speaker 20 Paid for by Public Investing.

Speaker 22 All investing involves risk of loss, including loss of principal.

Speaker 23 Brokerage services for U.S.

Speaker 25 listed registered securities, options, and bonds in a self-directed account are offered by Public Investing Inc., member FINRA and SIPC.

Speaker 26 CryptoTrading provided by ZeroHash.

Speaker 27 Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures.

Speaker 32 Living with a rare autoimmune condition comes with challenges, but also incredible strength, especially for those living with conditions like myasthenia gravis or MG and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, otherwise known as CIDP.

Speaker 29 Finding empowerment in the community is critical.

Speaker 44 That's right, and in the latest season of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby studio production in partnership with Argenix, host Martine Hackett explores what it means to reclaim your identity, discover resilience, and cultivate self-advocacy.

Speaker 33 From the frustration of misdiagnosis to the the small victories that fuel hope, every story told is meant to unite, uplift, and empower.

Speaker 33 And that inspires us all to take one step closer to being a better advocate and seeing life from a different point of view.

Speaker 45 So, if you or a loved one are living with an autoimmune condition, find inspiration along your path.

Speaker 43 Listen to Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 19 stuff you should

Speaker 19 Okay, so Chuck, you've been talking about

Speaker 19 animal species going extinct and then showing up again, like the coelacanth.

Speaker 41 Yeah, or at least disappearing

Speaker 19 from the record. But we, as humans, assume they were extinct.
Like, again, the coelacanth is this fish that they caught off the coast of South Africa. When did we talk about it?

Speaker 19 Was it in a this day in history?

Speaker 41 I don't remember. We definitely have hit on that, though.

Speaker 19 I think it was. Because it's huge, right?

Speaker 19 Yeah, it's a big, big, ugly fish. Yeah.
And it looks like an old dinosaur, but they thought it had died out like

Speaker 19 50, 60 million years ago.

Speaker 41 Actually, way longer. They thought it disappeared 400 million years ago.

Speaker 19 Even more impressive. Yeah.
So then they caught one off the coast of South Africa in the 30s. Then they caught another one a couple decades later in Madagascar or Mauritius or something.

Speaker 19 That made the coelacanth a Lazarus species. Even though it hadn't really gone anywhere, we just thought it did.

Speaker 19 So we humans having the most important perspective on the entire planet, possibly in the entire universe,

Speaker 19 it was a Lazarus species to us.

Speaker 41 Yeah, Lazarus from the Bible.

Speaker 19 Right. Raised from the dead.

Speaker 41 Yeah. Like the coelacanth.

Speaker 19 Again, with the biblical connotations with extinction. Yeah.
There's a lot at stake here.

Speaker 41 That's true. Another way something might disappear and you might think it's gone is if it actually evolves into a new species.
That's called pseudo-extinction.

Speaker 41 And that's a great success story as well.

Speaker 19 It is, but it also, I don't understand why that's not just a speciation event.

Speaker 19 I mean, why is that pseudo extinction? Why is that any different from regular extinction?

Speaker 41 Yeah, maybe just because

Speaker 41 it's didn't die out, it actually just changed and evolved. Those are two different things.

Speaker 19 Yeah, it seems like a gray area to me. Yeah.

Speaker 19 But for the most part, when an animal just disappears, and we should say, like, even today, we're still finding things that we thought were extinct.

Speaker 19 So-called Lazarus species, which goes to make the point. We have no idea how many living species there are on the planet today.

Speaker 41 Yeah, or have been. It's all just a good guess.

Speaker 19 It is, using math. Yeah.
Grim, grim math. But for the most part, we understand that when a species goes away suddenly, it went extinct.

Speaker 19 And as we've been saying again and again, extinction is kind of this natural process, or it is a very natural process.

Speaker 19 And it typically results from a change in the habitat of a species and its

Speaker 19 inability to adapt. So it dies out.

Speaker 41 Yeah, competition with other species, hunting by humans,

Speaker 41 or perhaps the environment has been tainted by humans.

Speaker 19 Humans or a new bacteria or a new virus.

Speaker 19 The thing is, though, is so these big factors, habitat loss, competition with new species, hunting, and contaminants in the environment, those are the big four reasons that something goes extinct, right?

Speaker 19 Yeah.

Speaker 19 Humans can and are responsible for all four of those.

Speaker 41 Yeah, and these are this is the extinction that happens over time, obviously. Not a big asteroid hitting the planet.

Speaker 19 No, but it can happen pretty quickly. And this, uh, this is a Tracy Wilson joint.
And in

Speaker 19 the introduction, she mentions the stellar sea cow, which was an Arctic resident. It was a big old manatee, basically.
Yeah. And they were first described by Arctic explorers in 1741.

Speaker 19 By 1768, they were extinct. So it can happen on a pretty rapid

Speaker 19 scale.

Speaker 41 Yeah.

Speaker 19 Especially when you introduce humans.

Speaker 41 Yeah, and it has a domino effect, too, because we talked about, and everyone knows about the dangers of losing bees. It's not just like, oh, well, there are no more bees.
Right.

Speaker 41 That's going to affect pollination and plants, and those plants are being fed on by other animals. And it tends to have a snowball effect.

Speaker 41 Like, for example, at the end of the last ice age, mammals, small mammals, started to go extinct, and because of that, large animals started to go extinct because they like to eat the small animals.

Speaker 19 Exactly, which is the answer to the question: why is biodiversity important? Well, because ecosystems thrive and survive on a wide number of species that exist pretty much naturally in balance. Yeah.

Speaker 19 You know, a pretty good example of that stuff falling out of balance is the passenger pigeon. You familiar?

Speaker 41 Yeah, they're trying to

Speaker 41 de-extinct that thing.

Speaker 19 Yeah, you want to talk about de-extinction?

Speaker 41 Yeah, well, de-extinction is

Speaker 41 exactly what it sounds like. It is sort of Jurassic Parky.

Speaker 41 It is in 2003, some scientists revived the Berkardo, Bucardo, and that's a Spanish mountain goat, and they did it just sort of like Jurassic Park from DNA that was frozen in time. Unfortunately,

Speaker 41 although it did work initially,

Speaker 41 the DNA only survived a matter of minutes, but

Speaker 41 it did count as a de-extinction.

Speaker 19 I think

Speaker 19 there was a live birth that survived a few minutes, wasn't it?

Speaker 41 Yeah, the animal itself only survived a few minutes, though.

Speaker 19 Right. It was like, I should not be.

Speaker 41 That's true.

Speaker 41 And,

Speaker 41 I mean, they basically said it's happening now, and we have the capabilities, and we may not be able to bring the woolly mammoth back, but we might be able to bring back something kind of close.

Speaker 19 Right. So and that raises in this article that you sent

Speaker 19 just this moral question, like, should we be doing this? Just because we can, does that mean we should?

Speaker 19 And so, like, if you bring back an animal that has been extinct for so long that its habitat is now gone. Yeah, where are they going to live? Exactly.
Where are are you going to put it? A zoo?

Speaker 19 That doesn't seem like a good reason to bring an animal back so we could put it in a zoo.

Speaker 41 Yeah, and just

Speaker 41 like, maybe

Speaker 41 this is my opinion here, which we don't do a lot of, but it seems like concentrating on the problems we face now with the extinction rates is something that we should concentrate on, not bringing back the woolly mammoth.

Speaker 19 Right, and that also kind of dovetails with the point that if we have this ability and routinely

Speaker 19 exercise it, we may be less inclined to protect the stuff we have now. For like, well, if it's important enough, we'll just genetically re-engineer it and bring it back later.

Speaker 41 Yeah, I think in the CNN article, they liken it to just thinking we have an undo button on the world.

Speaker 19 Control-Z. Yeah, no good.
No.

Speaker 19 And it's funny because the author doesn't realize that Control-Z works outside of Microsoft Word, too.

Speaker 19 I'm not sure. He specifically mentioned Control-Z and Microsoft Word.

Speaker 19 Oh.

Speaker 19 Word specifically? Microsoft Word. He He said it.

Speaker 41 Yeah, that's a little weird.

Speaker 19 He could be a shill, and he was just working it in. Maybe.
You know?

Speaker 41 Well, on Macs, though, it's not control. Maybe he just meant Microsoft and awkwardly put in Word.

Speaker 41 Maybe. Or maybe that's the only program he knows.

Speaker 19 Maybe. You know?

Speaker 19 How do I work this?

Speaker 19 So you were saying that they're trying to bring back

Speaker 19 the passenger pigeon, right? Yeah. So the passenger pigeon is this really neat example of what happens when

Speaker 19 you have a lack of biodiversity.

Speaker 19 There were when European settlers came to the New World,

Speaker 19 apparently like one out of every four birds in North America was a passenger pigeon. A quarter of the entire bird population was passenger pigeons.
That's a lot of pigeons. That is a ton of pigeons.

Speaker 19 There are so many that you could just like shoot into like a flock and you would kill a couple hundred. Literally, there were that many.

Speaker 19 The thing is, is if you look, if you read 1493 or 1491, I can't remember which one it is, but both are excellent books by Charles C. Mann.

Speaker 19 He talks about the passenger pigeon and how they've recently realized that there were so many passenger pigeons because a century before,

Speaker 19 one of their great predators, the Native American, had been wiped out by disease that had been introduced to the continent about a century before that.

Speaker 19 So by the time the Europeans got here and really started to settle and encounter the passenger pigeon, they're like, God, look at all these pigeons and didn't realize that the pigeon population had exploded because their natural predator had died off.

Speaker 19 Right. And so we, in turn, hunted them into extinction.
So because of one near extinction,

Speaker 19 another species was allowed to thrive and explode. And then that,

Speaker 19 when they were faced with their predator again, humans, they were eventually wiped out and went extinct.

Speaker 41 Yeah, the American buffalo, we almost hunted them out of existence.

Speaker 19 Yeah, were it not for Ted Turner?

Speaker 41 Yeah, we tried our best to. They were just shooting those things for fun at one point.
Man, that's disgusting. It is disgusting.
You hear about the trains

Speaker 41 just going through the west and just shooting out the windows at the buffalo for no reason.

Speaker 19 Yeah, and doing nothing, just leaving them there to rot. Unbelievable.
Remember, we did an episode on the buffalo. That was a good one.
So sad.

Speaker 41 No, it was good.

Speaker 19 Well, it was sad too, though.

Speaker 41 Oh, gotcha. So

Speaker 41 if you want to talk about extinction-level events, that's a whole different deal.

Speaker 19 If you want to talk bust arrangements.

Speaker 41 That's not a slow, gradual extinction. That is

Speaker 41 some big thing that happens that wipes out a lot of living things all at once. And they estimate there's been more than 20 of these in the history of the world, but

Speaker 41 five of them, they call them the big five for a reason.

Speaker 19 For a good reason.

Speaker 41 And we'll just go through those kind of quickly now.

Speaker 41 The Ordovician extinction is about 490 million years ago, and that wiped out about half of all animal families.

Speaker 19 And the reason it wiped out about half was because at the time, most of the stuff on Earth still lived in the sea.

Speaker 19 Glaciers formed at this time, lowering sea levels, which meant that animals that lived in a certain depth of the sea, usually toward the surface, lost their habitat. Spoiled.
Yeah. Maybe.

Speaker 19 Yeah.

Speaker 19 Or were brought down to the level where their predators like to hang out and were eaten en masse.

Speaker 19 But that accounted for that extinction, which is kind of rare because as you'll see, when we're talking about the big five or mass extinctions in general, it's very difficult to pinpoint exactly what happened.

Speaker 19 So that's one of the rare ones that we're like pretty sure this is why

Speaker 19 all this life went extinct all of a sudden.

Speaker 41 Yeah, and one reason it's difficult is because it was almost 500 million years ago.

Speaker 19 That's another reason.

Speaker 41 It's kind of tough here in 2014.

Speaker 41 Number two, I feel like Letterman.

Speaker 41 Number two on the top five extinction.

Speaker 41 The late Devonian extinction, they're still debating about that.

Speaker 41 And about a quarter of the marine families and by the way, we should mention when they research these things, they home in on family and genera in the big

Speaker 41 classification group. Right.
They don't say like, oh, look at these kingdoms that have disappeared or these phylum. They go down to the smaller levels.

Speaker 19 Right. And family and genus are just above species as far as the taxonomy is is concerned.

Speaker 41 Exactly.

Speaker 41 So, what I say, about half of the marine genera, and that was 360 million years ago.

Speaker 19 Right. No idea what caused that one.
No idea. At least you and I have no idea.

Speaker 41 Yeah. I don't think they care about that one too much.

Speaker 19 The Permian-Triassic extinction,

Speaker 19 this is a pretty big one.

Speaker 41 This is the biggest one ever.

Speaker 19 This is the one they call the Great Dying, right?

Speaker 41 I think so.

Speaker 19 I've seen estimates of as much as 95 to 96% of all life

Speaker 19 died off during this extinction event.

Speaker 19 In this article, it says 85 percent of marine genera and 70 percent of land species went extinct. And that was 250 million years ago.

Speaker 19 There's a lot of people who have different ideas about what did it, but they think it's possible as volcanic activity, creating acid rain. Yeah.

Speaker 19 That's a big one. That possibly happened more than once.

Speaker 41 Was that the one where, I don't know, I think that was the

Speaker 41 K-PG event was the one where they think they're not exactly how it happened, but they may have been just broiled.

Speaker 19 Isn't that awesome?

Speaker 41 Broiled on the face of the earth. Yeah.

Speaker 19 Which would have happened pretty quickly too, actually.

Speaker 41 And I think that one is if because they think it may have burst through the atmosphere, right? Yeah, so it just rained hot debris everywhere.

Speaker 19 That's the one that got rid of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. What is it called? The K-K-Hyphen-PG?

Speaker 41 Yeah, the Cretaceous Paleogene event now.

Speaker 19 And that's the one where they are pretty sure sure that an asteroid hit

Speaker 19 Central America

Speaker 19 and sent all of this rock,

Speaker 19 like basically vaporized rock,

Speaker 19 away from Earth with so much force that this stuff made it out of the atmosphere and then started to come back down. And as it did, it generated thermal heat enough to bring the broil down on Earth.

Speaker 41 Yeah, and that's one of two sub-explanations. The other is that the old familiar ash basically kept photosynthesis from it.
Like it blacked out the sun.

Speaker 19 Yeah, like a nuclear winter. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 41 Pretty nuts-oh. But we skipped number four for no good reason.

Speaker 41 The end-Triassic extinction killed about 20% of marine families, about half of marine genera, and that was 200 million years ago. Yeah.

Speaker 19 And again, like with a mass extinction,

Speaker 19 there's no real definition for it, I found. I was looking to see, okay, who's the body that says, like, okay, a mass extinction event took place? It's again,

Speaker 19 the fossil record is incomplete enough, and we're making guesses and mathematical guesses, but still guesses, to the extent that we don't have a real definition for what

Speaker 19 constitutes a mass extinction. But those five were so massive that there's virtually no debate whatsoever that those account for mass extinction events.
Yeah.

Speaker 19 It's kind of like a you know it when you see it kind of thing. But there's no agreement on how fast it's pretty much.
Yeah.

Speaker 19 There's no agreement on how fast

Speaker 19 it has to happen or how widespread it has to happen. But typically it's like a large percentage of all of the animals alive.
Yeah. Something like 20% say of all living animal species.

Speaker 19 Not just animals, animal species just die off.

Speaker 19 And it's worldwide.

Speaker 19 That that seems to be another factor in defining a mass extinction.

Speaker 41 Yeah, like how widespread. Yeah.
Sure.

Speaker 19 So

Speaker 19 these events were pretty big.

Speaker 41 Yeah, and one of the, I think one of the researchers in the article you sent made a pretty good point that the current mass extinction that we're in now, which we're going to talk about in depth here in a minute,

Speaker 41 he said these are way more dangerous because in the event of an asteroid, let's say, while it might really suck, it's one bad event. And right afterward, the world starts to try and recoup.

Speaker 41 It may take a million years, but it tries its best to start reforming life and get going again.

Speaker 41 Wherein now there's no stress relief. It's just a constant, there's no recuperation because it's not over.

Speaker 19 Right. Or the recuperation will come, but we won't be around to see it because

Speaker 19 the breaking point will be us wiping ourselves out by wiping out the biodiversity.

Speaker 19 And there is a kind of this whole moralistic thing to the idea of extinction.

Speaker 19 There's this whole human guilt. But if you just kind of take a step back and look at mass extinction

Speaker 19 intellectually, it doesn't wipe out life. It just changes everything.

Speaker 19 Right. So

Speaker 19 for one species, it might be a boom time. For everybody else, it's a dying off time.
But it's all in your perspective.

Speaker 41 Well, yeah, this beautiful earth that we know and love now isn't anything like it was 100 million years ago.

Speaker 19 Exactly, and there's not necessarily a set level or a baseline that Earth is supposed to be at.

Speaker 41 Right, because nature doesn't care. Right.

Speaker 41 And nature's not like, oh, we got all these people here now, and things seem pretty modern, and they got smartphones, so maybe we should just protect this version. Yeah.

Speaker 41 They're like, what was the cycle? Every what, 10 million years?

Speaker 19 For a species.

Speaker 41 For a species, okay.

Speaker 19 That's the lifespan of a species on average.

Speaker 41 So basically, every,

Speaker 41 what,

Speaker 41 10 million. 10 million years, the Earth just doesn't care.

Speaker 19 No, the point is, is for a species, its lifespan is 10 million years, and the Earth is not caring every day of that. Yeah.
It doesn't care.

Speaker 41 It's just stumbling toward the next event, basically.

Speaker 19 Exactly.

Speaker 41 That will one day probably happen.

Speaker 19 The thing is, is all of this is not to say that humans are off the hook.

Speaker 19 All evidence that's coming in now is showing that we are doing a lot to speed up extinction events and create a mass extinction, so much so that the big five is possibly the big six, and we may be in the very beginning stages of the six one, and we'll talk about that right after this.

Speaker 2 Support for the show today comes from public.com.

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Speaker 25 listed registered securities, options, and bonds in a self-directed account are offered by Public Investing Inc., member FINRA, and SIPC.

Speaker 26 Crypto trading provided by ZeroHash.

Speaker 27 Complete disclosures available at public.com/slash disclosures.

Speaker 32 Living with a rare autoimmune condition comes with challenges, but also incredible strength, especially for those living with conditions like myasthenia gravis or MG and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, otherwise known as CIDP.

Speaker 29 Finding empowerment in the community is critical.

Speaker 44 That's right, and in the latest season of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby studio production in partnership with Arginix, host Martine Hackett explores what it means to reclaim your identity, discover resilience, and cultivate self-advocacy.

Speaker 14 From the frustration of misdiagnosis to the small victories that fuel hope, every story told is meant to unite, uplift, and empower.

Speaker 33 And that inspires us all to take one step closer to being a better advocate and seeing life from a different point of view.

Speaker 45 So, if you or a loved one are living with an autoimmune condition, find inspiration along your path.

Speaker 43 Listen to Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 46 Let's talk about something you probably haven't thought about. Your couch.

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Speaker 19 So, Chuckers, we've been talking about mass extinction events.

Speaker 19 There's a big five, and a lot of people are saying, no, there's six, and the sixth one is human-caused. So much so that geologists are proposing that we call our current epoch the Anthropocene.
Yeah.

Speaker 19 Because humans are having such an impact on Earth that they imagine 10,000 years from now, geologists will be able able to look and point to this layer and say, here's where humans started.

Speaker 41 Yeah,

Speaker 41 let's get in the Wayback Machine. Oh, yeah.
Let's crank this baby up.

Speaker 19 Does it have enough kerosene?

Speaker 41 Oh, it's got enough kerosene, buddy, because we're going back about 50,000 years.

Speaker 19 You got enough. Okay.
And we're bringing a spare kid.

Speaker 41 And we're going to go to Australia even because it's just nice down there. And what I see around me are these huge...
wombat-like things that are as big as hippos. Huge.

Speaker 41 And I see a tortoise over there that's the size of a VW beetle. Yeah.
And this weird short-faced kangaroo, and he's 10 feet tall.

Speaker 19 10-foot-tall kangaroo. Look at the size of that thing.

Speaker 41 And everything is crazy. But

Speaker 41 let's just unpack here and let's start propagating, you and me.

Speaker 19 Okay, I'm going to make a

Speaker 19 spear just for safety. All right.
And it sounds like I need it to fend you off, too.

Speaker 41 And you know what? It's weird. Things are starting to disappear around us as we grow and as we expand.

Speaker 19 And

Speaker 41 and seen

Speaker 19 that was nice can we get out of here because that 10-foot-tall kangaroo is eyeing us

Speaker 41 well not anymore buddy he's dead oh wow because they believe

Speaker 41 a lot of people think that around 50 000 years ago when humans started expanding their footprint um there was a very inconvenient uh correlation with species dying out as we spread about the Earth.

Speaker 19 Yeah.

Speaker 19 This sixth mass extinction, I apologize for not being able to say sixth correctly.

Speaker 19 That's right. But

Speaker 19 there's a huge debate, and it's still, it's not settled. Both sides are like, ah, we're right.
Right. Another one is like, we're right.

Speaker 19 The thing is, both sides agree, like, yeah, we're in the midst of a sixth mass extinction.

Speaker 41 And isn't that what matters?

Speaker 19 But is it human-caused or is it the result of climate change?

Speaker 19 And just because it's the result of climate change doesn't mean that if you take the trail back far enough, it isn't necessarily human-caused. But these are the two debates.

Speaker 19 So one is the theory of overkill, which is the one you were just describing.

Speaker 41 Yeah, and that was describing Australia 50,000 years ago.

Speaker 41 If we want to get back in the Wayback Machine and go to North America 11,000 years ago, three-quarters of our largest animals started to die out, like the mastodon and the woolly mammoth and the giant beaver, saber-toothed tiger.

Speaker 41 And not coincidentally, probably, that's right around the time where we first walked over the Bering Land Bridge and set up shop here in North America.

Speaker 19 Yeah, the thing is, is you can also say, well, that kind of gives or takes a few thousand years. And yeah, you can, that's definitely stretchable, but it's just not been proven.
So

Speaker 19 there is a huge correlation between the spread of humans and the death of what are called megafauna, huge land animals. Yeah.

Speaker 19 And they say that that theory of overkill says that we came along with our smart little tool kits, which included like spearheads and arrows and axes and clubs and domesticated dogs after a certain point in time

Speaker 19 and over-hunted either these huge

Speaker 19 like

Speaker 19 hippo-sized marsupials

Speaker 19 or we hunted things that were slightly smaller that the huge hippo-sized marsupials ate. Either way, we contributed directly to their mass extinction.

Speaker 41 Yeah, and they think generally that overhunting isn't, at the very least, it's not the sole cause because you probably just can't hunt enough the amount of people that we had, especially in a place like Australia, which wasn't super heavily

Speaker 41 founded. You know, it wasn't like 10 million people moved to Australia overnight.

Speaker 41 Right. So they say overhunting is probably not the sole cause, but maybe a factor.

Speaker 41 But other things humans did, like maybe in Australia they started burning shrubs to clear land, and maybe those shrubs were eaten by certain species and then that caused that domino effect again.

Speaker 19 Another

Speaker 19 camp that basically says, no, it's climate change and it's fairly natural. Other people might say it's human-caused climate change.

Speaker 19 But for the most part, if you are a climate change extinction proponent, you

Speaker 19 probably just believe that this is a natural process that the earth is undergoing and humans didn't have enough of an impact early on to account for the loss of a lot of these species.

Speaker 19 This one study pointed to a place called Sahul,

Speaker 19 which was Australia, New Guinea, and Tasmania all joined together in this mega-continent.

Speaker 19 That was a crazy place. It was several tens of thousands of years ago.
And they were saying that by the time humans arrived in Sahul or Australia, most of the megafauna was already gone.

Speaker 19 It was gone as a result of climate change. And there's no evidence that we had a toolkit capable of killing these animals

Speaker 19 at this time. Yeah, Yeah, true.
So the debate still rages on.

Speaker 41 Yeah, and there's been several ice ages that didn't make things go extinct. Right.
So people point to that as maybe another counter argument. Yeah.

Speaker 41 But the researchers you sent along did this pretty cool thing. They did the first global analysis

Speaker 41 of mapping large animals during this period 132,000 to a thousand years ago.

Speaker 41 And it was the first time they were able to really get a fine point on this geographical variation and and species loss.

Speaker 41 And they did find that 177 species of large mammals disappeared during that period where we were starting to spread out as a species. Right.

Speaker 19 Which apparently is, as it's put in this article, a massive loss.

Speaker 41 Yeah, and they said, you know, they expect these kind of things to happen on an island.

Speaker 41 Like if you go to Hawaii or, you know, any island, they say that survival is the exception when humans invade an island. Exactly.
But for it to happen on like a continent,

Speaker 41 it's pretty amazing to think about the human impact.

Speaker 19 Still an island?

Speaker 41 Well, yeah, I guess that's a good point.

Speaker 19 But the jury is still out, though, on exactly what's causing this. Most scientists agree that we are in a mass extinction event, and it's happening pretty quickly.

Speaker 19 Something like, I think a third of all coral reefs are in danger of extinction.

Speaker 19 A third of amphibians, I believe.

Speaker 41 Yeah, and a quarter of all mammals and an eighth of all birds are all classified as threatened with extinction.

Speaker 19 And this is happening around the world, so it's fitting the criteria for a mass extinction.

Speaker 41 Yeah, they're basically chalking up to the pace of human expansion. And if you consider that

Speaker 41 farming and logging and building roads and buildings and most of the world's waterways have been diverted or dammed at this point or manipulated somehow,

Speaker 41 only 2% of rivers in the United States run unimpeded.

Speaker 19 2%.

Speaker 41 Everything else has been altered in some way.

Speaker 41 Chemical plants affecting CO2 in the atmosphere.

Speaker 44 It's having an effect.

Speaker 19 And the CO2 actually in the atmosphere is having another effect called ocean acidification, which has been described as global warming's evil twin.

Speaker 19 As more and more CO2 gets released in the atmosphere,

Speaker 19 the oceans scramble to keep up by absorbing more and more.

Speaker 19 And it stores some of that by turning some of it into acid, which lowers the pH of the ocean, which is making the ocean unfit for a lot of life.

Speaker 19 But as to kind of demonstrate how mass extinction is bad for one species, but great for another, jellyfish populations are booming. Oh, really? So probably.

Speaker 41 Because they like the lower pH.

Speaker 19 Yeah.

Speaker 19 They like it more acidic, and they are like seriously starting to cause some real problems. And we're just seeing the beginning of this.

Speaker 19 So it's entirely possible that the next thousand years we'll see the rise of the jellyfish as the rest of the life on Earth starts to die off.

Speaker 41 Well, here's a staggering stat.

Speaker 41 The drop in ocean pH levels that have occurred in the past 50 years, they think might exceed what has happened in the past previous 50 million years.

Speaker 19 Wow.

Speaker 41 So in the past 50 years, they've changed the, basically changed the chemical makeup of the ocean more than the past 50 million.

Speaker 19 And speaking of 50 years, apparently in the next 50 years an estimated half,

Speaker 19 half of all species on Earth could be extinct.

Speaker 41 Sucks, man. I want to see a sloth as big as an elephant.

Speaker 19 Hey, get into de-extinction.

Speaker 41 Well, here, um.

Speaker 19 You just saw one.

Speaker 19 We were in Sahul.

Speaker 41 Well, yeah, it was nice. But I wanted, like, I want it to come in the Wayback Machine and bring it to Atlanta.

Speaker 19 No, I don't think that's a good idea, man.

Speaker 19 That thing looked like it would go berserk.

Speaker 41 And finally, unless you have anything else.

Speaker 19 I don't think so. I'm looking at everything.

Speaker 41 We have a few highlights of extinct animals that have been rediscovered, which is not the same thing as being re-engineered.

Speaker 19 What was this, an I-09?

Speaker 41 Yeah, I-09. And some of those are pretty good.

Speaker 19 Sure.

Speaker 41 The Bermuda petrel.

Speaker 41 disappeared, they thought, in the 1600s, but rediscovered in 1951. There's about 180 of those alive today.

Speaker 41 Let me see here. What else is good? Well, we also, we already talked about the coelocanth.
The Cuban

Speaker 41 solenodon, solenodon, excuse me, discovered in 1861,

Speaker 41 has only been caught 37 times in the history of the world.

Speaker 41 In 1970, they thought it was extinct. It's like a weird rat-like species.
But then they found one in the 70s and then another one in 2003. Huh.
So like, welcome back, Cuban solenodon.

Speaker 19 So it was like caught during the 70s and then during the period of the 70s revival in the early 2000s.

Speaker 3 That's right. Nice.

Speaker 19 Gilbert's Poturu.

Speaker 41 Man, these have weird names.

Speaker 19 That's why they went extinct.

Speaker 41 Because you couldn't say sloth.

Speaker 19 You know, we should save the

Speaker 19 what? The Gilbert's Poturu.

Speaker 41 In 1841, this is a rabbit-size marsupial in Australia. And it last appeared in 1879, and they thought, well, this thing's gone.

Speaker 41 Up until 1994, came Came back out and poked his head around and got caught in a few traps. But currently, less than a hundred of those in the world.
Yeah.

Speaker 41 And so those are just a few of the ten, and there's more than ten, obviously. But it's always a good story.
Sure, it is.

Speaker 19 It's heartwarming.

Speaker 41 We think this thing's dead.

Speaker 19 It's like, yeah, welcome back to the mass extinction. Yeah, exactly.
Still going on.

Speaker 19 If you want to know more about extinction, you should read each and every one of the articles we've cited.

Speaker 19 And you can also read this article on HowStuffWorks.com by typing extinction into the handy search bar and since I said that it's time for listener mail.

Speaker 41 I'm going to call this Police Interrogation Follow-Up. Okay.
From Matt Pope.

Speaker 4 Hey, in Victoria, British Columbia.

Speaker 19 All right.

Speaker 41 Thank you to Vancouver, by the way, for two great shows. Yeah.
After our great shows in Toronto. Yep.

Speaker 19 Thanks to Toronto and Vancouver.

Speaker 41 Very supportive people. And boy, that second crowd in Vancouver was drunk and rowdy.

Speaker 41 Hey guys, just listened to police interrogation. I thought I'd share a couple of quick personal stories that illustrate the pitfalls of relying on non-verbal cues to see if someone's guilty.

Speaker 41 I've never been in trouble with the law myself, but several years ago I witnessed a crime, called 911 to report it.

Speaker 41 The cops nabbed the perpetrator and a few days later asked me to come down to provide a witness statement.

Speaker 41 When I arrived, an officer led me into a tiny room that was every bit as bleak as the ones you see on TV. It was a weird experience.

Speaker 41 Even though I wasn't accused of a crime and the cop was polite in his questioning, the interrogation room setting and the power differential between the uniformed cop with a gun and my unarmed self made me feel really nervous.

Speaker 41 I started sweating, my voice shook, and if you had been watching my body language through the one-way mirror, you would have thought I was guilty. Wow.
And he was just a witness.

Speaker 41 The second story is very similar. Every year, our local courthouse has a public event where they give tours and put on a mock trial and actually hang someone.

Speaker 41 Kidding.

Speaker 19 I made up that part. That was pretty good, too.

Speaker 41 It's supposed to be educational and fun. My father is a lawyer, and one year asked me, I'd like to play the defendant in the trial.
I'm no actor, but I said, sure.

Speaker 41 My character was accused of a minor drug offense, and I went through the whole ordeal being on trial and testifying in my own defense.

Speaker 41 I'll spare you the details, but afterward, my mom said, wow, you looked really guilty up there. I hope you never actually are on trial for anything, because they'll lock you up and throw away the key.

Speaker 41 I learned from these situations, the very act of treating someone like a criminal can make him appear guilty. Yeah.
It reminds me of the Stanford Prison study that we've talked about.

Speaker 19 And there's a Psychology is Nuts about that Psychology is Nuts video on our YouTube channel about the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Speaker 41 Yeah, that's a good one. You should check that out.
I hope you guys never have to find out the hard way you'll react to the police interrogation. If you do, I hope you find a good lawyer.

Speaker 41 That is from Matt Pope, once again in Victoria, B.C.

Speaker 19 Well, thanks a lot, Matt.

Speaker 19 That's kooky about your town doing mock trials and stuff like that.

Speaker 17 Yeah, and like hanging a guy?

Speaker 19 Yeah.

Speaker 19 Crazy. They said it's fun.

Speaker 19 The only thing that's okay about it is they make the guy guy look like Hitler. Right.
So it's like hanging Hitler every year, which everybody can get behind. Yeah, they call it the Hitler hang.

Speaker 19 If you want to send us an email that Chuck feels the need to make up stuff about, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

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Speaker 32 Living with a rare autoimmune condition comes with challenges, but also incredible strength, especially for those living with conditions like myasthenia gravis or MG and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, otherwise known as CIDP.

Speaker 29 Finding empowerment in the community is critical.

Speaker 38 Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production, and partnership with Argenix explores people discovering strength in the most unexpected places.

Speaker 14 Listen to Untold Stories on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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