Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from House toff works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with me as always as Charles W. Chuck Bryant. We are the Koch Brothers and we own you. How you doing good, sir? Top of theod morning. I saw you give me a tip of the hat and everything off the old cap. Wow, we're suddenly like Will Ferrell and anchor man. You're a London gentleman went in Rome. Uh, Chuck, I think before we go any further, we should um plug our Kuba Team, Big time awesome Cuba team. That's k I v A dot Org slash team Slash stuff you should know. Nice. Yeah, that's where you can find us. Yeah. Um we founded that team in October two, right, brilliant idea. Yeah. Um. By October two, last October, we'd already hit the quarter of a million dollars in loans mark right, Um, we are on track to hit half a million dollars in loans made to entrepreneurs in developing countries. Um. By May we just hit four hundred thousand. Our team did, and we just wanted to let everybody know who's not a member, the team is open. Just go on and make a loan. Uh, twenty five bucks is the lowest increment you can make. But it's alone. This is not just an outright donation. Because it's repaid. You can reloan again, or you can take it and go on your merry way. But it's pretty cool. It's a good feeling. Everybody on the Kiva message board is a happy chipper person. And I don't know that they are all the time, but I think when they come to Kiva and hang out there for a little while, they get happy. Feel better about yourself. I know I do. But yes, halfs half million, it was nice. It's crazy. Who knew? Well, that's Cuba. Also we're on Facebook stuff you should know and Twitter, the Twitter, s Y s K podcast. Yes, all right, let's go to sleep. All right, let's get started. Huh, Chuck, did you know that UM xerox and I think the twenty one century, maybe a little before that, UM took out ads in all sorts of publications. I saw it in some sort of bar association UM magazine. I can't remember which one. Um saying hey, Mr and Mrs Consumer or Mr Mrs Lawyer, UM, don't use the word xerox, use the word photocopy instead. Yeah, xerox is. It's like a Kleenex or cute dip or as Britain was once a brand name, Heroin once a brand name. UM. And the reason that Xerox is so up in arms about this is because if enough people's start using your term generically, especially as a verb like xerox ng or facebooking, you can lose your trademark status. It can become a part of the vernacular. And it has happened to to some other um, some other brands before. Evidently Alan Wrench Um, like I said, Aspirin, Escalator Um, the Jungle Gym, Tarmac, Yo Yo, Zipper, all of these were once brand named shattering my everything, the illusion of everything I know, But isn't that weird? And then there's a there's a whole this is pretty cool. There's a whole list of stuff that's um become. It's in that's in danger, it's in that realm where xerox is right now, where it's very commonly used. But these people still managed to keep their their trademark Jaws of Life, Yeah, Neilla Wafers Yeah, ban Pong Yeah, is table tennis Yeah, and um, let's see uh, Skivvy's is underwear. Crock pot Rolodex is technically supposed to be called a rotary card file. We should just read each one of these with a question mark at the end. After everyone for Mica, go card, and my voice will go higher and higher until you can't even hear any more untill only dogs start howling. Jack. This is one that I knew to. Realtor is a real estate agent that is not any real real estate agent. A realtor is a specific company's real estate agent, centuries any one real tour oka. Um, but you have all of these uh, all of these bands are all these brands band Aid, by the way, that's why I said that. UM. Originally their tune was I Am Stuck on band Aids because band Aid stuck on me. They changed it to I Am Stuck on band Aid brand because band Aid stuck on stuck in the brand because the adhesive. They don't want to genericize their own name. There's one in this list that I didn't see that should be and that my friend is Dumpster. Did you know dumpster is a trademark name. He told me, okay, well, the dumpster the big trash bin usually on wheels um that can be lifted by a garbage truck. That whole process was actually, this whole process was originally called the Dempster dumpster, and it was invented in by George Dempster, who was later the mayor of Knoxville, Tennessee. And apparently up to that point, if you were making something or you had a construction job going on, you just park a dump truck nearby, and everybody would throw their waist in or take piles and moving into the dump truck. It was somebody's job. So Dempster was like, why don't we just create this receptacle, receptacle that we can eventually, you know, start by hoisting with the chain and just dump into the back of the dump truck, or you know, will eventually create these hydraulic arms that can go into the slots on the side of this dumpster with a capital and that can just lift itself up into the back. I bet you, he said, I'll call it the Dempster, and his wife said, you're not calling that thing the Dempster. I'm not being associated with trash and how about dumpster and she was like genius copyright at trade market pour me and Martini. So and I've always noticed have you ever noticed it seems like a lot of waste management UM companies, especially locally owned ones, tend to have a person's first and last name, like Jackie Curtis Porta potties. Have you ever look around, You'll start to see it's really weird. Interesting, It's a lot of pride um. But Chuck, the point is the whole reason I say this is because um, we had to fatten up freegans. Anytime we use the word dumpster, we're using it with a capital D. I just want to say, so we don't have to say t M every time. The dumpsters with a capital D every time we use it, and we're gonna use it a lot because we are talking about freegans who are, in other words, dumpster divers. Yes, Josh, the word freagan is a combination with word free and vegan. Doesn't necessarily mean they're vegan. I think they just thought I had a nice ring. Probably, I'm sure a lot of them were vegans when they started. Yeah, of course there's a lot of overlap or maybe the guy was named Frogan who started the movement. That's not true. No, actually his name is Keith McHenry. Okay, Well, freagans, Josh, are I know? You know this are people who are it's also called post consumerism or reclaimism. They are anti consumerism. They say, we don't like this whole cycle of working and spending and buying and wasting and trashing and then buying it again. And we are going to try and reclaim and scavenge. We're gonna try and not buy things. We're gonna try and not work, maybe just volunteer were we don't want to pay rent. We're gonna squat when we can. And uh, that's what we are. We're freagans. In a very big distinction between freagans and um tramps, hobo the homeless is that freakings are doing this by choice um and if they don't actually have the money to buy food, they usually have the skills or education to um to go out and make the money needed to buy food. This is all very much a lifestyle choice, and it is also their very presence, Their very existence is a thumb in the nose to the consumer economy that America has which is in many ways very wasteful. One right, Uh, stat time, I guess in the United States of America, Josh wastes billion pounds of food each year. That if you go by the stat that we waste a quarter of our food, it's between a quarter and a half. I've seen a half. So it's entirely possible that a hundred and nineties six billion pounds of food are wasted every year. And we'll get in two more specifics on what kind of food is being thrown out, But a lot of times it's not oh, this big box of uh, completely rotted apples. It's uh, these apples are pretty bruised. Uh, this container is mashed, So we're gonna throw this stuff out exactly. Um, And I guess it's not just food. You know, food makes a lot of sense. We need food to live, work, play, freaking eyes, do whatever. Everybody needs food. But food has a lot of other inputs wrapped up into it. Right, Like I think we talked before about virtual water, like the movement of crops from a place that has an abundance of water and can grow these crops to a place that doesn't have it is technically the movement of water needed to grow those crops. You're just moving the crops, so there's a loss of water when that's thrown away. There's a loss of energy to produce and transport these things. Um, there's just all of these losses represented by just throwing away of food, and Freakings are like, okay, two things. Number one, I'm gonna eat that food for free, because I'm not grossed out by jumping jumping in your dumpster and technically it's perfectly fine food. And number two, I'm also gonna do it to make you feel like a jerk for throwing it out right. Yeah, critics will fire right back at freakings. Oh yeah, well you're putting gas in your car and you're using electricity to cook that food, so you're on the grid, So you're a big hypocrite freaking say oh yeah, well every little bit counts, jerk. Everybody's calling one another jerk, yeah, pointing fingers. It just goes downhill from there, throwing food at each other. Well, I do take issue with with that a little bit, like I I do. It's true every little bit counts, um, And obviously you do need electricity or heat or something to to live, to freaking another day. Um. The thing that gets me is the idea that, um, you should hitchhike um or hot box cars or whatever, because that way, in that sense, you're just freeloading on somebody else who's using that gas and you're still using it too, You're just freeloading it. That's the one that I do have an issue with is hitchhiking. Yeah, because I guess so they would fire back. Hey, dude, that train is going from here to Topeka. I can totally understand the train. And technically, if somebody, if you only catch a ride with somebody in a distance or for in the to the place that they're going anyway, isn't that what hitchucking is? People out of their way here? Yeah? And plus where do you give them the person in return? I can understand the train. It's a company and yeah, well yeah, yeah, so uh freaking figure. We should point out that freegans there's not an official organization. Uh, there is a website freaking uh f R E E g A and dot info and that's very robust and up and running. Yeah, that's that's kind of the central home where you can learn how to forage urban forage. Uh, They also forage in the woods. We'll talk about that in a minute. They have classes, they talk about scavenging sites, like, hey, dude, the dumpster on the street is loaded with baked goods this morning. Get over there and it gets the other And I want to say, also, I have nothing against freakan is um um, it's just freeloading drives me crazy. But for the most part, freakans don't you know hippie rob Yeah, yeah, heeries again. But if for the most part freakans um don't freeload. And there they they squat, but they squat in abandoned buildings. It's not being used anymore. They they eat free food, but it's food that other people throughout. Um. But the I think the key here that really differentiates freagans from other people who eat out dumpsters, aside from being able to buy food, is that they actually do work or they do activities. They're just not doing it for money. So for example, they volunteer, right, because how much money do you need if you eat out of a dumpster on purpose and you don't have any you know, house payment or anything. So you have all this extra free time aside from foraging and um most of them tend to volunteer or um work on activist causes. Like there's a freaking colony um in old growth forests around North America where basically they just built tree houses in these huge old trees and said now you can't cut them down. It's called the resistance community, right, yeah, which is pretty cool. It's a cool thing to do with your time. So let's talk for a second about freaking's. The key to their philosophy to me is they think that consumerism is bad because it destroys the environment through things like deforestation, factory farming, labor practices that stink, and it's all profits centered. So they think, uh, you know, that's implicit approval. If you're working, yeah, living in what most people get, still in a normal life, working and buying, you're saying that all this, all this is okay with you because you're taking part in it. We don't want any part of it. So we're gonna do our thing. We're gonna not upgrade our iPhone. We probably wouldn't get an iPhone. We have an old flip phone, or maybe we don't even have a phone like that. We have cans on the strength. I'm not gonna update my fashion because the sweat her is perfectly nice. Just because Bill Cosby might have worn it in it's still a great sweater. Your mom liked it, and fashion is like, how important is that really is there? You know their philosophy. Um, we're gonna repair things that we have to. That's that's that's another big point with volunteering and and um donating time and all that. Um. Like, if you can do something like repair somebody's camp stove, that's a valuable activity, right, and uh, in the end, Josh, what they end up with is a lifestyle that is very much not financially dependent on things like, uh, some stinky job that you have to do that you hate doing, so that frees them up. They're like, Hey, I need a couple hundred bucks a month to live, so I'm gonna make that by doing some odd jobs. And then I'm gonna volunteer and give back, right, And also you can you can get back when you give and you volunteer through things like time banks. There's a website um called TimeBank dot org that I found on the freaking website and basically it's like, um, let's say that I know how to repair your bike, and you know how to um teach people how to play the guitar. So I'll go, you know, repair your bike, and and you teach me how to play the guitar um and it's equitable. We don't remember in the bartering podcast that doesn't always happen. You sometimes have to engage in multilateral barters all that kind of thing. Time banks get around that by saying like, Okay, well you went and volunteered at the animal shelter for a couple of hours, you earned two time dollars that you can turn around and use for anything, you know, from a member of this time bank. So that's pretty cool too, although again it's pretty much impossible to get away from currency in one form or fashion. Huh Yeah, I mean most freegans have a very limited uh budget to endorse your lifestyle. They're they're probably not completely free, although there there might be some that don't use money at all, but most of them like limited as much as possible. So where's this going on, Josh? It's going on all over the world. But if I was a freaking I would move to New York City, New York City, New York City. Yeah, because New York city has got a lot of rich folks. That means there's gonna be a lot of great trash. I know, what do you Allen's trash? Yeah, and in trash Day in New York, imagine it's a field day and the night before trash night, which is called um. It's pretty bad. You know. The worst in New York is in the summertime and it's hot and it's rainy, and it's trash day and the sidewalks are just full of garbage or in the middle of a garbage strike. I mean, hats off to whoever makes that city run. They're doing a good job, I think Michael Bloomberg, Oh yeah, yeah, it's off to you, then, sir, h They forage in New York for things like furniture, bags of clothes, electronics, Like they'll camp out behind an office that's moving. M All of what you just said is called urban foraging, right. It all fall falls under that umbrella, which is just like foraging, except rather than looking for um routes to drink water from, you're getting office chairs for your squad or water. Yeah, that's another thing you want to But the point is is the the um the city is the forest with everything you need and then some if you know where to look and you can hold your nose. It depends. So you know, every everyone who's ever once a bad kid knows that the cops can go through your trash once it comes out to the curb. So there is actually a Supreme Court case UM from California v. Greenwood, wherein the the Supreme Court ruled that cops could once you put your trash out it was public property. You expected someone else to come along and take it eventually. And that means that anybody wants you can go to your trash, including cops looking for evidence that you're a drug dealer, or freakans looking for bananas that still look pretty good. Yeah, freakings thought, hey, this should apply to us too, right, Well, that's what they use and I think they I think they use it to a great success. Although there are a lot of laws UM like local, state, regional, municipal laws that UM are anti scavenging laws, basically because most people think of people who go dumpster diving is strictly UM hobos who you don't necessarily want around. I'm not sure that there's plenty of cities out there, you know, well, a lot of stores, grocery stores and the like will lock up and cage up their dumpsters to discourage this kind of thing. Some will put sharks in their dumpsters. Yeah, land sharks very dangerous if you come across one of those. Uh. The deal is they think that they can get a lawsuit if someone dumpster dives on your property get some food and get sick by it. And and um, that's not exactly true though, is it. Didn't the us D have a ruling on that. Uh No, the U s c A encouraged this. It's called the um Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Act. And I could just barely find who he was. He was a uh A congressman who encourage this act died before it could get passed. When they passed that, they named it after him. But basically it said, if you are a good person and you are giving away food, you're picking up food, you have any anything to do in the chain of taking food, rescuing it from the landfill to feed the poor, and you are not purposefully poisoning the poor um or doing it for your own benefit, and someone gets harmed, you can't be held liable for anything that happens. We're gonna protect you, but that that prevents that. The whole point was to encourage people like you, like you said, grocery stores and um, other groups to donate their leftover food rather than just let it go to way and a lot of people, a lot of places do that. We're not saying everyone just hatches their food. A lot of restaurants donate their food. It's great. Yeah, Um, speaking of food, though I did mention bruised fruit. A lot of times you're just crushed packaging boxes. Sometimes the cell by date is cruised on by and that doesn't necessarily mean that it's rotten. No, the FEDS don't have any kind of mandatory dating low except for baby formula and baby food, and cell by date is all voluntary. The used by date is the one you want to stick to. That's actually kind of rare. The cell by date is just saying it's past it's prime, but it's still got tons of life in it. Like, for example, if you can keep eggs at forty degrees fahrenheight just you know standard for a refrigerator. Um, the last for three to five weeks past the cell by date? Did you know that? And if you talk to my Mom, you can drink milk for up to two months after the date. I don't know about that one. The U. S c A Does say, though, that factory sealed bacon, not fresh bacon, but stuff that was in the in the factory that came last two weeks beyond its sell by date. And you mentioned New York being the center of freakingism, Well, it stays fairly cold New York throughout the year, right, which prevents bacteria from being from growing because bacteria throws between forty and a hundred and forty degrees fahrenh height. So I imagine that you're safest in below forty degree Weather's good point, you know what I say? What the nose? Nose? Yeah, I don't even look at the dates. I give it a good sniff. That'll tell me all I need to know about whether it's gonna go in my body. Yeah. I usually don't have time to sniff. I'm too hungry wolfing it down. And then if I'm still standing afterwards, so much the better. Uh. So that is urban foraging. Um. We should also point out to that sometimes stores uh actually bag discarded food separately from the other trash, so it's not like you're picking an Eclaire off of a lot of toilet paper and saying, oh, this looks fine. Uh. And then there's why all foraging. If you live near the forest and you're freaking you can collect plants. Uh. The website freaking dot info will actually tell you how to do this, tell you what's safe to eat. Um. Sometimes they practice guerrilla gardening. They'll go find a little unused plot of land. We've talked about this. Have you noticed that, like in the last couple of podcasts we've recorded, like five other podcasts have been touched on. You know, this means we're we're growing a body of work. Well, our quest to explain the world. It's all coming together. Oh it isn't it. Yeah, it's all tying. And at some point we're gonna say that's the last one. It'll be the time when we use the word is and realize we did a podcast on is. It depends on what your definition of is is. It's gonna be a long podcast, but we'll do it. A lot of them barter, like we said, they call it free sharing though, but what it is is bartering. They'll have a little market, freaking marketplace that's set up like every Saturday morning in this this part of New York, will all go meet and hey, I see you've got a a laptop that you fixed. I've always wanted a toaster oven. Let's make a deal throwing some rotten eggs and we're all good. Just sell buy man. What about healthcare, that's a big one, And I looked all over the freaking info site for this. Um. Basically, they don't have healthcare licked yet. Um. They've got it close though. There are healthcare collectives which have been successful here there say if you get enough people, you can get it down to about a hundred bucks a year per person, and those go to fun free clinics relies heavily on volunteers. Um. But the state operates all sorts of free clinics as well. UM, which I imagine if you just go in and say I dumpster dive every day, they'll be like, we'll take care of you. Um. So that one is not kind of licked because you can also make the you can make the case that well, that's freeloading again, and that completely undermines everything that freagans are about reloading, because it's not waste. Health health care is not wasteful. The um hours of a volunteering doctor or are in or not wasted. Of course not somebody would use those right well, but a lot of times they are avoiding the healthcare because of we don't want to support the pharmaceutical industry. We don't want to support these h ms. Have a feeling if it was the you know doctor down the street from with the white picket fence that gives you a coke and tells you to everything will be better, they might be a little more apt to support something like the health care syst right, And that I saw that stated somewhere that they were saying, like if you just cut out the profits, that it's much cheaper than we think. Interesting, So Josh, this food recovery is um what they're into as a freaking But that's not a new thing because we have a long history in this country and other places as far back as biblical days of gleaning. And that's when you have a crop. You especially nowadays with the big mechanic systems, they'll leave behind a lot of waste that they're not gonna go back and pick it all up, so they'll allow people, um, and they did this some biblical days after they've reaped the harvest. So if you're poor, you can come into the field after us and pick up what we've left behind. Yes, it's called gleaning, not gleaning the cube. You no gleaning. Gleaning UM. There's a group called the Society of St Andrew And there's a lot of gleaning organizations, but UM. One of the more famous ones is a Society of St Andrew UM where basically they just have a central hub and they say volunteers go pick up you know, discarded food anywhere you can and bring it here and then we'll distribute it. Right, a simple model, but it works very well. They And if you are a freaking I would imagine you get some sort of halo for volunteering at the Society of St Andrew. Yeah, you're the ultimate circle is completely you have a good, nice spot in freaking heaven if you do that. The whole idea, the anti consumer culture idea that forms freaking is um apparently finds its roots back in the sixteen forties in England and Chuck there's a guy named Gerard wind Stanley who lost his shirt in business, moved to the countryside and founded a colony that he called the Diggers, and the Diggers basically lived without money for as long as they could, not that long. But UM, when Stanley and the Diggers inspired the sixties counterculture diggers who UM created their own kind of utopian colony or movement, and they inspired Keith McHenry, who is basically thought of as the father of freakani is um, which popped up in the early twenty one century as far as you know, and now he lives a lush, rich life collecting on that word freaking. And then food he's a fat cat, right. And then Food not Bombs is another good, good example of UM. The free in movement incarnate right, which is basically like they're a gleaner society and then they go feed the homeless, feed the poor, feed freagans UM. And one of my friends, Justin, who's living on tour for a while UM out in California. He told me they used to call him soup not food instead of food not bombs. I was like, that's kind of jerky, don't you think? And he said yes. And as a sister a sister group to Food not bombs as homes not jails, which is pretty self explanatory. That's it. Uh, well, let me give you a quick example. If you're wondering and thinking these people are really weird, let me tell you about Daniel Zeta. He's an American who moved to Tasmania. But you might think it is weird in and of itself, not necessarily. About a decade ago, he's thirty five, and he gradually became a freagan as he became a little more conscious of the world around him, the environment, it wanting to help out the environment. He had a great job, government job. It's pretty good money from what I understand. Uh, And he eventually quit the job, and now he is a freaking pretty much full time. He doesn't dumpster dive though. He works for a food market. Basically trades his work for food. Whatever they're gonna discard he'll take. He travels around the state. He builds environment environmentally friendly houses in return for lodging, and then in his off hours he services the community. So he says he needs about two hundred bucks a month to live. And for a while he lived on a boat that had solar panels, and the whole bed of the boat was a garden, a vegetable garden, and he bought you know, sandals off the Internet that were returned because the dude didn't like him. He got his computer from his friend who was throwing it out because the hard drive was busted, replaced a hard drive. He's been using it for like five years. And uh, that's just one story. He's not some Weirdoh, he's not a freeloader. He's not some crazed hippie hobo freak. He's just a guy that was like, you know that, I'm kind of tired of buying into this whole system. So this is my life now. Chumps, if you ever me to freaking assume they think you're a chump. How they do chuck. If anybody wants to learn more about freakings, they can check out f R E G A N in the handy search bar, how stuff works dot com. And if this picked your interest, you should check out our another podcast of ours on how much money do I really need to live? Remember that one that was good? Uh, you can find both of those on how stuff works? Right, And I said handy search bar, So that handy failed search bar. I failed in my attempt to find a replacement. It is handy though. It's time for a listener ma'il okay, Josh, I'm gonna call this zebra fish email of course, from Alex. Dear Chuck and Josh and Jerry. I'm a research technician in a neuroscience science lab studying sleep in circadian rhythms with zebra fish. I first discovered your scintillating podcast several months ago, and they had quickly become part of my daily routine. Each morning when I come in to feed the fish, I turned up the speaker's blasting the show, and there are suddenly over ten thousand fans listening to your podcasts in a fifteen by fifteen foot room. They eagerly swim to the left sides of their tanks the position of the speakers as soon as the podcast begins, so the zebra fisher are reacting to the dulcet tones of Thus, I consider myself apparent to these fish, and that I feed them, clean their tanks, and educate them through your podcasts. One of the first errors I made as a parent was to make a false promise to these fish that if they continue to work hard in our experiments, which is administering cocaine to sleep deprived fish, that's what he's studying. Chuck and Josh would acknowledge their hard work on the podcast. Please help me out. Don't let down my fish for a false promise I made long ago. God speed. Keep your ear to the grindstone, Alex. I wonder if that tiny room that they keep them in is a bathroom. I don't know. And I wonder if Alex is really a scientist. Yeah right, he's just into getting fish high. Well we'll see. Well, Thank you, Alex. Thank you two our ten thousands zebra fish fans. Hello fish, You guys get some sleep. Okay they can't, they're dying to or they're just dying. If you are conducting some sort of odd experiments, we want to hear about it. Wrap it up in an email, will you spank it on the buttocks and send it to stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com. Want more how stuff works, check out our blogs on the house stuff works dot com home page. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you

Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from House toff works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with me as always as Charles W. Chuck Bryant. We are the Koch Brothers and we own you. How you doing good, sir? Top of theod morning. I saw you give me a tip of the hat and everything off the old cap. Wow, we're suddenly like Will Ferrell and anchor man. You're a London gentleman went in Rome. Uh, Chuck, I think before we go any further, we should um plug our Kuba Team, Big time awesome Cuba team. That's k I v A dot Org slash team Slash stuff you should know. Nice. Yeah, that's where you can find us. Yeah. Um we founded that team in October two, right, brilliant idea. Yeah. Um. By October two, last October, we'd already hit the quarter of a million dollars in loans mark right, Um, we are on track to hit half a million dollars in loans made to entrepreneurs in developing countries. Um. By May we just hit four hundred thousand. Our team did, and we just wanted to let everybody know who's not a member, the team is open. Just go on and make a loan. Uh, twenty five bucks is the lowest increment you can make. But it's alone. This is not just an outright donation. Because it's repaid. You can reloan again, or you can take it and go on your merry way. But it's pretty cool. It's a good feeling. Everybody on the Kiva message board is a happy chipper person. And I don't know that they are all the time, but I think when they come to Kiva and hang out there for a little while, they get happy. Feel better about yourself. I know I do. But yes, halfs half million, it was nice. It's crazy. Who knew? Well, that's Cuba. Also we're on Facebook stuff you should know and Twitter, the Twitter, s Y s K podcast. Yes, all right, let's go to sleep. All right, let's get started. Huh, Chuck, did you know that UM xerox and I think the twenty one century, maybe a little before that, UM took out ads in all sorts of publications. I saw it in some sort of bar association UM magazine. I can't remember which one. Um saying hey, Mr and Mrs Consumer or Mr Mrs Lawyer, UM, don't use the word xerox, use the word photocopy instead. Yeah, xerox is. It's like a Kleenex or cute dip or as Britain was once a brand name, Heroin once a brand name. UM. And the reason that Xerox is so up in arms about this is because if enough people's start using your term generically, especially as a verb like xerox ng or facebooking, you can lose your trademark status. It can become a part of the vernacular. And it has happened to to some other um, some other brands before. Evidently Alan Wrench Um, like I said, Aspirin, Escalator Um, the Jungle Gym, Tarmac, Yo Yo, Zipper, all of these were once brand named shattering my everything, the illusion of everything I know, But isn't that weird? And then there's a there's a whole this is pretty cool. There's a whole list of stuff that's um become. It's in that's in danger, it's in that realm where xerox is right now, where it's very commonly used. But these people still managed to keep their their trademark Jaws of Life, Yeah, Neilla Wafers Yeah, ban Pong Yeah, is table tennis Yeah, and um, let's see uh, Skivvy's is underwear. Crock pot Rolodex is technically supposed to be called a rotary card file. We should just read each one of these with a question mark at the end. After everyone for Mica, go card, and my voice will go higher and higher until you can't even hear any more untill only dogs start howling. Jack. This is one that I knew to. Realtor is a real estate agent that is not any real real estate agent. A realtor is a specific company's real estate agent, centuries any one real tour oka. Um, but you have all of these uh, all of these bands are all these brands band Aid, by the way, that's why I said that. UM. Originally their tune was I Am Stuck on band Aids because band Aid stuck on me. They changed it to I Am Stuck on band Aid brand because band Aid stuck on stuck in the brand because the adhesive. They don't want to genericize their own name. There's one in this list that I didn't see that should be and that my friend is Dumpster. Did you know dumpster is a trademark name. He told me, okay, well, the dumpster the big trash bin usually on wheels um that can be lifted by a garbage truck. That whole process was actually, this whole process was originally called the Dempster dumpster, and it was invented in by George Dempster, who was later the mayor of Knoxville, Tennessee. And apparently up to that point, if you were making something or you had a construction job going on, you just park a dump truck nearby, and everybody would throw their waist in or take piles and moving into the dump truck. It was somebody's job. So Dempster was like, why don't we just create this receptacle, receptacle that we can eventually, you know, start by hoisting with the chain and just dump into the back of the dump truck, or you know, will eventually create these hydraulic arms that can go into the slots on the side of this dumpster with a capital and that can just lift itself up into the back. I bet you, he said, I'll call it the Dempster, and his wife said, you're not calling that thing the Dempster. I'm not being associated with trash and how about dumpster and she was like genius copyright at trade market pour me and Martini. So and I've always noticed have you ever noticed it seems like a lot of waste management UM companies, especially locally owned ones, tend to have a person's first and last name, like Jackie Curtis Porta potties. Have you ever look around, You'll start to see it's really weird. Interesting, It's a lot of pride um. But Chuck, the point is the whole reason I say this is because um, we had to fatten up freegans. Anytime we use the word dumpster, we're using it with a capital D. I just want to say, so we don't have to say t M every time. The dumpsters with a capital D every time we use it, and we're gonna use it a lot because we are talking about freegans who are, in other words, dumpster divers. Yes, Josh, the word freagan is a combination with word free and vegan. Doesn't necessarily mean they're vegan. I think they just thought I had a nice ring. Probably, I'm sure a lot of them were vegans when they started. Yeah, of course there's a lot of overlap or maybe the guy was named Frogan who started the movement. That's not true. No, actually his name is Keith McHenry. Okay, Well, freagans, Josh, are I know? You know this are people who are it's also called post consumerism or reclaimism. They are anti consumerism. They say, we don't like this whole cycle of working and spending and buying and wasting and trashing and then buying it again. And we are going to try and reclaim and scavenge. We're gonna try and not buy things. We're gonna try and not work, maybe just volunteer were we don't want to pay rent. We're gonna squat when we can. And uh, that's what we are. We're freagans. In a very big distinction between freagans and um tramps, hobo the homeless is that freakings are doing this by choice um and if they don't actually have the money to buy food, they usually have the skills or education to um to go out and make the money needed to buy food. This is all very much a lifestyle choice, and it is also their very presence, Their very existence is a thumb in the nose to the consumer economy that America has which is in many ways very wasteful. One right, Uh, stat time, I guess in the United States of America, Josh wastes billion pounds of food each year. That if you go by the stat that we waste a quarter of our food, it's between a quarter and a half. I've seen a half. So it's entirely possible that a hundred and nineties six billion pounds of food are wasted every year. And we'll get in two more specifics on what kind of food is being thrown out, But a lot of times it's not oh, this big box of uh, completely rotted apples. It's uh, these apples are pretty bruised. Uh, this container is mashed, So we're gonna throw this stuff out exactly. Um, And I guess it's not just food. You know, food makes a lot of sense. We need food to live, work, play, freaking eyes, do whatever. Everybody needs food. But food has a lot of other inputs wrapped up into it. Right, Like I think we talked before about virtual water, like the movement of crops from a place that has an abundance of water and can grow these crops to a place that doesn't have it is technically the movement of water needed to grow those crops. You're just moving the crops, so there's a loss of water when that's thrown away. There's a loss of energy to produce and transport these things. Um, there's just all of these losses represented by just throwing away of food, and Freakings are like, okay, two things. Number one, I'm gonna eat that food for free, because I'm not grossed out by jumping jumping in your dumpster and technically it's perfectly fine food. And number two, I'm also gonna do it to make you feel like a jerk for throwing it out right. Yeah, critics will fire right back at freakings. Oh yeah, well you're putting gas in your car and you're using electricity to cook that food, so you're on the grid, So you're a big hypocrite freaking say oh yeah, well every little bit counts, jerk. Everybody's calling one another jerk, yeah, pointing fingers. It just goes downhill from there, throwing food at each other. Well, I do take issue with with that a little bit, like I I do. It's true every little bit counts, um, And obviously you do need electricity or heat or something to to live, to freaking another day. Um. The thing that gets me is the idea that, um, you should hitchhike um or hot box cars or whatever, because that way, in that sense, you're just freeloading on somebody else who's using that gas and you're still using it too, You're just freeloading it. That's the one that I do have an issue with is hitchhiking. Yeah, because I guess so they would fire back. Hey, dude, that train is going from here to Topeka. I can totally understand the train. And technically, if somebody, if you only catch a ride with somebody in a distance or for in the to the place that they're going anyway, isn't that what hitchucking is? People out of their way here? Yeah? And plus where do you give them the person in return? I can understand the train. It's a company and yeah, well yeah, yeah, so uh freaking figure. We should point out that freegans there's not an official organization. Uh, there is a website freaking uh f R E E g A and dot info and that's very robust and up and running. Yeah, that's that's kind of the central home where you can learn how to forage urban forage. Uh, They also forage in the woods. We'll talk about that in a minute. They have classes, they talk about scavenging sites, like, hey, dude, the dumpster on the street is loaded with baked goods this morning. Get over there and it gets the other And I want to say, also, I have nothing against freakan is um um, it's just freeloading drives me crazy. But for the most part, freakans don't you know hippie rob Yeah, yeah, heeries again. But if for the most part freakans um don't freeload. And there they they squat, but they squat in abandoned buildings. It's not being used anymore. They they eat free food, but it's food that other people throughout. Um. But the I think the key here that really differentiates freagans from other people who eat out dumpsters, aside from being able to buy food, is that they actually do work or they do activities. They're just not doing it for money. So for example, they volunteer, right, because how much money do you need if you eat out of a dumpster on purpose and you don't have any you know, house payment or anything. So you have all this extra free time aside from foraging and um most of them tend to volunteer or um work on activist causes. Like there's a freaking colony um in old growth forests around North America where basically they just built tree houses in these huge old trees and said now you can't cut them down. It's called the resistance community, right, yeah, which is pretty cool. It's a cool thing to do with your time. So let's talk for a second about freaking's. The key to their philosophy to me is they think that consumerism is bad because it destroys the environment through things like deforestation, factory farming, labor practices that stink, and it's all profits centered. So they think, uh, you know, that's implicit approval. If you're working, yeah, living in what most people get, still in a normal life, working and buying, you're saying that all this, all this is okay with you because you're taking part in it. We don't want any part of it. So we're gonna do our thing. We're gonna not upgrade our iPhone. We probably wouldn't get an iPhone. We have an old flip phone, or maybe we don't even have a phone like that. We have cans on the strength. I'm not gonna update my fashion because the sweat her is perfectly nice. Just because Bill Cosby might have worn it in it's still a great sweater. Your mom liked it, and fashion is like, how important is that really is there? You know their philosophy. Um, we're gonna repair things that we have to. That's that's that's another big point with volunteering and and um donating time and all that. Um. Like, if you can do something like repair somebody's camp stove, that's a valuable activity, right, and uh, in the end, Josh, what they end up with is a lifestyle that is very much not financially dependent on things like, uh, some stinky job that you have to do that you hate doing, so that frees them up. They're like, Hey, I need a couple hundred bucks a month to live, so I'm gonna make that by doing some odd jobs. And then I'm gonna volunteer and give back, right, And also you can you can get back when you give and you volunteer through things like time banks. There's a website um called TimeBank dot org that I found on the freaking website and basically it's like, um, let's say that I know how to repair your bike, and you know how to um teach people how to play the guitar. So I'll go, you know, repair your bike, and and you teach me how to play the guitar um and it's equitable. We don't remember in the bartering podcast that doesn't always happen. You sometimes have to engage in multilateral barters all that kind of thing. Time banks get around that by saying like, Okay, well you went and volunteered at the animal shelter for a couple of hours, you earned two time dollars that you can turn around and use for anything, you know, from a member of this time bank. So that's pretty cool too, although again it's pretty much impossible to get away from currency in one form or fashion. Huh Yeah, I mean most freegans have a very limited uh budget to endorse your lifestyle. They're they're probably not completely free, although there there might be some that don't use money at all, but most of them like limited as much as possible. So where's this going on, Josh? It's going on all over the world. But if I was a freaking I would move to New York City, New York City, New York City. Yeah, because New York city has got a lot of rich folks. That means there's gonna be a lot of great trash. I know, what do you Allen's trash? Yeah, and in trash Day in New York, imagine it's a field day and the night before trash night, which is called um. It's pretty bad. You know. The worst in New York is in the summertime and it's hot and it's rainy, and it's trash day and the sidewalks are just full of garbage or in the middle of a garbage strike. I mean, hats off to whoever makes that city run. They're doing a good job, I think Michael Bloomberg, Oh yeah, yeah, it's off to you, then, sir, h They forage in New York for things like furniture, bags of clothes, electronics, Like they'll camp out behind an office that's moving. M All of what you just said is called urban foraging, right. It all fall falls under that umbrella, which is just like foraging, except rather than looking for um routes to drink water from, you're getting office chairs for your squad or water. Yeah, that's another thing you want to But the point is is the the um the city is the forest with everything you need and then some if you know where to look and you can hold your nose. It depends. So you know, every everyone who's ever once a bad kid knows that the cops can go through your trash once it comes out to the curb. So there is actually a Supreme Court case UM from California v. Greenwood, wherein the the Supreme Court ruled that cops could once you put your trash out it was public property. You expected someone else to come along and take it eventually. And that means that anybody wants you can go to your trash, including cops looking for evidence that you're a drug dealer, or freakans looking for bananas that still look pretty good. Yeah, freakings thought, hey, this should apply to us too, right, Well, that's what they use and I think they I think they use it to a great success. Although there are a lot of laws UM like local, state, regional, municipal laws that UM are anti scavenging laws, basically because most people think of people who go dumpster diving is strictly UM hobos who you don't necessarily want around. I'm not sure that there's plenty of cities out there, you know, well, a lot of stores, grocery stores and the like will lock up and cage up their dumpsters to discourage this kind of thing. Some will put sharks in their dumpsters. Yeah, land sharks very dangerous if you come across one of those. Uh. The deal is they think that they can get a lawsuit if someone dumpster dives on your property get some food and get sick by it. And and um, that's not exactly true though, is it. Didn't the us D have a ruling on that. Uh No, the U s c A encouraged this. It's called the um Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Act. And I could just barely find who he was. He was a uh A congressman who encourage this act died before it could get passed. When they passed that, they named it after him. But basically it said, if you are a good person and you are giving away food, you're picking up food, you have any anything to do in the chain of taking food, rescuing it from the landfill to feed the poor, and you are not purposefully poisoning the poor um or doing it for your own benefit, and someone gets harmed, you can't be held liable for anything that happens. We're gonna protect you, but that that prevents that. The whole point was to encourage people like you, like you said, grocery stores and um, other groups to donate their leftover food rather than just let it go to way and a lot of people, a lot of places do that. We're not saying everyone just hatches their food. A lot of restaurants donate their food. It's great. Yeah, Um, speaking of food, though I did mention bruised fruit. A lot of times you're just crushed packaging boxes. Sometimes the cell by date is cruised on by and that doesn't necessarily mean that it's rotten. No, the FEDS don't have any kind of mandatory dating low except for baby formula and baby food, and cell by date is all voluntary. The used by date is the one you want to stick to. That's actually kind of rare. The cell by date is just saying it's past it's prime, but it's still got tons of life in it. Like, for example, if you can keep eggs at forty degrees fahrenheight just you know standard for a refrigerator. Um, the last for three to five weeks past the cell by date? Did you know that? And if you talk to my Mom, you can drink milk for up to two months after the date. I don't know about that one. The U. S c A Does say, though, that factory sealed bacon, not fresh bacon, but stuff that was in the in the factory that came last two weeks beyond its sell by date. And you mentioned New York being the center of freakingism, Well, it stays fairly cold New York throughout the year, right, which prevents bacteria from being from growing because bacteria throws between forty and a hundred and forty degrees fahrenh height. So I imagine that you're safest in below forty degree Weather's good point, you know what I say? What the nose? Nose? Yeah, I don't even look at the dates. I give it a good sniff. That'll tell me all I need to know about whether it's gonna go in my body. Yeah. I usually don't have time to sniff. I'm too hungry wolfing it down. And then if I'm still standing afterwards, so much the better. Uh. So that is urban foraging. Um. We should also point out to that sometimes stores uh actually bag discarded food separately from the other trash, so it's not like you're picking an Eclaire off of a lot of toilet paper and saying, oh, this looks fine. Uh. And then there's why all foraging. If you live near the forest and you're freaking you can collect plants. Uh. The website freaking dot info will actually tell you how to do this, tell you what's safe to eat. Um. Sometimes they practice guerrilla gardening. They'll go find a little unused plot of land. We've talked about this. Have you noticed that, like in the last couple of podcasts we've recorded, like five other podcasts have been touched on. You know, this means we're we're growing a body of work. Well, our quest to explain the world. It's all coming together. Oh it isn't it. Yeah, it's all tying. And at some point we're gonna say that's the last one. It'll be the time when we use the word is and realize we did a podcast on is. It depends on what your definition of is is. It's gonna be a long podcast, but we'll do it. A lot of them barter, like we said, they call it free sharing though, but what it is is bartering. They'll have a little market, freaking marketplace that's set up like every Saturday morning in this this part of New York, will all go meet and hey, I see you've got a a laptop that you fixed. I've always wanted a toaster oven. Let's make a deal throwing some rotten eggs and we're all good. Just sell buy man. What about healthcare, that's a big one, And I looked all over the freaking info site for this. Um. Basically, they don't have healthcare licked yet. Um. They've got it close though. There are healthcare collectives which have been successful here there say if you get enough people, you can get it down to about a hundred bucks a year per person, and those go to fun free clinics relies heavily on volunteers. Um. But the state operates all sorts of free clinics as well. UM, which I imagine if you just go in and say I dumpster dive every day, they'll be like, we'll take care of you. Um. So that one is not kind of licked because you can also make the you can make the case that well, that's freeloading again, and that completely undermines everything that freagans are about reloading, because it's not waste. Health health care is not wasteful. The um hours of a volunteering doctor or are in or not wasted. Of course not somebody would use those right well, but a lot of times they are avoiding the healthcare because of we don't want to support the pharmaceutical industry. We don't want to support these h ms. Have a feeling if it was the you know doctor down the street from with the white picket fence that gives you a coke and tells you to everything will be better, they might be a little more apt to support something like the health care syst right, And that I saw that stated somewhere that they were saying, like if you just cut out the profits, that it's much cheaper than we think. Interesting, So Josh, this food recovery is um what they're into as a freaking But that's not a new thing because we have a long history in this country and other places as far back as biblical days of gleaning. And that's when you have a crop. You especially nowadays with the big mechanic systems, they'll leave behind a lot of waste that they're not gonna go back and pick it all up, so they'll allow people, um, and they did this some biblical days after they've reaped the harvest. So if you're poor, you can come into the field after us and pick up what we've left behind. Yes, it's called gleaning, not gleaning the cube. You no gleaning. Gleaning UM. There's a group called the Society of St Andrew And there's a lot of gleaning organizations, but UM. One of the more famous ones is a Society of St Andrew UM where basically they just have a central hub and they say volunteers go pick up you know, discarded food anywhere you can and bring it here and then we'll distribute it. Right, a simple model, but it works very well. They And if you are a freaking I would imagine you get some sort of halo for volunteering at the Society of St Andrew. Yeah, you're the ultimate circle is completely you have a good, nice spot in freaking heaven if you do that. The whole idea, the anti consumer culture idea that forms freaking is um apparently finds its roots back in the sixteen forties in England and Chuck there's a guy named Gerard wind Stanley who lost his shirt in business, moved to the countryside and founded a colony that he called the Diggers, and the Diggers basically lived without money for as long as they could, not that long. But UM, when Stanley and the Diggers inspired the sixties counterculture diggers who UM created their own kind of utopian colony or movement, and they inspired Keith McHenry, who is basically thought of as the father of freakani is um, which popped up in the early twenty one century as far as you know, and now he lives a lush, rich life collecting on that word freaking. And then food he's a fat cat, right. And then Food not Bombs is another good, good example of UM. The free in movement incarnate right, which is basically like they're a gleaner society and then they go feed the homeless, feed the poor, feed freagans UM. And one of my friends, Justin, who's living on tour for a while UM out in California. He told me they used to call him soup not food instead of food not bombs. I was like, that's kind of jerky, don't you think? And he said yes. And as a sister a sister group to Food not bombs as homes not jails, which is pretty self explanatory. That's it. Uh, well, let me give you a quick example. If you're wondering and thinking these people are really weird, let me tell you about Daniel Zeta. He's an American who moved to Tasmania. But you might think it is weird in and of itself, not necessarily. About a decade ago, he's thirty five, and he gradually became a freagan as he became a little more conscious of the world around him, the environment, it wanting to help out the environment. He had a great job, government job. It's pretty good money from what I understand. Uh, And he eventually quit the job, and now he is a freaking pretty much full time. He doesn't dumpster dive though. He works for a food market. Basically trades his work for food. Whatever they're gonna discard he'll take. He travels around the state. He builds environment environmentally friendly houses in return for lodging, and then in his off hours he services the community. So he says he needs about two hundred bucks a month to live. And for a while he lived on a boat that had solar panels, and the whole bed of the boat was a garden, a vegetable garden, and he bought you know, sandals off the Internet that were returned because the dude didn't like him. He got his computer from his friend who was throwing it out because the hard drive was busted, replaced a hard drive. He's been using it for like five years. And uh, that's just one story. He's not some Weirdoh, he's not a freeloader. He's not some crazed hippie hobo freak. He's just a guy that was like, you know that, I'm kind of tired of buying into this whole system. So this is my life now. Chumps, if you ever me to freaking assume they think you're a chump. How they do chuck. If anybody wants to learn more about freakings, they can check out f R E G A N in the handy search bar, how stuff works dot com. And if this picked your interest, you should check out our another podcast of ours on how much money do I really need to live? Remember that one that was good? Uh, you can find both of those on how stuff works? Right, And I said handy search bar, So that handy failed search bar. I failed in my attempt to find a replacement. It is handy though. It's time for a listener ma'il okay, Josh, I'm gonna call this zebra fish email of course, from Alex. Dear Chuck and Josh and Jerry. I'm a research technician in a neuroscience science lab studying sleep in circadian rhythms with zebra fish. I first discovered your scintillating podcast several months ago, and they had quickly become part of my daily routine. Each morning when I come in to feed the fish, I turned up the speaker's blasting the show, and there are suddenly over ten thousand fans listening to your podcasts in a fifteen by fifteen foot room. They eagerly swim to the left sides of their tanks the position of the speakers as soon as the podcast begins, so the zebra fisher are reacting to the dulcet tones of Thus, I consider myself apparent to these fish, and that I feed them, clean their tanks, and educate them through your podcasts. One of the first errors I made as a parent was to make a false promise to these fish that if they continue to work hard in our experiments, which is administering cocaine to sleep deprived fish, that's what he's studying. Chuck and Josh would acknowledge their hard work on the podcast. Please help me out. Don't let down my fish for a false promise I made long ago. God speed. Keep your ear to the grindstone, Alex. I wonder if that tiny room that they keep them in is a bathroom. I don't know. And I wonder if Alex is really a scientist. Yeah right, he's just into getting fish high. Well we'll see. Well, Thank you, Alex. Thank you two our ten thousands zebra fish fans. Hello fish, You guys get some sleep. Okay they can't, they're dying to or they're just dying. If you are conducting some sort of odd experiments, we want to hear about it. Wrap it up in an email, will you spank it on the buttocks and send it to stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com. Want more how stuff works, check out our blogs on the house stuff works dot com home page. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you