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[00:00:00]

Hey, friends, are you registered to vote to update or check your voter registration status, go to head count, dawg, where you will find all the information you need to be ready for Election Day, register to vote today at head count, dawg.

[00:00:14]

Her with the Menagh Brown is a weekly podcast brought to you by Cynical Women Podcast Network and I Heart Radio.

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I'm your host, Amena Brown, and each week I'm bringing you hilarious storytelling and soulful conversation centering the stories of black, indigenous, Latino and Asian women. Each week we are going to laugh, consider and reflect upon the times. Join me as we remind each other to access joy, affect change and be inspired. Listen to her with Amina Brown on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Hello friends. We have a book coming out finally and it is awesome. You're going to make me say the title again. Yeah, fine. It's stuff you should know. Colen an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. And get this, Chuck, you don't have to wait to order until the book comes out. You can do what we in the book biz call, preordering it. And then when it does come out, you'll be the first to get or among the first.

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Well, and not only that, you get a preorder gift. You get this cool custom poster from the illustrator of the book, Carly Manado, who is awesome. We worked with another great writer who helped us out with this thing a great deal. His name is Nils Parker. And it was just a big team effort and it's really, really cool. We love how it's turning out.

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Yeah, we do. So anywhere you can buy books, you can go preorder the stuff you should know, Collin, an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. And then after you do, you can go on over to stuff. You should read books, dotcom and upload your receipt and get that preorder poster. So thank you in advance for everybody who is preordering.

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That means quite a bit to us and we appreciate you stuff you should read books. Dotcom preorder now.

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know. A production of IPART radios HowStuffWorks. Hey, and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Joshua. Joshua Clark. And there's Charles W. Charles, Chuck Wayne, Shaquan Twain, Bryant and Jerry the J dog. Roland is floating around somewhere in the ether. So this is stuff you should know everybody. Hi. Hi.

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This is the episode I'm nervous about. Why? Because of me. Oh, what? I mean, why? Because she knows so much about it. She's going to be like, you got this wrong, that wrong. Not so much getting it wrong. Just, you know, it's one of these it's close to her heart.

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So I feel like I got to do right by it. Oh, I'm sure you will. Like, I usually don't care at all about anything we ever talk about.

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Gee, but this one I care about.

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You're like a nihilist like Philly. Hey, by the way, we should mention we got a book coming out. Yeah, we do.

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Which not only do we have a book coming out, we have a preorder gift that's ready to go now, too. I think we have a pre order gift, which is a custom poster. It's written by us and designed by Carly, our amazing illustrator for the book. Yeah, that's right. And we even have a book website now. Oh, is it up already? Yeah. Have you seen this thing. Yeah, I saw the drafts of it.

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I didn't see that it was up. I'm so glad you're handling things. So thank you for doing that.

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Yes. And that is stuff you should read books. Dotcom so great. Oh, and it looks great. The web page looks awesome and it gives a little excerpts and you get a little peek inside.

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It looks way better than our actual site, like our regular stuff. You should know. It's like it's great. We're working on that too. We are. We are. But so here's the deal. You can go anywhere and preorder the book now and then come.

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I think sometime in is in October, November, Chuck, that when the preorder gifts know no coming, when the actual book arrives, when it comes out, I think we pushed it back a little bit into November. Right. OK, so you will eventually get the book.

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But in the meantime, if you go on to the website stuff, you should read books, dot com. You can upload an image of your receipt and they'll say, Oh, thank you for preorder in the book. Here is your preorder gift and you can hang it in your room next to the torn out posters from Tiger Beat magazine. Wouldn't it be? I don't think so. Smart smarty pants. Uh, yeah. So we're going to be mentioning this a lot because as John Hodgman told us, the secret is ABC, ABCP always be plug in.

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That's why I know where that is. It's going to be on his headstone and they'll probably be a QR code on his headstands. He can buy his books. Oh, man. It's a great idea.

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So we're talking today not about books necessarily. We're talking more about essential oils than books, although there's plenty of books on essential oils, but there's nothing to do with our book. Instead, Essential Oils has to do with our podcast, in particular this episode of our podcast, which is on Essential Oils.

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That's right. And these are the oils, these little chemicals that are stored in plants, in the glands of all different kinds of plants and all over the plants, from pedal's to stems to roots. And depending on where you are in the plant, you might be getting a different kind of oil from that particular spot.

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Yeah, there might be a certain type of essential oil found in the seeds in a totally different one found in the leaves or the roots or the bark or the stems, the twigs, the hair, the teeth. Basically, every part of the plant can hold some sort of essential oil. And one of the things that I love about this, Chuck, is that science isn't 100 percent sure exactly what the functions are of essential oils, but they know that it's some form of communication.

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I mean, like scent is a form of communication in the plant world, in the animal world. And these communicate different things, likely things like get away, cow, I don't want you near me and eating me instead bring on the honeybee to help pollinate me. That's right, and we'll get into what they have been used for and are used for, but it's safe to say that since the times of ancient Egypt, people have been using essential oils.

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Certainly back then, before there was modern medicine as medicine. Right.

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So so we'll talk about all this. Let's get into also a big shout out to Julia Layton for helping us out with this one.

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Yeah, Julie is back in the rotation. Very happy about that for sure.

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So essential oils to us. You know what an essential oil is. Most people do. But as far as like plants go, as far as chemistry goes, they're really just a certain kind of compound. You can divide them into two different categories. One is oxidated compounds and the other is hydrocarbons. And oxidated compounds come in all different forms and shapes, things like alcohols, phenols, oxides, esters, aldehydes. And then on the hydrocarbon side, there's a they fall under one category called terpene.

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If you have ever been in a drug education class and the educator brought out that briefcase full of different drugs, you may have gotten a whiff of the marijuana that is the terpene in the marijuana that give it that distinctive smell.

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That's right, and by the way, I'm going to read it on a listener mail some point, someone said that we should not use the term marijuana anymore. Oh, my gosh. Why? And then use the term cannabis because apparently the term marijuana was created as sort of a racist term to make it sound.

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Wow. For foreign south of the border. Wow. It evil.

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Yeah. Wow. The news to me. So.

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Well, it makes sense. Yeah, sure. Wow.

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OK, well we'll start calling it Zwirner. OK, that's the new name for pot everybody.

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X Factor. I think that's a TV show. We might get sued. That's a Joe Rogan TV show, isn't it? No, that was Fear Factor.

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I bet you anything.

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There was an X Factor and a bit Joe Rogan had something to do with it, but he's like, we're going to come up with a good name for the spin off.

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So you were talking about, like you mentioned, one thing. You said something about an alcohol. People are like, what, in a plant?

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But that's true. Like if you look at peppermint oil, that that great scent that you get from peppermint oil is the alcohol menthol. Right.

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And all of these all these different things, they're different kinds of compounds. They're they have different kinds of atoms put together the different things. They provide different functions. Again, they probably all largely have to do with plant communication to other plants or to animals. But they smell different. They combine to make different smells. The thing that they all have in common is that essential oils are all Vox's volatile organic compounds, which are just a type of compound usually, I guess, carbon base.

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They might have to be. Yeah, because it's organic. So they're all carbon based compounds that have in common the fact that at room temperature or at low temperatures, they evaporate. They have their boiling point is so low that it happens at room temperature and it can happen at such a low point that it doesn't actually even go from solid, you know, alcohols to to liquid into gas. It can sublimate sometimes just from solid into gas. And it's that gas that spreads out off of the plants stems or leaves or rose or petals, whatever, and hit our olfactory senses through our nose and we smell.

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But that's all it is. It's a compound that that vaporizes very easily at low temperatures and spreads through the air.

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Yeah. And, you know, those little tiny droplets, they diffused through the cell membrane and then all of a sudden they're on the surface of the plant just waiting for somebody nostrils to come by.

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It's kind of like that old question, like if a tree falls in the woods, does it make it sound like if if there's nobody there to smell a volatile organic compound, does it actually smell?

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And the answer is clearly yes. Yeah. And just the tiniest I mean, sometimes you can just smell with your nose and it smells great, but sometimes the tiniest bit of activation will get it going. One of my favorite things to do is on a walk when someone's got one of those big, beautiful rosemary bushes out in there by the sidewalk is just, you know, Emily and I both and and my daughter to just run our hands up one of those stocks.

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Sure. And just rub our hands together.

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And you got delicious steak hands, which is why I mean, that's also a good example, why if you grow, Rosemary, that you use in your food, you want to grow it away from the side.

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There's you know, people are tattooers walking by with water on their hands, are having your food, basically. Hey, man, if you if you've got a edibles in your front yard, then that's your fault.

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I know. I'm saying yeah, they're up for grabs, but you so you need like the public Rosemary Bush for people to walk by and smell that you need, like your head stash Rosemary Bush up by your house, you know. Right.

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And if you go up to the house, you can lean out the window and say, hey, sir, that's my private bush.

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Stay away, steer clear, steer clear. So OK, so volatile organic compounds. We've kind of gotten that across, I think. And with essential oils. This is, I think, pretty essential to know that when you smell something like lavender or rose or juniper or something like that, like, you know what that smell smells like. And from researching this stuff, I think scientists have managed to isolate the essential oils found in like 3000 different species of plants so far aren't amazing, 300 of which.

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And we'll talk about this more later, but 300 of which have been shown to have some sort of biomedical properties, which is pretty important.

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But from all of these, they've realised there is a central player. Right? Like what was the one that you called out? Peppermint oils ments. All, huh? It's the type of alcohol, but if you just smell menthol, you're not like that. That smells like peppermint. Instead, the essential oil is that main component that mean volatile organic compound with dozens or hundreds of others in varying quantities and amounts, all mixed together just perfectly so that you have not menthol but peppermint, the essential oil of peppermint.

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And that is what an essential oils is. It's a really intricate, complex combination of volatile organic compounds. That is the essence of that plant. That's right. The essence of the plant. That's exactly perfectly said. And I'll just say this now.

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We're going to talk about them in a minute. But there is a Swiss chemist, Chuck, named Peristalsis, and he was an alchemist. And it turns out the alchemists are the ones who coined the term essential oil because the alchemists believe believed in five elements, the four elements where Earth, Wind, water and fire. And then there was a fifth element that was like elusive. It was the one that bound all the other elements together. And just it was the glue that bound reality in existence in the universe together.

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And so quick to essential comes from Quinter essence, meaning the fifth essence or the fifth element. And so quintessential is was shortened eventually into essential oil, which was the thought to be the purest, most basic, fundamental essence of a planet. So that's where we get essential oil is from alchemists.

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Boy, why wasn't there a soul band in the 70s named The Fifth Essence featuring Billy D. Williams?

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He could open for Earth, Wind and fire and water. Yeah. And they would have done the soundtrack to the Fifth Element. Yeah, whatever. So if we go back in time, if we have in the old Wayback Machine, boy, we haven't been in this thing for a while. No.

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Think about it. Kickett Jerry.

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It's fired up. It smells a little musty. We've been in this thing since in 2020. Well, you didn't dry out the life preservers from last time.

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You just threw them in there in a pile. Now they're all that was true.

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Well, luckily, we have some essential oils on hand because we're going back to ancient Egypt. And this is when they started using essential oils, integrating them into medicine, the trades between, you know, of course. And in China, they were doing stuff like this in the Orient and trade routes between the Orient, the Mediterranean really opened up this up, opened up this trade to these sort of magical oils as far as they were concerned.

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We know it's not magic. Now, let's go back.

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Back then this was this was early medicine, you know for sure.

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Yeah. I mean, it was it was used in traditional Chinese medicine. Still, is it spread from Egypt to the Mediterranean to the Greeks to the Romans, over to the Persians who figured out how to distill ethyl alcohol from sugar, which we thought was a really big component in extracting essential oils from plants. There was a huge innovation and then that trickled over to Europe in the Middle Ages. And that is where we join up with our friend Peristalsis, that Swiss chemist whose birth name was Philippa's Theophrastus aerialists, bombastic von Hockenheim.

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Oh, man, it's amazing. Isn't that amazing? Just Von Hoggett home gets a statue in my mind. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's pretty amazing. But he was known as the Luther of Medicine because at the time people were like, oh, this Gailen guy had it all figured out. There's four summers and that explains everything. He's like, no, no, let's use like evidence based science. Let's use things like chemistry. And this guy was an alchemist even.

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And he died bitter and angry because no one would listen to him. But he really helped kind of push things forward as far as reforming science into thinking scientifically is concerned.

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Yeah, and he was a big proponent of these plant oils that he was extracting and the compositions were revealed in the nineteenth century. And then, of course, you know, the twentieth century comes along and we get much more efficient with our extraction. And that just means more essential oils, which means more experimentation, basically.

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Yeah. You know, and it could make him a little X factor in a little fooling around.

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Who knows? Should we take a break? Definitely. Now. All right. Let's take a break and we'll talk about this extraction process, something that I see under my desk a lot these days, right up to this.

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It's no secret that in Washington, D.C., corruption is everywhere, you could say it's gone viral and I should know my mom's the speaker of the House. My name is James Parker. My friends are all in the same boat. Daughters of the D.C. elite. When are this close to power? There's nowhere to hide. And when my friends and I got a little too visible, our parents broke us up.

[00:18:45]

But now I need them back because I'm in deep.

[00:18:49]

You see, I'm a bit of a hacker in here.

[00:18:53]

No one knows me as James Parker. They only know me as Storm Boy and Storm Ally. Well, she went poking around somewhere she shouldn't have. I'm James. I'm Peyton. I'm Celia. I'm Natalie. And we're the daughters of DC. Join me and my friends, four daughters of DC, a new twelve part scripted podcast, political thriller from the team that brought you Liza Lit Einhorn's Epic Productions and I Heart Radio. Listen to Dogs for Free and I heart radio, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.

[00:19:26]

Imagine this, you've been playing football for years, dreaming of going pro, and then it happens, life as you know, it changes with a phone call.

[00:19:36]

I finally got that call just through know I'm ready. Go, go, go. This is Keegan Michael Key and welcome to Drafted.

[00:19:44]

This podcast series follows eight players as they enter the twenty 20 NFL draft. This is their real life as it unfolds in real time. And each player tells his own story unfiltered. I'm not a first rounder, not even the top three rounder. This is something I've been dreaming about. I've been doing this for my son.

[00:20:02]

We go behind the scenes before, during and after one of the biggest days of their lives, and we relive every detail from the players perspective. Please join me on the first step in their journey to greatness. Welcome to Drafted. Listen to Drafted on the I Heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. So I want to say something, check with extraction, one of the reasons why essential oils are so expensive, and if you get really good essential oil, you're going to pay a lot for it.

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I saw if you bought a liter, seems like a lot of rose oil, but if you're going to turn around and sell it in smaller amounts to other people, you probably buy a liter if you have twenty one thousand dollars to cough up for a single liter of rose oil. And the reason why essential oils are so expensive is because it takes so much plant material to to get that essence from it. Right. So with with roses in particular, you can expect to need about five metric tons of rose petals just to get a kilogram of rose oil, 3000 lemons to get a kilogram of lemon oil, and something like 440 pounds of fresh lavender flowers to get a kilogram of lavender essential oil.

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Yeah, for our American friends who are like, dude, what are you even talking about?

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600 pounds of rose petals for one ounce of essential oil or 40 to 60 rosebuds for a single drop of Rose Ottowa Central Oil.

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I love stuff like that. Well, essential oils are my favorite new thing. No, it's cool. But it's also, you know, sustainability is an issue because of that. Oh, yeah. They use the most plant material to produce produce that very small amount of oil. So you're throwing away the rest of the plant?

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Well, yeah. I mean, that is true. But here's another way to look at it, Chuck. If if the purpose of life, genetically speaking, is to multiply is as much as possible, we are helping plants by propagating them and we're doing it because those plants are producing a smell that we like. So in this sense, we are the slaves of plants who were propagating as much as we possibly can to produce that smell more. Yeah.

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And, you know, Emily's all about essential oils for sure, but she's also gotten much more into using the whole herb and the whole plant and trying to use like as much as the plant is possible, which is pretty cool.

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She's like, you just stick this whole twig of rosemary up your nose and you'll be fine. She's really learned a lot. And it's pretty impressive to see, you know, and inspiring to see someone learning so much, you know, midlife, something brand new, like going back to school, basically. Yeah.

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I can actually attest this is not a paid plug. Everybody. Chuck does not give me money for these. We got some soaps and some room sprays. I think I told you from from Emily. From her. Oh yeah. Company. And we actually sent some to some friends and within like a couple of weeks they were asking they were dead, where can we work, can we get some more of this because we're spraying this lavender spray on our pillows every night to go to sleep.

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And they wanted to make sure that they could secure more because they were halfway through the bottle that we said them, not even like we're out where, you know, where'd you guys get this? It was we're halfway through. We want to make sure we can get some more. So Emily's taken the good stuff for sure.

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That's right. And get to love your mom and dad. Come in and check it out. She's a small business and they're all hurting right now. So we always appreciate the business.

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Yeah. So extraction there are have been a lot of different methods over the years. As Emily told me, she's like, you know, these are all ancient methods are not all ancient methods, but many of these are ancient methods.

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Does she say things like lo first lo these these ancient methods, what she does say Honfleur age, OK, which is a very interesting older technique where you isolate these essential oils by using purified fats.

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And this all sounds gross. But what you would do back in the day, and I'm sure there are probably still some people doing it this way and you can probably go like pay five dollars to watch them dress up in old timey clothes and stuff and do this. But you would get a talo and lard mixture and spread it out on a flat surface. And then the first thing you have to do with any of these is you got to crush up the plants really well.

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And you you coat it with these crushed up plants and the fat absorbs these voices, takes a few days, then you filter out those plant parts, you know, because you don't want those around anymore. You've gotten what you needed from them. You're done with them.

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Get out of my sight. And then the fat will eventually become saturated with this essential oil. And then you extract that oil with a solvent, basically like alcohol. Yeah. From what I saw, though, this is a multi-step process where once you extract. Once you get rid of, like the plant material, once you've gotten the essential oil out of it, you repeat the process again and again and again until the fat is saturated with essential oil.

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Oh, yeah, that's pretty cool. And I mean, that's great. That seems very ancient indeed. And there's another variation of it called maceration hot fat, which is where you do the same thing. But you you warm the fat to kind of speed up the absorption process. So I guess that means that essential oils, or at least certain kinds of them are fat soluble is what I'm taking from this.

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Yeah, I couldn't really figure out this maceration.

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That may be an old term because like a macerated oil was basically an infused oil. You're using a carrier oil now. Yeah.

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My understanding or my familiarity with maceration is when you make a shrub, the vinegar shrub, to put it cocktails or whatever masquerading is where you. Basically chemically mash the fruit by putting so much sugar on it that it just breaks it down and then you take that and add vinegar to it and shake it up and let it sit for a few weeks and thank me later.

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One of my favorite ways of extraction is good old fashioned mechanical expression. Another good band name. And this is like citrus rinds. Yeah. Like all those great essential oils that you get from an orange peel or or a lemon peel and you cold pressed this stuff and just extract those oils with good old fashioned elbow grease.

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This is what Lucille Ball was doing to those grapes in that classic episode where she's mashing grapes by jumping around the tub with another lady.

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I mean, is there anything better than taking a lemon twist and squeezing that thing into a drink and seeing those little that citrus sneeze come out of it? Yeah. And then like that, it kind of floats like oil on top of the drink. It's when you get it just right, it is very satisfying.

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Agreed or to you know, if you ever just like use some lemon juice and then throw away that lemon without using the peel for something, then you're doing it wrong like. Oh yeah. Sprayed in the air, sprayed on your counter, sprayed on your hands, do whatever.

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Oh friend. This is what you do with the lemon peel. You never throw it away. You throw it into your garbage disposal and eventually run your garbage disposal. And not only does it make your garbage disposal smell really good, it actually disinfects the garbage disposal so that it doesn't smell funky. Nice. Yeah, do that, like if you drink a lot of lemon water, your garbage disposal is going. Thank you for it. I saw one of those, and I hate calling them hacks, but one of those food hacks lists the other day and this was pretty good, you take instead of cutting the lemon and then getting like a cheesecloth or something to keep those seeds and things in there.

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Yeah, you just roll it on the you know, before you do anything, you roll it on the counter like a rolling pin with your hand. Yeah. And just get it all soft and squishy.

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And then you just stick like a like a skewer, like a kebab skewer through the little what's it called. The nipple.

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Sure. To nip the nip of the lemon all the way through and then that's just a little spout and you can just squeeze the heck out of that thing.

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Oh no. The only thing that's coming out is the juice. I've never heard of that food hack was a good one. You know what else we could call that? Part of the lemon is the the lemon mousse knuckle. What do you think about that?

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Fatter than you make your choice. Uh, what else do we have?

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Well, Emily is a steam distiller. You know, she's got a still and she uses steam distillation process. Yeah. Which is very cool to see.

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So with steam distillation is basically the same thing that you would use to make like gin. The still that we talked about in gin is basically the same thing where you've got hot water that's producing steam. The steam rises up through like a great or a grid or something. It passes through that and then up past these mashed up bits of whatever plant you're extracting the essence from. And then that water vapor carries those essential oils from the mashed up plant up, up, up, and then down, down, down again to another part of the still where it's cooled and turns into a combination of oil and water.

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And correct me if I'm getting any of this wrong, because I've never actually seen this first hand. And then the oil and water goes into the final little area with a spigot at the bottom for the water spigot at the top for the oil, which will eventually start to float.

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It sounds about right. OK, great. And then I saw something else, Chuck, that ties into another episode of ours that I found very satisfying.

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Ultrasound is, you know, sometimes to pre mash the ah, I guess pre extract the essential oils. So you take say I saw a demonstration using this ultrasound wand basically, and these had a cup of water and like hops that they mashed up some hops and they just stuck the ultrasound wand in the water and made the water go crazy.

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And what they found is they're using a lot less energy and even less plant material. You can extract more essential oil because the cavitation that's produced by the sound waves in the walls of the cells that hold the essential oil in the plant, those cell walls get busted open and so ready, essential oil comes out so you can actually get more essential oil out of the plant and it takes lower temperature steam to look for essential oil out. So there's no thermal degradation and there's a lot less thermal degradation.

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So you use less plant material, less energy to get more essential oil out thanks to the beauty of ultrasound.

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Now, before they did that demonstration, did they say this wand has not been up anyone's but you? Of course. OK, so this stirred every single video in Germany. Oh, boy. That was a German company. Sure. And they're into that kind of thing.

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Yeah. And Germans, listen to this. Hey, Germany, because we have a specifically tailored ad for Germany, which I'm proud as punch about. Yeah.

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Guten tag, everyone. Yeah. Uh, you know, that means it means this one has not been up anybody's but. That's right.

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Couldn't talk. So the uses of essential oils, depending on who you ask and we'll get into the controversies of how they're marketed because there are some for sure. Yeah. A couple. Um, you know, if you read some sites they'll say basically they'll cure anything or maybe not cure anything because you have to be careful of how you say things. But they still say that, yeah, it's bad. Uh, but some of the legit uses of essential oils, they can be a preservative, they can be a flavoring agent.

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They are certainly used to send agents and all kinds of things. Yeah, Emily makes her own insect repellent. Mosquito repellent.

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Is she use like citronella?

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Um, she's I should know this because I sprayed all over my body, like, every night. I don't know. I just trust her that she's doing it right. Uh, it can be a fungus, sidel, herbicides and pesticides agent for crops.

[00:33:16]

And then there's aromatherapy, which we'll get into in a few minutes as well. Yeah. All of us will make a lot more sense in a second once we talk about the actual evidence based research into what kind of biomedical properties essential oils have at what are the things that we found like pretty early on. And we should say there's, you know, hundreds of essential oils that are used for aromatherapy or for industrial purposes. And we really have studied just a handful of them.

[00:33:50]

But the ones that we have studied have turned up some pretty interesting results. Like we found that very clearly some essential oils are antimicrobial and antifungal as well. Some essential oils are both at the same time, like clove oil. If you're a bacteria or a fungus, you do not want to be around clove oil because it is going to mess you up pretty bad. Worse than than Rocky on Draco eventually.

[00:34:17]

Yeah, tea tree oil is something we use a lot in our house as well to like dry out pimple, let's say. Yeah.

[00:34:24]

Or to heal something, you know, something like on your skin. It's very good for skin treatments. Yeah. Uh, what else here. I mean, and we should mention to the reason people are turning to these is because there's a big movement and there always has been. But there's it seems like it's really gained steam in the last decade of people trying to find or natural alternatives to synthetic treatments.

[00:34:52]

Sure.

[00:34:52]

Which is laudable and commendable as long as the science backs it up. And part of the science also, too, is showing that it's not actually harmful, which we'll talk about, too. But one of the things that they're figuring out about essential oil, and they are scientists, I should say, is that because they have antifungal properties that antimicrobial properties and because those properties survive being vaporized, that you could use this stuff as a spray for cleaner, conceivably.

[00:35:21]

And that's not to say like just stop using any other cleaner and just use clove oil. Although we use clove oil a lot to disinfect things, we use lavender oil to disinfect things. So I don't know, maybe do what you want, but we're probably going to start seeing more essential oils in cleaning products than we do even now. And they're starting to be all over the place.

[00:35:45]

Yeah, I mean, the air base disinfectant is pretty interesting. We use you know, Emily makes room sprays and those I don't think are so much for the disinfectant. It's just a good, you know, scent based poop cover up.

[00:35:59]

Yeah. Oh, I hadn't thought about that. I was just using it to make the room exponentially more pleasant.

[00:36:05]

Yeah, but they're good to have in the bathroom, you know what I mean. What do you mean if you poop.

[00:36:12]

I got another cool thing is, is there is increasingly there is drug resistance. Yeah. Among infectious microorganisms. And so that is opened up the doors for more research into the anti pathogenic properties of essential oils because they're saying like, hey, maybe some of this stuff can be replaced, these synthetic compounds with these natural compounds.

[00:36:38]

So they're so they're talking about Mersa here. Right. So like one of the problems with Mersa is that it's resistant to the drugs we have. So if you even if even if you're like I don't care if it's all natural or the most horrid industrial compound we've ever come up with, kill the mersa because it can kill us and we can't treat it. They're finding that essential oil has properties that Mersa can't develop a resistance to. So not only can kill Mersa, we would expect that Merce's not eventually going to evolve to be resistant to these essential oils as well.

[00:37:14]

Yeah, and I mean, maybe now would be a good time to take that next break because we're going to dive into aromatherapy. And that's the one area, like you said, they've done.

[00:37:25]

Well, I wouldn't say a lot, but they're doing more and more studies on a handful of essential oils in there and their uses. But aromatherapy is the one area where they still have not done a ton of studies. And that's probably the most controversial area. Of essential oils, wouldn't you say, it is for sure. And before we take a break, I do want to say we're talking about individual studies that are basically the first steps in a scientific understanding of the properties, the biomedical properties of essential oils.

[00:37:58]

So it's all like, gee whiz in everything. But it's not.

[00:38:01]

It's not it's not it's not settled by any any stretch of the imagination. We're still just beginning to investigate this stuff. So bear that in mind as well. Hi, this is Hillary Clinton, host of the new podcast, You and Me both, there's a lot to be anxious and worried about right now, and it's made so much worse by the fact that we can't be together. So I find myself on the phone a lot, talking with friends, experts, really anyone who can help make some sense of these challenging times.

[00:38:43]

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[00:39:41]

All right, Chuck, we're back right to talk about aromatherapy, and this is when you get into the different applications for essential oils there in Emily told me to make sure I mentioned that there is there are people out there that are recommending people actually ingest essential oils more and more. And she's saying, don't do that.

[00:40:04]

That sounds a lot like injecting bleach or cleaner to to combat viruses. That's not that's not how these work. Yes, she's saying there are people out there recommending that you literally ingest this stuff and she's saying don't just don't do that. It's a good point.

[00:40:25]

Yeah, it's much, much better in a tincture maybe, or a topical thing. Or in this case, we're talking about aromatherapy, which is breathing stuff in either through your skin or into your mouth and lungs.

[00:40:40]

Yeah, but either way, apparently, however you ingest it like that through your lungs or your nose or mouth, your olfactory center is initiated and it starts doing all sorts of different things, depending on what the what volatile organic compounds are hitting it. Right. And when I found that was a really good example, my favorite smell of all time, lavender and lavender, through some of the letters in the green, through some studies, lavender has been shown to prevent serotonin reuptake.

[00:41:16]

They've shown what kind of neuro neurochemical mechanisms lavender affects our brains through. And one of them is it prevents serotonin transporters from doing their job. Once the serotonin transporter gets a hold of like a serotonin molecule, that thing gets taken out of your brain and you're no longer feeling your mood from that particular molecule of serotonin. Well, lavender or specifically, I think Levin Duell, which is a terpene from lavender, prevents the serotonin from taking up or the serotonin transporter from taking up that serotonin.

[00:41:51]

That's step one. And then another one is that it's an end DMA receptor antagonist, which puts it in the same class of chemicals that dissociative chemicals as ketamine. So they've actually studied lavender now closely enough to say this is how it affects your brain and it definitely does affect your brain. So there is something to the idea that aromatherapy does have therapeutic effects and lavender in particular.

[00:42:21]

Now we understand how now do you mean SSRI potential, like a natural SSRI?

[00:42:28]

I don't know, because I think part of the other thing about essential oils, too, is like the impact in the effects that they have on us are pronounced enough that we could study them and see them. But it doesn't necessarily mean we're going to be able to just take lavender pills as like a mood enhancer or to combat depression. It's just not pronounced enough for that. It could conceivably open a door to some some inquiry or some investigation that could lead to new synthetic compounds based on what we find.

[00:43:01]

But just taking like lavender is not going to cure your depression from from anything I've seen.

[00:43:07]

Yeah. And I think I mean, it depends on who you're talking to. Some people might advocate for a complete replacement of, you know, a practitioner of TKM, let's say, might be like Neman. Don't take any any of these, quote unquote, Western medicines like this is the only stuff that you need to be taking.

[00:43:28]

But other people will say, hey, you can augment with things like lavender or eucalyptus or cedar wood and stuff like that.

[00:43:36]

I have no problem with augmenting. I have no problem with traditional medicine of any culture. As long as it works, it's not harmful to the user and it's not harmful to other sentient beings or the planet. Those are really my only qualifications. As long as it works, just go for it. But just make sure that those those caveats are checked or else it's harmful.

[00:44:01]

Yeah, well, let's let's talk about some of these purported benefits of these various oils we talked about lavender, of course, relaxation, sleep is where you're going to see a lot of it, like spraying it on your pillow. Eucalyptus is a big one for congestion, for burns, for cold sores, arthritis. Even Rose is a big one for anxiety. And a lot of these two have to do with skin, things like eczema or dandruff or rosacea and stuff like that.

[00:44:32]

And all of these. You should say these are all ones that, like the essential oil industry, says that not not that science necessarily backs up.

[00:44:40]

Right? Well, that's what I meant by purported health benefits. OK, gotcha. I gotcha. Yeah, I didn't pick up on that.

[00:44:48]

Or if you play the video game Dead Red Redemption, you can spend a lot of your time gathering herbs because it's the old West.

[00:44:57]

What do you do with those herbs you use them in, craft different things with them to help yourself?

[00:45:02]

Oh, that's neat. Do they have X Factor in it?

[00:45:05]

And then, you know, I got bit by a rattlesnake the other day in the game and I said, you've been poisoned. You might want to go find some medicinal herbs and eat them.

[00:45:15]

Did you survive? I survived and I shot that snake.

[00:45:19]

Do you shot the snake? That's got to be tough to shoot a snake. Yeah, they are tough to hit. Yes. Unless you pull out the old shotgun. Oh, well, there you go. Yeah, it's funny. Someone who loves animals and hates hunting as much as I do really gets a kick out of hunting in this game. Well, it's different. I don't think it counts. It's not real as far as we know.

[00:45:40]

It's not real.

[00:45:43]

So, you know, some of these oils have been studied to a certain degree. And I like the way that Julia puts this studied enough to confirm or strongly suggest a positive association between oil and a health outcome.

[00:45:59]

But it's tough because the, uh and we'll get to the FDA part, but all these plants are different.

[00:46:07]

And it's when you're talking about these scientific studies that's all built on consistency of the product that you're testing. Yeah. Replication. Yeah. And because these are plants, it's tough, but we're depends on where the plant grows and what month you pick it and how it was distilled. You know, there's so many X factors.

[00:46:27]

And this one. Yeah.

[00:46:30]

Kind of compounds things, right. It does. And I mean, apparently, depending on the time of day, the plant might be producing different levels or types of of essential oil. And because no one has said this is the chemical compound of the chemical recipe of, um, lavender essential oil, because there's nothing like that, then even if you are trying to apply science to studying essential oils, you don't know if you're studying the exact same thing that somebody else is studying who's getting results that you're having trouble replicating.

[00:47:07]

It's very it's definitely like the Wild West right now. Like people are getting bit by rattlesnakes level Wild West. Yeah.

[00:47:16]

And it's you know, it's important because it's not regulated by the FDA right now. It is. It falls in that weird gray area between being a pharmaceutical medicine and being a cosmetic. And so they aren't FDA regulated. So they don't have to go through that testing and approval process that medicines do. Right. So technically, they can make vague claims, like if you are an essential oil producer, you could take some of these studies that you found that may not have been peer reviewed, that may have had a very small sample size that may have been virtually made up, but that support your your claim that say things like, you know, Roman camera meals, good for heart health or something like that, you could put that on the label.

[00:48:08]

But if you say something like Roman Kandhamal helps stave off heart disease, you'll then you'll get a letter from the FDA saying, like, hey, you're making health claims that you can't back up, that science certainly doesn't back up and you need to stop. The problem is there's a lot of companies out there making these claims right now all over the place. And a lot of them come in the form of multilevel marketing or pyramid schemes like I think young living is a really good example of that, where you can find, um, young living products in your neighbor's garage or on Twitter or Instagram and not necessarily in a store.

[00:48:53]

So it makes it very difficult because it's decentralized. It makes it difficult for the FDA to find out about this stuff. And then even when they do, they don't. I have a lot of recourse to to stopping it, aside from sending threatening letters, threatening legal action.

[00:49:07]

Yeah, and I think they were one of the ones that markets to pregnant women specifically. Yeah, that right? Yeah, and this is where we get to like this is why it's actually problematic. Yeah. I mean, you know, any time that you're any time it's an unregulated substance and they're saying, hey, use this on your baby or use this if you're pregnant. And there's been so little peer reviewed research, then that's when it can get a little bit dodgy because there is very little research on how these oils should be used at all on on kids and babies.

[00:49:45]

Right. As a matter of fact, I mean, there's a couple of of companies let's see, young living has like a series of essential oils that they recommend for different stages of pregnancy. Hopewell has a whole baby chart, the four for your child to use for things like teething or ear infections, that kind of stuff. These are all essential oils. And the problem is, is some essential oils have been shown to actually potentially be harmful for women, for pregnant women, like there's a whole class of essential oils that are that can produce sudden and heavy menstruation, which is not what you want to do when you're pregnant.

[00:50:28]

So those oils should not be marketed toward pregnant women who should not be using them like Rosemary is a really good example of that. It's actually used as an abortifacient in Brazil and traditional medicine in Brazil because it can bring on heavy, sudden menstruation. So there's there's a lot of reasons not to use these things, depending on your situation, who you are. And the problem is, is not not only that kind of marketing is being avoided, they're actually being aggressively marketed toward women without proven results, but also without being proven as safe because they skate, you know, the edges around FDA regulation.

[00:51:13]

Yeah.

[00:51:13]

Or that there may be like one study that is sort of cherry picked and overstated. I know that in this article, it's mentioned the 2008 study about lemon oil and the effects on mood. And in that study, they you know, the subjects did say that their mood improved, but then the scientists were like, well, your actual biological markers on stress and mood isn't really changing. So is it the placebo effect that's going on here, which I mean, they said they felt better.

[00:51:45]

Yeah, and that's fine. The placebo effect is fine, Chuck. It's just that if you're not treating something else or you're not you're not using something else to actually treat a problem like lemon oil, improving your mood, that's who cares. But if you're if you're using something that's actually harmful, then that is problematic. And what you were just talking about also about how you could just cherry pick a study. That's essentially what we were doing toward the beginning of this podcast when we were saying there are some studies that have shown that it's you know, these definitely do have antimicrobial and antifungal properties.

[00:52:20]

So maybe we'll end up seeing them as like, you know, aerosolized disinfectant spray in the future. That's really close to what some of these companies are doing. But instead, these companies are actually selling these things and saying, here, drink this or take this or use this based on these cherry pick studies.

[00:52:37]

Yeah, and I know the company t t are a they've come under fire. They're one of the giants of the industry. In 2014, they got a big warning from the FDA about crossing that line into making medical claims. And they're like, you know, you're you're basically touting yourself as a as a pharmaceutical and and you're not basically. Yeah.

[00:53:03]

So so a really good example of this is some some essential oils. There are studies out there that have shown that they may have antiviral properties. Right. Like how clove oil has antibacterial and antifungal properties. Some some essential oils are showing the possibility of being antiviral as well. So then those essential oils would be taken by a company like Young Living or Doctora and marketed as a cure for Ebola or coronavirus. That's a big problem. That's a huge leap.

[00:53:41]

That's totally unfounded and that people really should not be using rather than, say, seeking medical attention. Because you have to you have to assume that somebody who is turning to essential oils to cure their Ebola is probably doing so because they don't want to to use Western medicine. The problem is, is Western medicine is one of the few, if only courses of treatment that has been shown to be able to take on Ebola and certainly not something like Klotho.

[00:54:12]

Oil, so that's really, again, I don't know if I'm getting this across or not, that's problematic. Same with using marketing essential oils to cure things like and again, we're using the word cure here, Parkinson's disease, autism, diabetes, hypertension, cancer, insomnia, maybe insomnia, heart disease, PTSD, dementia, M.S., tetanus, all these things have been marketed to be curable by certain kinds or combinations of essential oil. And there's just not science to fully back that up or even come close to backing that up right now.

[00:54:47]

Right, and but that's not to say that you can't use certain essential oils to help with nausea because of your cancer treatments or something like that.

[00:54:55]

Yeah, or apparently lavender also is good with helping curtail agitation and aggression in dementia patients, which is great because those are really tough to treat pharmaceutically. So there is stuff that it can do. It's just it can't cure Ebola. Like stop and think for a second. It can't kilovolt can't cure Ebola. I'm sorry. Maybe if you take a ebolavirus and put it in a petri dish and put a drop of clove oil on it, then yes, I would not bet you a single cent that that that clove oil wouldn't kill the Ebola virus, I'm sure.

[00:55:31]

But that's not how our bodies work inside. So stop and think for a second. If you actually are walking around believing that Cloverdale cures Ebola, stop for a second and just do me that favor. Just stop that what you're saying, just stop and think, don't forget, the second part is very important.

[00:55:51]

Oh, see, I usually just stop. That's not good.

[00:55:56]

Thank you for letting me go off there. Regardless, this is a big industry and the market is is booming and growing. It's expected to reach seven point three billion in just the next three or four years. And that's up from about four and a half billion just last year in 2019. And they're looking by 20, 26, 14 billion dollar industry.

[00:56:24]

Yeah, big money. It is big money. So you got anything else? I got nothing else. I've said my piece too. So since we don't have anything else about essential oils, everybody, it's time, of course, for listener mail.

[00:56:43]

I'm going to call this fellow breakfast. Hey, guys, just listen to your episode about bruxism. I myself grind teeth like a champ, but I got really excited when I heard that Chuck and I have the same mouth just went to the orthodontist in the list of atrocities inside my mouth. Could take up a short stuff episode. So, Chuck, I feel your pain. I have a cross bite, a weird underbite. I feel like my lower jaw belongs in a different mouth, just like you.

[00:57:09]

I love the orthodontist feeling like a freak of nature and hearing that one of my all time favorite personalities has the exact same diagnosis made me feel less pitiful.

[00:57:19]

Eventually I'll have that horrible jailbreaking surgery and the plan was to recover with cheeseburger, smoothies and stuff. You should know Marathon now it'll mean a whole lot more. And that is from Erika McLarens from Memphis, Tennessee. And Erica, my family is from Memphis. So you might be my sister from another mother. That's right. That's great.

[00:57:42]

That was given. Thanks a lot, Erica. I'm glad Chuck can make you feel a little better about things, because that's what Chuck does best. Who's going to make me feel better?

[00:57:50]

Me or and want to. Emily's room sprays will help to. You need to get those things out of the bathroom and get them more involved into your life.

[00:58:00]

Chuck, they're. Oh, dude, I'm constantly being slathered and pink and poultices and tippity did. I'm a guinea pig. Nice. That's a pretty pleasant thing to be a guinea pig for, I have to say. I agreed. Well, if you want to get in touch with this like did Erica. That's right. Erica, I just want to make sure you knew you still do things again. Erica, you can send us an email to Stuff podcast and I heart radio dotcom.

[00:58:32]

Stuff you should know is a production of radios HowStuffWorks for more podcasts, My Heart radio, because the radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hi, this is Hillary Clinton, host of the new podcast, You and Me both, there's a lot to be anxious and worried about right now, and it's made so much worse by the fact that we can't be together. So I find myself on the phone a lot, talking with friends, experts, really anyone who can help make some sense of these challenging times, like Semin Nasrat, author of one of my favorite cookbooks, or Stacy Abrams, who we know as the woman who should be governor of Georgia.

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But did you know she's also an award winning romance novelist, or Tanne Frantz, who has lots to say about everything from athleisure to the American dream? These conversations have been a lifeline for me, and now I hope they will be for you, too. So please listen to you and me both on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm John Heilemann, host of the podcast Hell and High Water from the Recount America in 2020 feels like Apocalypse Now again.

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