Welcome to Stuff You Should Know. A production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles, the future Brian over there, Jerry's hovering about and this is stuff you should know. Another jazzy Earth Science Edition, Chuck. Yeah, and this is like I know we cover this head of an Internet roundup.

I don't think we covered I mean, we've done a lot of cave stuff. We did sinkholes, cave dwellers caving, cave diving, NEELEY allergy and cave diving. So which one like it could have come up in cave diving, I think maybe, but I feel like I remember showing a picture and feeling the Internet round up.

OK, yeah, we've been that's kind of funny because this then is the second thing we've done that we already did on Internet roundup and then forgot about.

That's right. That's the trend we're trending. But the cool thing about this one, Chuck, is that like these things that we're going to talk about today, blue holes are so new, scientifically speaking, they're so unexplored that there's a lot we can get wrong. And no one will know for like 10 or 15 years.

Perfect will be done by then. Isn't that great? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll be we'll be sipping mai tais on the beach, earning 20 percent by the end of German Barry Bonds when trading places.

No, that's a die hard. Yeah. OK, I think that was a mash up. Oh yeah. Yeah.

It's funny how things just kind of invade your subconscious like that.

Well I mean trading places, they definitely were sipping drinks on the beach, which did not happen in die hard.

No, but he says did he say something like that. Yeah. Yeah. He says by the time the FBI figures out what's going on will be sitting on the beach, I think he says sipping mai tais, earning 20 percent.

Does he say like in trading places? That's right. Yeah, but he, like, breaks. The fourth wall is serious right at the camera when he delivers, that would be great.

So obviously, as everyone's picked up by now, we're talking about blue holes. And if you don't know the blue hole is I feel like this is definitely one of those ones where we need to define it rather than just start talking about it out of the gate, define what it looks like or the reveal of what it is.

Oh, OK. Yeah, well, define what it looks like first. How about that?

All right. Well, it looks like a blue hole in the ocean, like, you know, there's ocean. Yeah. And then all of a sudden it's like, wait a minute, there's a you know, sometimes they're pretty circular, like almost exactly circular. Yeah. And sometimes they're oddly shaped, but it's definitely like a different color. And what it looks like from a bird's eye view is like, well, hey, that looks like it might be deeper right there.

And it is. Yeah.

And it's a much, much darker shade of blue than the surrounding areas because it's a deep, deep hole in the sea floor and the stuff around it is usually far shallower, comparatively speaking. So usually the area around is like a much nicer kind of lighter blue, green clear color. And then this is like this really stark dark blue hole again in the middle of the sea floor. And it's a really popular diving spots. You have to be a really good diver as well, sea to dive on a blue hole.

And there also have long for centuries been known locally as really great fishing spots, both commercially and for sport fishing. But the thing is, it's like it's starting to become clear to geologists and biologists that these things are kind of dotted all over the world. There's some out to sea, there's some that are actually landlocked, but that they share some commonalities and that these things, these blue hole's submerged holes in the ground or the sea floor are some of the weirdest, most amazing environments that that are exist on Earth right now.

Yeah. And, you know, we should probably say that fishermen everywhere are probably still mad at Jacques Cousteau, who in 1970 to put the great blue hole, which is one particularly striking blue hole off the coast of Belize. He put that on the map in nineteen seventy two on a show that I used to love to watch the undersea world of Jacques Cousteau. Did you watch that?

No, I saw the Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, though. So close enough.

Yeah, I was I'm not sure what channel it came on or if it was in reruns or if I was watching it live.

But it was sort of like, you know, that in Mutual Omaha's Wild Kingdom, where the two big nature shows for me growing up. Yeah. As far as turning me on to all this stuff, you're right.

The the I think the show ran from 1966 to 76, so it's entirely possible you were watching it live as a youngster, probably reruns.

Yeah.

But still, I mean, I'm sure it immediately went into reruns. It was wildly popular in that particular episode, if you're interested, was Secrets of the Sunken Caves. But yeah, he put this thing on the map, like not literally it was on maps already, but he introduced it to the rest of the world. And the great blue hole as that one in Belize that he covered is called is on basically every serious scuba divers bucket list to dive.

It's just it's just one of those places you have to dive before you die. Hopefully you don't die while you're diving on it, but it does happen.

Sometimes it does. And blue holes are basically. I mentioned Sink our episode on sinkholes at the beginning. That was a bit of an Easter egg because that's really all they are, is underwater sinkholes. It's a feature of what's known as a caste system KRC, where you have this porous limestone making up the bedrock, which, you know, leads to a lot of things. It's porous. So it sedimented like it wears away and erodes kind of easier, I think, than other kinds of bedrock.

Yeah, that's where if you listen to any of the caving episodes, is where you're going to get some of these great stalactites and stalagmites because that acid rain drips down and wears away that limestone. And, you know, it forms little icicles from the top. And then when it hits the bottom, it forms reverse icicles on the floor. And some of these blue holes have these stalactites and stalagmites because they used to be you know, they used to be land, right?

They used to be dry caves. Like, that's the thing. Once they found stalactites and stalagmites in these blue holes, kind of a dead give out to see. They're like, OK, this had to have been above dry land because the dripping effect of water coming from the top and then dripping down on the bottom, it's kind of lost in the translation. When the thing is already submerged in water, it has to be dry.

You know what I'm saying? Goes underwater?

Not really, no. I think it just kind of goes every which way rather than straight down. So, yeah, when they when they started finding these collectively stalactites which come down from the ceiling and stalagmites which come up from the floor, they're collectively called Stelio Therms, which we've talked about and plenty of other episodes when they started finding Coppelia themes. And in these blue holes, they're like these were once on dry land, which is pretty cool. But it also makes sense, too, that these are just caves that formed at some point in the great, great distant past on on on Earth.

I mean, where else are they going to form? You know, and it also makes sense that as a cavern formed through the same process that formed Stelio themes, it's just the water kind of carves out a hole in the the limestone. It dissolves it and then it gets bigger and bigger over time. And then all of a sudden you have a cavern that the roof of that area is not supported like it is surrounding. And so it's eventually going to collapse in whether it's on dry land as a sinkhole or if it's on dry land, and then that eventually becomes submerged by water.

You have a blue hole. So it's just a sinkhole that's now out to sea because of sea level rise, basically.

Yeah. And one of the cool things about the great loophole is when they started looking at these stalactites and stalagmites, they were like, well, some of these looked like you would expect because when things drip, they drip straight down or build straight up. But some of these are angled sometimes up to 12 degrees. And they're like, that's pretty interesting. So what it probably means is that this thing formed over many, many, many years and the Earth's tectonic plates started shifting and so they started dripping at different angles.

So you've got this really cool effect that happens where you have these, you know, something that you wouldn't see normally in a cave, basically. So a couple of years ago, Nat Geo and Richard Branson did an expedition where they were basically tried to map the great blue hole 3D map it. And they went down there and they they went deeper than I think had been before in in a submarine like that and found a bunch of stuff. They found that it was filling up very slowly.

I think they likened it to like an underwater hourglass. It's very slowly. So it's not like it's going to be full any time soon. They found a two liter bottle of Coke, GoPro camera and some some dead people, some dead humans, a lot of dead animals, but some dead humans as well. Yeah.

So the blue hole has claimed at least three lives that we know of on record. Right. Which is actually kind of a low ratio compared to some other blue holes out there. But they are still down there. And like you said, two of them were found by Branson in the GEO crew, and they came back and told the authorities in Belize exactly where they were. And they also apparently said, but look, it's really quiet down there. It's really like a restful place.

Like you could do a lot worse for a final resting place than the bottom of the blue hole in Belize. And I guess the authorities I don't know if they consulted with the families or what, but I I was made to think by some of the stuff I read that the authorities in Belize said, you know, let's just leave them down there.

And that will be their final resting place, which sounds a little morbid from the outside. But that's actually kind of customary when it comes to cave diving in particular. I think we talked about that a little bit in the cave diving episode.

Yeah, for sure. And the cool thing about the great blue hole is that at one point. It was it was in the jungle. Yeah, so that would make it a different kind of blue hole, which is still technically a blue hole, but it's called an keyline, I'm pretty sure that's right. Pool, which is a blue hole, but it's landlocked. So like the rim is exposed to dry air. It's not underwater, like on the sea floor because the sea levels just aren't that high.

And one of the interesting things about the great blue hole in Belize is it was at some point because sea levels lowered so, so dramatically during the last interglacial maximum about 26000 years ago, that that a significant portion of this vertical cave, which is now the the great blue hole in Belize, was dry.

It was just totally dry. Like you could walk around the top of the rim because it was no longer underwater. You could jump in, you would die, but you could jump in and you would go all the way down. And then maybe at about the bottom, say, 20 meters of the cave, you would finally hit seawater. So over time, the seawater levels have risen from the last time the Earth was in an ice age. And the seawater says sea levels have risen so much that now the cave is totally submerged and is actually many meters under the surface of the sea because of sea level rise.

Yeah, and there's there's some really cool things you can learn from from studying these blue holes. And maybe we should take a break, OK, and learn about those right after this.

All right, so there's a couple of really cool things that you can learn by studying black holes, one of them is you can look at the sediment and you can basically kind of get a snapshot of of ancient weather patterns. I think when they when Branson and the gang went down to the great blue hole, they found a lot of sediment where it sort of indicated that in different areas, it indicated that that perhaps the Mayan empire had several severe hurricanes and maybe had something to do with them not being around for much longer.

Yeah, because so the these these blue holes are basically at a certain level cut off from the ocean above them. Like there's a point where there's no currents any longer, where the waves can affect it, where there's no oxygen dissolving past a certain boundary that we'll talk about in a second. And so beneath a certain depth there, just like this, this perfect record of the earth's geological history, frozen and sequestered from everything else. So if you go down there and this is the kind of the trend that they're starting to figure out, these are the expeditions are trying to launch and start taking samples of the sediment.

You can get like a really good picture of Earth's say, like hurricane past or drought past. Apparently, when when there's spikes in iron content they take that is from dust storms from Africa, which which says that there's probably severe drought around the world that year. So there's all of this information you can glean that's just trapped and locked in the bottom of these these great blue holes because they're so deep and so remote and so unaffected by the world above them.

I just think that's amazing.

It's super cool. The other cool thing you can learn about is sea level rise. Over the years, we don't have the clearest picture in science of ancient sea levels. And when they were, you know, like exact levels of when they were glacial periods and interglacial periods and the rising and falling of the seas. But if you go down there and you radiocarbon date these stalactites and stalagmites, you can compare them to the relative depths of the whole cave system.

And then you can basically say, when was there air here? When was there water here? And get a pretty, you know, at least a much better picture of what the sea levels used to look like.

Yeah, and they figured out that the the cave itself was formed between about hundred and fifty, 3000 years ago to about fifteen thousand years ago. There are four major dry periods where the cave was exposed during that time. And I don't know if they figure it out from the the the great blue hole itself or if they just already knew this. But apparently in the past, the sea level has risen really quickly a couple of different times, I think 11000 years ago and 8000 years ago, over the course of like less than 150 years, it rose 25 feet and then again twenty one feet in less than less than two centuries, which is a really significant rise.

And having information like that is really vital to kind of placing our current sea level rise and experience of climate change in context, in this greater context of Earth's history and possibly its normal rhythms or what's abnormal. So to be able to understand that because of the kind of the record that's kept in the blue holes is is extremely helpful.

Yeah, and I think that the usual level of sea rises about a meter every century. Yeah. So a spike of twenty four and twenty feet is really, really big. Yeah.

I mean you could basically watch it happening, you know, it start to come up around your ankles if you stood in the same place long enough.

Another cool thing about blue holes and in particular the great blue hole is there is a layer of hydrogen sulfide that basically acts like a blanket and there are different depths depending on which blue hole you're talking about. But it's just a real concentrated layer of hydrogen sulfide. That is, it's a byproduct of decaying plant material. And it's kind of stinky. It's kind of that sulfur egi smell that you might smell sometimes. And it's really, really clear water below in this area.

It is really brown and kind of gross. And then, you know, it's so far down it doesn't look brown gross from the top. It still looks nice and blue, but it's really a separation point where above it you have life and below it there's no oxygen getting through. So you have no life.

No. And I saw it described as like kind of a hazy brown kind of cobwebby layer. I think in the great blue hole in particular, it's about 30 feet thick. And it starts at about the 90 metre mark and you have to you have to go down past it and I guess creepy, it is creepy, but it's also apparently like even though you have a rebreather on our scuba apparatus, it still seeps in through your skin while you're swimming through it.

And people will, like, throw up and get itchy, kind of break out in hives, start to get nauseated and headaches because it starts it creeps in through your skin and just that short time. So it's really gross. It's really, really toxic in this concentrated form. It's like basically concentrated gas form, suspended in a blanket layer and oxygen can't get past it. So it's an anaerobic environment in that lower layer, which means it should be totally dead and lifeless.

But one of the things that they're finding out about blue holes is that even in this anaerobic toxic layer, there is archaea, another type of life that's not quite bacteria and definitely not eukaryotes or prokaryotes. I can never remember which one we are, but they lived on extremophiles is what they're usually called these these days. And there's a whole kind of teeming colony of life down there that actually takes all the stuff that accidentally falls into the blue holes and digests them and turns them into this bioavailable nutrient rich sediment that's just kind of trapped down at the bottom of the blue hole.

Yeah, and in the great blue hole, when they went down there, they saw I think they described it as a I think they were saying, Koncz, I'm not sure which is correct, but I've always said conc that like a graveyard down there, basically, where it's just littered with all these poor little sea creatures that happened to fall below that that layer. And they can't get back out. And it's like Silence of the Lambs ask. There's even like scratch marks where you can tell they've tried to get out over the years and we're unable to conc fingernails that have peeled off into the sides of the walls.

It's a bad jam. What do you think about that Clary's show? Is it going to be any good?

I like the concept. Yeah, me too.

But as a direct sequel, but an anime, I saw that they they seem to be recreating the Lam thing. And I think one of the I just saw this movie like a week ago and it's still just so good. I think one of the strengths of is that they don't show any of that story. It's all just Clarice and her. Her telling of the story, I think makes it so much creepier.

Yeah, there's no, like, flashback scene or anything. Right. So this TV show did that. And I'm wondering if that says a lot about it or not.

I'm wondering who is playing Buffalo Bill because they recreate some of that stuff.

It looks like my friend it's our old pal Tommy Chong, the note holder. He got himself a pretty sweet gig. He's playing him.

No, I'm just like, man, I mean this. You just get that. That guy, he's around. Still creepy looking. Yeah. Yeah.

James Gumm, the guy who played Jenga. Yeah, sure. Yeah. My not. So where are we here. We were talking about little crabs and things trying to get up unsuccessfully, which really is super sad.

Yeah. So there's a whole conch graveyard. Who is saying where they British. Hmm, I don't remember because I've always heard to so, yeah, there's a whole conc hermit crab graveyard down at the bottom of the blue hole and it is sad, but it's just kind of like the circle of life thing. But again, the weird thing about these blue holes is that some of them are not circles. It's all just a one way deposit of stuff from the top down to the bottom and everything just kind of gets stuck there.

And again, forms is pretty cool record isolated in time. That's not entirely true of all blue holes. It is for the great blue hole and plenty of other blue holes where it's just like things go in. They don't come back out. But there are other blue holes out there, including one called Green Banana Blue Hole in the Gulf of Mexico. I think off the coast of Sarasota, that is pretty deep. It's like 450 feet, I think.

Four hundred and thirty five feet below the surface is the bottom of it. And it starts one hundred and fifty four feet below the surface. And it's some incredibly vibrant, alive oasis in the midst of this relatively barren Gulf of Mexico desert. And they are trying to figure out what the heck is going on because other blue holes, there's this like. Life suckers in this blue hole is like have some more life, you get some life, you get some life and you get some life, you know, it's a pretty interesting conundrum.

Does the green banana have that layer? Yes, although so I'm sorry it doesn't have the layer, but it has plenty of hydrogen sulfide in it. There's so maybe that's the difference. There's some. Yeah. And they're trying to figure out why. Because there's another hole similar called amberjack hole that they've explored and it definitely has a layer. But there's also some sort of nutrient flux or exchange with amberjack, too. But in the green banana, there's like it's like a two way highway going from the top to the bottom up to the rim.

And what's interesting is they've figured out that there are microbes there, I think archaea that actually eat the inorganic carbon that leaches out of the dissolving walls of the cave under water. It eats it in, turns it into organic carbon, which then makes its way up somehow to the rim so that there's actually more life that can be sustained, there's more bio available carbon than would be there if those microbes weren't chomping on it and turning it into organic carbon.

So it's pretty interesting stuff. And like, you don't find this kind of thing just anywhere.

So they're starting to really figure out that, like, these blue holes are very unusual, unique communities even among compared to one another. But especially when you step back and compare it to like Topeka, it really knock your socks off. Yeah, and these are you know, they're all underwater cave systems, there are parts of these cave systems that are still unexplored because they're so vast or so deep. And like you said, they're new and they're, you know, it's dangerous to to get down there, even if you're Richard Branson in a fancy, you know, multimillion dollar submarine.

One of the things, the ones off the coast of Florida that they're trying to figure out is whether they actually connect to the aquifers in Florida and whether or not that is the reason why there's some saltwater intrusion going on in the states drinking water.

Yeah, and it's possible that that flow of nutrients up and down the green banana has to do with some sort of tidal connection. So there's like a flushing mechanism. Maybe it could be from the aquifers. They don't know. But that would be a big one to figure out because saltwater intrusion, especially down in Miami, is an enormous problem and will probably lead to that city being abandoned in the next 50 years.

Poor Miami, unless, I mean, we could always figure out desalination processes, but yeah, there'd be a town to save, if you ask me. I love Miami. Oh yeah. Oh it's vibrant. I'm not the biggest fan, but, you know. It's not for everyone. Sure, no, but it is. I like it, I think it's a great town.

Should we take another break here? Yes. All right. We'll take a break and we'll finish up with.

With diving in these things, I guess. Sure. So like I said, you know, Jacques Cousteau kind of said, hey, everybody, go check out the great blue hole. It's amazing, but there are plenty of other blue holes out there that everybody wants to dive on. And we should say the great blue hole is not just famous because of Jacques Cousteau. It's not just noteworthy because of Jacques Cousteau. Not like he could have gone to just any blue hole and it would have been like the the best known blue hole in the world.

Like it's incredibly large. It's not the deepest blue hole on the planet. I think that one actually goes to one in the South China Sea called the young Lee Marine Cavern, which is about 300 meters, nearly a thousand feet deep. This one is, I think, four hundred and fifteen feet deep, but it's a thousand feet across. So if you combine it with and its depth, it's the biggest blue hole out there as far as we've discovered yet.

Yeah, and that's what makes it great. And that's what makes it a diving destination. But it is very dangerous is not something any kind of novice diver wants to take part in. In fact, I'm sure I'm not sure how they are. You're probably not even allowed to unless you're at a certain level of diving ability would be my guess. I think it depends on how they can police that, right?

Yeah, that's that's my question, too. I don't I don't know how they police at all. I read about one called Jacobs. Well, I think in New Mexico or Texas that some people die diving on it. And somebody tried to put up a great that kept people out of the rest of the cavern system and they just immediately removed it and kept going. So I don't know how you would police that either.

But it is dangerous because it's super, super deep. It's dangerous because of that layer of hydrogen sulfide that we talked about. You know, we've I know we talked about the bends and quite a few episodes, but nitrogen narcosis can happen it just 100 feet down. So, like, the conditions are just so different than anything you would normally encounter as a diver. You can't just use your regular rulebook and playbook and think everything's going to be just fine, like it's very specific conditions.

You really got to know what you're doing as far as blue hole specific diving goes. And like we mentioned earlier, those three people died, at least three people. There's probably been more, I would guess, but three verified people have died in the great blue hole alone.

Yeah, from what I saw, when you dive a blue hole, it's a combination of technical diving, which is like really, really deep diving. That requires all sorts of planning and skill combined with cave diving, which requires, like we talked about before, all sorts of finesse. Like if you're Flipper just flicks one of these spillar thumbs, it just dissolves into a cloud of silt and you don't have any idea what's up and what's down any longer.

So it is really, really tricky. And, you know, people do die. You saw that one article I think I sent from Fiz dot org, I think where it was talking about them searching the cave system under Dean's blue hole in the Bahamas. And they came across a diver who was still wearing his 1970s scuba equipment and had been left in place there after dying there. So it's like really, really dangerous diving. There's a blue hole in Egypt that's considered the graveyard, the divers graveyard, I think.

So that that diver look like Brad Pitt in Once upon a time in Hollywood, basically. I mean, wouldn't that make it exponentially creepier to just the fact that it's like 70s diving equipment? That's just something about it would make that horrifying to come upon in a dark cave.

It's cooler looking. Oh, yeah. Equipment for sure. They should have never progressed past that design into the, you know, Mountain Dew electric yellow kind of thing that they've got going on today.

Yeah. Back when they were called skin divers.

Exactly. I don't even know what that means. I don't either.

I don't either. Because you usually are wearing a wet suit. Maybe maybe they're it's like the opposite of a dry suit diving. I don't know. Who knows. Everybody in the seventies was stoned on pot. So you can't make heads or tails of what they're talking about.

These things, blue balls are also a good place to go. If you are a free diver and if you're interested in setting any kind of a free diving record, a blue hole is a great place to go, even though it's dangerous because it's super deep. We talked about free diving before, but that's, you know, that's diving without the scuba gear. It's people that can hold their breath really, really long time. People that can whose bodies can adjust to those depths better, I guess.

Or maybe they're just trained to adjust, but. Than other people. Yeah, and I think it was the site up until Simay recently where they actually had a competition there called Vertical Blue, where they have set world records. But I don't think they do it there anymore. Right.

I don't know if the whole vertical blew or not, but there is a type of freediving called No Limits Free Diving, which is I think they stopped recording records because they didn't want to encourage people to do this any longer. Sounds terrifying. It's like the most extreme version of one of the most extreme sports there is. Free diving on its own is just crazy nuts, but no limits. Free diving is where you have, I think, flippers on in a wetsuit and a mask, and that's it.

You just take a deep, deep breath and hold it. And then you take a weighted sled that pulls you, plunges you down to the depths of the blue hole very, very quickly. And then when you reach the level that you're trying to reach, usually to set a new record, you grab on to a buoy that's sound there and it takes you back up really quickly. And I was like, how can you not get the bends? And the key is the trick is you're not breathing at depth.

You're just holding your breath when you breathe it. That's how nitrogen bubbles can get dissolved into your bloodstream if you're just holding your breath. I guess that that could happen. But I think it's much less likely for it to happen either way. It's not it can't possibly be good for your body because these guys are holding like they're holding their breath for nine minutes. I saw in one case. Yeah.

I mean, you can imagine what it does to your body going that fast down and then fast back up again. Yeah, like I can't go eight feet down in a swimming pool without my ears doing something funny.

You just kind of like, oh, that hurt. But I don't know. I mean, obviously it's practice and training and all that stuff, but I say no, thank you. Yeah.

And so we should tell people like what the depths we're talking about. The guy who holds the record right now is named Herbert Nitsch, head of the 700 two feet like this back in 2007. And in 2012, he did it again, this time to 831 feet by but by that time, they weren't recording records any longer. So it's an unofficial record, but 831 feet on a breath and then back up. That's yeah. Nuts, man.

So you can imagine that when people try this stuff, they die sometimes. And at that vertical blue competition at Dean's Blue Hole, which is Anketell and pull or pull up in the Bahamas, a guy named Nicholas Mevoli died back in 2012.

Very sad. It is. It's a very dangerous thing to do, free diving. It's also a dangerous thing to do, diving on blue holes. But I guess it's one of those ones where that you work toward a goal and you finally get to do it and your life has changed forever. Kind of.

Yeah. You know. You got anything else?

I got nothing else. I don't either. Man, if you want to know more about blue holes, there is a lot to learn out there. So just start researching and thank us later. And since I said thank you, Slater, it's time for Listener Mail.

This is a good one. This is in response to the NAACP episode. Hey, guys, just finish listening to NAACP. Made me think of my father's college days. He attended Ole Miss when James Meredith joined the school and one day saw an opportunity to help a young field reporter named Dan Rather move his equipment from the registration building to the library. My dad kept in contact with Mr. Rather and let them know that he was actually living in the same dorm as Mr.

Meredith. And that is how his time as a stringer began providing mostly audio clips of events happening at the school. He said at the time he was selling reels to CBS, ABC, CBS and the BBC, making around six to eight hundred dollars a week. Wow. Just real money for a college kid in the sixties.

Yeah, I mean, that's real money now. Yeah, it was only a matter of time before the university found out who's providing the footage and offer my dad the choice of stopping or being expelled. He opted for expulsion, thinking he could just enroll in another college, but then learned that his transcripts were flagged and he could not just pick up and move to another school. So he had to go and write. So he had to go back to Ole Miss and promise not to report any more so he could finish and get his degree, which he did.

Several years later, he married my mom and they took a trip to the CBS studios near them. And my dad suggested they pop in to say hi to Dan Rather, my mom. But he was pulling your leg. They went to the studio as to speak to him and was promptly asked if they had an appointment and was turned away. As they were leaving, Dan Rather walked by and said, John, last name, redacted, how the heck are you?

Curse word redacted. And according to my mom, she almost fainted. Anyway, my family family's always taking a lot of pride that my dad helped shed light on the. Integration at Ole Miss, Canada's role could have been filled by almost any of the students living in his dorm, but he was the one who did it. And that is Brenda in Sarasota, Florida. That's a great story, Brenda. And then jibes quite well with our Blowholes theme because there's some officers Sarasota to totally.

That's great. Yeah, the University of Mississippi is like, you better stop reporting now. Get back to class in journalism school.

All right. Exactly. Well, thanks again, Brenda. And if you want to get in touch with us like Brenda did, you can send us an email to stuff podcast that I heart radio dot com.

Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio for more podcasts, my heart radio is at the radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.