Walter Isaacson set out to write about a world-changing genius in Elon Musk and found a man addicted to chaos and conspiracy.

I'm thinking it's idiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a fingertips feel for social, emotional networks.

The book launched a thousand hot takes, so I sat down with Isaacson to try to get past.

The noise. I like the fact that people who say I'm not as tough on Musk as I should be are always using anecdotes from my book to show why we should be tough on Musk.

Join me, Evan Ratliff, for On Musk with Walter Isaacson. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Tune in to the new podcast, Stories from the Village of Nothing Much, like easy listening but for fiction. If you've overdosed on bad news, we invite you into a world where the glimmers of goodness in everyday life are all around you. I'm Katherine Nicolai, and I'm an architect of COSE. Come spend some time where everyone is welcome and the default is kindness. Listen, relax, enjoy. Listen to stories from The Village of Nothing Much on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, guys, it's Josh. For this week's Select, I've chosen our warm and cozy 2016 episode on Fireplaces, just in time for Christmas. I hope you have your wasel handy or some eggnog or a nice glass of water, if that's what suits you. I'd like you to settle in here with a cozy blanket and listen to this crackling episode of Stuff You Should Know. Happy holidays and Merry Christmas.

Welcome to Stuff You Should.

Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerome the Jayors. So this is stuff.

You should know. Jerry got a piece of mail the other day that said, Jerome.

Oh.

Yeah? Yeah. I think real mail, though, right, Jerry? Yeah. I don't know how that happened.

Oh, like mail mail, not fan mail?

Jerry just said, confirmed. Weird. We've been doing a lot of this Jerry translating lately. Yeah.

It's really weird. That's bizarre. I mean, I sold your address to a mailing list, but I've never been reimbursed for it.

So how are you, sir?

Great.

We are fresh off our live shows in Boston, Mass.

Right, Ma.

And Washington, D. C. And big thanks to everyone that came out. Those were a lot of fun.

Yeah, for sure. And thanks to the brightest young things for having us to the Benson Ball with Tygna Tarot.

And all that. Yeah, it was wonderful. We got to meet Tygna. She was just as nice and non-plused.

As I would have hoped. Exactly.

She didn't make a fuss. No. Nor should she.

Wait.

I mean that in a good way.

Wait, isn't non-plus the opposite of what you think it means?

I don't know.

I think non-plus means like you're agitated.

You mean you're plused? Yeah. I'd learn things all the time on this show. Yeah, me too. It's my favorite part of my job.

And most specifically, the most recent thing I've learned, Chuck, is that the use of fire, the technological application of fire, that's as far as I'm going. Actually, actually predates humanity. That it was Homo Erectus, who was the first upright hominid who controlled fire. It was as long ago as a million years. There's evidence of the use, the control-to-hold use of fire by humans as much as a million years ago.

Yeah, it says here in this article that you found that in China, there are hearse of clay, silt, and limestone from like a half a million years ago, and signs, like you said in Africa over a million years ago that people... And these are in caves, so essentially indoor fireplace.

Right, yeah. And if you are an anthropologist, you are familiar with the term hearth, but that's usually used to describe something that doesn't really resemble the hearth that we'll talk about today. Usually, it was just a shallow depression. Maybe it did have some limestone or some clay or something else to keep it from catching fire, but nothing like the fireplaces we know of today. The ones we see and say there's a fireplace, they're actually about 700-ish years old.

Yeah, and I think the history of the chimney isn't super clear, but by the 14th century in, of course, Europe, when you had a little dough, you could then afford the nice chimney or maybe just any chimney.

Well, actually, yeah, people started to afford chimneys quite a bit. Theres was, especially in, say, jolly old London, there was a lot of chimneys that sprung up. Yeah, they weren't happy about it, right? A lot of problems that arose, as we'll see later on. But yeah, it's interesting to see the fireplace hasn't really changed much in like 700 years. And then you step back and you're like, No, actually, that's evident when you think about the fireplace and how ridiculously inefficient it is.

Yeah, it's changed. I don't know, it depends what your definition of.

Changed is. A hole in the wall with a hole above it that's tall and narrow and leads to the outside.

Yeah, within that, there have been.

A lot of changes. Sure, but the overall general design has been relatively unchanged for 700 years. It's like toilet paper.

Yeah, they're not as straight as they used to be. Ben Franklin was someone who did a lot of complaining in life.

He did.

Out when he was just the person who would look around the world and his everyday surroundings and say, Why do people do it like this? That's stupid. I'm Ben Franklin. There's better ways. Listen to me.

Right.

Take a peek under my silkin robe. Sure.

He very famously wrote that on the back of the Declaration of Independence.

But fireplaces used to get under his skin, apparently, because the design, and we're going to talk about this, the traditional fireplace is fairly wasteful.

Oh, tremendously so.

And it can even make your room colder.

Yes, which is-Counterintuitive.

Yeah. It's like non-plus. Yeah. I looked that up, by the way.

I'm correct. The non-plus means you're agitated.

Well, it means that you are surprised and confused to the point that you are unsure how to react. So not necessarily agitated. Okay, got you.

But you're definitely not just like, laid back.

No, so Tygna Tar was not non-plus. She was not confused on how to react. She reacted the exact way, which was, Hi, nice to meet you.

Yeah, hey, how's it going?

Yeah, she's just chill.

And.

Very sweet. Yeah. I didn't expect some big show, trust me, from anybody that meets Us.

Well, no.

I just want to put that out there. I didn't want to sound like I was disappointed.

She didn't throw those snap crackers and start.

Tap dancing? No, I got exactly what I wanted, which was a very nice lady who gave me a big hug and a photo.

I think that's come across. Yeah.

I'm sensitive to that stuff. Once I start opening my mouth, digging that hole, you know what I mean?

Here's a little.

More rope. Anyway, let me give you a stat here.

Wait, first. I think everyone wants to hear about how you felt when you met Tignetaro.

I was super excited. Can you tell?

How was she?

I.

Don't.

Know. Here's a little stat for you. The National Association of Homebuilders did a survey, and I guess this is recent. It doesn't name the year, but it sounds recent. People still want their fireplaces to the tune of 77 % of home buyers say, and that's, I.

Guess-in the US?

Yeah, I mean, that's accounting for the hot places as well.

Sure.

I would imagine in the cold places, it's probably more like 100 %.

Yeah, well, remember, I don't remember what episode it was, but we talked about how in New York, it's very gosh these days to have a fireplace that you use because it's.

So wasteful. Now, does gosh mean what I think it means? Now I'm doubting everything.

It means super layback and non-plust.

Oh, so New Yorkers are like, Oh, you have a fireplace? Yes. How not green? Right.

Which, I mean, they're correct. There's a lot of ungreenness associated with fireplace.

Brownness?

Sure. For. Especially as far as air pollution goes, air quality. There's a lot of problems. Heating efficiency? Sure, there's a lot of problems that come out of it. For example, I guess if we're going to talk about this for a second. If you are a kid and you have, I don't know, respiratory diseases, you're far likely to be living in a house where your folks burn wood. So if you're a kid or an elderly person, respiratory distress can be brought on because smoke is going to get in the room no matter how great the fireplace is.

Right. Or let's say if you already have asthma or something, you're not doing yourself any favors by letting that smoke and the particles, particulate matter creep in there.

Yeah. And also, I mean, like house fires, there's like 25,000 house fires in the United States every year that result in 10 people's deaths.

Yeah, directly from fireplaces. Yeah, but.

No matter who you talk to, for the most part, people say, Still worth it. Yeah. I'm going to die of black lung and my house may burn down before I get a chance to, but I really love fires in the winter, and I'm willing to take that risk.

So you know my deal, or do you?

I don't know.

We live in a house that was built in 1935. Oh, yeah. And we're renovating it still forever. Yes. And we have the fireplace that is not used. I know. And it's not able to be used unless we pay some pretty good dough to get it retrofitted and the chimney worked on. And I, for years, have been leaving just little sticky notes, and I'll write it in crayon on the bathroom wall and just little things like, Hey, Em, how about that fireplace? And she says, quit writing on the walls. We're not getting a fireplace just yet.

But maybe.

We've been there for 10 years. When do we start living our life is my question. With a fireplace.

Have you considered trading something she wants for the fireplace?

It doesn't work like that in here.

No? Okay. Have you considered begging?

That doesn't work either.

Oh, wow.

I.

Don't know.

What to tell you. Well, I mean, you know what I do? I wait till she goes out of town and I just do it.

They just do it yourself, but do it in a terrible way so that somebody, a professional has to come in and go.

Behind you. Yeah, and then you have no choice. You're like, I got to get the fireplace guy.

In here now. There's a giant hole in the wall.

Long story short, though, we still don't have a fireplace, and I'm still, despite all the negatives, and I try to lead a green life, but I just want that wood burning thing. I don't-We'll talk about the substitutes, and that's great if you're into that because they are better in many ways. But I just love that wood crackle, the smell. I want that particulate matter.

Filling my lungs. You and 77 % of US homeowners. Yeah. So, yeah, most people do say, I'm willing to look past the problems for a wood burning fireplace. But like you say, there's alternatives. That's right. But we're going to talk about all of it here.

Should we talk about the parts?

Yeah, let's talk about... This is when I say there's very little change to the design over 700 years ago. It's true, man.

Yeah, I didn't realize some of these parts existed, so I did learn quite a bit in this. I thought was pretty much the Firebox and the flu that ran up the chimney. And that's it. Right. But there's more to it.

Than that. Well, yeah, I think these are the improvements that came over time.

So you do have that hearth that you mentioned that's going to be built out of something fireproof. You don't want a wood hearth?

No, they'll.

Be bad. It's probably rock or brick. Paper machete. Yeah. That's where you sit and drink your bourbon while you warm your back.

It's like an apron on the floor that extends out from the fireplace.

Yeah, and it can be even with the floor, as is the case now, or the one I grew up with, I grew up with one of those Mac Daddy huge rock stone fireplaces.

Those ones are.

Like, man. You could sit on the thing. They're the best.

They are the best, but they're also like just kid killers they look like.

Well, not if you don't climb in it.

Which I.

Never did.

Yeah, that is pretty nice.

What else.

You got? Well, you know the hearth extends out, but if you look usually up the walls along either side of the hole in the wall and then above it, that's called the surround. It's usually made of something either that's the same as the hearth, same material as the hearth or some other fireproof thing like tile or brick or stone. That's just to basically prevent that fire from licking out of the fire box and setting the house.

On fire. Right, so straw, no good as a material. You have your fire box. That is just what you think it is. That's the square typically, although they're shaped a little differently now. That's the square that holds your fire.

Right. It's where the smoke starts to collect. Yes. What you're setting this stuff up to behind the fire box is actually called the smoke chamber. There's a transition area in between the fire box, which is where you actually have the fire, and the smoke chamber, which is above and slightly behind it. It's called the throat. It's the opening that connects those two things. The smoke chamber, smoke box, I think I've been calling it, it actually connects the fire box to the flu. It's got some pretty cool stuff going on. This is where some improvements were made to the design.

Yeah, and the flu is surrounded by the chimney, also, again, not straw. Right. It's going to be brick, almost always.

In the back rear of the smoke chamber, there's a smoke shelf.

Yeah, it's concave.

Yeah, because if you look at a fireplace, you just think it just goes straight back and up, right?

Well, some of the old designs did.

Well, they were stupid.

Yeah, that's how it's changed some.

Right. So if you look at the back of the fireplace, if you could stick your head up into the.

Fire box-You don't want to.

Do that. -when there's no fire.

You don't want to do it, period.

You'll see that there's actually a shelf up there. Yeah.

And it's angled forward, too, in front of that. Like I said, it used to be just a cube and it went straight up. Now it's zig -ag. Yeah. Back and forth a little bit on its way to the flu.

That's right. So the whole point of that shelf and the zig-ag is so that when rain comes in, it doesn't get into the fire. It's almost basically a protective overhang. And it also keeps particulates like soot and stuff from falling into the fire box, too.

Correct. That smoke shelf underneath it, you're going to have the damper. That is that covering that it's movable and that separates the fire box from the place above it. When you don't have your fire, that's when you close. We used to say close the flu. Right. We didn't use the word damper in my house. Yeah. I don't know why. But that's technically what it is. It's just the damper and you get your... There are different mechanisms, but ours had a little eye-let circle thing that you would stick. We used our fire poker, and we would just unhook it and then close the damper. That when your fire is not burning, you want to keep that thing open when it's burning, obviously.

Well, yeah.

You're going to find out really quickly if it's closed.

It's like an epiglottis for the fireplace. Sure.

Now it's got a throat. Why not? What else we have?

Sometimes there's a chimney damper at the very top of the flu. Yeah, I hadn't heard of this. You could close too. It's unnecessary.

Oh, you think? Sure.

But then at the very top of the chimney, there's something called spark arrester, which is usually some mesh grates that will allow gas and air out, but will keep little embers and stuff from going out onto your roof and setting your house.

On fire. Yeah, especially paper tends to float up and out. The chimney cap, it serves the same purpose, and that a lot of times is one and the same. The cap and the spark arrest are all one piece a lot of times. Right. Is that it? I haven't heard of this ash dump. That sounds pretty neat, though.

Sure.

It's basically, I guess, a hatch in the floor where you can just sweep the ashes, I guess. That sounds like in the olden days when your house was built on to bricks and it would just drop into a bucket below as would your poop. There were different buckets under your house that collected things.

You wanted to make sure you knew which bucket you were grabbing at any given time. That's right. You didn't want a surprise.

Then finally, you got your little door. It's either glass or metal or it might just be a screen. We never had, in mind growing up, we never had the glass door scene. Sure. Just the screen.

We had one of those in my high school house. We had a gas fireplace. Yeah, it was fine. Sure. But I was like, This is not wood.

All right, well, let's take a break and we'll talk about wood after this.

When Walter Isaacson set out to write his biography of Elon Musk, he believed he was taking on a world-changing figure.

That night, he was deciding whether or not to allow Starlink to be enabled to allow a sneak attack on Crimea.

What he got was a subject who also sowed chaos and conspiracy.

I'm thinking it's idiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a fingertips feel for social, emotional, and networks.

And when I sat down with Isaacson five weeks ago, he told me how he captured it all.

They have cans of spray paint, and they're just putting big X's on machines. And it's almost like kids playing on the playground. Just choose them up left, right, and center. And then like, Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde, he doesn't even remember it. Getting to bars doesn't excuse being a total. But I want the reader to see it in action.

My name is Evan Ratliff, and this is On Musk with Walter Isaacson. Join us in this four-part series as Isaacs and breaks down how he captured a vivid portrait of a polarizing genius. Listen to Ayn Musk on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Tune in to the new podcast, Stories from the Village of Nothing Much, like easy listening but for fiction. If you've overdosed on bad news, we invite you into a world where the glimmers of goodness in everyday life are all around you. I'm Catherine Nicolai, and you might know me from the Bedtime Story podcast, Nothing Much Happens. I'm an architect of cozy, and I invite you to come spend some time where everyone is welcome and kindness is the default. When you tune in, you'll hear stories about bakeries and walks in the woods, a favorite booth at the diner on a blustery autumn day, different life. Cats and dogs and rescued goats and donkeys, old houses, bookshops, beaches where kites fly and pretty stones are found. I have so many stories to tell you, and they are all designed to help you feel good and feel connected to what is good in the world. Listen, relax, enjoy. Listen to stories from The Village of Nothing Much on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Get ready because Aaron and Carissa from Calmdown have got something special coming up at State Farm Park in iHeartland. A reading of Twists in Night before Christmas. They'll infuse it with stories and memories tying into the holiday spirit. Don't miss this special event. Starting Thursday, December seventh at 7:00 PM Eastern at State Farm Park in iHeartland in Fortnite. Available all weekend long. Afterwards, stick around and check out all the exciting things State Farm has to offer. Say hi to Jake from State Farm on the big screen and try to beat Jake's score at the hardcore mini game. Visit iheartradio. Com/iheartland to start playing today.

We're back, Chuck, and we're going to talk... This would not be an apt episode if we didn't talk about basically the physics of how a fireplace works. Yeah. Because there are some physics involved. Pretty impressive ones, if you ask me.

Yeah, I love this article said lighting a fire inside your living room, and it hits home of how crazy that is. There are two challenges. One, not setting your house on fire. Two, keep the smoke from entering the room. But yeah, never.

Really thought about it. Everything we just talked about, basically, was to prevent the first part, catching your house on fire, the surround, the hearth, all that stuff. But then if you get a little more into the guts of the fireplace, that's to keep the smoke from filling up in the room. When you look around your house, you will find that there's a lot of different places for air to get in. That's actually quite necessary for a fireplace.

It's quite necessary for living and breathing.

Sure, for breathing, it's important for that, too. But to keep a fire going and to keep the smoke from going filling up your living room, which again, you'll find out very quickly if you don't have your damper open, which I had before. Sure. If you have air coming into your house, then you can keep the air, the smoke from the fire going up the way it's supposed to. That happens simply because heat tends to rise.

Yeah, one of the places I get a nice flow of air in my house is from closed windows.

Oh, yeah, you got thin windows.

Yeah, we have it. We've only redone a few of the windows. That's on my must-do list is to get all the windows replaced. But it ain't cheap. No. But you're going to earn that money back over time with efficiencies. But yeah, I have those old windows. It can be fully shut and you can stand and your hair will blow. Right. And I'm like, Where is this coming from? Is it going through the glass. Yeah.

It feels like. It's defying the laws of physics.

It's freezing near my windows.

Yeah. I remember, you, me, and I had a house like that, and it was, I mean, the wavy, vaguely wavy windows. Yeah, those were thin.

It's neat, though, to think that in 2016, I'm living like a settler, basically. Yeah. In parts of my home.

Churning your own butter.

So, yeah, you want to talk about the different kinds of heat?

Yeah.

So you've got conduction, convection, and radiation. And fireplaces use convection and radiation, but not conduction. Hopefully not conduction.

No, conduction means your house is.

Catching fire. That means you're literally touching something hot, correct? Yeah. But confection, of course, is when that hot air is circulating to cooler areas of your home, in this case. And the radiation is just literally feeling that flame, warmth.

Yeah, in the case of the fireplace, it's infrared and visible light, electromagnetic radiation, basically. There is actually some radio waves and some microwaves produced by a fire, which is cool. But for the most part, you're feeling infrared radiation and you're seeing visible light radiation, right? Yes. So when you're warming yourself by a fire, you're being radiated. Thermal radiation is being emitted from the fireplace. But there's also convection. Yeah, big time. Yeah, big times, right. Convection actually makes up most of the way that heat is moved through a fire. Because you want to keep the smoke out of your house, you're also actually keeping those convection currents from going into your house as well, meaning, as Ben Franklin pointed out, because remember, he was a huge complainer, that most of the heat from a fire is just purposefully being funneled out of the house up through the flu in the chimney.

I think it drove him nuts a little bit, looking through some of these quotes.

Yeah, because he really spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make fireplace better. You got to understand, though, too, when he was alive, these weren't just for charm.

No, no.

They were to stay alive.

Yeah.

And the idea that you were wasting all this fuel, I think probably part of it also was the inefficiency, probably drove him nuts.

Well, yeah, I mean, he's dead right. You've got so much heat just going right up the chimney. And not only that, when you get that draft, because the fire needs the oxygen. Right. That's another reason it's pulling this air in, but it's also pulling in, you've got your thermostat on and your heat going. Sure. It's pulling some of that warmer air in and up and out as well.

Right. Even air that it's warming through convection, that's being irradiated out of the fireplace, it's being sucked in. And as a result, again, when that air is sucked into the fire and is pushed up the flu through the chimney, it's got to be replaced. It's creating what's called a negative pressurization, right?

Yes.

That means that air wants to come in and replace the air that's being sucked out and up the chimney. So cold air from outside is being drawn in, which is how, like you said before. -my windows. Right. But the fire can actually make your house even colder because it's pushing the warm air out through the fireplace and sucking in cold air from the outside.

Yeah, and it's not... It says here, here's a stat that said that a traditional fireplace can draw 4-10 times as much air from the room that it needs to actually burn that fire.

Yeah, something like 500 cubic liters of air a minute.

Yeah. So compare that to the smart fireplace, aka the wood burning stove.

Aka the TV with the fire burning on it, right?

I love a wood burning stove, man. Those are great.

D, I've never really been into those. I got no problems with them.

It's not good for every home.

Aren't they incredibly dangerous? They get super.

Hot, right?

They're really hot. If you fell onto one or something, you'd be in big trouble, right?

Yeah. You don't put the skateboard next to it or the banana peel. Okay, step one. You're not going to have a super modern house with a wood burning stove. It's a little more charming in your cabin or something.

Actually, I was looking through, I think, a popular mechanics or something. I had different types of stoves, and there are some that are mod.

Oh, well, that's cool. Yeah. They're trying to bring it into the future?

Yes.

Well, they're remarkably efficient. How much did you say? Five hundred?

Five hundred cubic liters, I believe, of air a minute is sucked into a fireplace, an.

Average fireplace. And only 20 for a wood burning stove.

Yeah, that's pretty efficient.

So they're super hot. You can cook on them, too. You can boil your water and do all sorts of things. Sure.

Just don't touch it.

No. I think the Randazos had one in their place in Connecticut.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, and I think it supposedly works super well. Sure. It'll heat a room and then some.

Yeah. Well, and the reason why is because it's like a contained fireplace, but it's not just-.

Wide open.

-it's out in the open.

Yeah, but I mean, you shut the door to it.

Right, you shut the door to it, so you're saving the warm air around it from being sucked in, right? Correct. Then it's also removed from the interior of the wall so that it can heat on all sides.

Yeah, it's right up there, so you can.

Fall on it. Sure. Then the flu itself can go up and then out of the room so that the hot gas that's being carried out can heat the air in the room around it. You've got-That.

Stove.

Pipe? Yeah, you've got a lot of different... In some ways, the air is being warmed in your house by a wood stove.

Yeah, I'm going to look into these new ones.

There's new ones. There's some famous ones. They're mid-century design that are super mod, Swedish ones. Then there's ones that look like the traditional ones, but they're newly built and they're improved designs.

Remember the old '70s fireplaces that were like orange metal that would sit out in the room?

That's the Swedish one I'm talking about.

Oh, really? Yeah. It's based on that old '70s look.

No, that's the one I'm talking about. It's the '70s one. Oh, okay. Yeah. There's newer ones, too. Got you. But the iconic orange one, yeah.

Yeah, like my friend, one friend in high school, Chris Booting, had the most '70s house. Is that right? Oh, dude, it was wonderful. It was the orange fireplace built in a terrarium set type of deal. It was with plants and rocks and things. I think there might have been a little fake waterfall.

Was there MacRamee?

Oh, I'm sure there was macrame at some point, but it had one of those sunken living rooms.

Oh, I like those.

And.

Looking back now, it's a super cool, like mod house. People now would be like, Oh, my God, it's preserved in time. It's the greatest thing ever. You hit a waterbed, of course. But one of his walls, his entire wall was a blown-up photograph of a Hawaiian sunset.

We had a couple of those in our house, not a Hawaiian sunset, but we had a forest with a waterfall going through it, and then in our kitchen, a forest mural. No water.

That's very Ice Storm.

Yeah, I've not seen that movie, but I can imagine. Because that was '70s, right?

'70s? Yeah, key parties are happening and people are drinking eggnog around the Orange Lackard Fireplace. Nice. Yeah. It's a wonderful time.

But let's say you have just the regular old fireplace to start. Yeah. All right? Traditional brick. You come across it, you say, What the heck is this thing? What do I do? Well, the first thing you do is you log on to the internet and go to HowStuffWorks and look up how to operate a fireplace because HowStuffWorks has you covered, man.

Yeah, I mean, the only thing I could say this would probably be good for is if you've never literally never started a fire. But it seems like common knowledge to me.

Yeah, there's some details in there that I don't know, like hardwoods, right? You don't want to burn pine or any softwood. Okay. You want your hardwoods like hickory, ash, oak, that stuff. And you want it seasoned. That's the key.

Yeah. You can't go cut down a tree in a yard and chop it up and burn it the next week. That's not going to work. Because it will smoke and you'll see literally, I mean, when I go camping, we get rooked all the time on firewood purchases.

Oh, yeah.

And we sit down for the evening, throw the wood on there, and you just start hearing the sizzle, and you see the water just literally boiling out of it. And we're just like, Oh, man. Well, okay. That roadside guy, I'm going to.

Go back. -here's how you tell. -going back this time. You got to test it right there in front of the guy and watch him squirm. You take two logs and you knock them together. And what you're looking for is a hollow sound, no thud, hollow sound. Then you know it's seasoned.

Yeah, but he would go like, City boy, this is North Georgia, lob-lolly pine. You don't know what you're talking about.

You'd say, Well, pines and softwood. I want hardwoods. Where's the hardwoods? I went to college.

Get off my property and leave the boiled peanuts.

You'd say, I'm going to take half of the boiled peanuts for my time.

Yeah, I feel like we always get wet wood, but at least six months you want that wood drying out. They say a full year. What you're looking for is 20 % moisture level by the time you're burning it.

You could also put in a moisture level temperature or moisture indicator in the end.

Yeah. There you go. Did you buy the.

Big city? But you look at the ends of the wood, too, and you'll see that it's cracked and split. It's usually dark like gray. It just looks aged. But the dead giveaway is the hollow thud sound.

Yeah, I didn't know that, so I'm going to try that.

The hollow thud, I'm sorry, the hollow sound, not the thud. Right. Yeah, that's what you're looking for. You take your fire or you take your wood, you put it on your fire grate. Although, this is a component of the fireplace. It's not an actual part of it. The fire grate is like this iron stand. It's a grate. There's really no other way to describe it. Although some fire aficionados suggest that you should use what are called and irons.

Yeah, I like grates.

Well, an and iron is basically a gate missing the gate part in the middle. It's basically these two stands, a pair of stands that go in the fireplace and it holds the logs aloft.

Yes, until they burn through.

The gate does the same thing, except it keeps burning like embers on the grade a little more. The reason why people are like and irons or grades because however you have a grade or an and iron, you want to keep a bed of embers going because that is going to eventually become hot enough that you could throw anything on there and it'll start to catch fire. When you take your split logs, you put them on your grade or your and irons, put a little kindling beneath them, which is thinner wood that'll catch fire easily. Light it on fire. I forgot. First, you want to pour about a half a liter of kerocene on this to make sure that it starts.

You do not.

Oh, did I misspeak?

That is just a joke, kids. You don't ever want to use any lighter fluid, gas, or anything like that to start an indoor fire.

Kids, you should not be starting a fire in the first place, so stop right now. Yes. This is for grownups. That's right. But you do want to use something like, I don't know, newspaper or just a piece of paper to light the kindling. But no, you don't want to use any accelerant.

Well, people don't get newspapers anymore, so you can just light your Kindle or your iPad and throw that in there instead.

Sure, it'll start. But that kindling is going to catch. And if your wood is seasoned, it'll catch, too. And then all of a sudden you got a fire.

Yeah, you may want to adjust that damper a little bit just to keep your airflow how you want it. Right.

And again, when you have a fire going, one of the two main things you're trying to do in addition to not burn down your house is to keep the smoke from coming back in the room. Sometimes that's easier said than done, because every house has something called a neutral pressure plane. Above the neutral pressure plane, the air is pressurized, so it wants to push air out. Below it, the pressure inside the house is lower, so air wants to be sucked in. As long as your fireplace, your chimney is above that neutral pressure plane, you're going to be okay. The air is going to want to go in. If it so happens that the air around your fireplace is a higher pressure, then the air is actually going to be pushed down the into the fire box and out into the room, which is no good. But you can solve it pretty easily by just opening a window and allowing air to come in or go out, depending.

Or have eight, 90-year-old windows.

Right, where you don't have to worry about it at all because the air just flows through freely.

We're talking about how inefficient they are. If you want to improve that efficiency, there are a couple of cool things you can do. One is called a tubular grate, and that is exactly what you think. Instead of just a grate made of solid iron at the bottom, it is a bit of a cage. It looks like the motorcycle exhaust pipes and things. They're tubular, so it's going to draw in the cool air in the bottom of the tubes, and then it's going to rise and then loop back around and shoot out the top of the tubes into your room.

Yeah, which should work in theory. Remember, if your fireplace is working properly, it's sucking air from the room into the fire to fuel it and then shooting it out the chimney. This air that's being warmed could be sucked right back into the fire.

That's right.

But if you have it so that the tubular grate is enclosed by some doors, but the ends of the grate can go out into the room, bam, you're set.

Oh, is that a thing? Yeah. I haven't seen that. There's another thing called a... Well, this is what when Emily's parents have moved to Georgia now, but when they lived in Ohio, they had one of these recirculators that was a fan, basically. You would turn on a switch and it would literally blow heat from underneath the grate back out into the room. And it worked really well, but it always seemed to blow a little stink out with it.

Stank?

You know, fire stink.

Oh, okay. Yeah.

I mean, you couldn't see smoke pouring out of it or anything.

But it was still affecting your respiratory?

Well, I mean, it didn't affect me so much, but I could tell what it was happening. Every recirculator I've ever seen or been around has had the same deal to me. Whether it's gas, only, or whatever, it always just seems to have this... But I'm very sensitive to odors anyway, so maybe that has something to do with that. I don't know. Maybe. I'm a super smeller.

Are.

You a.

Super smeller? What do you smell right now?

I smell null, like three rooms over.

Wow, you are a super smeller. Because we are hermetically.

Sealed in here. Not true. Then those glass doors you talked about is another way to increase efficiency, but you're also going to literally just cut down on the heat that gets into the room as much as 50 %.

Yeah, there's not a lot that you can do to have a dramatic impact on the efficiency of the fire. For the most part, it's going to lose more heat than it puts out. You just want to hope that you can warm the room you're in with the fire enough so that you don't mind.

Or if you're just after the esthetic, then.

Good.

For you.

You, me and I lived in a place where we had a fireplace for a couple of years. We were hooked on it.

-hooked on it.

-wood burning, I guess. Yeah, oh, yeah. And we could get that room.

Like, hot.

Yeah, toasty. If you keep fire going long enough, that's the key. You just have to waste more wood than you can imagine.

All right, well, we'll take another little quickie break here, and we'll come back and talk about some more options and a very depressing history of child labor.

When Walter Isaacson set out to write his biography of Elon Musk, he believed he was taking on a world changing figure.

That night, he was deciding whether or not to allow Starlink to be enabled to allow a sneak attack on Crimea.

What he got was a subject who also sowed chaos and conspiracy.

I'm thinking it's idiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a fingertips feel for social, emotional networks. And when.

I sat down with Isaacson five weeks ago, he told me how he captured it all.

They have cans of spray paint, and they're just putting big X's on machines. And it's almost like kids playing on the playground. Just choose them up left, right and center. And then like Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde, he doesn't even remember it. Getting the bars doesn't excuse being a total of a. But I want the reader to see it in action.

My name is Evan Matlife, and this is on Musk with Walter Isaacson. Join us in this four-part series as Isaacson breaks down how he captured a vivid portrait of a polarizing genius. Listen to Ayn Musk on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Tune in to the new podcast, Stories from the Village of Nothing Much, like easy listening but for fiction. If you've overdosed on bad news, we invite you into a world where the glimmers of goodness in everyday life are all around you. I'm Katherine Nicolai, and you might know me from the Bedtime Story podcast, Nothing Much Happens. I'm an architect of COSE, and I invite you to come spend some time where everyone is welcome and kindness is the default. When you tune in, you'll hear stories about the bakeries and the walks in the woods, a favorite booth at the diner on a blustery autumn day, cats and dogs and rescued goats and donkeys, old houses, bookshops, beaches where kites fly and pretty stones are found. I have so many stories to tell you, and they are all designed to help you feel good and feel connected to what is good in the world. Listen, relax, enjoy. Listen to stories from The Village of Nothing Much on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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All right, Josh, we've been talking about wood a lot because it's clearly the superior fireplace.

Seriously.

But you can get the old gas, fake log fireplace these days. My mom made the switch. It's a fake log. It's pretty good these days.

Wait a minute. She had a wood burning fireplace and had a gas insert put in? Yes. Wow, okay.

Because she had a, like I had growing up to the gas starter. You would light the gas, throw the wood on, get it going, turn the gas off.

Got you.

She just retrofitted it, actually, I did it, my brother, into full gas with the fake logs. Nice. They look good these days. You can arrange them in yourself in a way that looks esthetically pleasing.

They don't come in that mound that's shaped to look like three logs laying on top of each other?

No, it's come a long way, I'll say that.

Don't they have beds of embers now, too, and all that? They do. They catch the little flickery glow.

What is it? They've come a long way with trying to simulate that look.

Pica, pica, pica.

I don't know what that is.

It's like the Japanese word for that, like the little tingling glow.

I don't know.

I'm saying it wrong, but it's a throwback. I said it wrong on some other episode years back.

Are you talking about putty-putty?

No. Putta-putta. Putta-putta? Yeah, but that's something different. Yeah. I'll have to go back and find it. Maybe we'll just edit this whole part out.

So the gas logs covering the gas vent, you're going to burn that fire behind glass. It's going to give off radiant and convicted heat. You're probably going to have a air... Not recycler, what do I call it? Exchange. Air exchanger there working as well.

Yeah, and one of the reasons it's so much more efficient is because it doesn't require any air from inside your room. It draws air through a pipe from the outdoors because it requires much less, right? Yeah. So it's not going to take any of that warmed air that it's warming for itself to burn. It's just going to say, You keep it. I'm gas. I'm super efficient. I love you in ways that wood could never imagine.

Yeah, that's true. Wood is dirty and bumbling. Why do you love wood so much more than me? I'm gas.

So if you're getting a new house, you're probably going to have a gas fireplace. If you're getting a fireplace added to a home, it's probably going to be a gas fireplace. Sure. That's the direction they're steering you these days.

Yeah, oh, yeah. I would guess.

Because.

Gas. I would guess you're going to pay significantly more for a wood burning fireplace to be built into your new house than a gas one. You think? Yeah, probably just because I'll bet there's relatively few, especially down below the Mason-Dickson line, relatively few builders who know how to put in a wood burning fireplace.

Yeah, you got to find a builder from 1973.

Basically. And he's going to want to give you one of those Orange, modern jobs. You're like, Yeah, this is cool, but now I want the real thing. Yeah. He's like, This is real?

They're very efficient to these gas fireplaces. The gas burns cleanly. They even have them that are vent free. But people also say, you know what? If your house is not like Chuck's, and it is actually pretty tight, as we would call it, and sealed up, then they can actually deplete oxygen or moisture can build up. The jury is still out somewhat on these gas fireplace.

I say the jury is in. Oh, yeah. I'm the jury, and I say a vent-free fireplace is a stupid idea. It's pumping carbon dioxide into your house. Yeah. That's never good.

You would think.

Yeah. You can.

Get an ethanol fireplace.

This one seems like okay. You've seen them before, right? Like if you go to a Marriott courtyard or something like that, they'll have the chair situated around a table with the fireplace in the middle of the table.

It's nuts.

It's just.

Burning ethanol. The flame is actually cold.

It's basically like a sterno fireplace. You want to light your fondue pod or something like that from beneath? Yeah. It's the same thing, I think, virtually.

Then you can get the woe unto you if you opt for the electric fireplace.

Well, there's some now where you can get an entertainment.

Center.

With a TV and then beneath it, a fake electric fireplace.

Yeah.

It's cool.

An electric fireplace has no fire. It is a heater and it simulates the look of a fire if you're four years old.

In squinting.

If you're a squinty four-year-old. But we don't want to yuck someone's yummy. So if that's your bag, then more power to you. It's just not for me.

I have to take issue, though, with this article. It says that it's emission-free. It's emission-free on the user end. It's still electricity, which means it's producing emissions at the coal-fired power plant that's producing that electricity. Yeah, that is very much. So don't be fooled if you're like, Oh, it's mission free.

Nope.

No.

We're going to yuck that yumb. Safety wise, got to watch out for those sparks if you got carpet around or hardwoods, I reckon.

Yeah, keep your bag of oily rags away from the fireplace.

Yeah, the big one. You might want to fire extinguisher, but don't put it in the fireplace itself.

Carbon monoxide investing in a carbon monoxide detector is worthwhile. It doesn't have to be a smart carbon monoxide detector, although get one of those if you want. I'm just saying if you're using a wood burning fireplace, at the very least, get yourself a cheap but decent carbon monoxide detector. Yeah, get a dumb one. Smoke detector is not quite enough.

Yeah, I think you have to have those now, isn't that the new code? I don't know.

I haven't read the zoning codes in a while, building codes.

You should take a look. This is one of those once-a-year things. If you know what you're doing, you can at least get a flashlight and look everything over and see if there's anything obvious, like if your flu cap is no longer on your chimney. Hurricane hit? Yeah, if there are big cracks or anything.

So what's wrong with yours? Cracks? Your house would catch on fire?

All I know is the guy did a lot of like...

Maybe he just wasn't feeling it that day.

No, he didn't put on a good show. He came over because their specialty is old houses and old fireplaces.

Okay.

I thought this guy is going to be like, Oh, great, this is what I do. He acted like he didn't want to do the job. Right, but that's what I'm saying. That's a lot of work, man. You're going to have to fix your chimney on the inside, and it's cracked here, and you got this, and you got that. I was like, Yeah, that's what you advertise. You fix old situations.

You should bring somebody else out.

Yeah, I didn't like that guy. I'm going to bring out someone with some little moxy.

But you do, even if you think that your fireplace is doing great, it pays to pay somebody to come out and look at it inside.

Is it too much to ask for a little energy from your fireplace guy? A little wow factor?

Maybe.

Yes, you're correct. You do need a pro every now and then to come out. They're called Chimney sweeps. And Creosote is something if you look up Creosote, C-R-E-O-S-O-T-E online, it looks like black lava built up on the inside of your chimney.

Right, and it itself could catch fire. Yeah. And you have a chimney fire, in which case, and it sounds a little counterint, too, of like, well, there's fire going through it all the time. Fire going through it is much different from fire, like your chimney being on fire itself. Yeah, that's no good. And if your chimney is on fire, your house can catch fire fairly easy, especially if you have cracks in there because it goes... And all of a sudden, some pressure-treated two-by-four is like...

You.

Don't want to burn that pressure-treated two-by-four, by the way, it's wood. I don't think we mentioned that. One thing you can burn, though, which wouldn't use, but it's called a Chimney sweep log or a Creasote log, and it's just a special log. It's like a Duriflame. It's a prefab log.

Right. It's a.

Chemical log. But it's supposed to break down that creosote. I don't know, something about that made my radar went off. I don't know if that's the best way to do things. Yeah. Don't have any proof. But I hear chemical log that knocks that creosote loose, and it just didn't sound like the smart approach.

Well, even the Chimney Safety Institute of America says, no, no. Yeah, those things work, but you want actual scrubbing of the interior of your chimney. Yes. Which is what Chimney sweeps did. Yeah. And, man, if you want- They're still around. -if you want moxie in your Chimney sweep, you go to somebody's parents and say, I want to buy your four-year-old boy and make him my Chimney sweep slave.

Yeah. I mean, earlier we teased and promised a child labor horror show. That's pretty much what things were like in jolly old England after 1666, second September. I'm sorry, fifth September, technically. Yeah. The Great Fire of London changed a lot of things. And one of them was, our chimneys were a little bit narrower and they had a lot more rules as far as how clean you had to keep them. And so, like you said, what you would do is you would can't put an adult up there.

No, not really.

But you can put a five-year-old boy.

Or four, I think, is the youngest I saw them doing.

Yeah, so you would literally buy a child from a poor person. Right. Stick this boy up in there. They were your, quote-unquote, apprentice, which basically was child slave.

Unpaid child labor.

Zero.

Dollars. Right. Actually, chimney sweeping at the time, so after the Great Fire of London in 1666, I believe it was mandated by the Queen or Parliament or somebody that everybody needed their chimneys kept up with. So, Chimney sweeps became a thing, but they actually swept Chimney's free. It was a free service. The way that Chimney sweeps made their money was from the soot that they gathered. They would sell it as fertilizer.

I thought you're going to say sponsorships. They would show up like their Chevy Tahoe jacket or something.

He's like, Nothing gets your chimney cleaned like son of a gun by STP.

So they would stick these kids in there. Sometimes they would literally light a fire under their butt to make them work faster. The kids would shimmy and distort their body to shimmy in this little 18-inch wide chimney and chip loose this- -Creosote. -creosote and soot that would then, because they're working above their head, it would fall all over them. They would take a bath once a week, maybe once every month, maybe once every two or three months, depending on who you're asking. Yeah. So these children are literally not... I mean, if they survived this experience at all, they're not going to live past middle age. Right.

So what you just described was a good day.

Yeah.

There were all sorts of other horrible maladies that could come about, deformation of their skeletons, because these kids are like four, five, six, eight, 10, 12 years old. They're trying to grow. They're still developing, but they're spending hours upon hours every day in these cramped chimneys. So their bones, especially the bones, and their ankles, and knees tended to grow in a deformed way. Unbelievable. There's something the first industrial-length cancer ever identified. It's called Chimney sweeps cancer. Other people call it scrotal carcinoma, where the scrotum was irritated by soot, and it would produce warts. And these warts, if they went untreated, would turn into a carcinoma, which eventually, if it wasn't cut out, the tumor would grow into the testes and then into the abdomen. And it was a very painful way to die. Kids like 12 years of age were dying of scrotal cancer from this.

Yeah, you get up predawn, you work till the nighttime hours, 364 days a year. The one day that these kids would get off was Mayday, International Labor Day. They would sleep then, we said they collected that ash and soot and sold it. They would store all the stuff in sacks and the kids would then sleep in those rooms still ingesting all this stuff in the air. Quite often they would literally get stuck and die in these chimneys.

Here's the part where I started to hyperventilate just thinking about this.

From claustrophobia? Yeah.

There's like this thing called positional asphyxia. There's actually a pretty interesting Vice article called A Brief History of people getting stuck in Chimneys. They actually illustrate how positional asphyxia happens using the Grinch. As he's going down the chimney, his feet start to get above his head, and all of a sudden he's stuck. You can't get out of that position. This would happen to real live English boys and American, too, apparently, who would get stuck in the chimneys that they were cleaning out and would die there because they would asphyxiate. Their abdomen couldn't take in breaths any longer, right? It happened a lot. Actually, finally, it happened enough times that Parliament started to get involved. They first got involved in 1788 with the Chimney sweeps act, and they said, You know what? This is crazy. You guys are buying four-year-old kids. You can't do that. Chimney sweeps can be no younger than eight. That was their first stab at reform, right?

Yeah, and obviously, this is child labor was a lot different back then as far as how we thought about when kids should work.

Right. Or the idea of childhood hadn't even.

Come about yet. Yeah, but even so, even for a time where it was believed that children should put forth an effort and work like four and five year old kids, it's just ridiculous.

Sure, right? They also added, though, that if you are a master of a chimney sweep, you have to make sure that they are allowed to go to church on Sundays. That was the other part of the 1788 Act, right? Yeah. Then in the 1880s, the 1840 Act, they upped the age to 21, which was significant, but apparently it wasn't really enforced until 1875 when this one kid died and he was basically the straw that broke the camels back.

For the public. Yeah, his name was George Brewster, and he worked for a gentleman by the name of William Wire. And I say gentleman, what I mean is a scumbag. And he was cleaning a hospital, Chimney, full-born hospital, and he got stuck. And great efforts were made to rescue him. They actually pulled down a wall to try and get to him. He died, and Wire was actually found guilty of manslaughter. And his death was really a big awareness jolt for everybody, and it became part of the campaign. And that was pretty much the end of using kids. He was apparently the last child to die in a chimney in England.

In England, I guess in the US they kept using him for a while.

So shameful.

Now, if you see a chimney sweep, tell a four year old to go up in the chimney, you call the police because that is illegal these days no matter where you live. Yeah. Okay, let's all agree to that. Agreed. Do you got anything else? No. Fireplaces just in time for the fall.

Well, yeah, it's November here in Atlanta and in the mid-'80s, so ready to get that fireplace going. That's right.

If you want to know more about fireplaces, including how to light a fire, you can go find that out by typing fireplace in the search bar of how stuff works. Since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail.

I'm going to call this grammar police. Hey, guys, regular listener for quite some time. I finally become angered or inspired enough to write in about something. I used the sandwich technique proposed by Chuck recently, by the way. I was listening to an older episode. Does a Body Replace Itself? You guys were talking about emails from the grammar police. Grammar only has strict rules to those who decided that it needed strict rules. As a society we have a rather dramatic ebb and flow of grammar rules. There's no one entity to decide upon the rules and therefore there's no real right or wrong. You can almost consider it like a fashion in a way. We can all generally agree that double negatives are wrong, much like we can all agree that socks and sandals are wrong. Yet some will still use them or wear them without a problem. As long as we can understand eachother in the quote, incorrect in quote grammar does not take away from the meaning of your words, then it should not matter. There are different times in which proper grammar is necessary and scrutinized. Then there are times when it frankly does not matter.

There is a huge debate in the grammar world, the few but mighty, she points out, about whether we should be prescriptivists or descriptiveists when it comes to the rules of grammar. It's a constantly evolving topic, and arguably grammar is a constantly evolving entity. Just thought share my thoughts and hopes that you wouldn't get down on yourselves from the grammar police. And yes, feel free to pick apart my email for grammar errors. Nice. Happyface. That is from Colleen Zaker, an English teacher and grammar enthusiast.

Thanks a lot, Colleen. We appreciate that big time. We always love to hear support from people who are like, don't listen to the haters. Yeah. Yeah. If you want to get in touch with this like Colleen did, is it Colleen? Sure.

Who cares?

Actually, I don't know. Goes either way, whatever.

Yeah, she said you can call me whatever.

Sure. If you want to get in touch with us like cauliflower did, you can tweet to us at SYSK Podcast. You can join us on Facebook. Com/stuffyoushouldknow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks. Com. And as always, join us on our home on the web, stuffyoushownow. Com.

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Walter Isaacson set out to write about a world-changing genius in Elon Musk and found a man addicted to chaos and conspiracy.

I'm thinking it's idiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a fingertips feel for social, emotional networks.

The book launched a thousand hot takes, so I sat down with Isaacson to try to get past the noise.

I like the fact that people who say, I'm not as tough on Musk as I should be are always using anecdotes from my book to show why we should be tough on Musk.

Join me, Evan Ratliff, for On Musk with Walter Isaacson. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Tune in to the new podcast, Stories from the Village of Nothing Much, like Easy Listening, but for fiction. If you've overdosed on bad news, we invite you into a world where the glimmers of goodness in everyday life are all around you. I'm Katherine Nicolai, and I'm an architect of cozy. Come spend some time where everyone is welcome and the default is kindness. Listen, relax, enjoy. Listen to stories from the Village of Nothing Much on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Get ready because Aaron and Carissa from Calmdown have got something special coming up at State Farm Park in iHeartland. A reading of Twistin' Night Before Christmas. They'll infuse it with stories and memories tying into the holiday spirit. Don't miss this special event starting Thursday, December seventh at 7:00 PM Eastern at State Farm Park in iHeartland and Fortnite. Available all weekend long. Afterwards, stick around and check out all the exciting things State Farm has to offer. Say hi to Jake from State Farm on the big screen and try to beat Jake's score at the hardcore mini game. Visit iheartradio. Com/iheartland to start playing today.