The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is the greatest murder mystery in American history.

That's Rob Reiner. Rob called me, Soledad O'Brien, and asked me what I knew about this crime.

We'll ask who had the motive to assassinate a sitting President. Then we'll pull the curtain back on the cover up. The American people need to know the truth.

Listen to Who Killed JFK? On the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Laurie Santos, host of the Happiness Lab podcast. Making new friends and maintaining old friendships is a great way to boost your happiness. But sadly, we don't always feel up for being sociable. If I was approaching a stranger, my heart would raise, I was going to throw up. I just had so much anxiety around it. So in a new season of the show, I'll tackle how to make firm friendships firmer right through to the joy you can find in talking to total strangers.

I'm very much enjoying your animal print.

Scarf, madam. So listen to The Happiness Lab on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or when you get your shows.

Howdy, everybody. I hope you're having a lovely Saturday, wherever you are in the world. Chuck here with a Saturday Select selection. I'm going to go with from November 2019, not even so long ago as the crow flies, the episode is NYC Water, colon, an engineering marvel. I love New York City. Everyone knows that. I go on and on about that city on the show. I'm constantly amazed that city runs and the trash gets taken away and the mail gets delivered and that people have enough drinking water and water to bathe in and cook with. It's a pretty unique situation there in New York, how they get their water. Here's that story. Pleased to enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Should.

Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's guest producer Andrew. This is stuff you should know. Let's get busy.

I'm excited about this one.

This was your pick. I was like, What is Chuck talking about? Were you, really? Yes. Then, Chuck, I happened to stumble upon, I don't know what I was looking for, but an email from somebody who sent a Google Doc or something that was a list of episodes we said we should do. And people have sent those in before, but this one was condensed and that was on there. So I've stumbled upon your dirty little secret.

I don't think that's where I got it.

Oh, really?

I don't think so, but maybe.

Okay.

I just know that I am always fascinated by not only New York City, but by the fact that New York City functions.

With that many people and all that?

Everything. It's just all amazing to me that that city functions with that many people, that many buildings. I want to do an episode on trash removal.

Okay. I want to do one on- Or the mail. -on wastewater treatment.

Yeah, oh, yeah.

Not just New York.

In general, though. That's been long brewing.

Are you okay with that?

Yeah.

I mean, we can mention New York or whatever.

Big thanks to Dave Ruzzo, one of our great writers. Dave put this together and it's really, really fascinating.

Dave's just an amazing human. -he's great. -all of our writers are amazing, for sure. Dave is great as well. He's one of a few select amazing people.

Right.

So the reason why anybody would ask about New York's water is because if you've ever interacted with a New Yorker, they talk about their water a lot. It's like a thing in New York where they're like, Our tap water is the best water in the country. And they have a lot of stuff to back that up with. And so much so that they say this water is actually the reason why our bagels and our pizza are so good.

Yeah, we were both just there for our final shows of the year at The Bell House. Thanks to people who came out. Yes. They were great. A lot of fun. And by the way, the guy that fell asleep on the front row on night number two.

I.

Think it was Night Number Two, I was walking down the street and he randomly passed by driving in a car and rolled down his window and said, Hey, man. He's a great show the other night.

I was waiting for him to say, Is that Freedom Rock?

I said, Thanks, dude. I was like, Front Row. He was so excited that I remembered. He said, Front Row. He drove on before I had a chance to say, You fell asleep.

He's like, I feel like I was there maybe. It felt like a dream, too.

I don't know. But we were just there and there are many, many restaurants in New York where there will be like a water-cooler or a place where you can help yourself to your own cup of water. It will have a big sign on it that says, New York City Tapwater, in proud, all caps, underlined letters.

They mean like they're just getting water out of the tap, whereas in other cities, that's a dirty, shameful secret that people don't talk about. That's right. In New York, they proudly boast about it. Just the fact that New York or any New Yorker in the city gets water at all is pretty spectacular. It's like you said, there's a lot of people, there's a lot of buildings, and something like more than a billion gallons of water flow into New York through the taps every day.

I.

Said day with the D.

Yes, it is the largest water system in the United States. People from all over the world, government officials, fly in and take meetings with the New York City water people just to see how have you done it?

They're just a gog.

How could we do better?

That's impressive enough that more than a billion gallons of water is delivered every day to New Yorkers. Pretty great. But the idea that you can just drink it straight from the tap and it is 90 % unfiltered, that is a truly impressive feat.

Yeah, and by 90 % unfiltered, we mean 90 % of the water is unfiltered and 10 % is filtered.

Right. You might say, well, how can you just filter 90 % of the water? Well, it comes from different places. That's right. So 90% of the water comes from two places. Two watersheds that combined are called the Catskill, Delaware Watershed or Water System, I think. Then the other one from the Crow-Crowton, I always want to say Crow-Tow-Tow-on, but from the Crow-Crowton reservoir, that 10 % is actually filtered. We'll get into all of that. But 90 % of New York's water, it doesn't go through a filtering process. That makes New York one of only five major cities in the United States to get a waiver from the EPA that says your water is so deliciously pure and delightful that you don't need to filter it. Almost every other city has to have a filtering process before it gets delivered to taps.

That's right. And the other four, naturally, Seattle, Portland, Oregon, San Francisco.

The.

One that's a bit of a surprise is Boston, Massachusetts.

What? That's how surprising it is, Chuck.

Yeah, that's right. Let's talk a little bit about the history of New York and their water. Because back in the day, we've always talked about how what a disgusting disease-ridden poop and horse urine-ridden place New York City was.

Yeah, supposedly there was a good 12 inches of horse manure on the street at all times before they really started cleaning their place up.

Yeah, it's pretty bad.

I think that was in the When Christ Typhoid Mary episode, which is a great one.

Another great New York episode. Yeah. If we're talking New Amsterdam, pre-New York City, they got water where you would think from ponds and natural springs, underwater springs. They had a 48-acre pond. It's about 60 feet deep in tribeca, what is now tribeca, called the Collect, and also the Little Collect that was just south of there. That name comes from the Dutch word, Colk, which means small body of water. The Collect was where they got their water for a long time until the city let some tanners build a tannery on the shores of the Collect. That's not good.

Not smart, new energy.

Which ruined everything.

Yeah, because it started to get polluted. They also were able to drill wells and stuff around places where people pooped and peed and then dumped their poop and peed. It was a dirty, dirty place because this is pre-germ theory, or at least around the time that germ theory was being developed and people didn't understand it. I think it was our great stink episode where they traced a cholera epidemic to a public well, a public water pump. John Snow, if I remember correctly, did that. This would have been around the time that New Yorkers were suffering from cholera epidemics, one of which took place in, I think, the 1830s, 1832. It killed 3,500 New Yorkers. That was a substantial amount of the population at the time. Another hundreds of thousand New Yorkers had to flee just to get away from this cholera epidemic. It was because their sewage and their water was co-existing in very unhealthy ways. New York said, Maybe we should try something else. Let's look a little further outside the city, where we're dumping our waste and everything, and see if we can get our water from there. They did. They built the Croton reservoir.

They damned the river and reservoir collected. They said, Now, we have some beautiful, pure water. We will never need to do anything again to get our water. That's right.

Previous to that, though, in the 18th century, they had these public pumps like you were talking about on street corners. About every four blocks or so, a big wooden pump where you would get your water from underground streams and springs and stuff. But there were only a few of these that actually delivered good water. A lot of it was really brackish and gross tasting. Americans and early European settlers obviously loved their tea, and so they marked this was almost like an early Yelp or whatever. They had these pumps that actually delivered the two or three good pumps in the city that delivered good water, labeled T water pumps.

It was good enough to use.

For T? Good enough to use for making good T. Okay. They would go to these T water pumps. You would have to buy the water. The best one was apparently at Chathamon Roosevelt. There was another in what the Lower East Side is today that was a good T water pump. This worked out for a long time until the collect and all this stuff that started to get nasty and stinky. They built a canal to channel that water into the river. We got to get rid of it and drain this thing. Right. They build this canal 40 feet wide. They channel it. Right after they finish it, this canal begins to sink. In 1821, it got so bad, the smell was so bad that they eventually just covered up the canal. Guess what? Canale, that's what that became?

I don't know. Central Park.

Canal Street.

-how about that? I'm so stupid. I wasn't even in the right part of.

The city. That's all right.

We've even done an episode on Central Park, and that wouldn't forget it. Yes, Canal.

Street, obviously. That's where Canal Street came from. There was literally a canal and then eventually an underground sewage system running under Canal Street.

Right.

And there's another cool little tidbit. If you want your little New York history, if you like to walk around on subways and tell people about cool things. Yeah. One of the first public reservoirs in the city was dug by Aaron Burr and his Manhattan company. And that didn't work out. They transported it through wooden logs as pipes buried beneath the city.

Somebody found a piece of that wooden log. It's in one of the museums up there now.

Oh, no way.

Yeah.

That is very cool. But the water didn't taste great and it didn't work out for Aaron Burr. He still kept the Manhattan Company, but he got into banking and the Manhattan company became Chase Manhattan Bank.

I saw somewhere that that was his aim all along, that the water thing was just basically a fleece to raise money to found this bank. Oh, really? And that that's why the water was so shoddy and the delivery was so shoddy. But what they were selling was so bad, supposedly the horses wouldn't even drink it.

So it was a scam.

It was basically a scam. Aaron Burr was not the greatest historical American. Shot Alexander Hamilton.

I know. That's enough right there.

Right. And then also scammed a bunch of people out of their water investment. That's right. Because, I mean, if you want to invest in a bank, you want to invest in a bank. If you want to invest in a water outfit, you want to invest in a water outfit. You want people to be above the boards with.

Stuff like that. That's right. Above the hollow clogs.

I'm sorry, that's my tyranny.

You mentioned the Croton Dam and the Croton Reservoir. I want to say, Croton as well.

Yeah.

That became and that aqueduct became operational and things were okay, but then a tragedy struck with the Great Fire of 1835.

Yes, which actually, I guess that the Great Fire took place right before the reservoir was open, which is why the Great Fire was so bad. Oh, yeah, that's true. Yeah. In 1835, on a night in December, a warehouse caught fire, and it just leveled lower Manhattan, just destroyed something like 17 city blocks, 50 acres of the most densely populated part of New York at the time. Luckily, only two people died. Two is too many. But considering that it was 17 city blocks that got reduced to ash, that's not bad, actually, especially considering that the way that they ended up fighting this fire was by setting buildings on the perimeter on fire because they didn't have the amount of water that they needed.

Yeah, the reason for that was just really bad luck. There were two smaller fires that drained our hour. I'm a New Yorker, listen to me.

You're an honorary New Yorker, I would guess.

It drained the cisterns, the reserve Cisterns that they had. Because of those two smaller fires, they didn't have enough to fight the Great Fire. The long and short of all this is New York said, we got to really speed up this croat and reservoir work.

Yeah, and they did. The croat and reservoir was brought online in the middle of the 19th century, and they had a big old parade and everything. It delivered something like 90 million gallons of delicious, pure water to New York in the middle of the 19th century. It was a really big deal. It worked really well for a very long time. There was also they built the Murray Hill Reservoir. The Croton Reservoir would be where the water collected upstate. Then they built an aqueduct system, which is still around in parts today, an elevated aqueduct to what's called the Murray Hill Reservoir, which is a four-acre above-ground swimming pool, basically.

It's pretty cool if you look at pictures.

Yeah, it was a real spot in the city while it was around, I think, something till 1842 to 1900, it was around. People used to take stroles around it and make paintings of it and that thing. It is where the New York Public Library is now today, where the Ghostbusters did some of their early work. That's right. Right. But it worked really well for the time. But then as New York grew and grew and grew, it became very painfully obvious yet again that New York had outgrown its water supply.

Yeah, they needed more water. 90 million gallons a day wasn't enough. Then what made matters worse was in 1898, New York City officially made it a declaration that we are now not just Lower Manhattan. Of course, they didn't call Lower Manhattan at the time. That was just where the city ended.

They called it Mannehata.

Yeah.

Mannehata. I saw that episode, by the way. It was one of the better ones ever.

Which one?

Of what we do in the dark.

Oh, that's right.

Where they go to party in Manhattan.

What are we do in the shadows?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm so stupid. That's all right. The Five Burrows were included in 1898 officially. So New York and the water needed to get to the people was officially grown to more than three million people by the time the 20th century turned.

Right, which is just precious today. Three million New Yorkers. Oh, my gosh, what will they do? They started to look upstate again because they had hit upon a pretty good idea. The city is a cesspool. We need our water from outside of the cesspool. They started looking upstate. This time they looked up to the cat skills and they found two watersheds, which we did an episode on watersheds that I would love to forget, but it came up just now.

I thought it was.

Good, no? Oh, man, it was horrendous. Was it? Yes, I thought it was terrible and boring.

January 2017?

I don't remember when it came out. Like I said, I tried to forget that it ever happened.

I thought it was pretty good.

But anyway, a watershed is basically a specific topographical area where rain, snow, whatever precipitation falls down into this area and is delivered to a specific creek, river, stream, something like that, that eventually empties into a lake or a reservoir or something like that. There's two watersheds, the Delaware and the Catsill watershed, that put together creates something like 2,000 square miles of water-catching goodness. It delivers it to a number of different reservoirs. That is now today where New York gets 90 % of its water.

Yeah. Obviously, they had to dam up rivers to create these reservoirs. This all happened in the early 1900s. Then finally, they were like, Great, we've got all these reservoirs and the Catskills. But let me remind you, we're on the lower east side of Manhattan, surrounded by horse urine and poop. We need our fresh water. How do we get it here? So in 1917, the engineers of New York City completed the 92 miles, Catskill Aqueduct.

Which.

Is amazing. It's basically a big concrete tunnel that sends water 92 miles from the Catskills down to New York. It's as wide as 30 feet in some places. It is not a tunnel the entire length, as we will see here in a minute, not a continuous tunnel.

Right.

I'm not sure what that means. What is it? Just open.

At some point? No, there's parts of it that aren't technically a tunnel in that it's a covered trench. They cut a trench and then they covered it back up, which I don't know how you do that, but it's not technically a tunnel, like a circle or a tube.

Interesting. Here is to me, one of the facts of the show. You get this water down there in the aqueduct and you get to the Hudson River. What are you going to do? You got to go under it, right?

To me, it'd just be like just pump it in the Hudson and hope it comes out the other side. But then I would have gotten fired immediately when I raised that idea.

That's right. He's no engineer.

No, he's a shamp.

He's a rapscallion. It gets to the Hudson River and then it goes way down into the ground about 1,100 feet below sea level and then climbs back up the other side. It does all this via gravity.

Yes, and they did that not just to show off, but because they decided... I read this awesome... You know how I'm always like, read the contemporary articles? I read one from 1907, where they were talking about the construction of the aqueduct, and they said that the reason why they were going down that far is because they wanted to hit bedrock because it would be fissure-free, meaning there would be no leakage, and they could just pump the water through the hole that they bored in the bedrock. Well, they thought the bedrock was going to be about 500 feet down. By 1907, when they wrote the scientific American article, they reached like 700 feet, still hadn't hit it. It ended up being 1,100 feet below sea level where they finally hit bedrock. That's why they had to drill so far down. They drilled a tunnel, a vertical shaft from the Hudson down to that tunnel, and they built a tube to pressurize it. The water 1,100 feet under the Hudson is at 15 tons per square foot of pressure, which also helps. But the fact that there's no pumps or anything, it's all gravity and pressure driven.

Yes. Sadly, though, that story has a sad ending because it took so long that their Fisher Free and O-3 T-shirts were all rendered useless.

What?

No?

I don't know.

That was a great joke.

I'm going to go back and listen to it, and I'll probably think it's hilarious. Andrew's laughing. Compliments on it in advance.

Oh, man. That was a quality joke.

Oh, got you. Okay, sure, sure. Yeah, I got you. All right. I got you.

We're all.

Together now. Okay, that was a pretty good joke.

Jeez, should we take a break?

After that?

Yeah. All right, let's take a break. We'll talk a little bit more about this so-called aqueduct right after this.

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is the greatest murder mystery in American history.

That's Rob Reiner. Rob called me, Soledad O'Brien, and asked me what I knew about this crime. I know 60 years later, new leads are still emerging. To me, an award-winning journalist, that's the making of an incredible story. On this podcast, you're going to hear it told by one of America's greatest storytellers.

We'll ask, who had the motive to assassinate a sitting president.

My dad thought of.

Jfk, screwed us at the Bay of Pigs, and then he screwed us.

After the Cuban missile crisis. We'll reveal why Lee Harvey Oswalt isn't who they said he was.

I was.

Under the.

Impression that Lee was being trained for a specific operation. Then we'll pull the curtain back on the cover up. The American people need to know the truth.

Listen to Who Killed JFK on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Prepare to venture to the darkest, most haunted locations once again.

The most frequent report is that someone was.

Following you out.

Of that ward.

As your host, Amy Bruney, I'm ready to take you on a spine-tingling journey through the unknown, where the line between the living and the dead blurs. Unearth the historical, untold stories of the haunted places we explore, and hear from real witnesses to the unexplainable phenomena within them.

About four o'clock in the morning, it felt like the hand of God touched the castle. The whole thing just shook.

Race your sofa a supernatural journey unlike any other. Whether you count yourself as a believer or skeptic, a fan of true crime and mystery, or you just love a good ghost story, Haunted Road has something for you. Listen to Haunted Road, season five on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.

Fear the unknown is the greatest fear of all. And for millions of Americans, there is no greater unknown than what to do when faced with an Alzheimer's diagnosis. My name is Dana Tarito, and my podcast, The Memory Whisperer, takes a closer look at Alzheimer's disease and those affected by it. Like many of you, I've experienced the disease firsthand. I've been an advocate and care partner for decades and have written extensively about the subject. Each week, I'll talk to people who've been personally affected by the disease and learn how they coked with it. Folks like TV personality, Lisa Gibbs.

Action is the antidote for fear. And nursing dementia.

Researcher, Dr. Farron Epps. We no longer can be silent.

We have to speak up. We have to share our experiences so we can.

Help each.

Other and learn from each other.

Listen to.

The Memory Whisper on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Stuff you should know.

Josh and Chuck.

Stuff.

You.

Should know.

Okay, Chuck. We've got the Catscale Aqueduct delivering water. There's another one, too, called the the Delaware Aqueduct. This one actually is like a genuine tunnel.

Yes, it's 85 miles, completed in 44. I'm not going to make a T-shirt joke about that. It is still the longest continuous tunnel in the world at 85 miles. They did this all just this digging process is amazing in and of itself. Digging these tunnels and these trenches with steam shovels and pouring the concrete tunnel, which I was like, How do you do that even? You do the bottom half, let it set, and then you do the top half.

Let that set.

They were like Charles Branson in The Great Escape. They were digging tunnels.

Yeah, we're talking like dynamite and stuff like that. They really did it the old school way to build these aqueducts. They're still in use today, so much so that there's three tunnels. Tunnel number one and tunnel number two have been in operation since 1917 and 1936. They've never stopped operating. They've never been stopped up and drained and inspected in over 100 years for tunnel number one.

Yeah, I think the current memo going around is, I'm sure it's fine.

Well, so they're building tunnel number three, and they decided to start building tunnel number three in 1954. They actually started in 1970. They are still not done with tunnel number three. It's amazing. But parts of it are online. And when it does fully come online, tunnel number three will have a capacity enough so that they can individually stop and drain and inspect and repair tunnel number one and then eventually tunnel number two. That's the plan? Yeah, tunnel number three will save the other two. It's good that they're doing it now, but I saw that it's going to be fully operational in 2021, they think.

Oh, wow. We're almost there.

Almost, man.

Yeah, it's New York's longest running municipal project, $5 billion price tag so far, and counting, I guess. Then those three tunnels or two in however many parts of three are working, deliver 1.3 gallons of water a day through a network of manes and then individual pipes leading to apartments and homes and businesses and skyscrapers and all of those pipes, if you total them up, would lay out about 7,000 miles.

That's pretty impressive. I would also like to point out that I think you meant 1.3 billion gallons. What did I say? 1.3 gallons.

Did I really?

Which would be hilarious that they went to all this trouble, spent all this money, and they're like, We can crank out 1.3 gallons a day, New York. Gather around and get your water.

I was still thinking about my T-shirt joke.

It.

Was a.

Good joke, man.

Here's the kicker, too, another great fact to the show. Only 5 % of all of the city's water relies on pumps to get to its final destination, which it means your tap.

It's pretty awesome. Yeah, so that means that it can't break down. Or if something does happen, they still have things like gravity to help things along. It's great. The reason why the EPA gave New York a waiver and said you don't have to filter the water coming from the Catsill and the Delaware watersheds is.

Because-because Giuliani greased the palms of the EPA.

Exactly. Well, it started out as so pure and pristine and just great water to begin with, but they have taken steps along the way to ensure that it stayed that way. Because one of the things that happened with the Croton reservoir is development was allowed to grow up around it, agriculture was allowed to pollute it. It just got... It turned. After that, the EPA, I think in the late 90s said, You guys have to start filtering that water. It's no longer unfilterable. It's not drinkable as is. They had to start filtering. It used to be 100 % of New York's water was unfiltered. That Croton reservoir now is 10 % that is filtered. They learned a valuable lesson from that. Now they're very proactive in keeping the Delaware and Catsill reservoir or watershed water from becoming corrupted by things like development and agriculture.

Yeah, and the lesson they learned is money, because you might be thinking, What's the big deal? Why don't they just filter all of it? It's a lot cheaper to take care of the land and make sure you never have to filter it than to install a filtering plant.

Yeah, because they estimate that a filtering plant would cost something like $10 billion upfront and then $100 million a year to operate. New York is spending something like $1 billion every several years to protect the Delaware and the Catsill Watersheds. So it is an enormous investment, but also it's great because it's natural water that's unfiltered.

Yeah, and they do this in a number of ways, aside from buying up 40 % of the land, which was a good move, and making sure nothing happens to it.

Yep, so New York City owns a lot of land upstate. Oh, yeah.

Just FYI. Yeah, 40 %. Yeah. That's a lot of land. It is. Not 40 % of New York State, but 40 % of the property around the and Delaware Watersheds. They also did things like, hey, let's look at all the wastewater treatment facilities upstream and let's invest a lot of money in upgrading those. Hey, all you people that have septic tanks that are falling apart, that matters. So we're going to reimburse you 5,200 homeowners.

Yeah, that's impressive.

Yeah, install a new septic tank and we're going to pay for it. They removed dead trees. They replace those with little sapling trees who apparently have roots that are young and can absorb a lot of harmful nutrients from that rainwater.

And.

Here's another good fact of the show. Some of the water from those reservoirs or from that watershed can take up to a full year to make its way down to the tap that you're drinking out of.

That's a good one. I like that one. It's almost like how long it takes sunlight to reach us.

I knew you were going to say that.

It's the same thing.

It's the same thing.

They also did you talk about farmers?

The only difference between those stats is you don't have to explain what a photon is. You can just say water.

It's a tiny packet of light. It's the carrier of electromagnetic energy. That's right.

What did you ask.

Right before that? Did you talk about the farmers, how they train farmers upstate, too?

I did not.

They say, Hey, you hicks, you're going to learn these techniques. Oh, man. I'm just kidding. I love farmers. I would actually, as a matter of fact, Chuck, when I retire, I really want a small working farm. Oh, yeah? Very small.

What do you want?

A tenth of an acre small.

No, what stuff do you want to farm? What do you want on it?

Oh, I don't care. Animals? Yeah, some animals, but just having pigs around not to eat or milk, but to basically. But to churn up a field so that I can plan it the next year and move the pigs to the next part of the land, that stuff, for chickens to just walk around and eat their eggs and things like that.

You want some chickens, some pigs, you want some- Probably a couple of goats. A couple of goats. You want some planting. You want to farm some plants and vegetables.

Sure, yeah, but mainly just to have something to do with the earth. I was 100 million % teasing when I said that New York was calling the Farmer's Hex. New York probably did call the Farmer's Hex, but I wasn't condoning that. I was just making a joke.

Right. You're the guy who wants a 10th of an acre one day to do something on that you're not sure.

Those pigs are going to be like, This is some pretty tight quarters around here. Oh, you know what else I would do? What? I would need more than a tenth of an acre for this. Raise bees. That is where I will eventually raise bees. It's on Josh's farm.

Well, brother, you better get some land soon because it's leaving.

Leaving at a rapid pace. Land is leaving?

Yeah, people are buying land. I remember my parents looking at land when I was 10 years old, and they didn't buy it.

They.

Said it's leaving. It's a different deal now. It's a lot harder to find the land that you want.

People.

Bought it all up.

I know. You can still get it, but you got to pay through the nose.

For it. Yeah, or it's up to them if they want to sell it or not.

Sure.

We're getting sloppy seconds. Oh, God.

Oh, man. That's going to be one of those things that our younger listeners is going to be in college smoking pot in a dorm room, and it'll just hit them what you just said 15 years on.

Oh, goodness. You mentioned the Croat and Watershed needs the filtering, and they're trying to avoid that at all costs with the other watersheds. But the Croat and Water Supply, when they built this filtering system, it costs $3.2 billion, and it's under a golf course in New Jersey.

Which is so appropriate. That's where the tainted water is, under a golf.

Course in Jersey. In Bedminster, perhaps.

Sure. I don't know what that is, but it sounds right.

Some people would get that one.

New York's like, Hey, you, Hicks, build a golf course over this. New York just calls everybody else Hicks in my opinion.

That's right. They do. When we fly in to say, Welcome, Hicks. Right.

Have we taken our second.

Break yet? No, we probably should, though. This is a good time.

Okay, we're going to take another break and we're going to come back and explain what New York does due to its water and whether or not it is a secret ingredient in bagels and pizza.

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is the greatest murder mystery in American history.

That's Rob Reiner. Rob called me, Soledad O'Brien, and asked me what I knew about this crime. I know 60 years later, new leads are still emerging. To me, an award-winning journalist, that's the making of an incredible story. On this podcast, you're going to hear it told by one of America's greatest storytellers.

We'll ask who had the motive to assassinate a sitting president.

My dad thought JFK.

Screwed us at the Bay of Pigs, and then he screwed us after the.

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Stuff you should know.

Josh.

And.

Chuck.

Stuff you.

Should know.

All right, Chuck. One thing that you're going to want to say, if you're a New Yorker and you're boasting about your tap water, there are some things you should know. Number one, it's chlorinated. Number two, it's been run through a UV filter. Even if it hasn't been filtered, filtered, there's still things that are done to it. It's not like it's coming straight out of the cat skills into your tap.

Yeah, they take it very seriously, obviously. Here's a good stat. In one year, there are more than 15,000 water samples taken and analyzed at the source. This is upstream. They have AI... Well, not AI. Where is it AI?

There's AI involved somehow.

There always is. I always ask if it's AI. I always ask you because you know.

Sure, I know.

Thanks to the End of the World with Josh Clark.

Thanks for the plug.

Still available on iTunes, the iHeart podcast app or wherever you find your podcasts.

Wow, that wasn't just a plug. That was an ad.

They have these robotic buoys that monitor the Kinsico Reservoir, one of the reservoirs that feeds down into New York. These things take 1.9 million measurements a year and wirelessly transmit that back to the Department of Environmental Protection in New York.

Yeah, which is pretty awesome. They had a buoy before, but they had to remove it in winter because ice would mess with it. This new one apparently is, I'm ice loving.

Oh, yeah?

Yeah. They also, if you walk down the street, there's something like 1,300? No.

965.

965 little gray boxes that if you could open up, you would find a little sink and.

A faucet. It's adorable.

Maybe a little sample size of L'Occitane soap. That's a water sampling station. It says, NYDP, Department of Environmental Protection. Scientists walk up to these things, unlock them, and take samples, and test for all sorts of different things to make sure that the water getting to New York is good.

Yeah, it says more than that. It says New York City Drinking Water Sampling Station on the front of it.

Oh, wow. They really-They.

Really spell it out.

Yeah, it says Fisher-Free and O-3, that's the thing down there.

They're testing, they take 1,300 water samples a month. I'm not sure if you said that, but they were from these particular stations, and they do all kinds of tests. They're testing obviously for turbidity, which is cloudiness, pH, chlorine, bacteria. Does it stink? All kinds of tests that.

They're doing. Right. And usually, the New York City water is going to pass all these tests. There's not going to be a problem. This is just an extra little quality assurance that they're doing because by the time it reaches these testing stations, that's where it's going to the taps anyway. It's tapping into the.

Tap water, basically.

That 10 % of water goes through a couple of extra steps that the other 90 % doesn't go through. One of the first things it does in a treatment plan is it's mixed with alum, which is a component of aluminum. Alum attracts organic compounds and basically says, rise to the surface with me and creates flock, which is a white, frothy, sludge. And all that is just skimmed off the top.

That's step one. Yeah, this sounds so gross, and it is. But in the end, you get your good water. The next thing that happens is it flows through these giant water filters. Dave put it as these giant brita filters. It's essentially the same thing. This is just going to further purify the water passing through the layers and layers of stuff like sand and anthracite.

Then.

Comes the ultraviolet light that you referenced earlier, right?

Yes, and 100 % of New York's water is sent through a UV filter because UV filters are really good at disrupting reproduction of bacteria. All water is zapped, but that 90 % of water that's not filtered, that goes through a separate UV filtering plant that's built just for those. That's right. That's where a billion gallons of water a day are zapped with UV lights. All of that gets combined together eventually and comes out your tap. New Yorkers drink it straight from the tap, literally. It is very bizarre because I don't know if it's a placebo effect or what, but I feel like it does taste pretty good for tap water.

It does.

But at the same time, I typically don't drink just straight tap water, so my frame of reference isn't necessarily.

Right there. You want to hear something funny? Yeah. You know what my brother's favorite water is? What? It's probably just a bit, but he claims it's true. What? Hose water.

Oh, I know what he's talking about.

Yeah, like when you're water in the car or watering the car. When you're washing the car.

Here, right.

Grow car. When you're watering your mini, so it grows into an SUV.

Right. I think the reason why Scott is onto something is because when you're drinking from a hose, it's summertime and it's hot out.

Yeah, and you're probably working hard.

Maybe so. It definitely does taste different, for sure.

When it comes to New York water, everyone says it's the best in the country. There are rankings, actually, and it is 13 out of 100 Metro areas in the US.

It's not the best, literally, by definition, not the best water in.

The country. No, you got to move to Arlington, Texas, if you want. This was from 10 years ago, but I'm not sure what the current status is. I imagine Arlington is still up there, though.

Sure, but you're going to have to have a lot more reasons than that to move to Arlington.

Texas.ouch. That.

One I'm not taking back.

What are some of the problems, though, with New York Water?

Well, there's two big problems. Turbidity, which you mentioned earlier, which is sediment suspension in the water, which gives it a cloudy or dark or gritty look, which is it's not just that it looks bad. Pathogens can cling to that sediment, so it's not something you want suspended. Plus, it also makes it much more difficult to filter that stuff out. It's like extra work that has to be done to get rid of that sediment. If you're not filtering your water to begin with, that's a problem. Then secondly, the other one is nutrients. It's over-nutrient, meaning it's just packed with riboflavin. Well, what.

It actually is, is fertilizer runoff. Those farmers are doing their best, but there is fertilizer that goes downstream and runs into the watersheds. Phosphorous is one of the biggest problems because farmers do fertilize with phosphorus. If it runs off, the phosphorus alone is not great because it can cause algae blooms and stuff like that. Right. It can taste bad and stink.

Yeah, because when the algae dies, it decays and it does not smell good.

No, it does not smell good. But a bigger problem, though, is when you combine that with the chlorine, because like we said, New York water is chlorinated and fluoridated.

We.

Have the T-shirts to prove it.

Right. I don't think we said it was fluoridated, but yeah, everybody knows.

Yeah, it's fluoridated. Right. And when you combine that chlorine with the phosphorus, it can create byproducts called disinfectant by-products. That is no good.

At all. No, those are nasty. They're called DBPs. They are basically like chemicals that are accidentally made from sanitizing water, not just with chlorine, but chlorine, chloramine. There's a bunch of different stuff that they use to disinfect water. All of them can combine with organic compounds to create really just nasty stuff like carcinages or carcinogens. Some can produce miscarriages. It's just really, really bad stuff that can be produced in the drinking water.

Chloriform is one of those byproducts.

Yeah, which is why New Yorkers frequently faint when they're drinking tamp water.

But this all sounds super scary. New York City, I think there are eight known contaminants, but they are still apparently well under the legal limit, depending on what you think about how the legal limits are set, of course.

Right, exactly. It's a.

Good caveat. But New York City drinking water is 30.9 parts per billion chloriform, and the national average is 11, so they're way higher on chloriform. But as far as all of those DBPs total, they're far below the legal limit and just a little bit above average nationally.

Right. Then the total number of DBPs that they have is actually less than those in Arlington. Interesting. Chew on that Arlington.

That's right. Chew on that. Bad pizza.

Speaking of chewing, Chuck, and pizza, let's just answer this question. Is New York City's water the key ingredient to New York City bagels and pizza?

I think, I mean, you can't definitively say, but I think it does have something to do with it for sure.

It's got to because science is involved. So here's the thing. The water from the Catskills and from the Delaware is naturally soft, meaning that it's low in calcium and magnesium. Where do you fall on loving, soft or hard water?

I'm a hard water guy.

Same.

Here, man. When I lived in Arizona, they had soft water. Where I lived in my sister's house that I lived in, and most of the houses had water, softened, or I guess, hardening units or whatever in the house.

Yeah, because you can't feel clean. You never feel like you got the shampoo or the soap off. It's awful. It's just awful.

I don't know. Does anyone like soft water?

I don't know. Weirdos, probably.

I mean, hard water. Sorry. No. I had it all backwards.

Okay, so you like.

Soft water? Yeah, that's why I misspoke. They had water softeners in Arizona because the water was hard. New York water is soft. I like soft.

Okay, I like hard water typically because I feel like I'm clean afterward. But soft water, like just the New York water is fine with me, but a chemically softened water, I can't stand. Oh, really?

Yes. Interesting.

But New York is naturally soft, so it doesn't have calcium and magnesium, where it's very low in those things comparatively. That actually has an effect on taste. Calcium and magnesium can provide a bitter taste to water. There's one thing that they're saying like, Okay, the dough isn't going to taste naturally because of the calcium, magnesium. That's something.

That is something. It also interacts with the flour. If you're going to make a bagel, or a biali or pizza crust, you can be... Or a lot of things when you're baking, but those are the big three in New York, you're going to be using flour and water as your base for your dough. Hard water, the minerals in those tap water are going to fortify the gluten, and they're going to make it tough and less flexible. You don't want it too soft, though, because it'll have the opposite effect and it'll be gooey and you won't be able to work it as well. Right. Apparently, the American Chemical Society says New York City tap water is the Goldilocks of bagel water. It is just right.

Yep, not too hard, not too soft, just perfect for a bagel and for a pizza. That American Chemical Society quote came from a Smithsonian article, and they went on to say, Probably, though, it's actually the techniques that New Yorkers use to make bagels. They poach the bagel dough first, like they boil it.

That's the only way to do a bagel. Sure. If it's not boiled, it's not a bagel.

No, it's not.

That's like a baked doughnut. It's not a doughnut.

Basically. And then they also let the yeast sit for a little while to make it ferment, which creates volatile flavor compounds. So it just tastes better. They're saying probably those are the reasons why New Yorkers make better bagels or pizza, and it's not really the water. The water just contributes a very small amount.

I think it's all those things.

Why not? No one can say for certain, so let's just say, yes, it is all those things. Exactly. Well, if you want to know more about New York City's tap water, go on to New York City and try their tap water. Since I said that, it's time for listener mail, everybody.

I'm going to call this House Rolling. Remember we talked about TPAing houses? Yep. Love the podcast, guys. Just finished up trick or treating. You were talking about rolling houses. I grew up in Franklin, Tennessee, where we used to roll houses all the time. Franklin, Tennessee, for people who don't know, is where a lot of big shot, Nashville big wigs live because you can buy a huge house with lots of land. That was Chuck speaking. Funny thing, though, guys, I'm back to being Brandon.

Okay.

Funny thing, though, guys, my neighbor was Brad Paisley. This was a couple of years before his first Grammy Award. And once we found this out, we knew that we had to get him. So my sister and I gathered all of our friends dressed in black and snuck out to roll this country, Music Stars' house. We were halfway through the job when his freaking tour bus rolled up on us. At first, we all ran away frightened, but we were pretty much caught in the act, nowhere to go. He got off the bus and was super nice about the whole thing, actually. He gave us a quick tour of the tour bus, chatted us up for a little while. We even cleaned up the little bit of mess we had made and left starstruck. I highly doubt he remembers that night at all, but my friends and I will certainly never forget. Anyway, that's all I got, guys. I have a spooky Halloween. That is from Brandon Saunders.

That is very nice, Brandon. Thanks a lot for that email. Hats off to Brad Paisley for being so cool.

He doesn't take his hat off.

All right, exactly. But also, how about just a hat tip then?

Yeah, or actually, I was thinking Kenny Chesney because he's bald.

None of those guys take their hats off, dude. But also, he hangs out with Payton Manning, which means that he must be a good.

Guy, right? Oh, yeah.

Isn't Payton a good dude?

Sure. I'm just tired of seeing him on my TV.

Oh, that's not going to happen anytime soon. Pretty soon you'll see them in augmented reality in front of you everywhere you go. It or not, Charles. Okay, well, if you want to get in touch with us like Brad Paisley did, you can go on to stuffyshowno. Com and check out our social links. You can also send us a good old fashioned email. Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom with some good old country goodness and send it off to stuffpodcast@ihardradio.

Com.

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The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is the greatest murder mystery in American history.

That's Rob Reiner. Rob called me, Soledad O'Brien, and asked me what I knew about this crime.

We'll ask who had the motive to assassinate a sitting president. Then we'll pull the curtain back on the cover up. The American people need to know the truth.

Listen to Who Killed JFK on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Laurie Santos, host of the Happiness Lab Podcast. Making new friends and maintaining old friendships is a great way to boost your happiness. But sadly, we don't always feel up for being sociable. If I was approaching a stranger, my heart would raise. I was going to throw up. I just had so much anxiety around it. So in a new season of the show, I'll tackle how to make firm friendships firmer right through to the joy you can find in talking to total strangers.

I'm very much enjoying your animal print.

Scarf, madam. So listen to The Happiness Lab on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, wherever you get your shows.

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