And for this week's Elsewise Case Selex I've chosen, please listen to how plasma waste converters work. It is one of those unsung sleeper episodes that may prove to be one of the greatest stuff you should know episodes of all time. It talks about technology we had never heard of until we came across it and started researching it. And still to this day, five full years later, it is just mind blowing to me is when I first heard about it. So check out please listen to how plasma waste converters work.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know. A production of I Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark, Judge Charles W. Bryant, guest producer Noles here, Noles moved in. Yeah.

Yeah.

So that court is on the floor and he works constantly.

You know what my superhero nickname was as a child?

I'll tell you, plasma boy, no, it wasn't me, I'm just kidding. It was a weird joke. Why we're talking about plasma. Plasma boy.

Yeah, like radioactive man and plasma boy, right?

Yeah, but it wasn't plasma boy. It was.

What was it sidekick's named radioactive man sidekick. Oh, I was just part Slavin's. Now I want to know, dude.

Well the answer is fallout boy. That's a band, I know, but I wonder if it's based on that maybe, I don't know, huh? We'll find out, won't we? Well, we'll look it up and then we'll find out with a million emails. So plasma boy, huh? I wish you must have an affinity for this episode that it's great, Chuck.

You know, when lightning strikes the Earth, we did a pretty awesome podcast on lightning. Do you remember we talked about how it literally rips the sky open?

Yeah, it rips the atmosphere open. Yeah. And as it's traveling down through this ripped open atmosphere, the air on either side of this stuff is superheated to about 20000 degrees. It's more than three times the surface temperature of the sun.

Yeah, Celsius, I should say, Celsius, not even Fahrenheit. And it's about 12 grand Celsius roughly. It's super hot. Yeah. I'm sorry, Farenheit does everynight, yeah, talk and Farenheit, yeah. OK. At any rate, 20000 degrees is lightning, and this when the air is superheated, it takes on what's commonly called the fourth state of matter. Plasma, right? Yeah. So you've got solid, boring liquid the gas. Awesome.

OK, but plasma is super awesome. Gas. Yeah. It it's a bit like a gas and usually starts out as the gas. But if it holds an electro magnetic field or creates an electromagnetic field and it holds an electrical charge, it has free roaming electrons running through it, doing all sorts of crazy stuff. Yeah, it just basically breaks gas into like this crazy, weird, different type of fluid. And that's plasma and it's awesome. Yeah.

Ionized gas.

Yes, pretty good stuff. Super high temps like you were saying. And because it's a super high temp, what it can do is it can break down. It can it can cause something solid to undergo what's called molecular dissociation, which means it's not just burning something, it's not melting something. Right. It's actually exposing it to so much heat that the molecular bonds break apart and it becomes a pile of its components. Yeah. And it breaks it down to from its compound of molecules to its atomic components.

Yeah.

Yeah. Pretty amazing. It is very amazing. And it's like you said, it's not it's not burning like this process of using a plasma torch to break something down, to decompose. It is actually what it's doing doesn't even need to use oxygen. Nope. So that means that it's a process called pyrolysis, which is intense, intense heat that creates decomposition in some sort of matter, especially organic matter. Yeah.

And as a result, you get these byproducts. If it's a an inorganic piece of material, say, like some corn stalks that you're using as biomass feedstock, it will become something called syngas.

Yeah. Synthetic gas. Right. And then if it's something like an old pair of roller skates.

Yeah. We'll save those, first of all. Well, plasma is not very good any longer. All right. So the leather is was at one point organic. I guess it would still be considered an organic material that turns into gas.

Yeah, the metal in the skates that will turn into something called slag. Yeah, right. And it undergoes a process of vitrification.

Yeah, it does. Vitrification is where this this stuff becomes. So the bonds break between it so thoroughly. Yeah. That it becomes basically a form of glass. Yeah.

Like volcanic glass almost is what it looks like. Yeah. Like obsidian. So all this sounds great. We're kind of beating around the bush about what a plasma torch can do. Right. And here's the big the big bomb boom, plasma torches can burn garbage and waste.

Yes, and not only that, they can burn it without combustion, which means there's not a bunch of smoke.

Yeah. And they can actually harvest the energy in that garbage. Yeah. In incredible ways. Yeah.

Because it turns out garbage is chock full of potential energy. Yeah. You can release that energy when you burn it. Like just regular incineration. Sure. But you only can maybe net about 15 percent of the energy that's locked into this big pile of garbage in like a landfill. Right. What a waste with using a plasma torch to create pyrolysis or gasification. Mm hmm. You can get up to 80 percent of that energy that's locked in there, potentially crazy in the garbage.

So what we're talking about is a potential future where we are using plasma torches to create energy to sell back to the grid. Yeah, to create steam, to turn those turbines like we're always still just knocked out. Yeah. That that's how you create energy these days. Yeah. I'm sorry. Electricity. Sure. And then sell off byproducts as well and make more money. Yes. It's it's like I cannot be more excited about this.

And medical waste. Chemical waste. Yeah. Throw it in there. Yep. In fact, you know what. So anything you got in there Daddy, except for like radioactive material, you got to you got a swine flu outbreak.

Take the pig carcasses, throw them into gasification chamber. There is no swine flu left.

It is totally gone.

Or how about this? I'll bring it to your farm. I'll have a small one set up. Yeah. You got a swine flu outbreak. I'll come to your farm. Sure. And I'll burn up all those nasty pigs. Right.

You got some toxic waste. Oh, well, we'll just burn that. Yeah. In a gasification chamber and we'll break it down to its inner components. It's not going to hurt anybody no more little lamb.

I guess we keep saying burn. Well, it's really tough not to. Yeah. Yes, you're right. So we torch torch. Yeah. Nice.

All right. So let's talk. Strickland wrote this Jonathan Strickland of Tech stuff, and he did a great job, as always. And he seemed to be as excited about it as we are when he was writing it. Right. Because how can you not be?

Let's talk about some of the parts of these things. The first thing that he points out that we should point out is that any plasma conversion gasification facility is going to be unique to its own needs. They're all custom built at this point. There is no standardized unit.

There are some companies that are starting to like Westinghouse has some that you can just like what amounts to off the shelf the backyard gasifier?

Pretty much, yes. I think they have like three different models, although I'm sure they will custom build you whatever you want.

And you're probably right. But anyway, when he wrote this, they weren't super standardized. And that's good that we're going toward that. But so what we're going to talk about it, you know, sort of depends on the system. Sure. But what you're probably going to have is a conveyor belt that's going to move the garbage into the converter.

Yeah, it's going to play that Bugs Bunny powerhouse song. Oh, man. Sometimes they will treat the stuff like although you could if you had a big enough machine, you could throw an entire car in it, let's say. Yeah, but sometimes it's more efficient to break that car down. Sure. And have a pile of tires in a pile of scrap metal. Yeah. And break it down to its components just to make it more efficient. Yeah.

Because it's going to use a lot less energy to break it down into smaller parts. Yeah. And then feed it into the the plasma torch incinerator then it will to just torch it with the torch because these things use a lot of energy.

Yeah. A lot of energy.

They probably saved that for when the investors come by. Right. They're like you right now. You see it now you don't.

You have your furnace, of course. And Strickland says this is where the magic happens because you don't need oxygen. It is airlock and airtight.

It goes in, but the heat doesn't escape into the atmosphere or the gases or the byproducts, which again, that is really saying something about the material science that's gone into this, because these things are burning it like or heated to 6000 degrees Fahrenheit to Celsius like the temperature of the sun.

Yeah. In this little in this canister right here. It's amazing.

I'm surprised that our plasma weapons for real, I think it's really great that they don't. I looked into it.

It's like the realm of video games, of course, like plasma, guns and stuff.

And so if you have a furnace, which you will, you're going to have the plasma torch, which is in the lower like half of the first. Let's say, and they're also going to have some drainage for that flag and some venting for the gas, and it's going to be water cooled.

Yeah, one of the things that came across to me in researching this is these things frequently have like, really elegant designs, right?

Yeah. So, like, you have a drain for the slag, which again is the molten metal that's broken down into its constituent parts, inorganic material. And depending on how you treat it, it'll turn into glass or sand or nodules. Right. Asphalt. Yeah.

And then you have the gas going up. But you also and you're draining off the slag, but you're also keeping some because it forms basically a coke bed. Yeah. That keeps the furnace hot, which means you have to use less energy. Yeah. In your in your plasma torch. It's like having your own little lava bed. Right. Just sort of sitting there. Exactly. Eating things up. So it's pretty cool.

But eventually you're going to probably want to get some of the slag out of there because you're going to do cool things with that, which we'll talk about later. That's right.

The plasma torches themselves are clever, amazing little instruments.

It's basically a it's a lightning creator. Yeah.

Like they use an electrical arc. They push usually just plain old air through it. Yeah. So that this electric charge heats the air to the 6000 degrees, turns it into plasma and then that's what it's directed into the furnace. That's crazy. It is very crazy. But that's that's what they're doing. A little water cooled torch that that gets super hot.

Also doesn't use any kind of oxygen for combustion.

Right. And also these things you want to turn me on with electrical stuff is show me a system that powers itself. Right. That I just love that more than anything in these facilities. I mean, they've got they've got excess energy to spare right afterward. Not only can they power themselves and a lot of cases they're selling back to the grid.

Right. So once you've got this initial input where you get this thing going online and you heat that plasma torch up for the first time, the moment you start feeding feedstock into it, which in this case is garbage, plain old municipal solid waste from the landfill back to the future. Right. Right.

When you start feeding that, it starts to produce energy. Yeah. And the way that it does that that gas that escapes syngas. Let's talk about syngas, too. Yeah. Syngas is a beautiful, amazing, elegant thing. It has its combustible, its untreated form, so you could use it to burn like natural gas, although it has about half the energy density of natural gas.

But if you're burning garbage, it's just basically free natural gas, the byproduct, you can also treat it and scrub it and just released it into the atmosphere is inert gas. Yeah, no problems with that water. Water scrubbed, right? Yeah, but when the syngas exits the the furnace, it wants to expand. So if you're a very clever engineer, you'll put what's called the gas turbine right there. A gas turbine is spun by expanding gas.

Yeah, well, you got plenty of that stuff, right. So you've got the syngas going through the gas turbine, spinning that. So it's generating electricity. It's also very hot. So once it goes through that gas turbine, it can be caught by what's called a heat recovery steam generator.

Right.

And that's just got some water going through it and uses hot, hot heat gas to turn the water into steam. Well, that, in turn turns another turbine that generates even more electricity. And then at the end, before you even treat it, you have all the syngas that could be used to fuel a combustion engine to generate even more electricity, all from burning garbage.

All right. We have to take a break because the people just off the ceiling, because you're so excited about Singye. All right. We'll be back in a sec.

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No, no, no. How you feeling, buddy?

OK, I'm so excited. This might as well be ocean currents. Oh yeah. You like that one too, huh?

All right. So we're talking about syngas. You need to scrub it with water. They passes through a spray of water. You're actually cleaning gas, which is pretty interesting as a concept. And then there are all measure of filters afterward to remove acids and things like that, which do form weird byproducts like salts and salts. It's pretty neat.

If you run it through a basic scrubber, it turns into salt. But there again, inert, like, just go ahead, pick up a handful and eat it, see what happens. Probably nothing.

And if you use an afterburner, sometimes they'll use a secondary burner, which is actual just natural gas flames, I guess to finish the job maybe.

Yeah. To burn off like any particulate matter in the gas. Like if the if the the, the process didn't it. The syngas is like pure. Right. This, this basically burns off particulate matter or you can scrub it too. And if you're doing all this you're probably just going to release it rather than try to trap it and use it for combustion. Right. If you're to scrub it.

But you do need to scrub it, especially if you're going to release in the atmosphere because it does contain some pretty nasty stuff.

Yeah, cadmium, mercury, a lot of heavy metals, because remember what what this process does, the plasma torch and the gasification process breaks these things down into their constituent atoms and molecules.

Yeah. And heavy metals and some other things are not really good for us, even in their most basic form. Yeah, for the most part, it's going to take something that, chemically speaking, was once a threat but has been broken down into its separate, innocuous inner components. Right. Some things, even when they're at their most basic level, are still dangerous to us, like cadmium, like mercury, like other heavy metals. And these things do have to be taken out of the slag and or the syngas and disposed of.

The thing is, is if you put a thousand tons of municipal solid waste into one of these furnaces, you're only going to get about 20 tons of that stuff.

Right. So so we will still need landfills or something like that, but it will just be for these very dangerous chemicals are very dangerous, like heavy metals or something like that. But you still got great stuff out of the other 980 tons.

Yeah, exactly. So the byproducts we talked about, the syngas, the slag and the heat are all use or not always used. Depends on what you're trying to do with your plant, but they can potentially all be used. And the slag, I think you already said you're getting eighty percent. So that means the weight of your resulting flag is only 20 percent of what you started with. So you took that Buick and it now weighs twenty percent what it formally weighed.

Right. You could pick it up if you wanted. Yeah, maybe so.

Probably should wait for it to cool down first. And the volume is only about five percent of the original waste volume. And like you said, it looks like volcanic glass and they can use it in asphalt and concrete. They can pour it directly into molds and make paver stones. Right. And it's all of a sudden it's a it's a it's something you would find at your big bucks hardware store for your garden. Yeah. Which is pretty amazing.

Another potential creation that you can use slang for is to turn into Rockwool. Oh man, I love this stuff. Right.

Like so as a molten slag is coming up.

If you expose it to compressed air blasts, it turns into this thready, very light, but also very strong wall material like gray cotton candy is how how Strickland puts it.

Yeah, and there's a lot of uses for it like you can use in hydroponics. It's a it's a growing medium. You can also use it as insulation. Apparently it has twice the insulating properties of fiberglass.

Yeah, amazing. Yeah, it is. And you can also use it to clean up oil spills.

It says, yeah, this is the one that really gets me going. It's lighter than water. So you can just throw it on water and it'll sit there. Yeah. And it's super absorbent. So it'll basically. What they'll probably do is contain it in something like a tube or something, and then just throw that tube in a big circle around an oil spill, will float on the water, soak up the oil, and then just go back and scoop up the rock.

Yeah, I guess so.

Yeah. I had a friend that used to work and I need to look that up and him up actually because I don't know where it went, but they were using banana fibers to do the same thing to clean up oil spills.

Didn't we do one on oil spills and like your friend, you emailed with them or something like that about it? I don't know. I feel like we did.

Seems like the distant past. But here's the cool thing about the the rockwool. They currently use it. It's not just something that you can only get as a byproduct of creating the syngas. Right. It is produced by mining rocks. You melt it down and then spin it sort of like cotton candy, like he said. Yeah. And a big machine. And here's the cool thing about the gasification, though. The way they make the rockwool now, it's about ten cents, I'm sorry, about a dollar a pound as a byproduct, it could be sold for 10 cents a pound.

Plus, you don't have all of the disturbances in the earth of mining rock in Iraq. Well, it's a byproduct of garbage that you're burning.

That's great. It's amazing.

This is like a win win, win, win, win, win, win, win. The flag is not reachable. That's another cool thing that I found. So Stricklin specifically said you can't do this with radioactive material. I have seen that you can. Oh, really? Yeah.

And what you can do is it'll turn it into this slag, this obsidian glass. And while it's still radioactive, it's not going anywhere.

It's not going to leach out into the soil. Yeah. And it's shell. It should be stable like this for thousands of years, conceivably, until the radioactivity is not harmful to humans any longer. That would be a really great you could just turn it into these radioactive paver stones that the. Yeah, that might even glow at night. You'd have a nice little path in your backyard, you know, glow. There's actually glass like that. I can't remember what its technical term is, but in the mid 20th century there was a big trend for radio.

They call it Vaseline glass because it glowed about the color Vaseline, which is weird, but you can find glass like ashtrays and sculptures that glow and the reason they glow because they're radioactive.

I think I know what you're talking about, really neat looking, but it's also like I don't know if that should be in my home.

Light your own cigarette. Just hold it against the wall. Yeah. All right. Well, let's take another break here and we'll talk about where we are now and where we could be headed with gasification.

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Well, all right, so here's what I found, and this may not even be current, what I saw was that there are currently eight functioning.

Plasma gasification facilities in the world. That sounds about right, when Taiwan, one in Japan, one in Canada, one in England, one here in the USA was the one in the U.S. Think Vero Beach, Florida.

Oh, yeah, one in India. One in China. And get this one. There's one on an aircraft carrier, Neith, that the U.S. is using. The idea is that it's a little small unit that basically just treats the on board waste. Oh, that makes sense. So they envision a future where, like cruise ships have these things and just dump all their garbage in the ocean. Exactly. You treat all the waste. And I guess they could even sell byproducts if they wanted to.

Yeah, pretty cool.

There's one that's supposedly going. I know you saw it was mothballed, right. But there's one that's Intel that's planned. They have like all the, I guess, the licenses and certifications that they need to build one in Port St. Lucie, Florida. And it's supposedly it started out as it was going to take on a thousand tons of garbage a day and put out it was going to generate 67 megawatt hours a day and sell 33 of that.

So it would completely power its own operations and still have 33 megawatt hours to put out, like to sell back to the grid.

That's just more money that this thing's making, right? Yeah. What I saw is that I think it was like 2014. It said that it was going to be about 60 percent of that. So it would take in about 600 tons of garbage and generate total output of 22 megawatts. But, yeah, I don't know if it's coming or not. But either way, the thing that got me about this one check was that they plan to not just accept landfill waste, but to go out and mine existing landfills and use those things as feedstock.

And in fact, there was one in which the shehnai, Japan, that closed down because they ran out of feedstock.

They burned through all the garbage. Wow. Yeah, that's pretty great. Yeah.

When you're out of garbage. Exactly. You have to go get more garbage. I guess we'll stop. Earlier this year, I think the world's largest plant is they said it was near completion in May. So it may be done at this point. But a company called Air Products became processing 350000 tons at this facility. Wow. Creating power.

Wow. Wait, 350000 tons. Yeah, it's that enough power for 50000 homes. Wow. And 50 full time jobs, which is not that many enough for that much.

But now which is a highly automated I would guess. Yeah. Which is sort of good in a way.

But I guess you'd want more jobs created to ensure sort of a balancing act against and it cost half a billion, five hundred million dollars. And that is one of the that's one of the stumbling blocks along the way. Stricklin points out that any time you have a new technology, it's going to be super expensive to get going. And everyone's dug in on the landfill and how we're doing things now. So it's going to take a lot. It'll get cheaper over time, like everything else.

That's a new new way of doing things. You also have to win over the establishment with with dollars. You have to show them why it'll be better for them financially.

Well, yeah. Also, if if, say, a municipality is kind of like, well, we're not going to close down the landfill, but if you guys want to open one, go ahead. Right. Well, then you have a plasma waste treatment facility and a landfill in direct competition. And if you are their customer, meaning you have some garbage that you want to take, you don't care where your garbage is going. Probably you want to go to whoever has the cheaper fees for accepting that garbage.

Yeah, because a landfill, is it kind of an expensive proposition to kipping fees are going to be high. It's basically the only way they can make money is by charging people to deposit their garbage with a plasma waste treatment facility.

They're making money all over the place. They're selling slag as paper stuff. They're selling rockwool to clean up oil spills. They're selling electricity back to the grid. Yeah. So they're making money and all these other ways that can pay for the operation and generate a profit so they could keep their tipping fees low. So if you own a landfill and somebody opens a plasma waste treatment facility in the same city, yeah, you may be in a bit of trouble business wise.

Yeah. Keep the tipping Filo.

And and not just people like municipalities will begin using your services ultimately, because I think the one thing that's lacking still is that environmental will be right.

And we're definitely a lot further along than we were when Strickland wrote this article. Sure.

But I think that that. One of the things that makes it so attractive is we're going to burn your garbage in really, really green, sustainable ways, create energy from it, and we're going to go get your old garbage and burn that, too.

Yeah. And make even more electricity.

And the plant's going to power itself with your garbage.

Yeah, it's it's a win win, win, win, win, win, win, win, win.

So Stricklin interviewed he was from Georgia Tech. Right. Adductor Cicero. Yes. I'm sorry, Susya. Oh, I thought it was Cicero too.

Yeah, it's a mind trick R before C, so Dr. Susya said he envisions a future where you don't just have, like, the big municipality plant. Like, that'd be great. Now maybe you could bring a plasma torch to a landfill. Yeah. And just bore a hole through it and stick that plasma torch in there, cap it off and start burning that junk from the inside out. Yeah.

But if you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, there could be a coal seam nearby. What about. That's what I thought. What about like Centralia, Pennsylvania. Right. Centralia, Pennsylvania, caught fire.

There is a combustion fire going on. If any coal seam was exposed to this. Yeah, it would it would just be decomposed into carbon, into its constituents. It wouldn't catch fire. That's nothing to do with this again. So it's actually extremely safe in the landfill itself. Would act as the furnace. That's amazing, isn't it?

I like it's really tough to think of really intense heat without thinking fire. Right. But that is not where this goes.

Yeah. Yeah.

Or Dr. Sorceror Susya CEO says Cirque du Soleil says, hey, why not work together here and bring a plasma converter to another existing traditional facility where they can work hand in hand like a coal fired power plant? Yeah, I want.

So what this would do is you would just basically stick a plasma facility onto it, into the existing infrastructure and just accept garbage in there and burn that and everything.

And then the syngas that's created would be used to help fire the coal fired plants. That's right. And it would be used for combustion, right? Yeah. And you would be using less coal or less fossil fuels to do the same thing to create steam, to spin the turbine. Because ultimately that's what it all comes down to, is electricity.

So if you have a a green way to supplement the stuff, all you're doing is using less fossil fuel too.

Right. It's also way cheaper because then you're not having to treat the syngas, which apparently is half the cost of a plasma treatment. Yeah, yeah. Because these guys have to treat the escaping smoke and everything anyway. So all you're doing is adding actually a cleaner, a cleaner fuel into the fire. It's going to ultimately be clean down the line.

Amazing. And then we talked about sort of half joking, but they're serious about decontamination. You know, if you have an outbreak on your farm and you have a bunch of, you know, sad, but if you have a bunch of sick disease, dead livestock, right. Just bring out the the P 3000 and throw those cows in there. Bing, bang, boom. Yeah. Maybe grind them up first, too. Yeah. Why not.

Yeah.

And you can do that with soil as well. Contaminated soil. Got an E. coli outbreak in your spinach field.

Not anymore. Yeah. But a dirty humans, not anymore storm in their medical waste to biohazard. Nope, you've got inert stuff. Yeah, a poopy cruise ship, the P3, the whole thing in there at once. I'm kidding about dirty humans, by the way. Why do I need to say that? I don't think so. Okay, good.

I hope not. You never know, buddy, so that is plasma waste treatment, hopefully the wave of the future.

Yeah, we should title this something a little sexier so people aren't like, yeah, there's a lot of people listen to that because that should. Yeah, because then like even people that are super into like green technologies are probably going to want to learn about this weird science thing. Yeah.

How about plasma waste treatment. Please listen. Signed Josh and Chuck.

Yeah. I like the little clumsy. We'll work on that. If you want to know more about plasma treatment facilities or any of that stuff, you can type those words in the search bar, howstuffworks dot com. And since Chuck said sexy, it's time for listener mail.

I'm going to call this. You guys got Africa, right? Thank you. Hey, guys, listen to your podcast about female puberty. I was very impressed with the thoughtfulness and sensitivity in which you explained things and gave advice. By the way, we heard from a lot of people in that room. And thank you. A lot of young women like grown women, a lot of men and dads. Right. And that one meant a lot. It was really good to get that one right.

I think the one thing that we didn't quite get right that someone has pointed out more than a few times is we said, boy, crazy a lot. And we should have gone out of our way to say, like, you know, oh, you might also be girl crazy or you might not have sexual feelings and thoughts. I wish we had that one back. I know that's you know, I'm giving us a break on that because we we people know how we feel about that stuff.

We just didn't pointed out a strong to that.

So that's I mean, that's how things change and improve, though, you know what we're saying? And now young young ladies out there going through puberty, like other girls, you might not like boys or girls and all. That's OK, too. Yes. All right. Thanks for saying it.

So back to this. Probably listen to about 200 or more of your podcasts. And you got a long way to go, buddy. And I'm always like I'm almost a three oh one. Yeah, only 500 after that. I'm always happy to hear you guys do your best. To be specific, when you make references to events in countries or geographic regions. What I mean by this is you don't generalize like a lot of people do and say crap like in Africa they blah, blah, blah, or in Europe it's normal to blah, blah, blah.

When you got to the part of your latest show where you talk about female puberty rights, I was elated to hear you being careful not to say in Ghana there is a village where dot, dot, dot. The reason for my reaction is that I've lived in the US for 20 years, but I'm from Ghana are at least 20 distinct ethnic groups and languages in Ghana alone. And I know for a fact that the ritual you described is not done.

And all of them in fact, I've heard of it, but I don't think it happens anymore. By the way, the official language in Ghana is English, so we are able to communicate with each other. Nothing irritates us Africans more than to hear someone start a sentence with in Africa. I bet a continent that huge. Yeah, because no one says, well, in North America. No, they just say like in the US. But it's a confederation of like associated states in Africa.

It's like, yeah, you're you're putting the whole continent and in all these different countries. All these different cultures.

Yeah. It's amazing. So thanks guys for being so thoughtful and professional. Eric from Seattle, by the way, have gone, I guess. Yeah. Thanks a lot, Eric. Appreciate that. Thank you. Agree.

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