Selects: Blacksmiths? You got that right!

20:37Chuck Bryant:The wrought iron? Yeah. Yeah. And the difference, the big difference between wrought iron and steel is that wrought iron has silicates in it that kind of ends up as like these fibrous filaments that get hammered into order, basically, by the blacksmith from pig iron, which gives it a certain structure. With steel, like you said, all types of iron are basically based on their carbon content. Steel has a much higher carbon content than wrought iron does. And so it doesn't need to be hammered like wrought iron does because it doesn't have these iron silicates that need to be arranged just so or else it'll make it brittle.

21:20Chuck Bryant:Instead, because of this carbon in it, it forms this kind of crystalline structure in the iron that makes it hard and durable. way harder and more durable than wrought iron. The problem is because of that durability and the strength and hardness, it makes it more difficult for a blacksmith to work with down the line than it does wrought iron. But it's also a much more effective, say, battle axe than a wrought iron battle axe. Yeah, and like you said, it's not what we use on our staircase isn't wrought iron these days. It's not wrought iron and the production of that in a big way went out in the 20th century pretty much altogether.

22:01Chuck Bryant:Went out with disco. Oh, gosh, I wish it lasted until the 70s. So one thing we should say also to Chuck is we tend to think of steel as like a modern invention. Steel was perfected in the modern times. It was like basically the thing that kicked off the Industrial Revolution, if I remember from our Robber Barons episode. But that's not to say that people weren't experimenting with steel long before that. It was just the scientific understanding of it was lacking. Instead, that was replaced by an intuitive understanding among blacksmiths of, you know, what fuel did what to iron to make it stronger.

22:38Chuck Bryant:They weren't saying like, oh, if I use charcoal or coke, it's going to make this a better steel than, say, you know, coal or something like that. That's right. Then you've also got cast iron. If you have a nice cast iron collection in your kitchen, it's going to be 2 % carbon or more. It's very brittle, so you're not going to hammer cast iron. It is formed into shape by casting it. That's why it's called cast iron. And use a mold while it's molten and pour it in there. And it's a great thing to cook with. Yeah, and we would have never been able to make anything out of cast iron until those bellows were introduced to the forge to really bring that temperature up because iron has a very high melting point.

23:19Yeah, if you're going to pour it, it's got to be super, super hot. And we'll get to these temperatures and the different kinds of hot later on, which is very interesting stuff.

23:27Chuck Bryant:Yeah. So we've got like the blacksmiths are working with this. They're figuring out that if you add like carbon or if you do this, like if you heat the iron to a certain temperature and then take it off and hammer it and then let it cool on its own, it's going to form one type of finished product. If you do something that's called quenching it, which is cooling it down in a bucket of water and usually mineral oil these days, It's going to cool differently, so its structure is going to form differently. And again, they were passing this knowledge on, but they weren't using terms necessarily that we were using.

24:03Chuck Bryant:What's interesting to me is we use terms that they came up with, like quenching and slag and scale and that kind of stuff. Those are all still very much around and it makes sense still. Even after having made the transition to industrialization, they still use words very much like that, if not those same words. Now, do you mean quenching as in how a human might quench their own thirst? Kind of. Kind of. But rather than turning up a bucket of water and mineral oil, you would plunge the iron, the hot iron, into that bucket of mineral oil and water. That's right. Very cool stuff. Were you making a joke that I just missed?

24:42Chuck Bryant:A reference? No. Okay. No, I didn't know if you were saying the etymology of the word quench was from smithing. Oh, maybe. And that when we quench our thirst, it's taken from that. Maybe. It's possible. All right. No, there's no joke in there. Smite, they think that the words smite and smith are from the same word. Right, because smite means very biblical meaning, or not meaning, but they use a lot in Bible times to hit something, right? Yeah, to strike it, to smite something. That's right. That's what a smith does. Smitties. Should we talk about tools? I think so. One of the cool things about blacksmiths is that when you get good, you just start making your own tools.

25:22Oh, man. Isn't that neat? Tools to make tools. Yep. You got to start somewhere, though.

25:28Chuck Bryant:Yeah, you got to lay down a little bit of money first. But I saw this one blog post by a blacksmith who's like, look, if you're just starting out, get the bare minimum stuff. Get some used things. See if you like it first. And then eventually when you get good, you can invest a little money. Then you can just start making your own stuff. Right, which is very cool. I did see there was one YouTube video that was like how to get going for less than$100. Oh, I'll bet, yeah. Some very basic stuff. Yeah. So if you're going to be a smithy, you're going to need some things. It might be less than$100 to start.

25:58You're going to need a forge, which is the heat. There are different kinds. You know, the one that I saw, the axe, this was sort of a, I don't know if it's old-timey, but it was actually using coal. And that's very appealing to the eye if you're watching on YouTube. it seems like the backyard smithy these days uses a gas-powered oven, a gas-powered forge.

26:21Chuck Bryant:Were they using coal or charcoal? Because there's a big difference. It was coal. Okay. I didn't know much about charcoal until this. We'll talk about it later. But it seems like these days the gas-powered forge is kind of what you use. They're not very big. It's sort of like a double size of a bread box because when you're making something, You're not building a car out of iron. You're making a tool. You're making a dagger or an axe head. Like, they're all kind of small, something you can just sort of stick in there. You're going to have your anvil, very key piece. You're going to have a lot of other tools for, like, the more finesse work, grinders and files and stuff like that.

27:06And you're going to have a nice collection of hammers, of course.

27:08Chuck Bryant:Yeah, you definitely, there's different hammers for different things. And like we said, you know, hammering pig iron into wrought iron, people don't do that these days. So you're not using a sledgehammer. And so you're using like a little more finesse and precision to kind of strike what's called the workpiece. Whatever you're working on is called the workpiece. That's one thing that really stood out to me watching some of these blacksmith videos is like these guys do not miss. At least if you're at the level where you're doing close-ups of your work on video and posting them to YouTube, you don't, your hammer is not missing.

27:40Chuck Bryant:It's going exactly where you want it to every time, which is pretty cool, too. It is, but I also, and this is not to knock the smithies, it seems like a bit of a forgiving craft in art. Sure. So where you can sort of like, if something didn't, if you did strike in it and it kind of did something you didn't quite like, you can change that. Right. You can restrike it. You can reheat it. Yeah, yeah. But I'm sure there's a lot of trial and error involved when you're first getting started, you know. For sure. Yeah, I'm sure, too. And then, you know, as you keep advancing, you're figuring out new techniques and all that kind of thing.

28:12Chuck Bryant:But like you were saying, the anvil is pretty neat. Like I didn't realize all the different parts to it. Like anybody who's seen a Wile E. Coyote cartoon can recognize an anvil and probably draw one from memory. And you'd probably be pretty close. And that's a pretty accurate image of what an anvil does. But all the little different details from like the point on the front to the feet of it, And all of those serve this kind of group of purposes that come up pretty frequently in blacksmithing. Yeah, so the anvil is super heavy. It is very hard, obviously. You don't want the anvil itself to be dented or start falling apart when you're swinging this heavy hammer on metal on this thing or on iron.

28:55And so you also want it so it doesn't, like, just absorb the hammer blows, too. So it's got to be the right amount of hardness. It can't be break-in, can't be shattering. You've got a horn on the front. You talked about the pointy thing. That's what's on the front of it. And usually in all the anvils I saw when I looked them up to buy one just to have, although they were way too expensive, it's got a little dip right before the horn, where the horn juts out. So the horn isn't exactly level with the regular base of the anvil. It's down just a bit. And it's not by accident. That's very much one of the big uses of the horn is that little step down.

29:36Chuck Bryant:Yeah, that's one of the neat things about anvils is like each little detail has a purpose, a larger purpose that's hidden until you understand what you're looking at or what it does. What about those holes? There's like two holes in every anvil pretty much. One's round and one's square. And the round one is called a pritchell hole. and it is basically a hole so that you can punch holes into whatever work piece you're working on. I saw that if you're punching a hole, you actually want to punch it on the face of the anvil, which is the top. You punch it on one side, almost all the way through. Flip it over, punch it on the other side, almost all the way through.

30:12Chuck Bryant:And then you move it to the pritchell hole. And then that's when you widen it to the shape you want. So it just allows you to punch a hole all the way through without harming the face of your anvil, really. Yeah. That was one of my favorite parts of the video I saw because that was where the axe head hole went where you would, you know, put the axe handle. Oh, yeah, yeah. So I was like, how are you going to do that? And just to see it happen in front of your eyes, it was pretty awesome. And then what's the other hole, the hardy hole? Yeah, the hardy hole is actually square. With a D. Yes, H-A-R-D-Y.

30:46Chuck Bryant:Yeah. Yes, it's not hardy because it's very tough, although it is very tough. Sure. But it is a square hole, which sounds counterintuitive, but it's not. And you can put tools in there that allow you, like you might stick something in there and then use that to then bend the hot iron around to make different bends and cuts and shapes and things. Yeah, I saw this one tool in a couple of different videos that fit into the hardy hole. The hardy hole is almost like a Dremel tool, right? So like there's all these different things you can put in that square hole that hold it in place. but the difference between them is what tool is attached to that square peg.

31:25Chuck Bryant:That's right. Square peg, square, square peg. That's right. And one of the ones that I saw looked like a tuning fork. It's like two rods that are very close together. I saw that. And you could put like a hot workpiece in between them and then, you know, bend it. So you can make like an S-hook. It's used for like very tight, creating very tight curves in the workpiece. Yes. Very, very cool. Yeah. You got to have your tongs. Oh, and I think we should have mentioned, too, the anvil, it doesn't have a sharp edge. Like the edge all the way around the main work base of the anvil is a little bit round.

32:00Because, you know, if you've got something super sharp and you're hammering away, it's going to make little creases in the iron. You don't want that.

32:06Chuck Bryant:I think the step is the sharpest edge of the whole thing between the horn and the face, the top of it. Yeah, I think that's where you need it to be sharp. One other thing I saw that I thought was really interesting is when you buy an anvil, you want to actually fit it to a block of wood. And traditionally, people will use like a good tree stump of wood that doesn't split very easily. And like, man, you fasten it to that wood, that tree stump. And then you bury the tree stump whenever you can about three feet into the ground so that the anvil becomes part of the tree stump, becomes part of the ground.

32:44Chuck Bryant:Yeah. So it distributes that extra energy that gets lost rather than back up at you down into the ground where it's absorbed, which I just find absolutely fascinating. But you make it so well fastened to the stump that the stump and the anvil become basically one. Yeah, it's like the anvil is essentially connected to the earth at that point. So nice. This just, man, I just keep thinking of Thor and Led Zeppelin. I know, all the things. J.R.R. Tolkien. Yeah. The Smithy, you got to have those tongs, and these are not like grill tongs that you have on your back porch. These are those big, thick metal iron.

33:24They look like gussied-up nail clippers almost. And that's what you're going to use to put stuff in the forge in that fire, pull it out. Um, it's funny here, Ed says that pretty much no one wears gloves. I didn't see that. I saw plenty of videos with people wearing gloves. I saw both. And I saw some where they didn't. I guess sometimes if you're working really near the heat, you might want your gloves on, but you might also want to have the hand feel during that finesse work.

33:54Chuck Bryant:Yeah, because, and I think it's worth saying one more time, that, that, that, um, forge where the fire is, it's, I mean, it is very small. I saw as little as like a six-by-six-inch little area of extraordinarily intense heat. So it's a small area of heat, but the heat that is there is so hot, it can turn iron white hot. So, yeah, you want to not get too close to it. And even when you're wearing tongs, it's smart to wear gloves from what I saw. Yeah, and we never really talk much about the fuel. I said these days they power it with gas mainly. Back in the day, back in the day, they would use charcoal.

34:31That was the first thing. And charcoal, apparently, if you're going to be a Brooklyn hipster, you want to work with charcoal because that is the superior product and the superior fuel. But it's really messy. Very wasteful. It's very wasteful. It's expensive. It takes a lot of wood to make charcoal. So then coal comes rolling around. And there was a lot of coal, and it was super cheap. and they had to kind of rebuild their forges. But coal, even though it has some impurities like sulfur and stuff in there, they basically kind of made the big switch to coal at a certain point in time.

35:05Chuck Bryant:Yeah, and even better is if you can get your hands on coke, which is a derivative of coal. Just like charcoal is a derivative of wood, it's just wood with the sap and the water burned out, so it's a really energy-dense form of it. Coke is the same thing with coal. It's got the impurities generally burned out, So it's a pure energy-dense form of coal. But both of them play a really important role in that they produce really high temperatures, but they also introduce a lot of that carbon that gets absorbed into the iron at those high temperatures, which produces better, harder, stronger steel. Can you cook with that stuff?

35:42Can you cook with Coke? Cook with Coke?

35:45Chuck Bryant:I don't know. Like in a Kamada, like egg-type cooker? I don't know. That's one thing that I saw in one of these blog posts about different types of fuel. I think it was like the no BS, but they spell out the word BS, which I'm not going to say here. Because they're blacksmiths. The no BS guide to different kinds of fuel. They said one of the things to consider is what kind of environmental impact is your fuel having? Right. So that's a good question. If you're like, I'm not sure I should be cooking with this. don't forget you're going to be in a small enclosed room that's your blacksmith shop with that same stuff.

36:19Chuck Bryant:And you probably have a pretty high efficiency chimney, but some of it's still coming back. So that's definitely a consideration to think of your own health and the health of mother earth who is absorbing the blows from your anvil. That's right. You do need good ventilation in your workshop, eye protection. Sometimes if you really want to kick it old school, you might have one of those leather aprons, like a leather face. And then your quench, you know, we talked about quenching. It's called a quench or a quench bucket. And that is the bucket with the water. And like you said, sometimes mineral oil these days where you'll plunge it in there just like on TV and in movies when it makes that great steamy sound and the steam rises everywhere and they pull out a beautiful battle axe or long sword.

37:04Chuck Bryant:Yeah. Apparently, so it's not that surprising when you consider samurai, but the Japanese are really, really good at creating high carbon steel blades. Yeah. And there's one guy named Goro, G-O-R-O, who is like, well, widely considered the greatest Japanese swordsmith of all time from back in the 13th century. So he can throw together a katana, no problem? No problem. Should we take a break? Yeah. All right, we're going to take a break and talk a little bit about, and get quite a bit wrong, probably about techniques right after this.

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40:13All right.

40:14Chuck Bryant:Let the parade of misinformation begin. You know, these worry me more than other episodes that we do when it's something very technical and very specific. Because these guys make battle axes. Yeah. And anytime it's a very specific craft or something that you haven't done, like we haven't done, And you can research it and watch videos and do your best. But until you've actually done it, you can't get it 100 % right. I will say, though, the videos help tremendously. Oh, for sure. If this is even remotely interesting to you, and hopefully it is if you're this many minutes, 33 minutes or so into this podcast that it is, go watch some videos.

40:53Chuck Bryant:There's a bunch of them on there. And I think you're going to be like, oh, okay, I get what they were saying now. Oh, that makes sense. Forging a bearded X. That's the one. I've got one, Black Bear Forge. Oh, boy. This giant man with a giant beard and a tiny little leather cap. And his name is Black Bear Forge? Which is adorable, yeah. The video I watched is called Scarf Theory and Making Chain, which we'll talk about that in a minute. But it's just amazing. So cool. And like you said, I don't want to do it. I want to have a friend that does it. I want to come over to their house and watch them do it.

41:31Chuck Bryant:Like, let's see if we can get John Hodgman into it. Yeah, Hodgman. Although he's got very strong forearms. He does, freakishly, like Popeye. All right, so here's some of the techniques. What you're doing, if you're a smithy, is you are shaping hot metal. That's what it comes down to. And this is where the temperature of the metal becomes really important because certain metals have to be at certain temperatures to do certain things. These days, like I said, if you've got your gas-powered forge, you can set that baby on whatever exact temperature you want, and it's not quite as—it's still very impressive, but back in the day when they were using coal and charcoal, I feel like much more intuition and trial and error and actually looking at the color temperature because the metal will turn different colors at different temperatures.

42:27Chuck Bryant:Right. So there's white hot, orange hot, yellow hot, red hot, different kinds of gradients of orange and yellow and white, too. There's glowing white, which is the hottest. Those aren't just expressions, people say. No, and again, that's the etymology of blacksmith lingo, basically, that has made it into— White hot. Yeah. Red hot. Those abs of yours are white hot. Oh, wait, that was a different episode. Yeah, that's right. So, but apparently blue white hot is the hottest of all, but you don't typically see that in blacksmithing. White hot is about as hot as you get. And how hot is white hot? White hot, from what I saw, is 2 ,550 degrees Fahrenheit, which is super high in Celsius.

43:17Okay. Yellow, I think, is just below that. Yeah. And then you've got orange. Right.

43:24Chuck Bryant:And then you've got lame-o red hot, which is only 1 ,400 degrees. 760 Celsius. And you can't do anything with red hot. That's actually not true. You can do some very limited stuff, but at that point, the iron is, I mean, it'll probably bend a little bit. I saw good old Black Bear Forge was making some chain with what looked to be red hot iron at the time. Okay. And he was bending it pretty good. but I mean, I'm not the best judge of color. He was making chain? Yes. Wow. I'm just going to, I'm not going to wait any longer. This guy made a chain, a length of chain. Perfect. Each length was exactly the size of the last.

44:05Chuck Bryant:Oh, God. He was making them like in threes and then connecting those threes to other threes. And he was using the horn. Chuck, are you, are you about to? It's so satisfying. Climax or something? No, it's just so satisfying. It touches these parts of my body. You know, it's not sexual at all. Right. You know what I'm saying? Oh, I know what you're saying. It's, I know exactly what you mean. Although I haven't seen it. You never know what might happen. Right. But this guy, so you know the horn of the anvil, right? Oh, do I? He would make like, he would bend the chain initially on kind of like a thick, about the middle part of the horn.

44:40Chuck Bryant:And then he would bend it even further, moving it a little up the horn. And this guy just so expertly put it exactly where he needed it to be. I think one of the things I like about Black Bear Forge guy is that he doesn't seem the least bit pretentious. I'm pretty sure he lives in Minnesota. He's not wearing his little leather cap, ironically. He seems very helpful. He was born in that cap. He's making these videos to help. Yeah, I think you might be right. And with a white beard. I think he was born with a white beard as well. Well, when you watch this bearded axe thing, what this guy does is he starts with a block of iron and then eventually makes an axe head but he's hammering this thing out he's using this little rolling tool and hammering that as he's kind of rolling it forward and it's almost like kind of reminded me of baking like the way you would use a rolling pin to smooth out dough and then when it came time to actually make the the sharp part I guess what he was doing was forge welding and we're kind of jumping around but this is one of the techniques, and it's also called fire welding, and that's when you combine different grades of iron and steel, and you're joining these things together in multiple shapes together.

45:51I think that's what was going on, because what he did, he had this axe head, and the sharp part, he split. And I was like, well, dude, what kind of an axe is that? That's crazy looking. I thought he messed up. But then he put some other kind of metal in between and would use this, and from what I gathered, it's, where is it? Flux? Is that what it is?

46:14Chuck Bryant:Flux, yeah, like sand? Did it look like sand? Well, it was in a bottle, and it looked like a little sandy chemical, so I guess that's what it was. And he would heat it up and then spray this stuff on it and hammer it together, heat it up, spray some of this, and hammer it until that metal becomes one. And the really, you know, the super specific metal that he needed for the sharp axe blade was melded with the rest of that iron to where you couldn't even tell. It was just like they became one with one another. He was probably reinforcing the axe head with a stronger type of iron. Totally. So there's slightly different carbon content.

46:51Chuck Bryant:And then the outside was a harder kind. So it resisted surface deformities, but the interior stuff was strong. So it resisted breaking. Probably, but he was making these two one. I saw Black Bear Forge do the same thing with the chains. He was using a scarf weld where you make one end angled and then you make the other end that it's going to join to angled in the opposite direction so they kind of fit tightly together. And then he would heat it up and hammer it together and it just became one. But he used flux as well. And from what I could tell, when you use flux like sand or borax, I think, is something you can use.

47:32Chuck Bryant:it prevents that joint from oxidizing, which makes it a stronger joint, a stronger seam rather than kind of a compromised seam. Yeah, and it was also interesting to see how this guy would, sometimes that block was out for quite a long time of hammering and shaping and hammering and shaping. And then it looked like when he got into the little more detailed work as it became an axe head, he would put it in the fire and he would turn around very quickly and start hammering. You could tell he wanted to do it very fast. Right. And he would hammer it for like 10 seconds and then put it right back in the fire.

48:07Yeah. And then pull it out and hammer it really fast for 10 seconds. So whatever he was doing at that point required a super, super, super hot piece of, what do you call it? Ground piece? Work piece? Work piece. Yeah.

48:20Chuck Bryant:But I mean, so most blacksmiths, you'll notice in their shops, they set the forge and the anvil up within just twisting distance. Oh, yeah. Like you're standing in one place moving from one to the other so that you can lose as little heat as possible when you transfer it out of the fire. You don't walk across your shop. No, you don't stop and like make a sandwich or anything. There's also drawing, which is drawing that metal out into a longer, thinner shape. You might be shaping something into a rod or a block into a blade like I saw. And that's sort of lengthening it without flattening it out.

48:56Right. Because you can also flatten it. That's another thing. That's called peening.

49:00Chuck Bryant:Yeah. There's also upsetting, which is the opposite of drawing, where you shorten the length of iron or steel by hammering it. And that's what happens when you make a nail. Would you want to talk about making nails here? Yeah. I mean, we kind of mentioned earlier, you know, the foundation. I mean, there were things that were built with dovetail joints and corn cobs to keep logs together. And there were technologies like that. But if you really want to talk about the building of the world, you got to talk about iron nails and how many millions and tens and millions of iron nails that were made in the world by hand, by people.

49:44Yeah.

49:45Chuck Bryant:I mean, before industrialization, they were all made by hand. And it's apparently harder to make them than you would think. I watched a video by a blacksmith named Nick Kimball on Instructables. And I guess his brother writes for Instructables and interviewed him. And he's like a blacksmith at one of the colonial model farms. Yeah. I think maybe Mount Vernon. They didn't say. I met that guy. So he looks like it too. He looks like a cool dude. But he showed how to make a nail. And he says he can make one a minute. And this guy is an advanced blacksmith. Like he has a job as a blacksmith. That's how advanced this guy is in the 21st century.

50:24Chuck Bryant:And he can make one a minute. Apparently blacksmiths of yore could make 10 to a dozen of them a minute. Wow. And it's very involved. Like it's, you would, you actually have to make the tool first to make, to make the nails. So you take an iron bar, flatten that, punch a hole in it using your pritchell hole and a punch. And then you take nail rod, little strips of, of the iron that's going to be nails. Heat it up, hammer a shoulder into it on the edge of the anvil so that there's like a, it's, it's narrower at the, in the, for the bulk of it. and then up top it just kind of is a little wider and boxy.

51:04Chuck Bryant:And then you put it into the hole of the tool that you made and then you heat it up and you hammer the head a bunch of times to flatten it. That's what you have to do to make one single nail. And some blacksmiths in the days of yore could make a dozen of those in a minute. That's how good they were at it. Unbelievable. I would have charged so much for nails, it would have been astronomical. I would have been like, no, I will, like, let's make you some chain mail instead. What do you need nails for? Let's do something cool. And they'd say, you know, I need to build a second story in my house. I'd be like, all right, it's going to cost you.

51:42Chuck Bryant:The Josh nail? Yeah. The Josh Clark special? Because it would not be fun to make nails, for sure. No, but boy, they made a lot of them. They did. There are also some other techniques. There's bending we've kind of already talked about when you're creating curves and things. If you've, I mentioned the staircase irons, how they're twisted around. That is done with a square bar, which is a bar with a square hole in it. And that's placed over a square rod of hot iron. And then you turn that square, you basically, sort of like that Dremel you were talking about, you stick that hot thing into the hole and you twist it around and you create those little twists.

52:23Chuck Bryant:Yeah. And then every time it's a blacksmith tradition, you say, Et voila!

52:30Chuck Bryant:You got anything else? I don't have anything else. It's just, I know we got stuff not quite right, but hopefully the Smithies, hopefully our enthusiasm won them over. Yeah, let's hope so. Or they're coming after us. Ignorance. Also, there's like a ton that we didn't talk about. It's a really, I mean, this is a countless human, thousands of year long body of knowledge that we just tried to do in 45 minutes and failed at that. But there's a lot to it. So if you're interested in it, go check it out. At the very least, go watch some videos. And since I say go watch some videos, everybody, it's time for Listener Mail.

53:10All right, I'm going to call this Olympic Torch Bearer.

53:13Chuck Bryant:Okay. Hey, guys, I was a torch bearer for the Winter Olympics, and it was a lot of fun. The amount of logistical coordination that went into it was incredible. I was told four months in advance when, down to the minute, I'd be carrying the lit torch, and it wasn't off by more than a few, actually. A guy came to our hotel with a bunch of toys, vehicles, and action figures and modeled exactly what would happen. That's so cool. I had to be reminded by my handlers to ensure that I kept it very high, high enough so as to not light my hat on fire. The torch is pretty light but fairly top-heavy. I'm sure we were wearing mittens to make it impossible for any of us to make any finger gestures, even accidentally, that could be seen by the world on the live feed.

53:56Didn't even think about that. One term you didn't use that I thought you'd appreciate, when one torchbearer passes the flame to another, it's called a torch kiss. We went through training and practiced just this part. On the street, we did a little dance after we kissed, and then I and whoever just finished got back on the bus. As you mentioned, a guy took my torch and extinguished it right afterward, and since it was still hot, they stored it in a rack on the bus. When we got back to the starting point, they removed the fuel cell and gave it back to me.

54:24Chuck Bryant:Broke it in half. And that is from Matt Jones. We had quite a nice little exchange about this. He said he did get it through work, but he was not a C-level executive. He won it through a drawing at his work. Oh, that's totally great. Yeah. That's great. He might as well have gotten it from contributing to society, as great as that is. Man, I got to thanks for that, Matt. Also, I knew it was called The Kiss. I thought I said it was The Kiss. And if I left that out, that drives me crazy, man. When there's a fact that I know that I failed to put into the podcast, that somebody then comes and says, you left out this really awesome fact.

55:00Chuck Bryant:And I just drop to my knees like the Liberty Mutual guy in the elevator and go, no. You know how much that bothers me when that happens to me? How much? None. Man, it's like it'll ruin my week. My week's just toast now thanks to Matt. There's the difference between you and I. Well, if you want to ruin my week and have a neutral effect on Chuck's week, maybe even make it more positive, you can email us. Go ahead and type it out. After that, wrap it up. After that, spank it on the bottom, and then send it off to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

55:39For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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