Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?

Summary

Stuff You Should Know: Episode Summary Episode Title: Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Release Date: May 20, 2025
Hosts: Josh Clark & Chuck Bryant
Production: iHeartPodcasts

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1. Introduction to Pseudocide

Josh Clark [01:25]:
“And it’s just us because we don’t know where Jerry is. But that’s okay, because this is stuff you should know.”

The episode delves into the intriguing and often misunderstood topic of pseudocide—the act of faking one’s own death. Josh and Chuck explore the motivations behind such drastic measures, the methods employed, and the ramifications for those who attempt to disappear.

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2. Reasons People Fake Their Deaths

a. Personal Relationships

Chuck Bryant [03:15]:
“One of them is to get out of a personal relationship... I wanna leave my family.”

Individuals may resort to pseudocide to escape toxic or abusive relationships, seeking a fresh start devoid of past entanglements.

b. Financial Troubles

Josh Clark [03:37]:
“The most common is probably a financial thing. You either have some huge debt you’re trying to get out of, or you’re trying to commit insurance fraud... Or you’ve embezzled from your...”

Financial distress, including overwhelming debt or desires to commit insurance fraud, drives many to consider faking their death as a means of evading financial obligations.

c. Legal Issues

Chuck Bryant [06:40]:
“If you are about to be incarcerated for a very long time... there’s a higher likelihood that you’re going to try this...”

Facing lengthy incarceration can compel individuals to fake their deaths to avoid imprisonment and its associated consequences.

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3. The Process of Faking Death

a. Documentation and False Certificates

Josh Clark [08:01]:
“For a couple hundred dollars, you can get an official death certificate from the Filipino government.”

Obtaining legitimate-looking false documents, such as death certificates from countries like the Philippines, is a critical step in making the pseudocide believable.

b. Creating a New Identity

Chuck Bryant [10:12]:
“Or if you really want to go with the deluxe package, you can spend tens of thousands of dollars to get somebody almost like concierge service...”

Establishing a new identity involves acquiring new passports, driver’s licenses, and building a credible backstory to support the new persona.

c. Acquiring a Dead Body

Josh Clark [11:37]:
“And that’s going to probably sit in for you. Apparently, this really kind of drives it home...”

Securing a body, either through black market morgues or corrupt funeral homes, is essential to convince authorities and others of the individual’s demise.

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4. Challenges and Risks

a. Modern Surveillance and Technology

Chuck Bryant [18:21]:
“Besides DNA facial recognition technology and video cameras on everyone’s front doorstep...”

Advanced surveillance technologies and ubiquitous cameras make it increasingly difficult to avoid detection when attempting to fake one’s death.

b. DNA and Biometrics

Josh Clark [13:28]:
“Cremation destroys DNA pretty good.”

Even if physical evidence is falsified, biometric data like DNA and facial features can lead to detection, especially with the prevalence of digital databases.

c. Interaction with Former Acquaintances

Chuck Bryant [26:06]:
“If this is the kind of thing you want to do, you have to really disappear from that life...”

Maintaining complete disconnection from past relationships is challenging and any inadvertent contact can unravel the pseudocide attempt.

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5. Notable Cases

a. Petra Pazika

Josh Clark [40:04]:
“She got away with this for more than 25 years... she just left her life, essentially.”

Petra Pazika, a German student, successfully faked her death in 1984 and lived under a hidden identity for over two decades before being discovered.

b. Sam Israel III

Chuck Bryant [43:06]:
“He got found out because he called his mom who said, ‘You need to turn yourself in.’”

Sam Israel III, a hedge fund manager, attempted pseudocide in 2008 but was captured due to a pivotal mistake—contacting his mother post-disappearance.

c. John Stonehouse

Josh Clark [44:21]:
“He had to come forward and basically tell everybody what had happened.”

John Stonehouse, a British MP, faked his death in the mid-1970s but was eventually apprehended after international intrigue and investigative persistence.

d. Marcus Schrinker

Chuck Bryant [46:34]:
“He staged a plane crash... then parachuted out, but was caught due to radio communications and accomplice involvement.”

Marcus Schrinker’s 2009 attempt involved orchestrating a plane crash to escape legal troubles, but technological surveillance led to his capture.

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6. Online Pseudocide

a. Casey Nicole

Josh Clark [48:38]:
“A woman named Casey Nicole... she passed away by suicide.”

Casey Nicole was a fabricated online persona who feigned a leukemia diagnosis and subsequent death to garner sympathy and manipulate her online community.

b. Susan Meechan

Chuck Bryant [51:16]:
“She became reviled and hated, and I think rightfully so.”

Susan Meechan perpetrated an online pseudocide in 2020, falsely claiming her own suicide to exploit online bullying narratives, which ultimately led to her public disgrace.

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7. Conclusion and Takeaways

Josh and Chuck emphasize the immense difficulties and legal ramifications associated with faking one’s death. They highlight that modern technology, thorough investigations by insurance companies, and the need for comprehensive planning make successful pseudocide exceedingly rare. Additionally, the emotional and ethical implications for both the individual and their affected loved ones are profound.

Josh Clark [27:20]:
“If you're going to try to stage your death and everybody who has anything to do with the research of this article says don’t bother, you're going to screw it up.”

The hosts conclude by advising against attempting pseudocide, underscoring the complexity and high likelihood of failure and legal consequences.

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Notable Quotes

• Josh Clark [02:03]:
  “So I don’t think pseudocyc side means death. I think it’s a little worse than that, but you get the point.”

• Chuck Bryant [16:04]:
  “At the end of the day, the most important thing to your small business is the quality of the candidates.”
  (Note: This quote relates to an advertisement segment and is not included in the summary of content.)

---

Additional Insights

The episode touches on various methods of pseudocide, the role of insurance companies in detecting fraud, and the psychological motivations behind such actions. It also explores the phenomenon of online pseudocide, where individuals fake their deaths on digital platforms for attention or to escape online obligations.

The discussion is enriched with real-life examples, illustrating both the audacity and the eventual downfall of those who attempt to vanish through pseudocide. The hosts maintain a balance between informative analysis and engaging storytelling, making complex legal and technological aspects accessible to listeners.

Chuck Bryant [25:53]:
“Men also are more likely to try this or, at the very least, are more likely to get caught.”

This highlights gender disparities in pseudocide attempts and the factors contributing to successful or failed disappearances.

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Final Thoughts:
Faking one’s death, while a captivating subject often portrayed in fiction, is fraught with immense challenges and ethical dilemmas. Josh and Chuck provide a comprehensive examination of pseudocide, offering listeners a deep understanding of why individuals might consider such actions and why they are rarely successful in reality.

Transcript

[Chuck Bryant]

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[Josh Clark]

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. And it's just us because we don't know where Jerry is. But that's okay, because this is stuff you should know.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, Jerry may have engaged in pseudocide because she's so tired of working with us.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And she didn't want to tell us.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's one reason somebody might want to get out of their life. Or, you know, not for real, but that's what pseudocite is. It's faking your own death.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And that definitely does sound like something Jerry would do.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Like she couldn't bring herself to tell us, so she's like, well, maybe I could just disappear.

[Josh Clark]

Right. So, yes. Pseudocite. I'd never known that before, but pseudocyc side is a different term for faking your own death. Like pseudo, like fake inside death.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right.

[Josh Clark]

So I don't think side means death. I think it's a little worse than that, but you get the point. Yeah. And I don't remember what brought this up. I just had this idea to do this one. I don't remember what it was. But it turns out that there's. There's, like, this is a thing. It's not just something you see in the movies, like, a surprising amount. I don't want to say a lot, but a surprising amount of people have tried this. And it's probable that even more people have tried it than we think, because the only ones that we know about are the ones who got caught, presumably. There's plenty of people out there who tried this and was successful.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Or tried it and failed, but didn't get caught.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, sure. Yeah. That's a good. That's a good point, too. I hadn't thought about that one.

[Chuck Bryant]

As you would say, there are three tranches.

[Josh Clark]

That's right. I wouldn't say that because I love myself.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, but you're the tranche master.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, that's so like 2010. I forgot about that. Can you believe that was 15 years ago?

[Chuck Bryant]

Hey, tranches were hot.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, they were. They were all a rage. So why would anybody do this? Chuck, I think we should start with that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, I mean, one of them I listed get out of a personal relationship. I mean, I was kind of joking about it, but it would be probably more like, I wanna leave my. If it's a movie, at least. Although this happens real life, I wanna leave my family.

[Josh Clark]

They're so boring.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And go set up another life with this new family. That's gonna solve all my problems.

[Josh Clark]

Right? That's how it works.

[Chuck Bryant]

It seems like the most common is probably a financial thing. You either have some huge debt you're trying to get out of, or you're trying to commit insurance fraud to get a big payout or something. Or you've embezzled from your. Like that.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, apparently so. Livia helped us out with this, and she found that there seems to have been an increase in pseudocides or people getting caught trying their hand at pseudocide after the 2008 financial crisis.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I mean, speaking of tranches.

[Josh Clark]

So another big one, too, is if you are about to be incarcerated for a very long time and they happen to have let you out on bail, there's a higher likelihood that you're going to try this than, say, you know, when you're gainfully employed and you're sitting around reading the newspaper fairly content.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure. Very sadly, of course, one of the reasons is, like, the sleeping with the enemy method, which is you're trying to escape some sort of abusive situation in your home, whether it's a spouse or a family member or something like that.

[Josh Clark]

Right. Or you want to frame your wife. Like in the movie Double Jeopardy with Ashley Judd.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Boy, we're. Is this 2007 you know what?

[Josh Clark]

This really feels like an earlier stuff you should know type episode. So let's do it. Let's do it. Tranches everywhere. Ashley Judd appearances. We'll figure it out as we go along. Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Our boss is just coming to us and saying that, like, there's people that want to put commercials on our podcast, and we're saying, no, why would we ever do that?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And then the other people are saying, what's a podcast?

[Chuck Bryant]

Exactly.

[Josh Clark]

So let's see what else. Oh, I think this one's probably. It's pretty niche, but if you're a lottery winner and you have a bunch of family you don't care about that are coming out of the woodwork, you might try this as well.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that's true. And here's the thing. If you have that kind of dough, I mean, making yourself disappear and faking your own death is not cheap, as we'll see. So it is definitely more common for people of great means to try this kind of thing. First of all, they may have the money to pull it off because it can be expensive to really do it right these days. Or if you're the kind of person who defrauded someone or a company of millions and millions of dollars, that puts you in a certain league. I've never had that opportunity to do something like that, for instance.

[Josh Clark]

Precisely. So, yeah, it's just kind of a selection bias almost, you know.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, totally.

[Josh Clark]

Men also are more likely to try this or at the very least, are more likely to get caught.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And I could see that being the case rather than just being. Yeah. More likely to do it. And also, again, probably because of selection bias a little bit, finance bros are likelier than others to try this or at least to get caught, too.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that makes sense. With just the risky sort of, you know, maybe they got into that hot water because, you know, this deal that just couldn't be resisted or whatever because it's so much money, bro.

[Josh Clark]

Right. It just didn't work out, bro.

[Chuck Bryant]

Here's another interesting thing is it is more common for people to come to the United States to, like, collect on an insurance policy. Like, if you're from another country and then just go back to your home country.

[Josh Clark]

Yes. And you just mentioned insurance for the second or third time. People who work for insurance companies are well aware of all of these things that we're rattling off and more.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Because as we'll see later on, there's a lot of stuff that you could do wrong that an insurance investigator is going to pick up on. We'll talk more about that. But that's a big part of this whole thing. It's a big reason people do this insurance fraud, and it's a big reason people get caught. Insurance investigators.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure. And as we'll see, it's. It's way more common for, like, the insurance company to hire somebody to find you rather than the cops to come after you. Because the cops are like, well, you know, it's really no skin off my back.

[Josh Clark]

That's right.

[Chuck Bryant]

And the insurance company is like, well, they just got millions of dollars from us, so we're going to. We're going to do your job.

[Josh Clark]

Exactly. We should probably give a pretty big shout out at the outset here to Elizabeth Greenwood. She's an author. I think her day job is a creative writing professor at Columbia. But she wrote a book which, as far as I can tell, is the most exhaustive look at pseudocide anyone's ever created. Her book was released in 2016. It's playing dead, A Journey through the World of Death Fraud. And I guess she had a conversation with a friend about how she could get out of her student debt, and somebody said, you should fake your own death. She said, you know, that's a great idea for a book. And here we are, ipso facto, talking about it now.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And she actually went through part of the process just to actually go through it to see how hard or easy or expensive it was to write about it. She didn't go through with it, but she went as far as finding out where this is. You know, when you talk about something sort of unusual like this, it seems like there's always like, oh, well, you need to go to this place. Because they just got the market cornered on that, whether it's like, you know, Swiss bank accounts or offshore accounts, you know, like, they have it set up so you can do this kind of stuff. And apparently that place for pseudocide is the Philippines.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Who knew for sure?

[Josh Clark]

That's another thing, too. If you died in the Philippines, your insurance claim is going to get investigated pretty thoroughly just because of that. Yeah. So Elizabeth Greenwood is not the first person to try this, but just based on her experience, she found that you can pretty easily find people who are more than happy to assist you with this for a fee and a relatively few cheap fee, especially considering the type of documentation you get. I think for a couple hundred dollars, you can get an official death certificate from the Filipino government. And that's a big part of why the Philippines is so like the. The center of all of this because the. You're not getting forged documents, you're getting false official documents.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Because you know somebody's got a friend on the inside and they're taking bribes and like, so you're getting good actual documentation. It's just all based on falsehoods. But that's not it. It doesn't end there. Like, just hold your, hold your credit card for another second. Because they're going to double this offer.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I mean, it's sort of like any service. They're like, well, if you just want the birth certificate, you can get that for a couple of hundred bucks. But that's probably not going to be enough these days. Back in the old days, that was probably all you needed. It used to be way easier to get away with this kind of thing.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Their driver's licenses didn't even have pictures on them.

[Chuck Bryant]

Exactly.

[Josh Clark]

It's nuts.

[Chuck Bryant]

But if you really want to go through with the second tier service, you can get a kit that may have a new identity for you. You could have a new passport in there, a new birth certificate maybe, something like that. Or if you really want to go with the deluxe package, you can spend tens of thousands of dollars to get somebody almost like concierge service for someone who's. I can erase your tracks. I can make it like you were never here. I can make sure you don't get caught. I can get people to. We can cook up a story and I can get witnesses to testify that they saw this car wreck and pulled your body out of the wreckage. And, you know, we know people that work in morgues and hospitals, and if you want to pay the money, we can really, really do this thing right.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. We can get you an actual dead body.

[Chuck Bryant]

You want a dead body? I can get your dead body by 3pm Right.

[Josh Clark]

And that's gonna probably. That's gonna sit in for you. Apparently this really kind of drives it home. If there's a cadaver and you're not just missing presumed dead, that's definitely gonna help your pseudo side become successful. Like you said, there's black market morgues that essentially, if you're unidentified or unclaimed in the Philippines, there's a chance somebody's going to hang onto your body and you might be sold to fulfill someone's pseudocide attempt. And it's not just the Philippines either. I saw at least one story here in Georgia, I think Coffee County. God knows where that is, where this, I guess, undertaker at a funeral home had a ton of bodies that he supposedly buried that he was selling for this reason or for other reasons. But also, this was one of the things you could buy a body for. And even, like, a legitimate funeral home has an incentive to just kind of be like, yeah, it's nice to meet you, Cousin Ed. Just give me the money and you can take this body. Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay, now I know where we did this. We did a video about this.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yep. I knew we had done something, but I looked up the podcast and we hadn't. We did something. We did some kind of video on this. Because it may have just been centered around the Coffee county thing. Because as soon as you said Coffee County, I was like, wait, there was a guy there that did this? So, yeah, it is 2008.

[Josh Clark]

It is all over again. We need to make this episode 12 minutes long.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, great. Here's my question, though. The idea is that you get this body and have it cremated, and you pass off those human remains or cremains. But how does that work with DNA? If that's the case, why can't you just get cremains?

[Josh Clark]

I think cremation destroys DNA pretty good.

[Chuck Bryant]

So why don't they just say, like, here's a bag of teeth and ashes?

[Josh Clark]

Some people do okay. I don't. Yeah, I think so. Elizabeth Greenwood, those Filipino guys, I guess they're trying to upsell her. But she said that some, like, they offer not just a corpse, but a fake funeral. They'll stage a funeral, a real funeral. But there's, like, the mourners, there are paid. There's photographs of, you know, people at your funeral, that if the insurance company asks for something like that to document it, you've got it. But she's like, this is all very unnecessary. Just like what you said. You just have the cremains, and it's like, well, you know, what are you going to do? This is supposedly the dead person. It makes way more sense. It's way cheaper. It's way less of a hassle. And like I was saying, some legitimate funeral homes, like, if you're. If the laws in your country say, one of the roles you play is, like, taking over custody of, like, unidentified people, like, say, a homeless person who dies, you're responsible for giving them a respectful burial. If you go to one of these places and say, oh, yeah, that's my cousin, and they're going to be like, here, give me some money, and, you know, you can handle everything from there.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And again, I mean, if you're trying to commit insurance fraud or something, that's gonna ramp up investigatory. Practice, most certainly from the insurance company, maybe the cops, depending on kind of what's going on. And obviously if you're escaping justice, stuff like that. But if that's not what you're doing, if you're just trying to get out of your life for some like, sad reason maybe, and especially if you go to another country and do this, law enforcement in America is probably not gonna do anything.

[Josh Clark]

No, they're gonna say Godspeed, because it's.

[Chuck Bryant]

Not a crime specifically. And maybe we should take a break and that sounds like a good place to leave it. Eh?

[Josh Clark]

I agree.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, we'll be right back after this with more on suiticide.

[Josh Clark]

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[Chuck Bryant]

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[Josh Clark]

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[Chuck Bryant]

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[Josh Clark]

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[Chuck Bryant]

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[Josh Clark]

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[Chuck Bryant]

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[Chuck Bryant]

All right, so before we broke, I mentioned before that it used to be way easier to get away with this kind of thing. I think this probably happened a lot more back in the day. As with all crime, it's just gotten more difficult to get away with that stuff. Besides DNA facial recognition technology and video cameras on everyone's front doorstep and surveillance cameras that cities have employed all over major cities all over the world, it's just really hard to not get caught on one of these eventually and someone say, hey, the guy going into that Italian restaurant there is totally my dad. I would recognize him anywhere.

[Josh Clark]

Right, Right. I thought those doorstep cameras were to create a sense of community. Like you would find out what a great person your UPS driver was. Isn't that what they're for?

[Chuck Bryant]

I think so. Because they pet your kitty.

[Josh Clark]

Right. It just tangentially helps to track people who have faked their own death.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Or to in my case, to post on the Internet when squirrels attack is what I call my show.

[Josh Clark]

It's a great show.

[Chuck Bryant]

Emily sent me one yesterday. She was like, hey, take a look at the doorbell cam at 12:11. And she tripped going up the stairs in a very, very funny way. And so she made sure I saw that.

[Josh Clark]

Are you going to post it?

[Chuck Bryant]

No, no, no, no.

[Josh Clark]

You should post it to Yakety Sax.

[Chuck Bryant]

I might do that actually.

[Josh Clark]

So, yeah, there's a lot of ways that you can get caught these days in ways you might not have thought of. Here's a word to the wise. If you're going to try to stage your death and everybody who has anything to do with the research of this article says don't bother, you're going to screw it up. Probably you had better researched every single aspect you can possibly think of and started a long time before. It would really help if you had thought about this 10 years ago. Yeah, at least the best time to start planning your pseudocide is 10 years ago. The second best time is today, but it's not really a good time. Second best. That's the old saying. But if you had started thinking about it 10 years ago, you could have really actually given this identity. Your new false identity legs by, like, getting credit cards in its name, building a credit history. Like, it would be way easier to step into that life than, say, like, you know, figuring out what Tor is and then buying, like, a false identity the same day. You want to plan it better than that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I feel like in movies a lot of times that's the giveaway is they'll be like, well, you don't have any credit history, and I really can't find anything about you. But if you've got a list of cable bills and a credit history and stuff that goes back 10 years, it's like, just having your ID isn't enough if you have a history already built up. I mean, this guy there was an artist in 2013 named Curtis Wallen who did it as sort of performance art, like, as a project, and he created an alter ego, and he got a driver's license. He got an ID certifying him as a member of an indigenous Native American tribe. He got a boat operator's license. Like, that's kind of a deep cut, I think.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I think so, too. I think, you know, that's the kind of thing where you're like, would a fake person have a boat operator's license for a decade? Exactly.

[Chuck Bryant]

He got insurance. If you have all this stuff, then all of a sudden, you're just not as suspicious, I think.

[Josh Clark]

No, he went even further, too. Like, he disguised his. His. His look, I guess.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

I guess so. Yeah. For, like, your. Your id. Because it would be very easy for somebody to scan a database of driver's licenses looking for somebody's face. That's easy peasy these days. But what he did was he took his driver's license photo and then merged it with a couple other people's features to create an entirely synthetic new person. And that's what he used for his photo. I guess it was close enough that if you showed it to somebody, they wouldn't be like, what is this weird thing? You look like a Picasso. But, like, it would still fool facial recognition.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And, well. And of course, like you said, he's Photoshopped these days. That could be very easily done with AI much quicker.

[Josh Clark]

Sure. I'm old school, though. Remember, this is 2010.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that's right. This new Photoshop thing is amazing, isn't it?

[Josh Clark]

It is. And I don't know what the heck you mean by AI.

[Chuck Bryant]

Someone's going to write and be like, photoshop was created in 1997.

[Josh Clark]

It probably was, actually.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Probably somewhere in the 90s. He also, the way he started all this was created an email address and, you know, seems pretty logical. He used the private Tor browser and he got in touch with someone on Craigslist anonymously and said, I want to buy this computer. I want to pay cash. Cash, as you'll see, is a big part of all this.

[Josh Clark]

Yes.

[Chuck Bryant]

Anytime you want to do this, have a lot of cash on hand. We're not instructing you on how to do this.

[Josh Clark]

No. It's kind of coming out that way, though, huh?

[Chuck Bryant]

It is. And again, if you're doing something like this, you're either a bad person who's done something very wrong or you've had something done very wrong to you, which is very sad. So, again, we're not making light of it, but he bought that computer with cash. He sort of disguised himself when he met up, and then he used more cash to buy Bitcoin at a computer shop, like a brick and mortar store.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

So bitcoin is obviously converting. If you have holdings or whatever you want to convert to Bitcoin or cash, it's a better way to do it than obviously having that in your name. But that's very hard to do these days. Like, everything can be tracked and traced so much easier now.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Including bitcoin. Although the bitcoin transactions themselves are anonymous, or who's buying what is anonymous. The actual transaction is public and it's publicly listed in the bitcoin blockchain. And if your real name is associated somewhere down the line with, say, your bitcoin wallet, and the Feds track a bitcoin to go to your wallet, they know that you have just bought a bitcoin and so they can follow you and see what you do with that bitcoin, so it's really, really hard, even with cryptocurrency, to remain anonymous, which is another reason that you would want to do this years ahead of time. You mentioned buying everything with cash you don't want to on the day before you disappear and, like, allegedly die. You don't want to clean out your bank accounts. That's a big, big red flag. That is bush league, right? Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

20S and hundreds will be fine. Just put it in this garbage sack.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, yeah. Don't look at me.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

So, yeah, you want to have been socking away cash, maybe burying it in mason jars in your yard. Who knows? While you also have your regular legitimate bank accounts that you do not touch when you leave, because dead people don't withdraw a bunch of money from their accounts the day before they die. It's just a bad look. So it's another reason to start planning this long ahead of time if you have any. Any opportunity to.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, and I mean, like, you know, we've listed a bunch of ways you can get caught. It turns out that the way most people get caught when they attempt a pseudocide is getting in touch with someone from their previous life.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

If this is the kind of thing you want to do, you have to. And this is how it plays out in the movies, too. I feel like you got to really, really commit to this and decide, like, I am never going to see my kids again or I'm never going to call my mom on her birthday or anything. You have to completely disappear from that life because especially, once again, I hate to say it again, these days it's very easy to. To track email and phone calls and everything else. And it's going to be very easy if you put in that birthday call to mom just one last time a year after you're dead.

[Josh Clark]

Yep. They'll be like, you're toast, man. We caught you. Yeah, there was another one. Did you mention the pet chip?

[Chuck Bryant]

No, but. Yeah, that's one you probably might not be thinking of.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. You could easily overlook something like that. Let's say you take your dog or your cat with you, Right. You took them out on the boat and the boat capsized, so sure, they're dead, too. If they're microchipped. You might have forgotten that you ever had a microchipped. Your pet can pretty easily be tracked. And if they track down your pet, they're going to track you down, too, so.

[Chuck Bryant]

Good point.

[Josh Clark]

I think if we're getting across that this is really hard to do successfully, I feel like then, you know, we're really achieving our goal.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, but again, I'm not going to feel too bad about giving semi instruction here because believe it or not, it's not a crime. Usually stuff you do to get away with this is a crime. It could be. And let's just put like, insurance fraud aside. That may be the Reason you're doing it, but the actual doing it, the act of doing it, you're probably going to be breaking some laws. Even if it's just like fake dental records or any kind of untrue. Even writing a fake suicide letter could be considered forgery or fraud, I guess. And then if you take on a new identity, that's identity fraud. Even if you're not like, it's not identity theft, which is different. Even if you're not stealing someone else's identity, like Don. Well, I'm not gonna spoil something from a TV show.

[Josh Clark]

Oh.

[Chuck Bryant]

Because it's 2008. Almost blurted it out, but I don't wanna do that.

[Josh Clark]

But Don Johnson from Miami Vice.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, sure. Let's just say that all I said was Don, like stealing someone's identity. Like let's say like you were in the army with. Or let's go ahead and ruin the Simpsons. Principal Skinner did that, right?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Armantanzarian.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. You know my favorite line from that.

[Josh Clark]

Episode, I was about to say to you, go ahead though.

[Chuck Bryant]

What if it's the same line? Wouldn't that be.

[Josh Clark]

It is.

[Chuck Bryant]

Do you think it is?

[Josh Clark]

Uh huh.

[Chuck Bryant]

Go ahead with the superintendent or whatever he says. I'd like to introduce our, our new principal, Seymour Skinner. Principal Seymour Skinner.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Was it something like that?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, very funny. That was a weird episode.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, agreed.

[Josh Clark]

So you said that if you steal someone's identity, like that's obviously a crime for sure. If you make up a completely false identity, like you didn't steal it from anybody, it's just completely made up, you're still eventually going to make a crime.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, I mean, that's what I said. That's identity fraud.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, so even if you. So you said that even if it's just totally made up, it's still identity fraud.

[Chuck Bryant]

I did, sir.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, good. Because yes, eventually you're going to have to legalize it. And once you do that, you're in trouble. There's a lot of laws you're suddenly breaking. The thing is though, is there was something you said earlier about the cops just kind of being like they can't really be bothered depending on how well you execute this and where you go, like say you move to another country, it's going to be tough for the cops to track you, even if they really want to. Everyone who's ever seen a movie like Beverly Hills Cop or whatever knows that the captain is going to be on that detective's butt to clear that case and go ahead and move on to the other ones. Because they have a backlog. Yeah, they're not going to track you to New Zealand. They're. They're just going to have to like move on, get another take on another case that's maybe a little closer, that doesn't involve New Zealand. But again, if it has anything to do with insurance fraud, there's probably going to be an insurance investigator who will show up in New Zealand disguised as a sheep and then pounce the moment that you walk past.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Or if it's not insurance, certainly if you have defrauded a corporation or a bank or something like that for like tens of millions or maybe even hundreds of millions of dollars.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

They'll hire some PIs to get on that case. Pretty toot sweet.

[Josh Clark]

For sure. And since this is 2008, 2010, I gotta give the obligatory shout out to Magnum P.I.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right? That's right. Cause that's when he was most popular.

[Josh Clark]

Well, that's when I loved him the most.

[Chuck Bryant]

No. Oh, has your love waned?

[Josh Clark]

I think I just started taking him for granted. Same old story.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I understand. Happens to all of us in a long relationship.

[Josh Clark]

You want to take another break?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, let's take a break and maybe we'll dive into what an insurance company might do to find you. How about that?

[Josh Clark]

Oh, good idea. Stuff you should know. Josh and Chuck Stuff you should know for adults with moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea or OSA and obesity, refreshing sleep may be hard to come by and who likes to lag and drag through the day?

[Chuck Bryant]

OSA is a serious condition where your airway partially or completely collapses during sleep, which may cause breathing interruptions and oxygen deprivation that could leave you feeling tired and fatigued.

[Josh Clark]

Loud snoring, choking or gasping for air during sleep could be signs of OSA. Don't sleep on the symptoms. Learn more at don'tsleeponosa.com this information is.

[Chuck Bryant]

Provided by Lilly USA LLC.

[Jerry]

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[Chuck Bryant]

Hey everybody. Here's an interesting fact. The most common disease in the world is cavities. It's also one of the most preventable, which brings us to the Colgate Total Active Prevention System because it attacks the root cause of oral health problems like cavities and gingivitis.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, spoiler alert. It's bacteria. The system is 15 times more effective at fighting bacteria. It reduces bacteria buildup in six weeks starting in week one. Compared to a non stainless fluoride toothpaste and flat trimmed toothbrush when used together.

[Chuck Bryant]

It'S some cool science too. The unique technology in the toothpaste was recognized with the Edison Patton Award, which honors outstanding research and innovation.

[Josh Clark]

But this is about more than impressive awards and healthy smiles. Oral diseases can increase the risk of other health conditions such as respiratory disease, diabetes and cardiac conditions. With the Colgate Total Active Prevention System, you can help prevent problems like cavities and gingivitis before they start, which may make a positive impact on general health conditions.

[Chuck Bryant]

Be dentist ready. Shop the Colgate Total Active Prevention system by visiting shop.colgate.com total.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, so we're back. And you said you promised everybody without consulting me first that we would start talking about what life insurance companies will do to find you.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes, I guess we could start talking a little bit about what might trigger this as far as an insurance company saying, like, all right, we definitely need to use our own resources here. Aside from cops saying that they're not gonna help out much and that is the first trigger is if your policy has a payout over a million bucks, they'll be like, all right, that's worth our time and money.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Apparently they think of basically any payout under a million dollars as small potential potatoes. So.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. So Mr. Clark. No, his was just $999,999.99. Brush that one aside.

[Josh Clark]

Forget about it. Yeah. Basically, anytime your death is sudden, unexpected or suspicious in any way, they're going to, they're going to investigate. Not necessarily because they think you've committed death fraud, but because they need to investigate anyway, to rule out something like suicide. Because there might be an exception for suicide on your policy. Yeah, that's a big one. They also look for inconsistencies. If there's any kind of inconsistency on say like your driver's license or your death certificate or something like that, that's going to catch their attention too. This is all just preliminary stuff they're looking at before they really decide to get involved in an investigation even.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. You mentioned the Philippines as being like the biggest red flag, but really any claim involving a death in a foreign country is going to get investigated just to sort of dot the I's and cross the T's. Maybe they might be a little suspish, but it definitely will get investigated. And also if you're like everything, like just send everything to my P.O. box, that's a pretty big red flag.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Or even like a friend's address would be a red flag as well.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

What else? If you're super thirsty for a life insurance policy and they find out that you've applied with a bunch of different carriers all at the same time, that's going to raise red flags. Especially if the payout is substantially disproportionate to your net worth. So you're worth $300,000 or $50,000, but the payout is like $10 million.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

That's just by virtue of that being very tantalizing. It's gonna be a red flag.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Here's a pretty good one that I didn't think about. They'll look up their insurance client or whatever and they'll be like, hmm, this is weird. Josh Clark went and picked up a year's worth of his heart medication all at once. And then right after that went to visit one of his relatives that he hasn't visited in a decade. So this sounds a little shady to me.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. I have to take that medicine because my heart's so big and tender.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right, I know. You just have to. It would burst out of your chest otherwise.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And then also there's some missteps that people who try this often make. One is staying in the same city. That's mind bogglingly dumb if you're trying to fake your own death.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. If I were to do this, I guarantee no one would find me.

[Josh Clark]

No, because you wouldn't do it. Like you're lazy.

[Chuck Bryant]

I could disappear into another country quite well, I think.

[Josh Clark]

Oh yeah. I mean, you're pretty famous.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, come on. Not that famous.

[Josh Clark]

You're famous enough that somebody would Narc on you.

[Chuck Bryant]

So if I just went. Well, I'm not gonna say the country, just in case I want to keep.

[Josh Clark]

It in my pocket. I was thinking that too, man. After all the research I've been doing that is surely just hanging around in my browser history. If I ever tried to fake my death, it would be pretty obvious that I tried it. Just from all the research for this one.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure. You also don't want to, like, there's lots of e mistakes you can make, like electronic mistakes, whether it's cell phone stuff or Googling yourself from an Internet cafe in the Philippines or, you know, stuff like that that could get you pinched.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And then also, if your new identity is pretty close to your old identity, that might be. You might want to go slightly further to the left or the right for your new identity. Not even politically. I just mean, like, veer.

[Chuck Bryant]

I didn't think about that. If you adopt a complete. If you're known for being like, whatever, like a MAGA Republican, and you adopt a new identity as this progressive liberal.

[Josh Clark]

Mm.

[Chuck Bryant]

Pretty smart move. Probably.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. There's this guy named Josh Clark who is a Republican who I think is in the Georgia house. I could just take over his life.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And still be Josh Clark, but a totally different Josh Clark.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

What else, Chuck? Anything?

[Chuck Bryant]

I mean, those are all the things that would trigger, like, an insurance investigation.

[Josh Clark]

Pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. So like we said, Chuck, this is like, this happens. People do this, and when they get caught, it makes the news. So there's pretty good documentation of people all over the world trying. This one that comes up quite a bit is a German student who in 1984 was 24 years old. Her name was Petra Pazika. Yeah. And she went missing from Braunschweig. Braunschweig, Germany.

[Chuck Bryant]

Nice.

[Josh Clark]

I'm not doing very well with this.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, that's perfect.

[Josh Clark]

Brownschweig makes me hungry for some sort of sausage.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, it totally sounds sausage. Yeah. So she was reported missing. Right. In 1984. She was 24 at the time, I think you said. And at a certain point, police got a guy that confessed to her murder. So that was like a case closed kind of situation. Even though the body wasn't found. And the guy later said, I actually did not kill her. He recanted his confession. So she was declared dead. Dead. Dead about five years later in 89, and lived quite a while with a sort of hidden identity.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. She finally got caught. It turns out she had been living by working, being paid under the table. She seems to have had, like, no credit or any. Any need for anything like that. She was just living a very modest, quiet life, paying for everything with cash. So she got away with this for more than 25 years. And she was burgled. At some point, she called the cops, and I guess just as routine, they asked to see her id, and she hadn't bothered to get any other kind of id. So she's like, you caught me. I'm Petra Pezyca. And they said, we've been looking for you forever. And apparently they did not press any charges because they couldn't find any crime that she'd actually broken. She didn't defraud anybody. She hadn't gotten any false documents. She just left her life, essentially. No one knows why. That's the weird thing.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. So they said, guten tag, and they left, I guess.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. But even after her being found out, the story being huge international news, she just wouldn't say why she did that. She just said, I don't want to contact my family.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And there are other cases, too, where police have, like, in the interview or whatever, found out why and don't release that to the public. Like, it's probably some sort of really sad, tragic situation. And I've seen police statements where they're like, you know, we had an interview and we understand why this happened, but there were no crimes committed. And why it happened is Nunya.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I think this is not actually that case. I saw somewhere, if I'm not mistaken, that her family was baffled by why she left and why she didn't want to see them.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, no, no. This was. I wasn't talking about this one.

[Josh Clark]

Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. And hats off to any cop that protects somebody like that, you know?

[Chuck Bryant]

Totally. I'll mention this one. This guy, Sam Israel iii, he was a hedge fund manager, and he was, you know, this is one of those deals where he stole $300 million, was sentenced to prison, a couple of decades in prison. So it was one of those, back up against the wall, I'm going to jail and I'm in debt up to my eyeballs now. Or I guess that even wouldn't count as debt anymore. Once you're going to prison, that's just, you know, you were found out.

[Josh Clark]

Sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

And in June 2008, he wrote a message. Suicide is painless. And the pollen on his SUV just kind of traced it out and jumped from a bridge in New York State, very conveniently landing on that construction net below.

[Josh Clark]

That is so scary.

[Chuck Bryant]

Pretty scary. But I guess, you know, that's there to catch people, I guess.

[Josh Clark]

Sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

So he went to that very specific bridge for that reason. And security cameras caught him literally getting up in another car in an SUV that pulled up and it was like, you know, the sound was off, but I'm sure they heard like, woo hoo, we did it. And like they honked their horn and they got in touch with his girlfriend, arrested her as a possible accomplice. He was on the most wanted list because it was, you know, pretty clear what had happened at that point. And he got found out because he.

[Josh Clark]

Called his mom who said, uh, you need to turn yourself in. This is a terrible idea and you are a terrible, terrible pseudocist.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, you did not do that. And it seems, you know, here's some other advice is if you do this, like don't go out to dinner to celebrate the next night because a few people get caught at dinner. It seems like.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, that actually that does happen to a surprising degree. My favorite is John Stonehouse, who was a huge, this was a big deal in the UK in the mid-70s because he was a member of parliament. And in 1974 he went missing off the coast of Miami when he went for a swim. Oh, that was one other thing. If you are, if you disappear in the water, you're automatically going to get investigated by an insurance company because it is just so old as trick. Yes, it is. So he went, this is before that though, he made it to Australia. He ran off with his secretary and as he, while he was dead in parliament, people started raising allegations against him. One was that he had enemies in the mafia. Another was that he was a spy for Czechoslovakia. That turned out to be true, weirdly. And then finally a woman came forward later on and said, this guy came to my house. He said he was a census taker, a survey taker. And he started asking really weird questions about my husband, like did he ever have a passport? So eventually he was found, I think in Australia and he month later. Yeah, he just had. He had to come forward and basically tell everybody what had happened. Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And. Well, I guess it's not funny, but the movie or I'm sorry, the. I guess the novel, I don't think the movie had come out yet. Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsythe had been published a few years before. And it appears that he literally kind of followed the steps of how to obtain a false identity from that book, kind of note by note.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, that's why he was asking about the passport. He took a constituent's name who had Never had a passport and then got a passport in his name. So.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Yeah, I'll pick one more for me. In 2009, there was a. A guy in his mid-30s from Indianapolis, a money manager named Marcus Schrinker. He staged a plane crash. He was trying to get out of lawsuits and divorce proceedings. And he got a bunch of cash, put it in his motorcycle saddlebags, went to Alabama, put it in a storage facility. So he had the cash kind of worked out. Then he took his very small little single prop airplane from his house in Indiana and was flying above Alabama radios to air traffic control that, you know, he's going down, something's wrong. He does a DB Cooper, he parachutes out, the plane crashes in Florida, and the next day he emails his friend and tells him what he did.

[Josh Clark]

Brah, man, that was dumb. Yeah, we could keep going on. There's a lot of these, but those are. I think those are some of the highlights, don't you?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. We should probably close by talking about another kind of pseudocide, which is a faked online death. It's usually not like an insurance fraud or anything like that, but it's a symptom of what they used to call Munchausen syndrome, and now they call it FD or factitious disorder, again, previously, Munchausen syndrome, where you will try and get, you know, it's tied into mental illness, but you're. It's a disorder where you're trying to get sympathy by playing sick or faking sick or actually having sometimes real symptoms of something, but you're not sick.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

And this is taking that one step further, which is to get that sort of attention that you're craving or whatever you're after through actually faking an online death. And it's happened in some pretty high profile cases.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, it has. And to be clear, this is way different from somebody trying to defraud an insurance company or escape from an abusive spouse. This is strictly because they want attention, they want sympathy and. Or they want to control other people and manipulate them. It's way different. There's a, like you said, a very high profile one that happened in the dawn of the Internet. People have been doing this essentially since there was an Internet.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

A woman, a teenager, a basketball star named Casey Nicole.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I remember this.

[Josh Clark]

She was a. She was a, I guess, kind of like a little star of chat forums and that kind of thing. Had a big kind of support group online. And she had leukemia. So she posted about her, you know, her. Her disease and decline from it. That was started in 1999. And in 2001, in May of 2001, there was a notice that appeared on her blog that said that she had passed away. And people were just stricken by this.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I do remember this happening. It was pretty big in the news at the time because again, it was a dawn of the Internet. So people are like, what is the Internet being used for already? So some of her followers had previously saw some sort of hinky things going on in her stories. Some of the medical stuff wasn't really making much sense as far as like how leukemia progresses. And then apparently she would quote a bunch of song lyrics that were not from her generation, which isn't the biggest giveaway. You can listen to music from any generation, but it just is shady enough combined with the other stuff that we're like, why is this teenager quoting songs from the 60s all over the place?

[Josh Clark]

Right. I didn't look deeply enough into it to find out how she was finally outed, but a 40 year old woman named Debbie Swenson admitted that she was behind the whole thing, that Casey Nicole had never existed. She stole the photo of a local girl, basketball star's picture, her photo, and used that as Casey. And I mean that was that like, I guess the police department told the FBI about it. And the FBI's like, no, we're not going to investigate this. She didn't actually defraud anybody or make any money off of it. She just probably needs a little bit of help. Yeah, so that's, that's bad enough saying that you creating a fictitious teenager who's dying of leukemia, pretty bad. Telling people that you, the real you, has died by suicide. There was a article in Gizmodo that interviewed a professor of psychiatry named Mark Feldman. And he puts it pretty clearly. He says because of the social stigma involved and the emotional weight associated with suicide, it's particularly powerful. And that if you use that to manipulate people, you're at the, you're, you're at the peak of manipulativeness. And that's exactly what an author named Susan Meechan did in 2020, I think. Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I totally remember this one. This is a very big deal. She was a self published romance author and she had a decent following on Facebook. And in 2020, in the voice of her daughter posted that her mom had died by suicide after being bullied in the book world. And it was a very big deal. It was a very shocking revelation that, you know, this woman had been bullied to death basically. And the writing community was all up in arms about it. And like, you know, like, see, this is what can happen with online bullying. Which. What really stinks is that is absolutely what can happen with online bullying.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

But this woman was lying. Her daughter continued to post on. Or, you know, in scare quotes, her daughter continued to post to the account. And they. Someone pointed out that they recognized a little quirk in her writing was that Meechan would say, instead of supposed to, she would type post to P O S T to like, I'm post to do this.

[Josh Clark]

And that little quirk, that's PJ from Family Circus.

[Chuck Bryant]

Exactly. And that little quirk writing as her daughter gave it away.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So she. She was outed. I think she carried this on for two years, and then she suddenly showed back up in her community, her writing community forum, and said, hey, I'm alive. This is all just a fake. She said, there's going to be tons of questions. Let the fun begin. I can't imagine a more arrogant way to announce that you didn't actually die. So people, of course, were appalled and angry. And she was. I think she expected people to be like, oh, my God, thank God you're alive. That was amazing. And it did not go like that at all. She became reviled and hated, and I think rightfully so. That's a really horrible thing to do to people. And also on top of it, to exploit online bullying.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, totally.

[Josh Clark]

You know, just for your own. Your own ego. It's just. That's terrible stuff.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, agreed.

[Josh Clark]

There's one more I want to just really quickly point out. This has happened more than once. People have faked their death online to get out of some obligation. I read about somebody meeting at work, kind of. This was. So one. One knitting forum participant died. Rather than say, like, I'm not able to come up with the patterns that I said I could. That was one.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Another one was a Percy Jackson fan fiction site that somebody staged their death online because they couldn't deliver some fan fiction that they said they would.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Pretty weird stuff. At least that's less manipulative. It's just being afraid of confrontation, I guess.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right.

[Josh Clark]

Since Chuck just said that's right, I think it's time for listener mail.

[Chuck Bryant]

This is about libraries a little bit more. Hey, guys. As you mentioned in the recent short stuff on alt libraries, I want. I wanted to mention this. In 1901, Andrew Carnegie funded the construction of dozens of libraries in all five boroughs of New York City. And most of these buildings came with a family apartment which housed the custodian who kept the coal fire burning the furnace. As the furnaces were replaced and the custodians retired, the apartments sat empty. Some of the apartments are still intact, while some have been converted into storage mechanical rooms or, as is the case in the library where I work, a teen center. I thought you might be interested in this little slice of New York City and library history. There are about 30 Carnegie branches left in Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten island, and the city is slowly working their way through renovations to modernize each location. Next time you're in New York, come check us out. Wrapped, spanked, delivered. I'm yours. That is Madeline Lovegrove, children's librarian at the 125th Street New York Public Library.

[Josh Clark]

That's awesome. Thanks a lot Madeline. That's I had never heard of that and I would really love to see some of those abandoned apartments that were just left as is.

[Chuck Bryant]

She sent a link and it had pictures, my friend.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, I can't wait to see that. Thank you for telling me that, Chuck. And thank you again to Madeline. If you want to be like Madeline and send us an email the exact proper way you can do that, send it off to stuff [e-mail].

[Chuck Bryant]

Stuff youf Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

[Josh Clark]

Do you know the symptoms of moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea, or osa, in adults with obesity? They may be happening to you without your knowing.

[Chuck Bryant]

If anyone's ever said you snore loudly, or if you spend your days fighting off excessive tired, irritability and concentration issues. It may be due to osa. OSA is a serious condition where your airway partially or completely collapses during sleep, which may cause breathing interruptions and oxygen deprivation.

[Josh Clark]

Learn more@don'tsleeponosa.com this information is provided by Lilly USA, LLC.

[D]

This podcast is sponsored by Talkspace. May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and Talkspace, the leading virtual therapy provider, is telling everyone let's face it in therapy by talking or texting with a supportive licensed therapist. At Talkspace, you can face whatever is holding you back, whether it's mental health symptoms, relationship drama, past trauma, bad habits, or another challenge that you need support to work through. It's easy to sign up. Just go to talkspace.com and you'll be paired with a provider, typically within 48 hours. And because you'll meet your therapist online, you don't have to take time off work or arrange childcare. You'll meet on your schedule. Plus, Talkspace is in network with most major insurers and most insured members have a $0 copay. Make your mental health a priority and start today. If you're not covered by Insurance, get $80 off your first month with Talkspace when you go to talkspace.com and enter promo code SPACE80. That's S P A CE80 to match with a licensed therapist. Today, go to talkspace.com and Enter promo code SPACE80.

[Jerry]

Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shankar. I host a podcast called A Slight Change of Plans that combines behavioral science and story to help us navigate the big changes in our lives.

[Chuck Bryant]

I get so choked up because I feel like your show and the conversations are what the world needs. Encouraging, empowering counter programming that acts like a lighthouse when the world feels dark.

[Jerry]

Listen to A Slight Change of plans on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Chuck Bryant]

You're listening to an I Heart Podcast.