The Mystery of the Sleepy Sickness

Summary

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Stuff You Should Know — "The Mystery of the Sleepy Sickness"

Hosts: Josh Clark & Chuck Bryant
Original Air Date: October 2, 2025

Episode Overview

In this classic “medical mystery” episode, Josh and Chuck dive deep into the bizarre and unsettling story of Encephalitis lethargica—also known as the “sleepy sickness”—a disease that tore through the globe from 1916 to the 1930s, left hundreds of thousands dead or potentially frozen in their own bodies, then abruptly disappeared. The hosts explore the epidemic’s origins, symptoms, attempts to identify its cause, and the mysterious chronic cases still referenced in medicine and popular culture today.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What Was the “Sleepy Sickness”? (01:17–04:07)

• Encephalitis lethargica, or EL, struck suddenly in the 1910s–20s, crippling patients with sleep-like states, paralysis, coma, and even death.
• Chuck: “We’re talking about an outbreak that happened in the early 20th century…people would kind of out of nowhere lose mobility. Some would fall into a coma-like state…Many people died within days. It’s a medical mystery because we still don’t know exactly why it happened or why it just kind of suddenly went away.” (02:37)

2. Initial Observations and Dr. von Economo (04:18–06:10)

• Dr. Constantin von Economo in Vienna identified and described the syndrome after puzzling over flu-like symptoms and neurological changes in patients who didn’t match any then-known diagnoses.
  • Also referenced: French physician Dr. René Cruchet, who considered a behavioral link.
• Von Economo stressed it was likely transmissible and infectious, not just behavioral.

3. Symptoms and Ubiquity (06:10–09:28)

• Starts with fever and malaise, progressing to severe drowsiness (hypersomnolence), and unpredictable neurological or psychiatric symptoms.
• Josh: “They weren’t like Sleeping Beauty…They might have their hand in the air and their mouth open in a silent scream. Their eyes were open, they just weren’t moving at all.” (03:14)
• Personality changes could manifest—kleptomania, psychosis, or mood alterations.

4. Age Range and Mortality (08:31–09:28)

• Affected all ages, but half of cases were in people aged 10–30.
• Mortality rate dramatic; some died within days or weeks.
• Set the stage for “chronic” post-encephalitic conditions.

5. Subtypes of Encephalitis Lethargica (09:28–14:24)

• Von Economo categorized three main acute subgroups:

  • Somnolent–ophthalmoplegic (most common):

    • Pronounced sleepiness, ocular paralysis, potential waxy flexibility (patients poseable like wax figures).
    • Delirium, catatonia, confusion.
    • Josh: “You can pose somebody in this state any way that you want them to. So you have to be very kind when you’re dealing with patients like this.” (13:38)

  • Hyperkinetic variety:

    • Marked by mania, involuntary vocalizations, jerky movements, and sometimes a reversed sleep cycle.
    • Hallucinations and nerve pain possible.

  • Ameostatic-akinetic (least common):

    • Immobility bordering on total body “statue state;” classic “frozen” symptom.

• Memorable Moment: Chuck jokes “waxy flexibility” could be a Guided by Voices album (14:01).

6. Mental Awareness & Chronic Cases (14:24–16:21; 19:21–23:39)

• Profound horror: Many chronic sufferers were mentally present yet trapped, unable to communicate or move for years or decades.
• Josh: “They’re essentially in the same boat where they’re aware, time’s passing, people are interacting with them. They cannot respond…they can’t do anything that would suggest to anyone that they are there in any way, shape or form.” (14:50)
• One third died, one third survived with recovery, one third relapsed later.

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7. Chronic/Post-Encephalitic Syndrome & Neurological Legacy (19:21–23:39)

• Chronic EL often involved “statue” state (now: post-encephalitic parkinsonism).
• Patients could develop mood swings, psychosis, increased libido—or a tendency for “excessive silliness and the use of puns” (20:30).
  • Chuck: “Excessive silliness and the use of puns was an actual symptom…seen over and over again.”
• Key medical point: Resembled Parkinson’s disease, but had distinct features—onset could be sudden, not gradual (22:09).

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8. Awakenings – The Medical Miracle (23:39–29:08)

• In the late 1960s, neurologist Oliver Sacks treated chronic EL patients in New York with L-DOPA, a new Parkinson’s drug.
• Patients awakened after decades of “statue” state—depicted in Sacks’ book and the 1990 film Awakenings (Robin Williams/Robert De Niro).
• Josh: “[L-DOPA] brought akinetic Parkinson’s disease patients back to life. If you’ve seen the movie Awakenings, that’s basically a big storyline…” (41:25)
• Some patients experienced a brief recovery, then relapsed into immobility, making for a bittersweet and tragic outcome.

9. Medical Riddles—How Is It Contracted? (29:08–36:25)

• Mystery persists: Contagious or not? Evidence is deeply mixed.
  • Group outbreaks (21 affected in a home) vs. single cases among large families.
  • Environmental toxins ruled out early; infectious origins (virus/bacteria) explored but not proven.
  • Extensive research (nearly 9,000 papers) failed to conclusively link Spanish flu, herpes, or strep as causative agent.
• Josh: “We just don’t know…One of the big ones is, how do you even catch this terrible disease?” (28:12)

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• Notable humor: “Waxy flexibility sounds like an album title…Guided By Voices or somebody.” (Chuck, 14:01)
• On awareness: “They were left to just go back to their frozen statue state again. And don’t forget, there is a great level of consciousness within them when they’re in this state.” (Josh, 43:48)
• On chronic sufferers: “[A patient] knew about Pearl Harbor…about Kennedy’s assassination. She said, ‘Nothing has seemed real since 1926, when I got the encephalitis and came to a stop…’” (Chuck quoting Oliver Sacks’ case, 44:48)

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Modern Perspective (46:55–51:33)

• The syndrome disappeared as mysteriously as it arose.
• Only 80 suspected cases in the last 75 years.
• Best current theory: EL is likely an autoimmune disorder, perhaps triggered by viruses like strep, herpes, or something similar that causes the immune system to attack the brain in susceptible individuals.
• Treatment for chronic symptoms sometimes includes L-DOPA and, occasionally, electroconvulsive therapy for psychiatric symptoms.
• Von Economo was nominated thrice for the Nobel Prize due to his work.

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Cultural Impact

• The story of Encephalitis lethargica, particularly through Sacks' Awakenings, has become emblematic of medical mysteries—highlighting human consciousness, resilience, and the deep unknowns about the brain.

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Historical context & outbreak: 02:37–06:10
• Symptoms and age range: 06:10–09:28
• Von Economo’s subtypes & waxy flexibility: 09:28–14:24
• Mental awareness—patients trapped inside: 14:24–16:21, expanded at 19:21–23:39
• Chronic syndrome/post-encephalitic parkinsonism: 23:39–29:08
• Awakenings/Oliver Sacks/L-DOPA: 41:25–46:55
• Cultural moment—Awakenings film: 24:12–25:13
• Scientific search for causes: 29:08–36:25
• Modern understanding & theories: 46:55–52:10

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Tone & Delivery

Throughout, Josh and Chuck maintain their trademark mix of curiosity, humor, empathy, and a relaxed explanatory style—interspersing their digressions, pop culture asides, and personal reflections to make the harrowing subject relatable and engaging.

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Conclusion

• Despite nearly a century of research, EL remains unsolved—a haunting reminder of neurological vulnerability and the limits of current science.
• Josh (epilogue): “It’s so fascinating that you have to stop and remind yourself, this actually happened to people. Then you realize how terrifying the whole thing really is.” (51:33)

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Transcript

[Mandy Money]

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[Mandy Money]

Welcome to Stuff youf Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

[Josh Clark]

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. And Jerry's here, too. And this is a good old fashioned stuff you should know. Medical mystery episode.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. Look at Jerry over there. She's just sitting there. She's froz. And what you can do is, I don't know if you know this, Josh. If you walk over to Jerry and take her hand off the keyboard and raise it above her head, she'll just keep it there until you move it back down.

[Josh Clark]

Why, Chuck? It sounds a lot to me like Jerry might have chronic encephalitic Lethargica.

[Chuck Bryant]

I think you might be right.

[Josh Clark]

I might be right. I might be partially right. I think I would have been more right if I had called it Encephalitis Lethargica. But that's probably what she has. If those are her symptoms.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. File this under Medical Mysteries and also file it under a Julia Jam. But we're basically going to call it El or Encephalitis Lethargica here and there. It was also known as the sleepy sickness, sometimes the sleeping sickness. Although there's a new sleeping sickness that is not to be confused with the previous one.

[Josh Clark]

No. It's spread by the tsetse fly and it's epidemic. I don't think it's endemic yet in Africa and it has got a couple of similar symptoms, but they're in no way related from what I understand.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. We're talking about an outbreak that happened in the early 20th century in Europe, starting in about 1916, wherein all of a sudden people would kind of out of nowhere, they would lose mobility. Some people would fall into like a coma like state or a sleep like state. Many, many people would die within days. And it reached epidemic proportions in at least four continents by 1919. Killed hundreds of thousands of people. And it's a medical mystery because we still don't know exactly why it happened or why it just kind of suddenly went away.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Where it came from, what caused it? Nothing. We don't know almost anything about it. They just kind of know the symptoms enough that when you see the very, very, very rare case come along these days, you can say, I think this actually is encephalitis Lethargica. And there was something you said about people being struck into like a coma or sleep, like state. The people who are struck with encephalitis lethargica, they weren't like laying there like Sleeping Beauty on their backs with like their hands crossed over their chest. Like it was like you're saying, like they might have their hand in the air and their mouth open in like a silent scream. And their eyes were open, they just weren't moving at all. And they were just sitting like that. That's the kind of like horrible symptom that you could suffer from for decades. Like once that started, it might just keep going on for the rest of your life. Even though this happened to you in childhood.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, exactly. So. And there's a bit of a reveal that we're going to hang on to here, but we're going to start off with not a reveal because that's not how you do things in the three act structure.

[Josh Clark]

Not in the podcast biz.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, no, no. We're gonna start out in 1916 with a Dr. Constantin Von. Is it Economo or Economo?

[Josh Clark]

I like the first one.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's like saying, is it economy or economy?

[Josh Clark]

This sounds to me like a Cosmo Kramer alias.

[Chuck Bryant]

Why don't you just tell me the name of the movie you want to see? I'll never not laugh at that bit.

[Josh Clark]

No, it's a good one.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, boy. So he was a doctor at the University of Vienna's Psychiatric Neurological clinic. And he started seeing some strange cases come through his office in 1916, where the symptoms were, you know, they had diagnoses on the charts, things like meningitis or Ms. Or delirium, but the symptoms weren't matching these things or anything else that he could think of. And the first thing he did was ruled out neurological, toxins, infections, and neurological disorders. And then was like, all right, I'm open here. Let's, like, no one knows what this is, and we need to figure it out. So let's sort of put our minds to this thing.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. He dove in, he started describing it. He wasn't actually the first one to describe it. I think he was actually beaten by a couple of days, even though some people say it was the opposite way around, by a French physician named Dr. Rene Crichet. The difference was Dr. Cruschette's take was that this was maybe a behavioral disorder. And Dr. Economo von Economo said, no, this is like, clearly some sort of infection or something like that. It's an epidemic. It's transmissible. So that's why this is sometimes called von Economo encephalitis. It was essentially named after because he was the guy who said, this is what's going on. This is what I think's going on. Check out these nutso symptoms.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right? Not so nutso at first, because when people would come in at first, they had basically looked like the flu. You know, fever, coughing, you know, kind of what you would think of. Everyone's had the flu, right?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't have to.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, there you go. That's. I watched a Zoolander recently.

[Chuck Bryant]

You know, a picture is worth a thousand words. A Josh impression of the flu is worth at least 20 of my words.

[Josh Clark]

All right, thanks.

[Chuck Bryant]

Was that part of Zoolander?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, he had the black lung when he went back home to mine coal with his dad.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, I love that dumb movie.

[Josh Clark]

It is really great dumb movie. I was like, this is pretty great still.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, so flu like symptoms at first, then just a huge array of neurological symptoms that were really inconsistent among the patients, the severity of which was pretty inconsistent. Sometimes it varied wildly from one to another. But one of the most common threads of these neurological symptoms was something called hypersomnolence, which is just really, really sleepy, like feeling really sleepy. And then eventually it could lead to that coma like state where you're just sort of locked in.

[Josh Clark]

So here's the thing. So the sleep, the type of sleep, though, that is, like, common among people struck with encephalitis lethargica is not what you would consider sleep. They're not getting rest. You can wake them very easily. They are probably semi aware of what was going on around them the whole time they were sleeping, but they. They couldn't not fall asleep. Another thing that sometimes gets chalked up under this hypersomnolence is freezing mid action. Like, maybe they're taking a bite of broccoli. That's a, that's a bad example because they probably are like, I can't make myself eat this broccoli, it's so disgusting. But let's say they're eating like a delicious animal cracker and they stopped mid bite. They're. They might not move again or they might like hear a song or something like that, and all of a sudden they start eating the, the. The animal cracker again. Yeah, it's not. The point is you. It's called the sleeping sickness. It's not sleep as you would understand it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Yeah, that's good to clear that up.

[Josh Clark]

Thanks.

[Chuck Bryant]

Cause sleeping sickness sounds pretty good to me right about now.

[Josh Clark]

Actually. It kind of does.

[Chuck Bryant]

Half of these cases, it was a pretty wide age range. About half of them were in people age 10 to 30. Like I said, a lot of the patients died. Sometimes they died within like a week or two after onset of symptoms. There was one case of a girl who was walking home from a concert, suddenly experienced a paralysis, fell asleep within about a half hour and died less than two weeks later.

[Josh Clark]

There was also some weird stuff, as we'll see, that had to do with psychiatric symptoms where sometimes people would be fine after, you know, suffering from this for a couple of weeks, but they will. Their personality would have changed. There was one report of, I guess. A study found four reports of people who develop kleptomania after having suffered this and then ostensibly were cured from it. So, like, it could really mess with your head, essentially in just about any way your head can be messed with.

[Chuck Bryant]

Did Winona Ryder claim that was her? Remember when she was stealing stuff?

[Josh Clark]

Oh, yeah, I remember.

[Chuck Bryant]

So weird.

[Josh Clark]

It was a big deal.

[Chuck Bryant]

She came back pretty strong, which I'm glad. I like Winona Ryder. She does a great job in Stranger Things.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, she's awesome in everything she's ever been in. Heather's dude is one of the all time great movies. She was great in Mermaids and then. Yeah, all the way through to Beetlejuice. I'm not going to say Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice, but definitely Beetlejuice and then Stranger Things.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure, yeah. And a great crush of much of Gen X, for sure. Both dudes and chicks.

[Josh Clark]

You got that straight? We're talking Gen X dudes and chicks. Gen X says that?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, they do. All right, so Von Economo was studying all these people. He was studying corpses of these people. He finally breaks it down into its subgroups. The first of which is acute el. That is the initial sickness that you're gonna get. We talked about the flu y kind of stuff that you get. And all these neurological symptoms that are gonna follow. Then he broke those down into three forms from most common to least common, starting with the most common somnolent. Ophthalmologic. How would you say that? Ophthalmologic.

[Josh Clark]

Ophthalmoplegic. That's what I'm going with.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right. That's the most deadly form. More than half the patients die when they have this form. This is a really overwhelming sleepiness. But like you said, you're aware, you're easy to wake up. The optimal part is ocular paralysis, so you're not moving your eyes. So if people come and they wave their hand in front of your face, your eyes aren't moving or anything like that. And also those neuropsychiatric symptoms that you were talking about, like delirium, sometimes confusion, catatonia, stupor, stuff like that.

[Josh Clark]

There was also the worst report that I saw, and I didn't see anything like this, but I checked, and it does seem to have been a case report of a girl from the 30s who basically had a psychotic break because of it. And she pulled out all of her own teeth and gouged out both of her eyes, a little girl did, because of this. And again, it's just some weird outlier symptom. But as you see, we get further and further into this, it's just the brain getting eaten up somehow, some way, in some fairly predictable region. So it's creating this whole cascade or galaxy of different symptoms that are just the worst things that can happen to your brain. Happening.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. The next subgroup, the next least common, or I guess the next most common, depending on which way you're looking at it, is hyperkinetic. That is, mania, basically, is the big part of this one. You have a manic phase, involuntary vocalizations, and kind of herky jerky movements. And then a hypomanic phase where there's a lot of fatigue, a lot of weakness. You can hallucinate. You can have nerve pain in your limbs and in your face. And this is one of the odder symptoms, is your sleep pattern will flip from day to night, or I guess night to day, if you were a factory worker or something.

[Josh Clark]

And there's another thing with that sleeping sickness part. Your sleep is messed up. I also saw, Chuck, that in at least one of these people might also be super sleepy, but not be able to fall asleep no matter how hard they try. Which sounds worse to me than most of the other stuff, for sure. There's a third one that he said is the least common, but it's also a way that it can present. It's called ameostatic akinetic, which is you can't move akinesis. And this is kind of what the classic idea of what Encephalitis lethargica looks like, where you're just. You're just sitting there with like. Yeah, your right arm's in the air, your left arm's a little further down, your mouth's open, you're. You're basically a statue, essentially, is how it's described. You're frozen in place, and you're not going to move until somebody maybe puts some slight pressure on your arm and then maybe you'll move it down. But it's not like they're just going to put pressure on your arm for a second and then you move your arm down. Like they have to move your arm down. And this is what's called waxy flexibility. You can pose somebody in this state any way that. That you want them to. So you have to be very kind when you're dealing with patients like this.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I could not help but think that waxy flexibility sounds like an album title for sure, like Guided by Voices or somebody. Lips, Inc. Is that a real band?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, they're Funky Town people.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, oh, oh, okay. Yeah. Oh. Waxy flexibility, sure. Nailed it. Guided by Voices. What was I thinking?

[Josh Clark]

This is the biggest part to me, that's, I guess, part of all of this, because of the sleeping part, the people suffering this, including the people who are wax figures frozen in place for years or decades, potentially. Are there mentally. They're not like locked in, as in Locked In Syndrome, where they know every single thing that's going on around them at all times.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

But they're essentially in the same boat where they're aware of stuff. They're aware of things. Time passing. There were people coming and going and interacting with them. They cannot respond. They can't speak. They can't change their position of their eyes. They can't focus their attention. They can't do anything that would suggest to anyone that they are there in any way, shape or form. And it wasn't until a genuine medical miracle took place that we understood, oh, my God. These people have been there in their heads the whole time. They're not just, like, comatose, like, just completely out of consciousness. They're conscious.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And, you know, earlier I said, like, they're locked in. I didn't mean the literal locked in syndrome. I just meant sort of know, look like they're locked in.

[Josh Clark]

Somebody cleared it up. I didn't take it like that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, but I think people might have. So, you know.

[Josh Clark]

Well, come on guys.

[Chuck Bryant]

We don't know how many cases there were. It was a legitimate pandemic, though. It's one of those things that was hard to diagnose. They think it was under diagnosed and reported estimates run from 500,000 to more than a million. But they think that maybe half of the cases weren't even reported to. Who knows how many it could have been. And about a third of them died, a third survived and were kind of okay, and then a third survived and then got it again later on. And that is acute el. So maybe we should take a break and talk about chronic EL after this.

[Josh Clark]

Let's all right.

[Chuck Bryant]

We'll be right back.

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[Josh Clark]

Okay, Chuck, so a lot of the stuff I was talking about, about people being frozen in place as if they were statues. They had waxy flexibility, mutism, catatonia. They weren't able to respond or move or anything. When I said for, like, years or decades, more accurately, I would have been referring to the chronic form of Encephalitis lethargica, because it was essentially, it seems to me, kind of like amniostatic, a kinetic. But for years and years, the scariest part about all this was that you had gone through the standard case of encephalitis lethargica, one of those three that we just talked about, and got better. You may have died, you may have gotten better, but maybe you had, like, behavior changes, like you turned into a kleptomaniac or something like that, or you got better and thought everything was fine, but then you suddenly suffered from being just a ton of bricks being dropped on you, and all of a sudden you can't move for the rest of your life, even though it's been 10 years since you had that case of Encephalitis Lethargica.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure. The chronic is much the same as the earlier, but with a few added symptoms, one of which is very, very strange. You can have mood swings, pretty, pretty normal feelings of euphoria, and maybe even an increased libido, which is not the weirdest thing. Psychosis in about 30% of patients. Again, not the most abnormal thing in the world, but excessive silliness and the use of puns was a actual symptom that they saw over and over again in acute cases.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Isn't that bizarre?

[Chuck Bryant]

Or not acute in chronic cases?

[Josh Clark]

Right Yep.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

But again, the defining trait, the one that people would point to and be like, oh, that person has chronic encephalitis lethargica is that statue thing that I was talking about, and that's more clinically called rather than that statue thing. Doctors tend to call it post encephalitic Parkinsonism. And Parkinsonism is one of those difficult things to grasp until you just stop trying to think too hard about it. It's essentially a bunch of movement and neurological symptoms and dysfunctions. And Parkinson's includes Parkinsonism. But not all Parkinsonism is Parkinson's disease.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right.

[Josh Clark]

Okay. It took me way longer than I care to admit to finally just nail that down and stop running in circles trying to figure it out.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I mean, I think they even. One of the reasons they call it post encephalitic Parkinsoni is Parkinsonism. Parkinsonism, Geez, that's a tough one.

[Josh Clark]

I know.

[Chuck Bryant]

Or pep, is to distinguish it from Parkinson's. Isn't exactly the same thing.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And one of the big things that distinguish it, because a lot of that shares a lot of symptoms. But one of the things that distinguishes post encephalitic Parkinsonism and Parkinson's disease is that Parkinson's disease progresses gradually in a predictable pattern. Post encephalitic Parkinsonism, like I said it. It can come out of the blue. You could be again sitting there eating an animal cracker, and all of a sudden, you never finish eating that animal cracker for the rest of your life. It just can suddenly come out of nowhere, and you're just living your normal life. And then all of a sudden, you're in an institution, and you're bound never to move again unless you happen to be in the right place at the right time. In the late 1960s.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. And this is the big reveal. If you were hearing these symptoms and you think, hey, that sounds awfully familiar. I think I saw a movie about that. Then you are correct. This is the movie from the book Awakenings, based on neurologist Oliver Sacks book of the same name, about his work with EL patients in the 1960s. I think there were 80 chronic EL patients he worked with at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, New York, in 1966. When this came around and Oliver Sacks was in there, EL had gone away. Basically, it was a medical footnote. And not a lot of people in the 1960s even knew much about it, because it was one of those things that, like, they never figured out what it was or how it started or how to cure it or anything. It kind of just went away. So all the doctors were like, all right, thank God. I guess we don't have to worry about that anymore.

[Josh Clark]

Right, Exactly.

[Chuck Bryant]

And they just moved on to their other work. There was a 1985 NPR interview where he was talking about, this is a quote, motionless figures who were transfixed and strange postures, sometimes rather dramatic postures, sometimes not with an absolute absence of motion, without any hint of motion. So everything looked frozen. And that was, you know, Robert De Niro's character in the movie Awakenings.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And all the others that he eventually grabbed together.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And assembled. When's the last time you saw Awakenings?

[Chuck Bryant]

It's been a while, I think. I remember thinking it was a pretty good movie back then, though.

[Josh Clark]

It's a great movie. Yeah, I watched it last night.

[Chuck Bryant]

Who directed that? Do you know?

[Josh Clark]

Laverne?

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, was that Penny Marshall?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, she did a great job. It was great. I mean, like, I don't remember if De Niro got an Oscar or not, but if he didn't, that's one of the all time great snubs he did. Amazing. I forgot how wonderful Robin Williams is to just, man, what a great guy that dude was.

[Chuck Bryant]

Great dude.

[Josh Clark]

Great movie too.

[Chuck Bryant]

I was watching a thing with him this morning and very, very sad stuff.

[Josh Clark]

What were you watching?

[Chuck Bryant]

It was an Instagram post of him with his mother and his mother making him laugh. And I think the whole point of the post was like, you rarely got to hear Robin Williams genuine laugh. And I heard it and I was like, yeah, I don't know if I really ever heard that. And his mom made him laugh that hard. It was really sweet.

[Josh Clark]

Can you do an impression?

[Chuck Bryant]

It was kind of a ha ha ha thing. No, I mean, not like that, but it was exuberant. But it was like, hahaha. Not like my goofy childish laugh.

[Josh Clark]

I got you. Yeah. So good movie. And it was 100% based on this. So much so that it's funny. They went to the trouble of changing the names of the changed names that Oliver Sacks had in the book.

[Chuck Bryant]

Wow.

[Josh Clark]

So, yes, Awakenings actually is pretty faithful in a lot of ways. I mean, there's a lot of like, movie stuff, literary license in there, but for the most part, it's pretty faithful to Oliver Sacks book. And again, it's nonfiction. Like, Sacks is a neurologist. Was a great neurologist and a great writer too. So he didn't take a lot of literary license as far as I understand. So the movie, being close to the book Means the movie was fairly close to real life. And one of the tests that Oliver Sex conducted was he would demonstrate that these people were. Had demonstrated what's called paradoxical kinesia, where somebody who seemingly can't move and hasn't moved for days, months, however long it was since the last time somebody moved them could suddenly move in a way that they just should not be able to. And the way that he demonstrates it in the movie, and I believe in the book he did this too, was he would toss them a ball. And all of a sudden somebody who's just sitting there with their hands in the air and their face frozen in this mask, this expressionless mask, just suddenly moves their hand without even moving their eyes and catches the ball. And that was, I think, again, at least in the movie, I haven't read the book, how he identified people in this, what they call the chronic hospital that he worked at in the Bronx by. By finding somebody who kind of fit these. These symptoms and then tossing a ball at them. And there's a very cute funny part where he does it to one person and she gets hit in the face and is like, ow, why'd you do that? She clearly didn't have encephalitis lethargica. It's pretty cute.

[Chuck Bryant]

It sounded a couple of minutes ago like you said, Oliver Sex.

[Josh Clark]

I know, and I didn't correct myself. You're an all time great conversation analyst, though, for noticing that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, I just. I mean, that's a different movie altogether.

[Josh Clark]

Oliver Sex.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Also called Awakening, so.

[Josh Clark]

God, was that a couple minutes ago? Have I been talking that much?

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, I have no sense of time. It might have been 10 seconds.

[Josh Clark]

That was amazing. Chuck. You've been killing it with the jokes lately.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, thanks. One of the things you mentioned there is they could catch a ball or something. Another thing that would happen. He said that if there was an emergency, another patient falls on the floor, all of a sudden, somebody who previously has not moved for days or weeks or months might just leap up out of their wheelchair and assist them and then sit back down and go back to their statue pose. And that phenomenon that you're talking about is that's the big key difference between PEP and Parkinson's disease is called kinesia. Paradoxical, where you're switching between mobility and immobility. And that is not something that happens generally in Parkinson's.

[Josh Clark]

No, but I saw that it does some. Yeah, but I think for the most part it's more associated with chronic encephalitis lethargica. Right, yeah. So this original thing where this disease, this mysterious disease, Encephalitis lethargica suddenly appeared out of nowhere in 1915. 16. Ravaged the world for 10 years and then just vanished. And, like you said, led a whole generation of neurologists off the hook for having to explain what it was. Like, they. They really tried, like, people like Vaughn Economo really tried to figure this out. I think 9,000 papers were written during this epidemic, and there were some things that they kind of were able to pin down, but the big, big questions were just left unanswered. We just don't know. Like, one of the big ones is, how do you even catch this terrible disease?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Like, is it contagious or not? They still didn't have a definitive answer at the end of their study on that. Evidence on transmission was really, really mixed. There were a couple of anecdotal cases that kind of illustrate that. One of them, there was among seven members of a family in a small apartment. Only one family member got sick. Another case, there was a girl living at something called the Derby and Derbyshire Rescue and Training Home, showed signs of El. And then very soon, within two weeks, 12 of the 21 residents got sick. So both cases, one looks clearly contagious, the other one doesn't look like it's at all contagious. So they didn't know. Maybe they thought some people might be immune. Maybe there are different strains that were contagious or had different levels of contagiousness. Or maybe it's just something that they never figured out.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And I was wondering, too, if the 12 of the 21 residents getting sick at that one home was maybe just a case of mass hysteria or something like that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, interesting. Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

No, I think half of the people who got sick died within 10 days of falling ill. So they were not. That was not mass hysteria. So that is just a genuine mystery. Right. Like, this just doesn't make any kind of sense whatsoever. So they started trying to rule out things they thought it wasn't.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

One was environmental causes. So that would make it toxic. Encephalitis. And I don't even know if we said at the outset, did you. I think that encephalitis is swelling of the brain and spinal cord.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, no, Okay. I didn't say that.

[Josh Clark]

So I'm sure everybody got like, a pretty good idea that encephalitis is something bad that you don't want to have.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

But what it is is a condition where your brain and. Or your spinal cord swells and it can start taking on water. And from doing that, all sorts of terrible things can happen. The thing is, is encephalitis is not just specific to Encephalitis Lethargica. A lot of different things can make your brain and central nervous system swell. A disturbing amount of things can make that happen, actually, if you stop and think about it. And one of those things is environmental toxins. So that's toxic encephalitis. And that got ruled out very quickly because there just was no pattern whatsoever where everybody was exposed to, you know, like a tesseract made of kryptonite or something like that. For our nerd fans. Yeah, that's good. I tried to toss you guys bone, just screwed it up royally. So I'm sorry, I think I may have just conflated DC and Marvel and.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh yeah, yeah. Disarrak.

[Josh Clark]

Is Marvel dead, Dude?

[Chuck Bryant]

No, I love it. I love it, man. You should meld those Superman meets Thanos. Sure, I want to see those dudes fight.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, that'd be great. I'm sure that would be a really interesting fight to watch.

[Chuck Bryant]

Somebody's going to write in and say, actually guys, it happened in 1987 when, you know, some dude put out a comic.

[Josh Clark]

I suspect that those people aren't going to speak to us any longer.

[Chuck Bryant]

I think you're right. So like you said, they rule that out the toxic exposure, then they moved on to an infectious kind of possibility. Infectious encephalitis, in fact. And that can be infectious. Encephalitis is a thing. So it's not like we think it's that that was already a thing. It can be secondary to bacterial or fungal or viral or parasitic infection. It's usually a virus. It's the most common type of encephalitis. It could be like from the herpes virus or maybe measles or West Nile, even influenza. And considering how this went on during the Spanish flu initially, which happened in 1918 and there were flu like symptoms, they thought that this probably early on at least was an influenza led infectious encephalitis.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And that was I think Von Economo's leading theory, which makes a lot of sense because they tracked with one another like you said, at least the start. So was this just some horrible strain of Spanish flu that managed to continue on for years after Spanish flu? And I think that was incontrovertibly proven incorrect because actually when I did the End of the World, I talked about this guy who went up and dug up the corpse of an Inuit woman who had died from Spanish flu to get enough of the genome of it to bring the Spanish Flu back to life to study it. It's one of the most breathtakingly arrogant moments in all of science for somebody to do that. But the reason we know that Encephalitis lethargica wasn't caused by the Spanish flu is because we had the Spanish flu genome and we couldn't find any Spanish Flu RNA in, in like collections of tissue samples of brains of people who definitely died from Encephalitis Lethargica. Spanish flu wasn't there. Ergo, it wasn't Spanish flu.

[Chuck Bryant]

And because Josh is always too humble to say so after an end of the world reference, everyone, if you don't know, Josh had a great solo album. A eight part or ten part?

[Josh Clark]

It was a ten part subtitled Waxy Flexibility.

[Chuck Bryant]

The End of the World with Josh Clark. Where and he, one episode at a time, examined 10. I can't think of the word existential risks that could face humanity, some of which are currently underway.

[Josh Clark]

Thanks a lot, Chuck. I appreciate that. That was really nice of you.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's very great. You gotta be a smarty pants. But even if you're not a smarty pants, you should still give it a shot, I think. Cause I gave it a shot and I'm not a smarty pants.

[Josh Clark]

Hey, you are a smarty pants. But yes, smarty pants or no, I think everybody can be equally scared by this.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, you did live shows too. So if you have a time machine on your hands, go back and see one of those while you're at it.

[Josh Clark]

And come talk to us. If you have an actual working time machine as well, that'd be pretty neat.

[Chuck Bryant]

Streptococcal infection was another possibility. At one point, there was some data that showed infection with streptococcal bacteria was in front of some of these cases of elite. And in 1931, our old pal Dr. Von Economo did an experiment and streptococcus vaccination actually led to an el like condition in dogs.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Which is sad. But.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

The thing is, the thing that makes it even more sad is it wasn't definitive. They weren't like, oh, it's a strep infection.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

It was like, I guess it could have been. There was another group called the Matheson Commission that studied Encephalitis Lethargica because a guy ostensibly by the last name of Matheson, I couldn't find who it was. He was a wealthy businessman from America who had been struck down by Encephalitis Lethargica. I believe he had gotten better, but not fully. And so he used some money to try to get to the bottom of this and funded this commission for 13 years. They put out four different reports and basically at the end said, maybe herpes, we don't know. And he said, your funding's cut off. I've gotten into Sherlock Holmes societies. That's who I'm funding now.

[Chuck Bryant]

At the end of all that dough for that many years, you come back with maybe herpes? Are you kidding me?

[Josh Clark]

At the very least, give me herpes, too. That reminds me, when I was a kid. I'll never forget one of the first headlines that ever sunk in with me, because I was a who's the Boss? Fan a little bit at the time. Okay, it was. It had to be the Inquirer or something, but it was Tony Danza gave me herpes. And I looked like just yesterday to see if Tony Danza actually had ever given anyone herpes. And it does not seem to be the case. I don't believe Tony Danza has herpes. So that headline was totally made up. And I hope Tony Danza got some money from that for suing the Inquirer.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Oh, we should issue that correction, too. You got that Tony Danza band name wrong.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, I did.

[Chuck Bryant]

In the metal episodes, do you know.

[Josh Clark]

What the correct one was?

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, what did you call it?

[Josh Clark]

I think I called it the Tony Danza Tap Dance Experience. Is that not it?

[Chuck Bryant]

I think if that's what you said, I think it was Tap Dance extravaganza.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

Or it's the other way around. Whichever one you said was wrong.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, that's fine. I can live with that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Yeah, we had a few metal people write in about that. So can't, you know, can't not correct the Tony Dan's and tap dance.

[Puzzle Guest]

Extravagant.

[Josh Clark]

I'll bet they were nice, though. Like, to a person. Pretty much. All the metal fans that rode in said even the ones correcting us were like, that was great.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that's the metal way it is. All right, shall we take our other break?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, we'll be right back.

[Josh Clark]

Wait.

[Puzzle Guest]

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[Chuck Bryant]

God that sucks so hard though.

[Anabe Sofa Advertiser]

I'm so sorry. Can you out petty them? Can you match their pettiness for funsies? Yeah, we had so much fun last season. Laughing, crying, talking to some new and old friends.

[Josh Clark]

Remember when we were in that scene where you guys were just supposed to hug and I was standing? Oh yeah. And I was like can I also hug them? I'm like this has no friends.

[Anabe Sofa Advertiser]

This time around we say it. Melissa, should I getting a little more better. Oh finally. It's all the dressing room talk you loved in season one. All the things. Because aren't we all trying to get a little more better? Listen to More better on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or Wherever you get your podcast.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, so we mentioned some people studying, you know, different causes back in the day. They never could find anything out, like we said. And for about 30 years, they just kind of left it there. And it was in the late 1960s when neurology researchers that were working on Parkinson's really hit on it when they developed L dopa, or levodopa, which is a substitute for dopamine, which is the missing neurotransmitter and Parkinson's disease. And it was released in 1967, and it brought akinetic Parkinson's disease patients back to life. And if you've seen the movie Awakenings, that's basically a big storyline. That's where it picks up is when Oliver Sacks scores some L dopa he.

[Josh Clark]

Did off a guy selling it on the corner below Beth Abraham Hospital. Exactly, yeah. So he finally starts with Leonard Lowe, who's Robert De Niro. Not the patient's real name, obviously, but there's just this amazing transformation where all of a sudden, these people, again, who are these frozen statue, like, people and have been for decades of their lives, suddenly, like, are, like, aware and talking and, like, focusing their attention on you. And one guy's playing the piano, and they're, like, going out on field trips now. It's like they were just completely broad out of it. And that supposedly was very much the case with people with actual Parkinson's disease. Like, they responded beautifully to L dopa. But one of the reasons one of the indicators that post encephalitic Parkinsonism and Parkinson's disease are different is that the people in Awakenings, the people with Encephalitis Lethargica, they responded well for a little while, and then they started to show other symptoms that really kind of, for some of them, it basically meant, you can't take L dopa anymore. And incredibly, sadly, like, one of the most sad things I can think of, they were left to just go back to their frozen statue state again. And don't forget, there is a great level of consciousness within them when they're in this state. So they came out of that state in which they were conscious, came to full consciousness and full interactivity, and maybe even left the hospital on a field trip and then had to go back to their frozen statue state again, conscious of this whole experience.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, Very heartbreaking to see in that movie. There was one case of a woman who. Is this the Rose of which you spoke of to me privately?

[Josh Clark]

Yes, that was Rose. And then Lucy was her name in the movie, for some reason.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay, well, this woman, just one of the cases of Oliver Sacks, she came out of it and she basically described, like, being aware of everything that was happening for decades and understanding what was happening, but just not feeling a connection to it. Like there was this weird disconnect. She knew about Pearl Harbor. She described knowing about the assassination of Kennedy, John F. That is. And she said that it just didn't seem real. She said nothing has seemed real since 1926, when I got the encephalitis and came to a stop. I know I'm 64 now and that this is 1969 and that I'm an elderly woman in a bizarre situation in a chronic hospital, but I feel like I'm 21 and I feel like it's 1926.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, man.

[Chuck Bryant]

Can you imagine?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And very sadly, she was one of the ones who did not, like, have her symptoms with L DOPA were too extreme to continue on taking L Dopa.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And some people, you know, came out and were just overjoyed and elated with this kind of thing, obviously. And some people came out and obviously you could also see. Had a very hard time with lost decades. It could not have been an easy thing to accept. Either way, the movie, there is good news. There is a bit of a silver lining because the movie does not cover the fact that after this, a lot of the patients finally regulated with the L dopa and were able to leave at least lead, compared to sort of their previous life, a somewhat healthy life. Like, they weren't in that statuesque locked in state. They might not have fully recovered, but they led an okay life.

[Josh Clark]

Right. Yeah. And they do mention that at the end in those, I guess. Yeah. Or post scripts.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Where they talk about how they continued on experimenting and some people kind of worked out with a little bit. So. But they don't. They don't show it in the movie. The movie's all sad at the end.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

It's so sad. And. Yeah. Oh, my God. Just go watch Awakenings again. I even watched. I accidentally watched Patch Adams first, and I wanted to watch Awakening so bad. I still watched it after Patch Adams, after Zoolander, and then I finally watched Awakenings. I was up till like four in the morning today last night.

[Chuck Bryant]

I never saw Patch Adams.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, it's not good.

[Chuck Bryant]

That was sex too, though, right? And then.

[Josh Clark]

No, it was just Robin Williams too. It was. There was no Awakenings, I'll tell you that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I need to check that out. It's funny. I met a guy named Leonard Lowe one time years ago. And the only thing I could think in my head was, my name is Leonard Lowe. Like, I just remember De Niro saying that.

[Josh Clark]

You didn't say that to him?

[Chuck Bryant]

No, because I figured, you know, like, our listener, Robert Paulson, he's probably tired of those jokes.

[Josh Clark]

I never stopped saying that to Robert Paulson. I can't help myself.

[Chuck Bryant]

So what about these days? What do we think about El medically speaking?

[Josh Clark]

Well, so one of the things that we did learn that we still don't fully understand, but was something that they recognized with L dopa and the study of the patients before they were administered L dopa is that while you're in a. Like, this frozen state, like, like I said earlier, somebody, like, throws a ball at you, or like you said, somebody sees an emergency, they can suddenly move like normal, and then they go back to that frozen state. Afterward, they found that it's not just like an emergency, like a ball coming at you or your friend laying on the floor. Cause they fell down. But things like music, human touch, even, like, obnoxious sounds like a siren or something can basically prompt the person to start moving again and, like, come back out of that frozen catatonia or mutism. And that was one of the things that they found people could do on L Dopa too. Like, even with the extreme, like, tremors or inability to control the movement of your mouth or eyes, those could be tamed by the same things, by stimulating your brain in some other way. And there was the story of a guy who was a cobbler by trade before he had gotten sick.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And after El dopa came along, he asked for, like, a cobbler's bench, and the hospital staff got him one. And when he was working at his cobbler's bench, he was able to hold nails in his teeth and nail the heel of the shoe with these little tiny nails and just work and control the symptoms. Because there's something in the brain that was overriding the symptoms. We have no idea why. We just know that that was part of this whole thing. There's some way that these problematic symptoms can be overridden by some other region of the brain taking importance or precedence over that, which is just bizarre, like, from start to finish. This is one of the most bizarre diseases in history.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Did you also watch Tremors by accident?

[Josh Clark]

No, that would have been very pleasant. That's one of my favorite movies.

[Chuck Bryant]

All of a sudden, the sun's coming up, and you still haven't seen Awakenings.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

So getting back to the modern perspectives and what we think medically these days, in the last 75 years, like I said, it completely went away. They kind of don't know. In the last 75 years, there's only been about 80 case reports where it looks like it might be EL. They call it like an EL, like presentation. You know, the hypersomnolence, maybe ocular paralysis, maybe some of those neuropsychiatric symptoms, but they're really not sure because the cases are pretty varied and the symptoms are pretty varied. And again, all they have is sort of these case studies from before. They never landed on anything. So it's hard to tell if this is still going on at all or not. There's no effective treatment. You know, they still use L dopa, I think. Right. And that's still on the scene. Yeah. So for the tremors and rigidity and stuff like that, sometimes ect, if you have, like, pretty extreme psychiatric symptoms. But for Von Economo's work, he got. He never won, but he was nominated three times for a Nobel Prize. Pretty good.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, for sure. And remember, he also originally suspected that it was some sort of infection. He thought Spanish flu wasn't Spanish flu. But they do think that it's probable now that it is the result of an autoimmune disorder triggered by an infection.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

So what that would amount to is that you are infected by. Maybe it is strep, maybe it is herpes, maybe it is influenza, we don't know. But something that resembles proteins found in different regions of your brain trains your body to attack those proteins in your brain. So it triggers an autoimmune disorder. And those proteins are only found on specific regions of the brain that when you step back and look at what those regions do, they control the symptoms that you see in people with Encephalitis Lethargica.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

I just sounded like Tim Curry and Rocky Horror Picture Show.

[Chuck Bryant]

Get on the slab.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, that was good. I forgot how good your impression is of Dr. Frank N. Furter.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, well, you know, I met the man, he held my cat.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, that's right. He said your cat was naughty. Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

I said he had dramatic ears.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, okay. Yeah, but also naughty.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, yeah, naughty. Get on the slab, Laurent. I got nothing else.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, okay, let's see. I guess I got nothing else either. That's it. We don't. We don't know the answer to all of this, and I don't know when we ever will. But it's just. It's so fascinating that you have to stop and remind yourself, like this. Actually happened to people. And that then you realize how terrifying the whole thing really is. Yeah, well, Chuck said. Yeah. Twice within seven seconds, which automatically means. Oh, well, now he derailed it. You have to say yeah. One more time. Hurry. Yeah. Okay, now we're back on to listener mail. This is.

[Chuck Bryant]

You're gonna like this one, Josh, I think. Hey, guys, this is about the eight tracks. I always learn something from you. Sometimes unexpectedly, you guys. In the eight track short stuff, you talked about cart being short for cartridge and sparked a memory. I'm from Buffalo, you see, and I used to listen to a radio announcer called Iron Mike Benson. He famously had what he called. And Jamie says, sorry to you specifically, Josh, about this.

[Josh Clark]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

Where Mike. Iron Mike Benson would say that he had the heinous anus fart cart, and he would use it to play various fart sounds and strategically place them over top of. Over the top of whatever songs happen to be getting played on the air at the moment. I always imagine the word cart at the time was referring to like a basket on wheels that contained a bunch of separate tapes.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Of fart sounds. Now it all makes sense. It was a tape recording, but because it was a looped tape with multiple tracks on it, he could cue whatever selection he wanted much quicker than you could with a linear cassette tape. So it was the analog way to do that sort of thing before a digital soundboard was used and invented. Thank you for all the useless interest grabbing information. And useless is in quotes, by the way. Okay. That is only useless until you can relate it to something else. Podcasts have come and gone, but your show is the one I haven't gotten tired of. And my sister Ashley agrees. Keep it up, boys. That is Jamie Lynn Bear.

[Josh Clark]

Awesome. Thank you, Jamie Lynn. And thank you to your sister Ashley, who ostensibly listens as well. And the whole bear clan. How about that?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, the clan at the Cave Bear.

[Josh Clark]

I thought that as well. Yeah. If you want to be like the clan of the Cave Bear and write in to let us know how much you like our show and. Or we triggered some memory in you that helped you put things together and. Or whatever else you want to say. We love that kind of thing, you can send it to us via [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 are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

[Josh Clark]

Foreign.

[A.J. Jacobs]

Let's start with a quick puzzle. The answer is Ken Jennings appearance on The Puzzler with A.J. jacobs the Question is, what is the most entertaining listening experience in podcast land Jeopardy truthers believe in?

[Puzzle Guest]

I guess they would be conspiracy theorists. That's right, they gave you the answers and you still blew it.

[A.J. Jacobs]

The Puzzler listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Mandy Money]

Do we really need another podcast with a condescending finance bro trying to tell us how to spend our own money? No, thank you. Instead, check out Brown Ambition. Each week I your host Mandy Money gives you real talk, real advice with a heavy dose of I feel uses. Like on Fridays when I take your questions for the baqa. Whether you're trying to invest for your future, navigate a toxic work workplace, I got you. Listen to Brown ambition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

[Evan Ratliff]

When news broke earlier this year that baby kj, a newborn in Philadelphia, had successfully received the world's first personalized gene editing treatment, it represented a milestone for both researchers and patients. But there's a gripping tale of discovery behind this accomplishment and its creators. I'm Evan Ratliff, and together with biographer Walter Isaacson, we're delving into the story of Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna, the woman who's helped change the trajectory of humanity. Listen to on crispr, the Story of Jennifer Doudna with Walter isaacson on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Mandy Money]

This is an iHeart podcast.