This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Hey, and welcome to the short stuff.

I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here, too.

Dave's here in spirit.

So this is a short stuff that we can begin now.

That's right, Josh.

Let me set the stage.

It's 1799. Founding Father George Washington is on his

deathbed. He calls over his secretary, Tobias Lear, and says, I am just going. Have me decently

buried. But do not let my body be put into the vault in less than three days after I'm dead, because you never know.

That is the last part. But that's basically what he was saying.

Yeah. So, yeah. And that was a great George Washington, especially dying George Washington.

Thanks.

The reason why he said that is because at the time, there was a, there was a chance, let's call it a non-zero chance to get nerdy.

Yeah.

That you might be buried alive accidentally.

There's all sorts of different conditions and stuff that we understand now. If you somebody up to like a EKG or EEG or some sort of G, you'd be able to detect their heartbeat that you wouldn't be able to say like palpitating it with your fingers or like watching somebody to see if they're actually breathing. you might not even have a decent doctor around

at the time, and you may end up being buried alive, in which case you are effed.

Yeah, I wonder when they started checking pulses.

I don't know. Let's say 1800 on the dot. I did a quick, rare lookup, and if we trust the AI overview.

I do not. All right. National Institutes of Health? Sure. They're talking like 4,000 plus years. They've been checking pulses.

...