What You Never Knew About Your Childhood & Go Inside the U.S. Capitol
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Today on Something You Should Know, couples who have been together a long time may be more tuned into each other than they realize.

Then, the fascinating science behind our long and unique human childhood. Something people may not realize is that very few other animals have anything like a grandmother. When you are a female animal, generally you live, you reproduce, and then you die. The traditional thought was that grandmothers actually contribute so much to the survival, not of their children, but their children's children. Also, how the genes you got from your mother and father can sometimes conflict with each other.

And the story of the U.S. Capitol building, the history, the people, and the wedding on top of the dome. People climbed hand in hand to the top outside, accompanied by two police officers, two newspaper reporters, and a justice of the peace, and they got in trouble for doing it. All this today on Something You Should Know.

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Something you should know. Fascinating Intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Well, you're going to hear some things about your childhood in this episode that you probably never knew before. But before we get to that, I want to start today by talking about relationships. If you're in a relationship or you've been married for a while,

You might notice that your partner sometimes acts as if they don't hear you, but they hear you. A study puts spouses to the test, and it turns out that they do hear each other, even when they're not listening. Each couple was asked to listen to their partner speaking across the room with a stranger. They were then asked to repeat back what their partner said and what the stranger said in that conversation across the room.

The translation was clear with much more accuracy when they described what their partner said than what the stranger said. It seems we're wired to tune into our partner's conversations. The same experiment revealed that participants could decipher a conversation between their spouse and a stranger much better than one between two strangers. Some married couples can even determine what their partner is saying just by their tone and inflection.

And that is something you should know. You may not know a lot about this, but I bet it's something you've thought about. And that is, why is our human childhood so long? Meaning, humans aren't really considered to be adults and capable of being on our own until we're roughly 18.

But think of a dog. They're considered adults within months of being born. In fact, they're lucky to live to 18, let alone be considered grown. And there are so many species who grow up a lot quicker than we do. In fact, I can't even think of another species that has a childhood as long as ours. So why is that? Is it necessary? Is there a benefit to it? These are interesting questions, and here to explore the answers is Brianna Hassett,

She's a biological anthropologist and researcher at University College London. She's a scientific associate at the Natural History Museum in London and author of the book Growing Up Human, The Evolution of Childhood. Hi, Brianna. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

Hi, thank you so much for having me. So the subtitle of your book intrigues me, The Evolution of Childhood, because I don't think of childhood as evolving. I think of it as we evolve through our childhood, but that childhood is a fixed thing. So can you start by explaining what you mean by the evolution of childhood?

Well, one of the ways of sort of thinking about how a species functions is through something called life history. And life history is basically just looking at the little milestones of life. So growing up, reproducing, dying, all of that stuff, and looking at the timing that different species use to determine, you know, how long are we going to spend our time getting big before we turn to the important business of having more babies, right?

And every species makes a kind of trade-off in terms of those milestones. They sort of move the sliders on the dial a little bit just to kind of, you know, put an investment there, put an investment there. And humans are just incredibly interesting because they have put so much investment in this one part of the life cycle, which is childhood. We have some of the longest childhoods of any animal on the planet.

And why is that? I mean, I don't know that you know the answer to why, but it does seem so weird when you look at other animals. You know, a dog, by the time it's one year old, it's a fully formed adult. And we take, you know, 20 times that. So why are we so complicated and so fragile that we just need more time or what?

Well, there's a sort of, it's a little bit outdated now and we don't like to be so, so sort of a black and white because there's lots of shades of gray, but there's a sort of theory that talks about why you would invest in one big expensive baby or why you might want to go for the kind of shotgun approach. So you could compare animals across sort of the animal kingdom as being on a spectrum. So you might have a

Poor old Charlotte from Charlotte's Web. A spider has a lot, a lot, thousands and thousands of babies, but doesn't exactly stick around for their childhood. Whereas some of our larger mammals, particularly us, have a huge investment in this childhood period. So a giraffe or an elephant or something like my favorite example, which is the bowhead whale. Bowhead whales live for hundreds of years.

And they have a childhood, which is about 25 years, which you could argue is pretty similar to the human childhood, which tells us something really interesting because we are not growing up to be the size of a bowhead whale. No matter how hard we try, that's not the amount of growth we're doing. So it must be something else that we're spending our time on and investing in in this period. And what is that?

The really short and snappy answer is that we need time to learn to be a better monkey.

Our nearest relatives, so our primates, our apes, our monkeys, our friends the lemurs and marmosets, they all have pretty long childhoods proportionately for how long they live and what size they grow up to be. Obviously, it does take a long time to grow something the size of a bowhead whale, so we can see that larger animals might have larger childhoods, longer childhoods. But

We seem to, in our primate clade, to have been extending that longer and longer. And one of the reasons that this might be is because childhood is the phase where we can get other people to invest in us. We can draw down resources from mom, dad, aunties, grandpa, grandma, the rest of our group.

And we can actually sort of invest in a child for a very, very long time, which I'm sure if any of your listeners are parents, they will be aware of. But who decides? How do you decide?

That a child is no longer a child, time to step out on your own. Is this a collective decision or is this based on observation? Basically now, roughly at 18, you're an adult and off you go. But says who? I mean, why? Why?

I think this is actually one of the most fascinating sort of questions because I'm an anthropologist, so I'm very interested in why humans do things. And, you know, if you look around different cultures in the world, we have very different ideas of what makes an adult, even in our own species.

So in a sort of evolutionary biology way, we might say, oh, well, an adult is capable of reproducing. But we would never say that about human children, because even if they're capable of reproducing, we're pretty sure they should maybe wait a bit. Otherwise, it's going to go badly. So we have, you know, a legal childhood where we have, you know, ages of responsibility, things like that. We have cultural childhood, the point at which

know um your parents start making moves to move your stuff out of the basement um and we have different um ideas of what actually makes an adult and as humans i don't think we have an agreement on what makes an adult and i find this really interesting i can think of um my grandmother's generation so you know a depression baby and

grew up and 16 was a fantastic age to get into the workforce and be an adult on your own. And then I look at myself several degrees later, and I'm not sure I was much used to society until I got out of university, which was well past 30. So I think we actually, we have very different definitions of childhood.

And the thing I think I find really interesting is whether or not we're actually still extending those. We're still allowing people to be children dependent on us for even longer. Which is a good thing, a bad thing, or it just is a thing?

This is the big thing about evolution is that who knows if it's a good thing or a bad thing, right? It's just what works best for the species now. So if we look at the very long-term history of our species, so right down back through our evolutionary history, we can actually see that as a species, we have evolved longer childhoods. So this seems to be a direction we're going in

And whether or not that's good or bad, I think we'll have to find out. But it's clearly given us an advantage over other species. If you look at our other primate friends, we are definitely the number one primate on the planet. Well, you said a few moments ago that different places on Earth have different, you know, benchmarks for when an adult is adult. Like, give me, can you give me some examples? Like, what's like where the youngest example of where off you go, you're

You're nine now, so you're all grown up. I don't know what the number is, but you know what I mean. Well, no, you're not far off. Anglo-Saxon life was pretty horrible. So this is, sorry, some of my cultures are in the past. But Anglo-Saxons were pretty sure that you could have legal responsibility by the age of 10. And this was something that got carried into UK law code and was only revised, I think, very recently. Or you can think of, for instance, the

places like Afghanistan, where suddenly 11 years old is too old for girls to go to school. And they have to switch into an adult role where they are adult women and not considered children anymore. And I think, you know, then you can look at

sort of some pretty eternal childhoods of those of us who perhaps go off and go to university for a considerate amount of time, but still get some help from bank of mom and dad, or those of us who get help, you know, buying a first house. You know, we, if you think of childhood and what I like to think of it is as a period where other people are investing in you more than you are investing in other people. I think you'll find that it's, it's really pretty different, not only across countries,

the planet across our human history, but very much across different groups within a society, whether that's men and women or people with different amounts of money that we allow childhood to some people for quite a long time and to other people, not so much. We're talking about your childhood. And my guest is biological anthropologist Brianna Hassett. She is author of the book Growing Up Human, The Evolution of Childhood.

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Shopify.com slash S-Y-S-K. So, Brianna, I wonder if how long your childhood is is determined by how long your potential life is. That the longer human beings live, the longer the childhood, but percentage-wise, it remains the same.

So this is a fascinating question. This is exactly what a lot of the early sort of pioneers in looking at this kind of thing wanted to know. And they come up against, you know, our old friend, the bowhead whale. We don't live to be 300.

We have the same length of childhood as an animal that's going to be 300. So we've actually pushed the limit of sort of where we put that time. And what's more interesting is even compared to other primates, we've moved those little milestones I was talking about. So you could break childhood down into a couple different categories. Infancy, where you're a baby, you're being fed directly by your mom, pregnancy.

you know, sort of a more juvenile period where you're sort of out and about learning from the others in your group. And then a kind of adolescence where you're sort of hitting sexual reproduction, final growth, and then, you know, you finish up. And humans, very interestingly, have an incredibly short infancy.

compared to sort of proportionally to other animals who grow a bit like us. We spend less time on our mom's breast than other primates and orangutan is nursing for seven years, which, you know, despite people sort of saying, well, these are things that probably changed with modern behaviors. There's really not a lot of information on any human culture breastfeeding for more than four years.

So we've actually taken some parts of our childhood and shrunk them down while letting other parts of our childhood expand to fill the space. And then we've taken the whole period where we're dependent on other people and really expanded into the rest of our lifespan. So in our culture, in this country, in the United States, you're generally considered an adult, a legal adult, when you're 18. Right.

but not in everything, right? You can't drink until you're 21. You can't legally drink until you're 21, even though you can do a lot of things legally.

Like signed contracts and things at 18. And I remember a time when many states in this country lowered the drinking age to 18 and it didn't work. And I think generally the belief was that people between the ages of 18 and 21 were not mature enough to handle it. And so the drinking age was raised back up to 21.

So this idea that you're an adult at 18, I mean, is that cultural? I mean, what makes that determination? I think that I'm going to have to come down very strongly on the argument that culture...

is a major, major driver for when we decide someone's mature enough or capable enough. So I'm now based in the UK. And of course, the legal drinking age here is 18. And it's 16 if you're having a meal. So you could go into a pub and have your nice roast dinner. And you could order a drink with it. And that would be absolutely fine. I'm not saying that the UK doesn't have its own

problems with youth drinking. That's certainly not the case. But culturally, it's considered absolutely age-appropriate.

And I think that's absolutely fascinating. So we've got two cultures that have the same language. We share a lot of sort of cultural markers, background. But in the States, you know, I grew up in the States and you absolutely couldn't have a drink till 21. I came over to the UK on a study abroad and suddenly, you know, the lessons are being held in the pub. Oh, you don't want to come to the seminar? I don't think I can get in. Oh, yes, you can. It was a little bit of a culture shock.

But I think all of these things really are super determined by the culture. Well, it seems to me that childhood is getting longer, that people are staying at home longer than they used to. That 100 years ago when people became 18 or 21 or whatever the age was, that they took off, that they were gone and didn't linger with mom and dad.

But you could also make the argument, rather than to say that childhood is getting longer, that adulthood is getting shorter, that people are postponing becoming mature adults, not because they have to, but because they can, because they don't want to grow up, that it's a failure to launch. So what's your art? Are you saying that childhood is getting longer, or perhaps adulthood is getting shorter?

I personally think that our childhoods are getting even longer. I always use the example of my grandma sort of, you know, being of an older generation and, you know, leaving school at 16 and that being quite the achievement for someone from her, you know, her age and her background. And then myself leaving university, well, I haven't really left, I'm still working at one, but, you know, finishing a PhD, 30-odd.

And just think, you know, I had an extremely long period where various people, institutions and things were investing in me. And I was a bit of a net loss to everyone else. And I wonder if that's not something that as more and more people are able to go to university, as more and more people sort of, you know, spend a little bit longer at home, whether that's something that our culture isn't actually pushing us towards. Yeah.

But there's a difference between, say, you going to college to get a degree, to do something with your life, to better yourself, versus staying home at mom's house because she's not kicking you out, telling you to get a job, you have no ambition. Those are very different.

It's true. I think, and it's really interesting to think, well, living in mom's basement is frowned on, but having your parents put down the deposit for your house, that's a great thing. We may have to think about that in terms of investment. Maybe you don't have to physically be there, but if, you know, if we're all still getting help from our parents later and later into life, I'm not sure that it's a good thing or a bad thing.

But I'm sure that is probably slightly more fun to be a child for 40 years than for, say, 14. You say that one of the things that makes human childhood somewhat unique is the role of dads or the role of fathers. Can you talk about that?

If you look way far back, there are primates that are on the other side of the family tree. Many of them actually do have dads. They have monogamous pairs where the dad does an enormous amount of work. A marmoset dad will carry his babies for the first year of their life. They ride around on dad and he does the bulk of carrying them around.

There's only a few other species really proportionately in the world that have these kind of monogamous pair bonds that end up with these dads that do childcare. And I think that's fascinating. So it's about 5% of species of animal species. And I think that's really interesting that we've got this sort of invention of a social relationship that allows us to extract more care from one particular individual.

One thing that seems to make human childhood different and special, and maybe it's not just humans, you would know, but grandparents. So many of us have such fond memories of grandparents, not everyone, obviously, but many people, grandparents were key in their development and were key players in that, and is that just humans?

Something that people may not realize is that other animals, very few other animals have anything like a grandmother. When you are a female animal, generally you live, you reproduce, and then you die. You don't have this whole bit of life where you're not reproducing, but you're still alive. This is a shocking invention in the animal kingdom. And we used to think it was actually only us. We now know that quite a lot of the smarter whales are

my favorite being the danger dolphin orcas they actually do also have grandmothers and this has been the basis for a lot of theorizing because why on earth if your goal as a species is to reproduce more would you shut off reproduction in half of your species and i think you know the the jury is in fact still out on this one we don't really know the answer the traditional thought

was that grandmothers actually contribute so much to the survival, not of their children, but their children's children, that they actually provide this, you know, expert pair of hands. So orca grandmas seem to know the best ways to navigate, the best ways to find seals to hunt.

Our own species, our grandmas are, you know, they're right there for the folk wisdom and the cookies. You know, so that grandmothers are providing this extra investment in this period where we need so much investment, this childhood that we've opened up to take all resources possible. But it's just a really important

strange, strange evolutionary principle that we would actually stop reproducing halfway through our lives in order to reproduce better.

Well, that's an intriguing idea. Well, all of this stuff about childhood is intriguing and I think interesting to people because, well, we've all had a childhood. I've been talking to Brianna Hassett. She is a biological anthropologist and researcher at University College London, and she is author of a book called Growing Up Human, The Evolution of Childhood. There's a book called Growing Up Human, The Evolution of Childhood.

There's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes if you would like to read it. Thank you, Brianna. I enjoyed this conversation. Thanks, Mike. It's been fantastic to talk to you. As a podcast network, our first priority has always been audio and the stories we're able to share with you. But at Realm, we also sell some pretty cool merch. And organizing that was made both possible and easy with Shopify.

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How many times have you seen a picture of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington? And when you see a picture of the Capitol, you instantly recognize it. You've seen those pictures all your life. It's an historic building and a lot goes on there. And a lot has gone on there in the past. But as important as this building is to all of us, there's a lot about the Capitol I bet you don't know.

And here to enlighten us a little is Kate Anderson Brower. She is a CNN contributor who covered the Obama White House for Bloomberg News and is a former CBS News staffer. She's author of a book called The Hill, Inside the Secret World of the U.S. Capitol. Hi, Kate. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me. Sure. So you've spent a lot of time at the Capitol. What is it about that building that intrigues you the most?

Well, I've always been fascinated by the people who make these institutions run. And so I actually got to know people who work at the Capitol. For instance, people who work in the finishing shop at the Capitol. I mean, this is a carpentry shop, essentially. The people who drive the subway car in the basement of the Capitol, the people who are there and they literally witness history in this enormous space.

complex, which, you know, you read about the Capitol, it's 1.5 million square feet. It's this huge symbol of American democracy. But who are the people who make it run every day? So if you would just give me a very brief history of the Capitol building, when was it built and just some stats.

So construction began on the Capitol in August of 1793. And it's really interesting because, you know, the members of Congress met in New York, they met in Philadelphia, and it was ultimately George Washington who decided that Washington, D.C. should be the capital of the country. Of course, it was near Mount Vernon, his home, but also it was kind of in the middle of the eastern seaboard, a good place for trade.

And it was a complete mess when people came here. I live in Washington, outside of Washington, and it was a swamp. And when it was built, did it look a lot like it looks now or has it just been added on to so many times that it bears little resemblance to its original structure or what?

No, I mean, you know, the rotunda wasn't done for quite a long time. I mean, they were still building it at the time of the Civil War. It was unfinished. And actually, that's when soldiers came and the rotunda was used. It was used as a hospital essentially during the Civil War.

So it wasn't finished for quite a long time, which I think is really interesting. And it's constantly being painted, renovated. There's always work. So much money and upkeep goes into making it look the way it does today. How many people work there?

So there's really a hidden universe inside the Capitol. Aside from, you know, the 435 representatives, the 100 senators, there are 10,000 staffers as well. So, you know, the architect of the Capitol is the person that runs all of these buildings. It's the superintendent or sort of the manager for the complex. And the Capitol complex is enormous.

It includes three Library of Congress buildings, the Botanic Garden, the Capitol Visitor Center. So to answer your question, it's literally thousands of people who work behind the scenes on Capitol Hill every day. And yet we think about it, when I think of the Capitol, I think about, you know, the chamber where

Legislation is discussed in the House of Representatives and in the Senate. And I know there's a rotunda and there's lots of offices and dining rooms probably. But what else is there? I mean, what goes on there that requires that many people?

There are people that have to be fed. So there's actually, I interviewed a food service manager there that describes the immense effort that goes into just, you know, the cafeterias that are run in the Capitol and the relationships that are formed there. I interviewed a

a grandson of this lovely woman, Tina Bonetta, who is a beloved member of the Capitol staff. She's no longer there, but she she served senators

for decades. So it's really this world, you know, the complex itself is more than 1.5 million square feet with 600 rooms, miles of hallways. And there's all those kinds of statistics about the Capitol. But to me, it was the, the heart of the Capitol is the people who work there every day and they don't make a lot of money. Um,

You know, they are they could probably get paid more in the private sector. Honestly, I'm talking about food service workers, painters, carpenters. But yet they do it because they're they're really true patriots. So what about the capital that you know that I probably don't know about goes on there? I think, you know, there's a subway that I don't think I knew until recently. Like what what other kind of things go on there that.

that people don't really know about. There's a shoe shiners, there are barbers, now there are hair salons for women, you know, there are, like I said, restaurants, there are, I think the barber shop is one of the most interesting things. And, and to me, the story of Joe Quattrone is really interesting. He's an immigrant from Italy. And

He worked side by side with a gentleman named Alvin Bolden, who was a shoe shiner. He was a cobbler. And the two of them developed this really close lifelong friendship. Alvin told me I did the feet and Joe did the hair.

And, you know, I went to the Capitol, wandered around the basement and stuck my head in and met a man named Tim Magruder, who was literally just sanding down a desk to replace for a new member of Congress because he's

Every two years, there are new members coming in and it's a it's a in each office gets replaced. You know, they get to choose their new offices and more senior members get moved up. But to me, it's the kind of backstairs at the White House. There's a backstairs at the Capitol. So can you just go into the Capitol and wander around? Yeah, you can. I mean, you know, there are metal detectors everywhere.

And but you can walk into offices, you can go make an appointment with your your member, your representative. But the Capitol has a wonderful Capitol Visitor Center and you can go there and it will tell the story of the pages who worked at the Capitol. And they've really done a good job of trying to tell the story of the enslaved workers who helped build the Capitol. So, yeah, you can wander around. It's really it's for every American to see.

So I know you talk about that the Capitol is basically haunted by the spirit of demon cats. Why cats and what's that all about?

There was a major rat problem in the Capitol years and years ago. And so cats were encouraged to, you know, there were members of the House who had cats and fed them and it was OK. And now people are saying that they're still there except they're ghosts.

So people do occasionally see and they call it the demon cat in who knows what, how true that is. There is, there could be an actual cat. I mean, there's a paw print in the concrete in the Capitol that you can see from when some concrete was drying on the floor. And they say that's the demon cats. Paw print is the Capitol itself haunted by spirits of, do people claim to see, you know, George Washington wandering the hallways or anything like that?

Yeah, I mean, people's claim to see a common one is John Quincy Adams, because, you know, he was the only president to become a member of Congress and he was known as old man eloquent. And he would stand and give these incredibly long speeches. And it said that he died, you know, mid speech, um,

In the Capitol. And he so he died on the hill. And people do say that they can they they can hear him. They can see him. There are sightings of John Quincy Adams. He's probably the most common ghost that people talk about.

What are some of the are there some people that work there that have like very odd jobs that, you know, don't exist anywhere else other than obviously, you know, representatives and senators don't exist elsewhere. But I mean, is there anything inherent to that building and what goes on there that requires certain jobs that don't happen anywhere else?

Well, I mean, I think that the subway car, there are subway car operators, obviously, but it's a really fascinating thing to see this very, it used to be actually not on tracks, the subway, but now thankfully it is on tracks. And so, I mean, it's, the walk takes a minute and 20 seconds.

And to be on the actual car takes 44 seconds. So it's good to give you a sense of a very short distance that the subway is going. And there's subway car operator, which is really interesting. But I mean, there are lots of old traditions on the Hill. Like a bill goes in an actual hopper. They call it the hopper. And, you know, a member of Congress will put the actual draft of a bill in the hopper, which is kind of a wooden box.

essentially. And so I think that there are things like that that are very unique. There's doorkeepers who's now called the sergeant at arms. And that's the person who it's a very complicated job, but it's very unique to the Capitol. It's the person who oversees security for members and also it's the person who walks

walks the president in you know when you see the State of the Union um there is always a person who walks the president into the chamber and practices they have a practice announcing the name so many times because they have to literally yell it um for everyone in the chamber to hear so I mean there's so much tradition that happens on Capitol Hill and I think it's important to

kind of recognize that and revere it in some ways. So I think, yeah, the doorkeeper, the sergeant at arms, these are all very unique positions. So the vice president of the United States, whoever that is at the time, is also the president of the Senate. So does typically does the vice president spend a lot of time at the Capitol or not?

Yeah, I mean, that's a really good question. It depends on the vice president. There is an office there. They some people like Biden who really enjoyed his relationships on the Hill spent a lot of time there. And, you know, someone like

Dick Cheney spent a decent amount of time there. It really just depends on the personality of the person. Most vice presidents want to be near the president. They want to be near like the seat of power where their office is just a few feet away from the Oval Office in the West Wing. So that's really where they spend the bulk of their time. And then in the old executive office building next door.

is where their staff is. And there's another office there. So they essentially have three offices to choose from. And most of them choose the White House office. But yeah, I think it, you know, Henry Wilson, who was Grant's vice president, actually died in his office. So he is another one that you hear stories about people seeing Wilson's ghost. You know, something I've wondered about, I've never, but I've never wondered about it enough to go figure it out.

So there's the House chamber and then there's the Senate chamber. But when the president comes and gives a State of the Union, it's in one chamber. How do they get all those people in there?

It's pretty crammed. It's in the House chamber because that's the biggest one, right? And it fits the most people. And I mean, it's pretty crammed. I mean, you see that there are people up in the rafters where people can come and view, but that's where the people sit in the president's gallery upstairs. That is a good question, but it's a packed house for the State of the Union, for sure.

What's something about the Capitol building that surprised you when you were putting this research together?

I think that the fact that the Supreme Court met there, you know, the kind of nomadic nature of the Supreme Court surprised me. It had never dawned on me that until 1935, they didn't have their own building. And so, you know, there was even a Supreme Court, the old Supreme Court chamber inside the Capitol was just kind of left vacant for years in the 60s and 70s until it was restored. And now you can go visit it. But

They met wherever the U.S. Capitol happened to be. So they were in New York. They were in Independence Hall in Philadelphia. They were all over the place. And it's interesting that the Supreme Court, this kind of very highly respected institution, didn't have a home. They just, you know, at one point in the 1800s, they just met in a little committee room, a very modest room. I think that's an interesting thing that I learned because I've always had a lot of

reverence for the Supreme Court. I mean, another thing you were asking about interesting things that have happened there. And, you know, during the war of 1812, when the British burned Washington, they set fire to the Capitol building. And it was actually 1814 that they were here. And kind of a fortunate twist for the capital city, there was a storm that, you

came on that afternoon and so caused the fires. Washington is really, really hot. And this was in August and a storm blew through, a thunderstorm blew through and put out all the fires. So it could have been much, much worse. And the British were not expecting it at all. So that was one little fortuitous event. So there's been so much history that's happened since

Talk about the rotunda, because that is certainly the room people most, when you think of the Capitol, you think of that structure of the rotunda. What was the point of that? What's the purpose of it? It seems like it's just a big empty room that people walk through to get somewhere else most of the time. But then there are times when, you know, caskets are laying in state. And so what was the whole idea there?

I mean, it's really quite beautiful and European in many ways, right? The rotunda is this gorgeous, it's actually 8.9 million pounds, 288 feet tall, cast iron dome. And like you said, it's used for these important events like lying in state,

And, you know, it wasn't finished, as I said, until 1824. And there's a lot of work that has to be done. In fact, one, they call it the AOC, the architect of the Capitol. But when they needed to get more money for funding, he brought a coffee can full of paint chips that had fallen off the rotunda when he was, you know, testifying to try to get more money for restoration because you have to constantly stay on top of it.

And for a long time, when I moved to Washington, there were cranes set up and, you know, you couldn't really see the rotunda because they were constantly working on it. But that's why I think the architects of the Capitol is such an interesting job, because they're in charge of keeping it as beautiful as it could possibly be. Talk about, because I'd never heard this before, that

Someone got married on top, on the outside top of the rotunda. Explain that. This is back in, you know, long, long time ago. But in the early 1900s, people climbed hand in hand to the top outside, accompanied by two police officers, two newspaper reporters and a justice of the peace to marry them. And they got in trouble for doing it and had to be escorted down. These are not famous people.

But yeah, this New York Times headline read in 1902, "Married on Capitol Dome, young couple made man and wife, 370 feet above ground."

So there were people who did this. They were then not allowed to do it because obviously it's very dangerous. And the sergeant at arms, actually, of the Senate, who's in charge of all security, tried to stop the marriage, but it was too late. So, you know, there are definitely incredible things that have happened. But yeah, members of Congress can get married, but a few people have snuck in and gotten married there.

So what about security at the Capitol? We've heard about the Capitol Police Force. And who's in charge of that? And what's that like? And a little bit about that. There are 2,000 officers. It ranks it among the top 25 biggest police departments in the entire country. It's the sergeant of arms' job to maintain that police force. And we saw, you know, on January 6th,

There was a lot of controversy about whether or not they had the manpower that they needed that day. So it's a really important, a Sergeant at Arms is a very, very important job. It's a very unique job to the Hill.

Well, I'm so glad we had this conversation because I'm going to Washington in a few weeks. And we were just talking about like, what do we want to do? What do we want to see when we're there? And now I think I'm going to go see the Capitol. Kate Anderson Brower has been my guest. She is a CNN contributor and author of the book, The Hill Inside the Secret World of the U.S. Capitol. And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. This was really interesting. Thank you, Kate.

Okay, great. Thank you so much. There is something called genomic imprinting, and that is basically the impact your genes have on you based on which parent they came from. In a study at the University of Tennessee, they discovered that genes you got from your mother tend to make you more selfish, but genes you got from your father make you more altruistic.

Often, these genes can be in conflict with each other. The genes from your father are telling you to be kind to others, and your genes from your mother are telling you to think more about yourself. Why is this important? Well, according to the researchers, their results reveal that the popular idea of someone battling their psychological demons that are telling them to behave in a selfish way is

has some basis in our genetic makeup. So it's not all just in your head. And that is something you should know. And that is the end of this episode of Something You Should Know. You know, it would really help us if you're so inclined to share this episode with some people you know and help us grow our audience. It would mean a lot. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Do you love Disney? Do you love top ten lists?

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