Chuck
Appearances
Crime Junkie
MURDERED: Peggy Hettrick Part 1
Crime Junkie is an audio Chuck production. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?
Crime Junkie
MURDERED: Nathaniel Jones
He asked me, Chuck, you know, the family is really torn up about this, and I know that you're working evening shifts, so if there's anything that you can do to accelerate or try to get a beat on who did this to Mr. Jones, you know, the family would greatly appreciate it.
Crime Junkie
MURDERED: Nathaniel Jones
He was a community grandfather, I guess you could say. The store that he ran, it sat right at the intersection of two major roadways, and there was always activity in and around it.
Crime Junkie
MURDERED: Nathaniel Jones
He was the grandfather of an up-and-coming athlete, basketball player by the name of Chris Paul.
Embedded
Alternate Realities: Down the Rabbit Hole
We had an interesting conversation. He did share with me his prophecies.
Embedded
Alternate Realities: Down the Rabbit Hole
Your father had frosted hair when I first met him. He was a fun guy and pretty liberal and smoked pot more than I did. And he lived with this drag queen. And so, you know, there was a wild kind of party atmosphere around him.
Embedded
Alternate Realities: Down the Rabbit Hole
I always take your dad in small doses. Maybe part of the reason I don't reach out as much is because I am afraid. that we get to a point where it would be like drawing a line in the sand and I wouldn't be able to cross it. You know, deep down in my heart, I would love to understand it, and I don't.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
At this point, I'm more... Confused and curious, then scared. I'm 6'2", and I weigh, like, 240. I'm a big dude. Like, I'm not intimidated. But I'm trying to think, like, why somebody would be up there. I didn't even know you could go up there. So I decide, well, I'm going to go up there, too. I'm going to go figure this out on my own.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
So I throw my stuff in my bag and start making my way up this slick rock next to the bridal veil. Now it took me, it took me close to an hour to navigate through all this slick rock. This stuff is pretty serious. It's kind of tough to navigate. And I'm trying to catch my breath and then I hear from the bottom of the falls. This time it was definitely a voice.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
I heard it really clearly and it just said, hey. And so I turn and look and now she is at the bottom of the falls where I had just been. Now I'm trying to figure out how she would have gotten down there past me when I was coming up because I couldn't find any other trails. Something's not right here. And I was like, this person's following me.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
What my brain and body said was, get out of there, dude. Like, we don't need to be here. Like, let's get out of here. Already had my pack on. So I just kind of stepped off of the bridal veil. And I just kind of went crashing through the bushes until I finally found the trail that I'd come in on. So I scramble up those rope assists, crest back over the ridge. And so now I'm heading back down.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
I mean, I'm trucking pretty hard downhill back toward that split in the trail where I saw the foot initially. So I blow past that point and I'm running pretty much full speed down this hill. And I come back to that point where the big boulder is, that big house size rock. And of course now it's on my right side.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
And as I come around this blind corner around this rock, she's standing right there in the trail in front of me. And I almost ran smack into her. I took a tumble to avoid hitting her. Hit the ground pretty hard. It winded me pretty good. When I came to a stop, I had basically rolled kind of up against this rock.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
So I'm rolled up against, my back's against the rock, and I'm kind of sitting up, and she is standing over top of me, just looking at me. No expression on her face at all. And her eyes were, they were so white-blue that they were almost white, like the irises. They almost blended right into the whites of her eyes.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
The rest of her was really old looking, but her eyes were very, very youthful looking, just piercing. Scared me to death. We could stare at each other for a second. Felt like an eternity. Like time slowed down a little bit. I break contact, break eye contact with her and kind of roll, get my feet under me and I take off. And she just kind of watched me. She watched me get my feet under me and go.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
Now I'm really running. I mean, I'm terrified at this point. The whole time I'm trying to tell myself like, this is all, like you're making this up. Like there's nothing weird going on here. Even though I'm in a dead sprint running from something. Finally get right about down closer to base camp and slowed down, checked behind me, stopped, didn't hear anything. I figured I was not being followed.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
And so I just continued my walk. I got to a point in the trail where there's this down tree and I cross over this log, come around a corner and there's a bobcat sitting in the middle of the trail. Ears were not moving, eyes were not moving, not a whisk or flinched. And that's very out of character for that animal.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
I mean, I've been in the woods for a long time, over 15 years, and I've only ever seen one actual wild bobcat. You're lucky to ever see one, much less one sitting just in the trail looking at you. So I stop, and I'm staring at this cat, and I notice the eyes. They weren't like cat eyes. The pupils, they weren't slitted. Wasn't the same shape. I mean, they were shaped like human eyes.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
The pupils were, I mean, almost dead white, like very, very light blue, almost dead white. So I knew right away as soon as I saw that cat's eyes. I was like, oh, that's her right there. And I was terrified. I was looking this thing dead in its eyes. And it's kind of looking at me. And I knew, I felt it like deep down in my being that she could do whatever she wanted to to me. I was at her mercy.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
So I started talking to her. I was like, look, I was like, you got a beautiful mountain here. I was like, well, I will never go back to your waterfall. Just like, just please let me go. Like, just let me go. I didn't even speak that out loud. That was just something I thought. And no sooner had I thought that this, this bobcat turned, walked off the trail. Let me go.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
After that, it did take some time to process it. But really, that's when it all kind of clicked for me right there. It sunk in for me. And I was like, whoa, whoa, hold on a second. It's just like, it's like, yeah, that was really, really weird. Like, I think I ran into a witch. I don't know. That's kind of just it was very organic in the way that it just like my brain automatically was like, yep.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
So, I mean, an experience like that, it humbles you a lot, especially in the position that I was in. I mean, you're a big, bad guy. Like, I've squared up with – I've punched a bear in the jaw.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
Like, I'm not intimidated by a lot of things, but sure enough, yeah, it humbled me a lot because that was probably one of the few times in my life where I felt, like, truly helpless when I was laying up against that wall looking at this – what seemed to be like an 80-year-old woman. This was an old witch, and I think she's been there for a long time. Longer than 80 years, I would think.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
I think she's much older than that. And I think that's just, that's where she lives. That's her stomping ground. And it's way out of the way for a reason. So, I mean, when I go out in the woods, like I'm picking up trash, I'm taking care of the woods. And I think she saw that.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
I think she was just kind of like letting me know that she was there, like she was making her presence known more than anything else. And yeah, really, that's what I got from it for the most part. Because like I said, I mean, she could have done whatever she wanted to while I was laid up against that rock wall. It sounds crazy, but I think she stopped me on that trail to judge my character.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
She decided for whatever reason not to harm me and just to see if I was worthy enough to be in her woods. And I think she determined that I must have been.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
My name is Chuck. I've been hanging out in the woods since I was really young. Kind of been out there ever since. Between backpacking tours and wilderness therapy, ended up making it what I do for a living at this point. So this happened in 2015, it was summertime. And the camp that we were working out of, our main base camp, from what I understand, it was an old Christian summer camp.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
I'm not sure the details, but it was pretty old camp. A lot of the cabins that we used had been kind of redone a little bit. And then of course we had the horse stables And we had, I want to say like probably 15 or 16 of them, older horses, a lot of them. And the horses were actually essentially in therapy as well. The kids would work with them for part of their therapy.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
And then the horses were also being rehabilitated from abusive homes at the same time. At night, you would hear, down by the stables, the donkey. His name was Stanley. It was a mini donkey. And he would start going off at night down there. I don't know if anybody out there has ever heard a donkey freaking out, but it can be kind of weird, a little bit scary.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
But he would do that pretty consistently. And then usually the next day when we would go down to do horses, first thing we do is groom them. And when you go to groom them, their manes and tails would be just completely in knots. Even if we had brushed them the day before, the horses would be in poor shape.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
So at the time, I really didn't think a lot of it, but I would have kids going to be like, look at this. Like, I didn't do this. I'd be like, okay, like, what's your point? They'd be like, we were the last group here. Like, I didn't do this. And I'm like, well, maybe Miss Ann did it. You know, like, it's not part of my pay grade right now to worry about the horses' names.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
I don't know a whole ton about horses, but I do remember... Growing up, my great-grandma would talk about that happening and she said it meant there was a witch on your farm. I guess it was because she would go out and every single day the manes and the tails on the livestock were tangled up. It was like somebody had gone out and just went haywire on these animals.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
And they'd be skittish and they would be jumpy and they just were not in a good mood at all. That was one of the few things she ever talked about was she said, I swear there's a witch out here. And she would, I mean, she'd say it all the time. From the first time it happened down by the horse stables, I mean, I definitely thought of that. I remembered her saying that immediately. That damn witch.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
But I was like, well, you know, if it happens a couple of times, whatever. It's not a big deal. You know, like, well, it's coyotes or something like that. But with how consistently it happened there, I did start to wonder a little bit about that. I'd heard about Dismal Falls. I'd read about it. I read about it initially on a photography website.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
And I saw pictures of it, and I was like, man, that's a beautiful waterfall. I want to get out there and go see this. And I got linked over to a book called Land of Waterfalls. And this is by a guy named Jim Bob Tensley. He wrote it in 88. And he wrote it about Transylvania County mainly. Which is the land of waterfalls, as they call it. There's tons of waterfalls out there, charted, uncharted.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
There's some that don't even have names. And he describes it as one of the most foreboding places in the southern Appalachians. I was mainly reading to get directions. I just want to know how to get out there. Decided I was going to go check it out the next day. And so I drove up and I parked there at the base camp and started my hike up there.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
It's almost like a tunnel made out of rhododendron and mountain laurels that are so low to the ground that they're almost over your head. Very thick to get through. You're kind of on hands and knees. And that goes on for some time. Then you pop out of that. It opens up a little bit for you. And you're still going up a really steep grade. Pretty blind. You can't see a whole lot.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
And you come around this corner and on your left side, there's this really large boulder. I mean, it's got to be the size of a house. It's a big boulder. So I took note of that and kept on moving. And not too long after that, you come to this point where the trail splits into two. At that point, I stopped and got my map out. I was not sure which way to go 100%.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
The lower route that stayed pretty flat, according to the map, would go to the dismal wall. But the other trail that goes, I mean, from where I was at, it looked like it went straight uphill. That's the one that goes to the waterfall. I mean, it is really steep. So I start the climb up that way. I get probably about halfway up it and just felt like I was being watched.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
I got that, just that pit of your stomach feeling and hair on the back of my neck kind of stood up. And weirdly enough, my nose actually started bleeding right then too. I kind of turned around to where this kind of sense was coming from. And all I could see was just this foot and part of a robe disappear into the rhododendron thicket. Just caught a glimpse of it.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
At the time, I mean, we had been out the night before. I was dehydrated a little bit, kind of tired, and a little bit hungover. And so I was like, I'm definitely seeing things. Like, I should take a break. And I'm thinking, I'm like, well, how is that possible? Because I didn't hear anything. And with how thick the leaf litter is there, you can hear anything. It was quiet.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
It's very quiet out there. So I'm thinking about all this and it's just, it's getting me flustered. So I'm just like, all right, I'm going to keep going. Kept on moving and eventually I got to the top of this hill that I've been climbing, and I crested over the top of it, and there's a tree there.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
The tree has got a rope coming down from it that goes to another tree, and that tree has a rope, and then from there, it kind of puts you down in the rhododendron by the banks of Dismal Falls. It's just a big, long bridal veil. Really, really pretty waterfall.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
it drops 40 feet with a nice cascade and then it hits it hits down and it just runs down this I mean it's got to be a couple hundred feet of just slick rock so I hike in go sit at the bottom of the falls I sat down to just chill out have some water look at the falls Water was nice and cool, so I'm enjoying that. I was chewing on some mint. I'm feeling good. I'm feeling really good.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
I'm not even stressing on the foot. Not too long after I got there and kind of had settled in, I get that feeling again, like I was being watched. And kind of as I have this feeling I hear what sounded like a voice. So I turn and look and up at the very top of the cascade, there's a woman standing on top of the waterfall. I could see her plain as day.
Otherworld
"Dismal Falls" from Spooked
She had kind of curly gray hair down to her shoulders. I would say she was in her 80s and was wearing a cloak, a black one or at least a dark colored one. It seemed to be in spectacular condition for somebody who runs around the woods in it. And that's about all I could make out from where I was. But no sooner had I looked at her, she turns and walks off into the rhododendron bushes.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
But then when you scale up to 100 to 1,000 to 10,000, it becomes less manageable. And you're... infrastructure cost also is scaling up fairly proportionally.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
So the issue that I've seen is when a microservice stops becoming a microservice and it becomes a monolith service. to where you have now these 20 different or 40 different microservices that just have grown and grown and grown.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
And now you have 40 separate full-fledged Ruby on Rails applications that are so highly coupled and dependent on each other that would it have been better to just have built it into one beautiful, majestic monolith?
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
I think that's where Netflix is at. I don't know how many they have, but I've seen their data map of their microservices and communications. It looks like a whole globe of just jumbled spaghetti mess.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
The infrastructure scaling pricing that I was referring to is more on the database side. Because on a small tier database, that's really all the application needs. But because you have scaled it up to 50 or 100 microservices, you're not going to be able to connect to that same database instance.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
with the lower tier plan because of the number of max connections that's available on those various plans. You would have to either spin up multiple database servers, in which case you incur scaling costs there, or have one really large database server where you have multiple databases within there. And then you still incur a higher cost just for that max number of connections.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
Now, AWS may have something different now where you can allow more connections, but each microservice would need at least its one own dedicated connection to the database instance.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
Yeah, and the whole container idea instead of the virtual machines, I really do like. And I think that especially, even if you stick with a monolith version of your application to do auto scaling, you can more instantaneously respond to the demand coming in, opposed to provisioning a whole new virtual machine. So I'm really with you on there with using Docker containers and stuff like that.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
Because I think that's... the proper way to do auto-scaling because you get instant reaction to your users instead of having to wait. Okay, we're at a 50% CPU usage load across all our VMs. We need to hurry up and add more servers, all automatically, of course. But then 15 minutes later, the server's provisioned and now it's ready. Well, that traffic's all said and done now.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
Until you get half the developers using ARM, the other half using x86 platforms.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
Yeah. I couldn't have said it better myself. I have an 8-core Mac Pro, 192 gigs of RAM. Thing is a monster. Then I have a 13-inch MacBook Pro M1 with 16 gigs of RAM, whatever it comes with. I can't tell a difference in performance. On my day-to-day tasks, I really cannot tell. The difference there is a huge price tag difference. It's insane.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
So the M1, the whole arm movement that Apple is doing, I think is amazing. And if they can keep it cost effective, then it's going to really make a huge difference in how we approach things.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
So I basically have a general rule of thumb when it comes to microservices. If this feature, so let's give a real world example. Let's say if I'm in the business of PDFs and whether I'm a government or whomever, and I want to have the ability to take in a PDF and then have it automatically do the form fill out based on the parameters that are coming in.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
So this is a very useful feature for one of the applications I'm developing. Within our same organization, this feature is also very useful for five other applications that we're developing. So because this feature can provide a lot of usefulness to these five different applications. And we can come to some kind of compromise or agreement on its API of how it should look.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
It should be taking a form post with a list of parameters. It should have an ID of a PDF that is stored on the database or wherever it's stored. Then we can have one code base that serves five applications. So I think that's a good use case of a microservice. It does one thing. It does it really well. And it is highly reusable, not only in my application, but in multiple other applications.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
Yeah. So I have a little story that I'll try to make tangible to this. So I've had a number of dogs growing up and one of the dogs, you know, was a Border Collie. So the nature of the Border Collie is a herding animal.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
And if we had installed an invisible fence around our yard, it really would have confused the dog because that dog is meant to be more free and it would have hurt its nature, essentially. So we got a chain link fence, which was a physical, visible boundary around the yard. And I had another dog who was not a herding dog. They're more of a guard dog.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
So that dog wanted to be around me all the time. It was a Rottweiler Doberman mix, which I named her Kitty. But that's a different story. And I could let that dog... out of the yard, you know, into a open backyard and run free. And we never had to worry about her because she always quickly came right back to us because she wanted to be right there next to us.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
She wasn't interested in hunting or herding. So the idea of, in translating this back over to what we're talking about with microservices versus monoliths, I think that the monolith is more like that big open backyard without any boundaries.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
And if you're not careful, it's not a matter of if, but just a matter of when are you going to have an accident or a mistake on your hands because you have now gotten too much cross-contamination within your application. You weren't careful with the boundaries and And you broke a lot of single responsibility principles.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
And now things are too tightly coupled and intertwined in together and you have a mess. Whereas the fenced-in backyard is more like the microservices where you are forced to stay within this confined area. Which means you are forced to... think about and write the single responsibility principles because you don't have access to the outside world beyond your gated fence.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
And I think that if we are talking about a single application, that its code base is never reused anywhere else. So I think that we can train ourselves as developers to have more responsibility in how we are writing our code to not introduce a lot of this cross-contamination of logic, which really should be separated out.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
And by doing that, like Chuck said, with the lib or app services or interactors, whatever kind of naming you want to call it, but these plain old Ruby objects where you're encapsulating and building these virtual fences around that bit of logic, then you're able to create the idea of the microservices without breaking up the majestic monolith.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
I mean, let's face it. If you have a really pro team that follows wonderful practices, they're very consistent. And there's no hidden surprises. And if you create a monolith, then it's going to be very maintainable. It's going to be well-tested. And you're not going to have any problems. Take that and compare it to a team that is not very well-versed. They...
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
are not consistent and they're creating microservices, now you have an application which consists of 100 microservices and each one is its own nightmare. And it can go either way. You can have a team that's great with microservices, they're great with practices, and everything is consistent and isolated in these microservices, and this could be a great application.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
But then you have a team that's not as well-versed, and they are just creating an insane monolith that is just unmaintainable. So it's a healthy balance of choosing the right tool for the job and making sure that you have the team and budget to match as well as the infrastructure budget to host, because as we said, there could be differences in which direction you go.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
So overall, I think that because I work primarily on Ruby on Rails applications,
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
microservices doesn't really have a fit in my world because i think the convention over configuration that rails has provided me plus the practices that i have developed over the past 10 12 years has really negated the need for microservices in my world but that could be a different story for someone else where microservices is the answer for them yeah i also just want to uh
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
Yeah, sure. So my first pick is a Pack Tool Gecko Gauge. If you've ever had to work with hardy board, which is the cement fiber boards that you put on the side of houses, then this tool is amazing. It allows you to just clamp on to the previous fiber board that you installed and then set the new one just right on top. It'll be completely leveled to the other one.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
It is a life-saving tool for working with hardy board. And the whole reason why I picked this up is because I'm building a shed underneath our deck. And I'm now getting around to the part where I'm doing the siding to make it look like the rest of the house. I was not going to be able to do this job without that tool. So it's amazing. And on the date of recording this podcast, today is April 1st.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
I launched a new tutorial site. So I've been doing Drift and Ruby for many, many years, over 280 episodes I've recorded on Ruby and Ruby on Rails. And so today I've launched a new training site and that is Drifting Cobalt. So you can go to driftingcobalt.com and you'll see that it's a completely satire site for April 1st. But...
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
Hey, if it picks up one subscriber, that's like 10% of the entire Cobalt user base. So I'd say that's when.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
Nice. It's not a real punch card. The real punch cards were more like the... This is... This looks like a copybook description.
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
And so just because I can, I want to push back just a little bit and just to get some more clarification. So when we deploy a now isolated bit of code as a microservice,
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
infrastructure speaking what is that going to look like as far as the database level is concerned are we going to spin up an additional database so now we have a whole new database server with a new database on there or would we just create a new database within a server and
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
So if we're running Postgres, we have one instance of Postgres or a cluster, and then we have a new database for this microservice, and that microservice only communicates to the one database, or do they all share the same global database?
Ruby Rogues
Architectures and Microservices with Darren Broemmer - RUBY 657
Yeah, so kind of where I'm going with the whole database side of things, because I agree, if you do have a microservices environment, then you should have a separate database for each microservice. But the issue kind of comes into play is when you start off with just a few microservices, it's fine. It's easy to manage.
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
Yeah, I've never understood this whole thing of rewriting stuff that does the exact same thing, but in a new stack. I'm like, what's the point? It's just wasted effort. So yeah, if it works, just leave it, let it work.
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
Yeah, the simplicity side of things is huge for me. And I also have an allergy for dependencies. I hate pulling dependencies. I will need to have a really, really good reason before I add something to my gem file. it would be like, literally, I do not want to solve this problem by myself. And that's when I'll pull in a gym.
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
Because I think most of the time, you could just spend two or three hours and build something yourself that specifically solves your problem. And it'll save you so much time in the long run, because you don't have an external dependency that you don't control.
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
Yeah, just pulling on this dependency thread a little bit more, like going back to your authentication example, I do my own auth. I don't like devices. I don't like pulling in anything for that, but the way I see it,
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
Once I've built it once, I can then, I know this is blasphemous to some people, but just copy paste the code into other apps and then tweak it as necessary because sometimes you need to just tweak things a little bit for the use case at hand is, And once you have something working, if you've written it well, that code should be reusable, I think.
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
And that's something I kind of think about a lot is that trying to maximize the reusability of code. That's not necessarily... in a way that it can be extracted to a library because it's different when you've got code living in your app and when you're kind of extracting something because when you put it in the gem, it's more of a black box. But yeah, copy paste code.
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
Once you've solved the problem of authentication on your own, you know everything about how that code works and you can just copy it into other projects. I don't know what you think about that kind of approach.
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
Feels like it maybe should. There's going to be something in Rails 8, some kind of generator, I think, that gives you a skeleton of authentication. And I think I remember seeing a tweet from DHH a couple of years ago that they might do something similar to has secure password, but for one-time pass keys. There's an authenticator app. What's it called? TOTP, I think, the time-based ones. Yeah.
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
I think there's some, I saw some chatter about like a has secure password flavor of that kind of thing. I don't think anything's actually gone in, but yeah, it'd be good to have for sure.
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
Yeah, most apps are crud apps. I think it's just something people don't like saying. My client at the moment is actually is a startup and we're completely rails. So there is at least one startup. And I had briefly spoken to another startup a couple of months ago about working with them and they were going to be completely Rails as well.
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
The way I see it, if there's something that you can't really do in Ruby or in Rails, it's usually something with quite a small footprint and you can just extract that into its own service and build it using something else. Like the PDF thing you said, you can't do that in Ruby. Build that one tiny thing using something else and then just call it.
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
Yeah, I think boot camps have just kind of generally moved away from teaching web fundamentals. It'd be good just to have them go back to teaching literally the basics of web development, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and obviously I'm biased, but Ruby and Rails. Because last year I helped out with the Rails World website because the Rails Foundation wanted a junior developer to build it.
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
And they wanted someone to mentor the juniors. I helped out with the mentoring. And she was a boot camp graduate. She graduated from LeWagon quite recently. And they had a little bit of Rails and quite a lot of React in the curriculum, if I remember correctly. And I remember showing her what you could do with just a custom element in JavaScript. And it was like, whoa, this is so easy.
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
And it's like, yeah, I just wish boot camps would teach that kind of stuff a bit more. Yeah.
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
Yeah, it's also adding a little bit of just short-term versus long-term. Like, yeah, learning React will get you a job in the short-term, but then when React goes out of vogue, you won't have that foundation of basics to kind of fall back on and then learn something else. But that's a different discussion, I think.
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
Yeah, I'm a customer and I just love it because I'm completely technical. This bookkeeping accounting stuff is just so alien to me and I can just click around and learn stuff from free agents. So it's been a boon for me as a freelancer to have that. So what was the motivation behind going to the cloud? Because obviously with 37signals, all the rage is going the other way.
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
then it would that's it it's kind of like it's almost game over at that point i think but yep i'm a big fan of render.com they're a bit expensive but uh in terms of like ease of deployment i just uh i find it to be heroku but for 2024 right yeah seems to be pretty popular
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
Yeah, easy one this week. Haggis Ruby, new conference in Edinburgh on the 24th of October. Both Oli and I are speaking, so come for his talk, stay for mine. what else is there anything else I'm about to re-watch the big short with my friend this evening so non-tech big short if you haven't seen it go watch it yeah I think don't think about anything else today awesome Valentino what are your picks
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
Now that's very, very thorough. And so yeah, you left in 2022, and then did you go immediately to 37signals after that?
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
The reason I asked about the timing was because I was curious about, did you just help free agent get onto the cloud, then switch jobs and help another company get off the cloud?
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
Fair enough. So I'm not saying this just to blow smoke up your ass, but FreeAgent has one of the best web UIs of modern software as a service app that I've used. And I was chatting with some of the FreeAgent guys at Brighton Ruby a couple of months ago, and I said this to them as well. I'm curious from your point of view as a leader, because you grew the company through the 2010s.
Ruby Rogues
Cloud Migration, Server Costs, and CDN Challenges - RUBY 650
How did you avoid this whole hype cycle of React and stuff? Because the way I see it, most web UIs are shit because people use React and shoved it where it has no business being. It's a great tool for the right job. But obviously, I'll avoid the rant right now. But how did you avoid the hype cycle? Just keep things simple. And as such, it's got a very snappy UI.
Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
Sounds like it was a people problem because they snoozed the alert.
Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
Yeah, I think we've all been there before where we get an alert from whatever monitoring that we're doing and the error looks serious, but you kind of read it and like, oh, you know what, this is probably just a one-off situation. And then turns out it is actually a big deal that needs to be addressed as soon as possible. So I know I've been there before and
Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
And, you know, the hard times to really track this, I use Sentry for my error tracking. And so I get email text notifications with that. And one of the nice things about it is that it'll show the number of occurrences, whether they are unique or not. So I can see if, okay, this particular error is only coming from one user.
Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
Or I could see we're getting 100 errors that's coming from 100 different users. So there's a more widespread problem. So I think definitely getting the notifications, but then having proper analytics on your errors so you can actually see the scope of how big this is can really kind of weigh in on the importance.
Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
I think it all depends on what you're doing. So if you have a heavy JavaScript front end kind of deal, and if you also have a lot of Ruby backend code, I know Sentry can handle both of those situations. Other people will go with another solution. So I personally found Sentry to be my flavor of choice, but mileage will vary based on what other people have.
Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
And if you're going to use Slack for your error notification, I'm not dissing that at all. I have a few applications that actually do that. It just triggers a Slack notification. But if you're only capturing the error message and not a stack trace along with it, then that error message is pretty much useless.
Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
Because it tells you you have a problem somewhere in your millions of lines of code, but we're not going to tell you where it's at.
Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
There's a little off topic, but you know what issue I found with that is I use my cell phone for everything. It's where I have my email, get my text messages, phone calls, and all that stuff. And so I would like to keep it on full volume late at night when I'm sleeping. So if a critical does arrive, then I can get notified.
Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
But my issue is that I would never get any sleep because my phone would just go off. So I need to figure out some way that I can set up for a particular phone number or something to override any kind of sleep mode or whatever that I have on my phone right now or get a different phone for that purpose. That seems a bit overkill.
Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
All right. I need to quit being lazy then and just do that.
Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
Well, that's no fun.
Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
Yeah, that should work well for my use case because no one ever calls me.
Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
Now, I have the Verizon call filter, which actually works pretty well. It's reduced the 15, 20 phone calls I would get a day down to like one.
Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
Yeah, I got burned by that pretty bad one time. My wife was over at the pool. She had forgotten her phone or she had lost it. And so she borrowed someone's phone there. And because that random person wasn't in my contacts, I never got her phone call. My phone just stayed silent. So I had to disable that pretty quick. That'll teach you.
Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
Yeah, sure. So went to the doctor the other week and they said I had high blood pressure, which I attribute to raising kids and them stressing me out. So I got this blood pressure monitor that syncs up with my iPhone. So it keeps a historical track of it. And it's been really nice. And I guess it's accurate. I don't know. It says it's high. So I guess it's doing something.
Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
So it is the Withings and it's a wireless rechargeable blood pressure monitor.
Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
No, it's just like the doctor's one where they put it, roll up your sleeve, put it on your arm and, you know, it starts to squeeze your arm. It's not like a wristwatch or anything. So I do it a couple of times a day. That'll raise your blood pressure.
Ruby Rogues
The Sounds of Silence: Lessons From an API Outage with Paul Zaich - RUBY 652
And so was this something that could have been caught by automated tests?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Trovants
Do you look up some of the pictures of them? Yeah, they're awesome. They're pretty smooth looking. They're lumpy. Yeah. It looks, you know, look up a picture of these things, you know, not if you're driving, obviously, but so you can get it in your mind's eye. They can be they can be little.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Trovants
They can be smaller than an inch and just weigh a few grams or they can be very, very large, like boulder-esque, like 15 feet high, several tons in weight. And people since the 18th century have been like, what are these things? They look like dinosaur eggs or alien pods. What's happening here?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Trovants
That's right. When they started getting serious and we're like, guys, can we move past alien pods and dinosaur eggs and really try and figure this out?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Trovants
Well, probably so, because that's where all that stuff takes place. But when they finally got serious, they were like, you know what's going on here? This is a concretion.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Trovants
And a concretion is something that starts out as a little pebble or something or a leaf maybe, and then starts getting depositions, maybe sandstone, other kinds of grit and minerals washed along a river, just building up and sort of cementing, almost like a snowball rolling downhill. That is a concretion.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Trovants
And they all got busy. So they, in Oslo, they hypothesize that the minerals were carried by a prehistoric river along these little sandy sediments and formed kind of a slurry solution, like you said, of mainly calcium carbonate. Along with calcium carbonate, you can also get sandstone from iron oxide and quartz. But in this case, the sandstone is calcium carbonate.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Trovants
So another little oddity here we have to talk about is the fact that these things secrete cement. And this is sort of what lends people to think like these things are alive. It's after a big rain. They will absorb the minerals from that rain. And then those minerals come in contact with the chemicals that are already in that stone, that calcium carbonate and the other stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Trovants
And there's a pressurized reaction that makes the rock grow. It grows in girth. And that sandstone is very porous. And so it's those places in between. It's not happening like the whole thing's not growing at once. It'll be like a little pocket where this stuff, you know, gets lodged and expands. And then it literally grows off little pieces and they can fall off.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Trovants
And that's when people are like, look, it had a little rock baby.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Trovants
Yeah, I think the deposition rate is about an inch and a half, maybe a couple of inches every year? No. Every hundred years? No. Every 500 years?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Trovants
Yeah, so an inch and a half to two inches every 1,000 years. That has not stopped certain patient people from sitting there and looking at them for a long time though, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Trovants
I bet it's Trovante. I don't know why I didn't look it up, but I'm going to go with that.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Trovants
Yeah, I feel like we talked about those in a video. It sounded familiar. Maybe I just had heard of them.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Trovants
Amazing. Another pretty cool thing that they found out in Oslo, where else, is they were like, hey, how do we explain the fact that we have found these fossils in here, these marine fossils? There's bivalves in here. There's gastropod fossils sometimes. And they said, well, the best we can come up with – and this makes total sense –
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Trovants
is that the area where they're found used to be an ancient marine environment because they're finding those fossils in there. And also that calcium carbonate, and we've kind of been holding on to this until the end, that is the essential ingredient in marine shells. So it seems pretty clear it was probably a marine environment in ancient times.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Trovants
Yeah. And most of them are found in not even just Romania, but this one sand quarry, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Trovants
That's right. So shout out to the Otisani village. And the other one is the Kostesti village.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Trovants
No, we should just let people know they're protected. Like so you can't go and break them and run off with them. UNESCO is protecting these things now. Do not do that.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
Yeah, and the Boddingtons, Murphys, Beamish, Tetleys, what else, Wexford, Bellhaven, and I'm sure we've missed some, but they all use the widget technology to deliver that pub-drawn flavor to your lips right there at home.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
You got anything else? I got nothing else. I'm sure we got some stuff wrong. There's some beer aficionados that are like, not quite right, guys. Whatever. I think you should say the thing. Okay. Short Stuff is out.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
That's right. They make it really easy to sell access to content on your websites like online courses, blogs, videos, and memberships. You can earn recurring revenue by gating your content behind a paywall even. Simply set the price and choose whether to charge a one-time fee or subscription for access.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
OK. Anyway, get widgets. Everybody thinks it's basically a spinoff of the word gadget, which is probably true. We don't know the true etymology, but I believe it was in a play in 1924 where they specifically in the play talked about, like, we're in the widget business. And that may be, like, the first time that anyone had ever used it like that. But then Guinness came along and said –
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
well, you know what, everyone talks about widgets as just a thing you make, a nameless thing you make at any company. We're going to make a real thing, and we're really going to call it a widget and get it patented as such.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
That's right. I think we should prep people that this simple, simple little short stuff was a cause of a lot of emails and consternation between us today, right? Is it simple?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
I doubt it because it's not full of air. Okay. And it's heavier. I was just making a joke.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
I bet they've done that in Ireland. And by the way, Guinness calls these officially within the Guinness company. They call it a smoothifier.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
Well, let's talk a little bit about a guy named Michael Ash. In 1951, Michael Ash joined the Guinness Company. He was a mathematician. He was a master brewer. He was a big believer in science. And he was like, hey, there's all these beers that are made with carbon dioxide, and it's that CO2 that dissolves in the beer. that makes it fizzy when you open it up.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
When the can is closed, the pressure inside is much higher than the pressure outside. So when you open that thing up, there's a pressure drop, and the agitation of pouring it makes that CO2 come bubbling out, and that's where you get your foamy head on a beer.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
He was like, this cask Guinness is smooth and creamy, and CO2 just doesn't do it if we're going to try and put this stuff in pubs and eventually in cans. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
That's right. And you know what? I think that's a good little cliffhanger.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
So let's take a break and we'll talk about the magic inside the Guinness can and glass right after this.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
That's right. Just go to squarespace.com slash stuff for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code stuff to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
All right. So where we left off, Michael Ash had discovered that nitrogen, along with – it doesn't replace the CO2. It's a mixture of the carbon dioxide and nitrogen. Right. But nitrogen isn't absorbed into the beer like carbon dioxide is. So it has the same pressure of just a regular beer, but it has a lot less – CO2.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
And so it's not as fizzy, which is not what you want out of a Guinness anyway, because that nitrogen is making up a great deal of that pressure inside the can.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
That's right. So the next step was like, how do I make this happen in a can? It seemed like an impossibility until a guy named John Lunn, L-U-N-N, a master distiller, created the widget. The patent, I believe Guinness eventually filed for the patent in 69. for an improved method of and means of dispensing carbonated liquids from containers.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
It began as Project Dynamite, but apparently that was problematic for customs because it said Project Dynamite on all the paperwork and stuff. Are you serious? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So they changed it to Project Oak Tree.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
Right. They changed it to Project Nuclear Waste. No, Project Oak Tree I think was a reference to the original Project Acorn from Guinness. So – They wanted to get these cans right. You can get Guinness in a bottle, but it's not the same beer at all. It's a completely different beer.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
Oh, Josh. I'm taking you to England next week.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
Well, maybe you just don't understand the concept of Guinness. I mean, Guinness is supposed to go down like a milk and not a fizzy carbonated beverage. They call it the surge and settle. It pours in and you just see it gently falling to the bottom and you get this milky foam at the top.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
Yeah. And like that's why I could always drink a lot of Guinness because it didn't it didn't fill you up and make you super gassy and burpy.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
Yeah. Oh, man. Go out and get a four-pack and crack the can open and then just dump it in the glass as hard as you can. Just turn it upside down.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
And it won't overflow or anything. It will get to the top and just stop and then start settling.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
Yeah, I saw the Nitro Surge. I don't think they sell them here yet. But it's like a – I think it's like a mechanical device. Like does it have a battery in it even? I'm not fully sure. I stopped looking into it when I realized how much further it was taking me away from the widget. You know what I mean?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
Yeah, I mean, there was the word, first of all, we need to thank our old buddy Brian Didsbury. Oh, right. The boom operator on the Stuff You Should Know TV show. So great. Who comes to our live shows, still a friend. He texts me all the time trying to get me to play Red Dead Redemption with him online. He texts me Simpsons quotes. Does he really? Mm-hmm. Oh, did he text you about this too?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
All right. Let's get back to the widget. Okay. So the widget is a little plastic ball. And I think this is where we got hung up earlier. I don't know if you saw my most recent email. I think it's a matter of semantics because I kept saying that the – and Guinness on their website says it's a nitrogen-filled sphere. And you're like, it's not filled with nitrogen.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
I think it's just semantics because they don't literally fill this ball with nitrogen and then drop it in the can. Okay.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
It is – because it has a hole in it. You drop it in there and then fill the can with nitrogen, and then that ball fills up with nitrogen and beer.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
And it stays in this tiny, it's basically a little mini turbo jet. So when you crack that beer, it's a little mini ball with higher pressure than the rest, than even what's inside the rest of the can.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
And so when you crack that beer and all that pressure changes, just like a regular beer, it comes shooting out of that little tiny hole in the plastic ball and provides this little extra boost of nitrogen, like a little beer jet, agitating everything to create even more bubbles.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
I think it was the semantical thing when people say it's filled with nitrogen. It is. But as a virtue of the canning process.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
They don't like fill it up and go like, quick, throw it in there.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
Yeah, it's really ingenious, though. I mean, it's got this tiny little hole. And imagine a little ball filled with like nitrogen infused beer being jetted out of this tiny little hole as you're pouring as you open and pouring this beer. It's so simple.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
It's ingenious and so ingenious that in 2004, they did a survey of almost 9000 people and they voted that the Guinness widget was a greater invention than the Internet.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
I mean, it's something to put on your website.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
Let me ask you this. Have you ever had any like cream stouts? Yeah. Like Boddington's or Murphy's or any of those?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
I think that's, to my mind, it's a misnomer because stout sounds heavy because it's a big dark beer. But it's because it's not heavily carbonated like a lager. Like it doesn't fill you up like that. It doesn't make you gassy and burpy. It's like drinking a big thick milk, which may make you feel full, but it's not from like gassy full.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
I haven't. I mean, I don't drink a lot of beer anymore, period. And I went through a big Guinness phase in the 90s, starting in college and through New Jersey. And in fact, that brings me to another little factoid here. The Guinness uses a floating widget since 1997. And I was like, oh, that explains it. Because in the 90s, we cut open the can because we were like, what is that in there?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
OK. Yeah. He texted me a couple of days ago and he's like, hey, man, how about one on the Guinness widget? I was like, done, buddy. It's a good idea for sure. It is. And thanks to Guinness dot com. How stuff works. Conservable, conversable economist, petroleum service company. Where else? YouTube.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Guinness Widget
And it was fixed to the bottom of the can. So it was pre-97. And during COVID with supply issues, they fixed it to the bottom of the can then as well. But otherwise, it's been a floating widget.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Genetic Mutations
All right. Well, let's get into this. Let's talk about DNA or deoxyribonucleic acid, as we all like to call it. Such a great word. Around the campfire. That's a molecule that's going to carry genetic material, almost a mutation, when you're developing as a future human.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Genetic Mutations
And structurally, I think we've all seen the – if you've seen Jurassic Park, you've seen what these double – this double helix looks like. It's a long – molecule comprised of nucleotides. And there's two strands to that coil that form the double helix that kind of wind around each other. And that's what the DNA, the full DNA, what would you call it? Just molecule looks like?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Genetic Mutations
Yeah. And, you know, like you mentioned, as these cells divide and the DNA is making copies of itself, there might be errors here and there. And that's where those mutations come from. And if they're in the egg and sperm cells, those are going to be passed on to the next generation. So that's a genetic mutation that's going to carry on and cause disease or genetic disorders.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Genetic Mutations
You can also have what's called a somatic mutation, and that only affects you. It's not inherited by your future kids.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Genetic Mutations
Yeah, and our cells are constantly copying themselves, either replacing old cells or damaged cells. And when that happens, when they're doing that copy, that double-stranded DNA is going to split into the two parts, and each strand is copied on its own, and then they come back together. And when that happens, there can be errors.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Genetic Mutations
The good news is it's approximately one in every 100 million replications this happens. So that's a pretty good statistic to have in your hip pocket. The other good news is DNA knows what it's doing. So it generally knows when an error happens, and they try to and often can repair and correct that before any problems arise.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Genetic Mutations
Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Genetic Mutations
Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Genetic Mutations
Yeah. So that's sort of due to bad timing. Another thing that can happen as far as those errors go is it's called mispairing. And was this a HowStuffWorks article?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Genetic Mutations
Yeah, they did a pretty good job of putting this in terms we can understand. If you imagine those two DNA strands that work together or zip together like a zipper, sometimes that zipper doesn't align. Your penis gets stuck in it? Oh, my God. And that can happen when the DNA is getting zipped back up, and that can cause parts of it to be skipped over or maybe something added that shouldn't be.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Genetic Mutations
That's right, because we're going to talk about the X-Men.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Genetic Mutations
Did not either. Had never heard of jumping genes. I've heard of jumping beans and jumping jacks, but never jumping genes. Very nice. So that's the ways that can happen as far as like an error occurring in your body.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Genetic Mutations
On a cellular level. You mentioned external factors. One of the big ones, and I didn't know to this extent even, is radiation. And you might be thinking like, yeah, so you just don't get x-rayed when you're pregnant, like that solves everything, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Genetic Mutations
That's not necessarily the case because UV radiation can be a very big cause of mutations, specifically when it's called like a sunburn on your DNA. If you have too much UV radiation, they can form something called, how would you say that?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Genetic Mutations
No, it's dimers. And especially thymine dimers that can distort that DNA structure. And that's sort of like a sunburn... And that happens when a couple of DNA building blocks are stuck together. And that's oftentimes caused from, you know, sun exposure.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Genetic Mutations
The problems arise when they have to sit there and watch Jimmy Fallon. Oh, man.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Genetic Mutations
I'm going to hear it. There are also biological factors like a virus can cause that can get in the DNA. Yeah. And that can lead to mutations. And then there's some other environmental stuff as well, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Genetic Mutations
Yeah, it's super cool that our body can do this. Sometimes it's like it's called a direct fix. And these are these are just small little errors like they likened it to a road crack. And they also likened it to just a quick patch on that road. The cell just directly fixes it super quick like.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Genetic Mutations
And if a whole section of DNA gets damaged, they can go to another DNA strand and say, hey, I'm glad you're here because we're going to use you now to come fix this other strand.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Genetic Mutations
That's an offset thing in my house. Thank God I was here because I know we mentioned War of the Roses, the movie, how it holds up. That's one of the great lines from War of the Roses when they are separated, but Michael Douglas is still in the house and the Christmas tree catches fire and he runs downstairs and puts it out and screams, thank God I was here. And I say that a lot.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Genetic Mutations
And just whenever anything dumb happens that I saw for the family, I go, thank God I was here.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Erfurt Latrine Disaster
That's right. And like you said, we don't know exactly why. And frankly, it doesn't matter as far as this story goes. What matters is during this time, this is the high Middle Ages, there was a king of Germany, Heinrich VI. He would eventually become the Holy Roman Emperor.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Erfurt Latrine Disaster
He knew this was coming, so he was on a sort of campaign to lobby different rulers in various lands to say, hey, let's change the line of succession for the Holy Roman Emperor to where bloodline is the key instead of just being crowned by the Pope because I'm in that bloodline. And so he was trying to just get people on board with his plan as kind of the backdrop there. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Erfurt Latrine Disaster
I may just go to have a nap. You're doing so great. Thanks. So a hoftag is just like an assembly, like an informal assembly, not a formal meeting. And there were a lot of the local rulers. Some of them came because they were told to because of this dispute. Some were just like, hey, the king's going to be there. Maybe I can get some face time, which is exactly what he wanted.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Erfurt Latrine Disaster
And it was held very keenly. Sure. It works. Here's another word. I just can't find it. Again, morning recording. Importantly? Sure. It was held at Petersburg Citadel, which was a fortress there in Erfurt. Still there today. It was about 15 years old at that time. And even more key to this is the latrine layout. And maybe we'll take a little break and talk about that layout right after this.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Erfurt Latrine Disaster
Sort of. I mean, it's actually a terrible band name, but a band name.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Erfurt Latrine Disaster
Yeah, exactly. The toilet seats is sort of what you might imagine from a latrine. It was wooden. There was a hole cut in the center. They did have a masonry basin that would direct the stuff downward. And, you know, they would wipe their butts with hay or grass or moss or something like that. Moss would be nice. Moss would be okay, like a nice green moss.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Erfurt Latrine Disaster
Yeah. But suffice to say, these rooms were disgusting and smelly. The ammonia could get so bad, sometimes they would hang their clothes near there because they thought they may be right about this, that ammonia could kill mite.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Erfurt Latrine Disaster
Yeah, so hang your clothes up near there. And what would happen if you look at the outside of a castle, a lot of times these restrooms were projected outward from the wall itself a little bit. There was a hole in the bottom, and the waste just dropped out of that.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Erfurt Latrine Disaster
That's right, and we're going to issue a trigger warning on this one. You see there in the title the words latrine disaster, so I don't think we need to over-explain what's coming.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Erfurt Latrine Disaster
Yeah, and it would go maybe just be washed away to whatever water is nearby. If you were unlucky, you might have a moat full of that. You did mention tubes. Eventually, in places like France, they would actually have plumbing piping on the outside of the walls to make it just a little neater.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Erfurt Latrine Disaster
But then they found out, hey, people can climb up these pipes to gain access to the castle, so those aren't good.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Erfurt Latrine Disaster
Well, the waste is at least on the inside of the pipe.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Erfurt Latrine Disaster
Oh, I thought that I pictured it as like a pipe running down the outside of the castle that they would just climb up.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Erfurt Latrine Disaster
Oh, like Andy Dufresne in Shawshank Redemption.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Erfurt Latrine Disaster
That's right. All right. So none of that really matters because all that matters is that's how it worked in some places. But in this particular Petersburg citadel, it didn't work like that at all.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Erfurt Latrine Disaster
It worked like this is there was a latrine and you did your poopoo and your peepee and it just went right under the floor into a disgusting cesspool that would maybe be cleaned out once a year by some very unfortunate servants.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Erfurt Latrine Disaster
Yeah. I mean, they say that between 60 and 100 people died. So... I mean, what percentage of that was of the total people? Like was it hundreds and hundreds of people in there or did most of them die?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Erfurt Latrine Disaster
No, you're trying to get out of there. You're stepping on the nobleman next to you's head to get out of there.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Erfurt Latrine Disaster
Yeah, exactly. There was one source you found that said someone may have died from stench and that may have been like an ammonia death. If the ammonia level was higher than I think you found 5,000 parts per million, they could have suffered from a respiratory arrest and died.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Erfurt Latrine Disaster
But, my friend, what happened with the Hoftag? Did it kill all of our major players?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Erfurt Latrine Disaster
I mean, it's just dumb luck, basically. I think Heinrich and Conrad had stepped into an alcove that wasn't on that floor that collapsed. And I don't think anyone knew where Ludwig was at the time. At least it's not recorded in history. But we know Ludwig survived.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Erfurt Latrine Disaster
Richard I should have said, man, you almost died in a pool of poop.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Erfurt Latrine Disaster
What's remarkable to me is that if you go to the Petersburg Citadel website, they do not say anything about this amazing, amazing, though gross, amazing story.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Erfurt Latrine Disaster
Wow. Well, maybe one day we'll do a follow-up called the Latrine Disaster Hoax.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Erfurt Latrine Disaster
Good story. It was written by a seven-year-old German, apparently.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
That's right. It popped up in the 1950s in the snack bars of rural Quebec and started gaining in popularity, kind of spread out from there. As we'll learn, it eventually started popping up in fast food menus in the 1980s, like McDonald's and Burger King and stuff like that in Quebec. And then eventually... over the border into Ontario. And nowadays you can find it all over the world.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
Even though if you want, you know, if you want that OG, you got to get it somewhere in Quebec.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
But he did it anyway, served it in a paper bag. It became pretty popular and people started kind of customizing it, adding vinegar and ketchup and stuff. And then six years into that, he started to serve that on a plate because it was such a mess. And customers were like, hey, they're on the plate now. They're not in this bag staying warm. They're getting cold.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
So he said, oh, dump some brown gravy on that stuff and said, how you like that for warm? Yeah. But in French.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
Yeah, that's when poutine, complete poutine was 1963. But our next guy comes from in Drummondville, Jean-Paul Roy, and he said, no, I had a place, a drive-in restaurant called Leroy Jusep, and in 1964, which was clearly a year later, He said, I've been serving fries with this sauce though since 1958. I called it patat sauce. And he said, customers started adding cheese curds.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
I was selling those at the snack counter. And they started dumping those in there. So he started doing that and added it to the regular menu and named it fromage patat sauce. And kind of a fun little side note there, apparently he couldn't find a container for In his province, like that could even hold this stuff, it was so heavy.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
So he had to go to Toronto to source a vendor who could provide these sturdy containers.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
That's right. Big thanks to HowStuffWorks.com, the Canadian Encyclopedia, and Food & Wine Magazine. Yes, I love poutine. How about you? What's not to like? I don't. Of course I love poutine. I can't eat a lot of that kind of thing. Well, now, who can't? Because, you know, I'm trying to look, be healthier and look better. And poutine does not lend itself to that. You look both, by the way.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
Yeah, or maybe one of the other like 10 to 15 explanations of root words, like French words like pâté or how would you say that one? Poutine. Poutine, which is a potato ragout. So, you know, no one agrees on that, kind of like a lot of the stuff that we talk about with these origin stories of foods.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
A lot of people will lay claim and no one agrees on who the person is, although I'm sure there will be people write and say, no, it's definitely for sure one of these people or maybe even someone else.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
All right. So where we left off, poutine was spreading like brown gravy through the streets all over Canada. Different variations started to pop up, like Italian poutine with spaghetti sauce or sausage instead of like the gravy, veggie poutine. There are regional variations. Apparently Montreal style has smoked meat. I've had that. Have you?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
Yeah. But, you know, as far as traditionalists go, it's just the straight up curds and gravy.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
All right, I'll try that. By the 70s, poutine had spread to the United States, in New York and New Jersey. They called it disco fries and used shredded mozz instead of those cheese curds. Because, you know, one thing we mentioned, it was made where it was made because you get those cheese curds fresh.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
And they say like, hey man, if you're keeping these curds for a couple of days, they don't squeak anymore and it's not the same. So this disco fries thing is an abomination.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
Yeah, McDonald's followed suit afterward. They added it to the menu in 1990 and then in Quebec only and then expanded to the rest of Canada. And gotta shout out Harvey's. Canadian fast food joint Harvey's started doing so in 1992.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
And then something happened in the 2000s when sort of elevated comfort food became a thing and people were like, let's try and charge, you know, 35 bucks for chicken pot pie.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
Yeah, Edison bulbs, you know, lighting up rooms all over the place, like barely. So they said, yeah, let's do that with poutine. And I think Martine Picard of, what's that restaurant, Josh?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
Das stimmt. Er war der erste, oder zumindest der erste, der bekannt wurde, dass er Elevated Poutine serviert hat, als er seine Foie Gras Poutine entworfen hat. Ja.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
Oh, I don't believe that one. Hugh Atchison, great person. He has restaurants here in Atlanta and Athens, Georgia. So he's a he's a top chef guy, too. So I love all.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
Well, I mean, you remember the coffee shop at Pond City Market? That was his.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
Downstairs in his Empire State South in Atlanta is Hugh Atchison's. Edison Bulbs. Yeah, Edison Bulbs. And then 5 and 10 in Athens is his restaurant. Oh, yeah. Because Athens has got some legit good restaurants now.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
Oh, I don't know. I was just there. I tried to go to 5 and 10, but they were booked up because I went to those REM shows again this year. And then Athens is just still one of my favorite places to go.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
Yeah, but this is about Quebec and Canada. And Hugh Atchison closes out his quote by saying, it's just really comforting garbage food.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
Which I love. So I guess that's it, right? Yeah, I got nothing else. You know, go visit Canada, go to Quebec and order some poutine.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Poutine: Canada's Pride
Yeah, I think General Muir here in Atlanta serves poutine. So, you know, I might give that a shot.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
I love them. I love that Fanta orange. I just, you know, you can't drink that stuff a lot.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
I think I like dabbled in the grape and knee-high grape and stuff when I was a kid. But it's really that – and I like Sunkist, preferred Sunkist as a kid here and there. Sunkist soda, right? Yeah, yeah. But Fanta Orange is one of my rare, rare guilty pleasures.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
And I also never have – drank any of the clear or yellows like I've never tasted Mountain Dew didn't drink Mellow Yellow or Sprite or 7-Up or anything like that you missed out you've never tasted Mountain Dew or Mellow Yellow I just want to make sure I have that correct I don't think so wow I can't remember ever doing it. I mean, I don't even know what it tastes like. It looks lemon limey, but.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
But what we're talking about is whether or not Fanta is a Nazi drink. And we're going to go into the history of that. And we're going to start out talking a little bit about Coca-Cola, the parent company. As most people know by now, it was invented by Dr. John Stith Pemberton in 1886. He was a morphine-addicted Civil War veteran looking for a better way to feel better than morphine.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
And put together some cocoa leaves and kola nuts, which had, you know, were stimulants because of cocaine and caffeine. And said, hey, this is like a new kind of medicine. And after he died, it went on to be a very, very popular drink.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
Yes, for sure. There's a guy named Mark Pendergrast who wrote a book called For God, Country, and Coca-Cola. No colon. Way to go, Mark. That's incredible. And he said that this guy loved Coke so much he really just wanted to weave it into – Every aspect of German life, including the Nazi party, even though supposedly he never was officially joined the Nazi party.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
And you think like, well, Koch probably wasn't super stoked about this. They didn't care. Robert Woodruff was running Koch at the time. And he was like, hey, this is all good. We're going to co-sponsor the 1936 Berlin Olympics. We're going to hang up some banners there with our logo right next to the swastika. And it's all good, everybody.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
I haven't been to the World of Coke Museum, but I bet right here in Atlanta, I bet it's not in there.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
Well, yeah, because once the war started, we were like, oh, well, I guess we can't do business with Germany anymore. And Germany was seizing enemy-owned businesses at will. I think General Motors actually got out of Germany, but they did seize IBM eventually. And Coca-Cola said, sorry, Kite, we got to stop sending you our 7X flavoring. And he said, but that is the secret.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
And they went, I know, and I'm really sorry. But even though we're friends, our countries aren't friends right now. And that was a huge hit on Coca-Cola LLC, GmbH, Germany. He couldn't make Coke. So he was like, I got to come up with a new plan.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
Yeah, I mean, not only was he not getting that sweet, sweet 7X Coke syrup, but He didn't have sugar or at least much. They were rationing sugar at the time. So he said, all right. He ended up saying the recipe was made from the leftovers of the leftovers. The first Fanta, which, by the way, is the German word for fantasy or imagination, was
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
And supposedly he said, hey, marketing team, use your fantasy to think of a good name. And they said, how about Fanta? And he went, that's great. I think it was a guy named Joe Nip who officially thought of the name. But he got apple pulp from leftover apple cider making, beet sugar, and whey. And by all accounts, it was not orange at all. And it tasted like sweet garbage.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
Oh, don't you wanna? Yeah, yeah, I remember that now.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
Don't you Fanta, don't you wanna? Was that it?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
Yeah, it was their own. They're like, we have Fanta and beer. And like, we're going to claim those and love those and drink those until we fall over. So he did, even though, like I said, he officially supposedly never joined the Nazi party. He did work very closely with the Nazi party because he needed their help. He needed their help making sure that production continued.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
And, you know, the cooperation with the Nazis was a key part of that. But that was able to keep the doors open, at least. Officially, Coca-Cola in April of 1955, post-war, said, why don't we rejigger Fanta and make it taste good? And we've got the name. We have it copyrighted, and it's already sort of got a little bit of a cred, at least in Europe.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
So let's just keep the name, and hopefully no one will remember the Nazi ties.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
Well, yeah, of course I do if I love it. Okay. I think I've mentioned plenty of times that I did not grow up drinking much soda because as a family, we didn't have the kind of money to just load up the house with sodas. So sodas were only reserved for my mom to drink Chab. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
Yeah, I think what the deal was is it wasn't widely known outside of Germany. So it's not like the word Fanta had some negative connotation all over the world. And the Germans loved it. So it actually had a positive connotation in at least one market. So, yeah, I get it. I mean, maybe it would have been a good PR move to change it because it's a Nazi thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
But I don't think it was like some otherwise tainted name.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
Yeah. Until, you know, people started calling it a Nazi drink and, you know, on the Internet. Right. And the idea kind of spread. And it was, you know, it was Fanta and not Fanta. But, yeah, people largely didn't think much about it. And I still don't think much about it. I mean, it's not like if you buy a Fanta or something today, you're supporting Nazis.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
But as far as Kite goes, he stuck around and the Coca-Cola company said, you know what? Even though your drink was garbage, you did the yeoman's work way back then and kept that brand alive. And so he was made eventually the head of Coca-Cola Europe. And, you know, seems like had a pretty good career as a soda guy.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
Yeah. I mean, who better to lead the Coca-Cola Europe, you know? I guess he was already in place.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Fanta - Nazi Favorite?
Yeah, we had money for that. But I didn't drink much soda growing up, so I don't drink soda now, thankfully, because that stuff is so bad for you, generally speaking. But I will hammer down six Cokes a year and maybe four or five Fanta oranges.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Alternative Libraries
I don't think. And it is actually called The Last Kids on Earth. It looks like it's a series. No. That sounds like something right up her alley, though.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Alternative Libraries
I'm looking at them now and they are terrifying.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Alternative Libraries
So maybe we should flip it and start with Little Free Library since I mentioned that one first as inspirato. But in 29, how the story goes, and this is straight from their website, a man named Todd Boll from Wisconsin, Hudson, Wisconsin, started it all when he built a little model of a schoolhouse, of a little one-room schoolhouse as a tribute to his mom, who's a teacher.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Alternative Libraries
put it on a post, put some books in it and said, hey, everyone, if you want a book, take one. If you want to drop one off, that'd be great, too. And it was a big hit.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Alternative Libraries
Yeah. Rich Brooks was the guy, like you said, he partnered with. He actually retired from the, which is now an NGO, in 2014. But he, you know, they were pals and he thought it was a great idea. And again, inspired by Carnegie, they set out to start building these by 2010. So in 29 is when the first one was built. By 2010, it was like an established thing that was happening.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Alternative Libraries
They started to give them away. They had charter signs. If it was an official one engraved with a charter number and it just people were into it and they start, you know, you see one of these things in your neighborhood. I remember when I saw the first one, I was like, wow, that's an incredible idea. And it felt like within that year we had like six or seven more.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Alternative Libraries
I thought you got you got a bunch of books and you sold one eBay.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Alternative Libraries
That's right, and we are here today to talk about, this is sort of a two-parter in one, about, I'm just calling this alt-libraries, as in alternative libraries. Sure. One reason is because I was on a walk the other day, and we have quite a few little free libraries in our neighborhood, and they are all super cute. If you don't know what we're talking about, they're...
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Alternative Libraries
Yeah, I did not know it had gone international until I started doing this research. It's just incredible. Like I said, Brooks retired in 2014. Someone actually wrote in 2015, a woman named Margaret. Oh, she's a pretty famous author, actually, Margaret Aldrich. wrote the little free library book. So all of a sudden it's like launching books in and of itself.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Alternative Libraries
They got in 2014, that same year, the Library of Congress Literacy Award. Just like people are lauding it. People are building these things like crazy. And it's just become one of the cool things that started here in the U.S. and then spread all over the place. Very sadly, in 2018, Todd Boll passed away from pancreatic cancer. after the launch of their 75,000th at the time Little Free Library.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Alternative Libraries
And he was working for them up until the end and has a great quote. I really believe in a little free library on every block and a book in every hand. I believe people can fix their neighborhoods, fix their communities, develop systems of sharing, learn from each other, and see that they have a better place in this planet to live.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Alternative Libraries
Look at all this stuff. There's so much stuff. Look at all this stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Alternative Libraries
Little boxes usually in the shape of a house or it could be a dog house or it could be a literal library or schoolhouse, just some sort of small house-y type structure with a little clear door. And inside are books that you can take a book, you can take a couple of books, you can leave a book. And it's just one of the great things. And I grabbed one.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Alternative Libraries
Yeah, you can also donate to them, of course.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Alternative Libraries
Yeah, bibliotech, that's in a lot of languages, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Alternative Libraries
Yeah, it's sort of part performance art, part TED talking away. Just kind of referring to them as books was the hook, I think. And obviously something to, you know, draw attention to their cause, which is very noble, I think. It started out as a small festival, and I think it ran eight hours a day for over four days initially with 50 human books available. And now it is an international thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Alternative Libraries
They have human libraries in Asia, Africa, Australia, both of the Americas, and Europe.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Alternative Libraries
Yeah. Don't make your book to your dishes. Don't put your book to work. That's not what this is about.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Alternative Libraries
Yeah. Just stamp my forehead so I can leave.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Alternative Libraries
Yeah, you can also book a group of books or check out a group of books at one time. Like a company can do this and companies have done this. It's something that companies do. They'll bring in guest speakers and stuff. And in this case, they're doing it in the form of human books. They'll bring in a few different people.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Alternative Libraries
I usually don't even look at them that much because I just have too many books I'm behind on already. But one popped up in my eye, peripheral vision that would be perfect for Ruby. So I grabbed it, and she's reading it and loving it. And so I thought we should do a little ode to alt libraries like this. What was the book? I can't remember. The Last Kids on Earth or something like that?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Alternative Libraries
to bring in to talk about, you know, things that, again, sort of like an individual would like, hey, let's bring in some people that maybe don't even work on our field, but might enlighten you to some diverse topics and people and ways of thinking. So like Microsoft and Eli Lilly and other brands have gotten together to kind of do this over the years.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Alternative Libraries
Exactly. Those people never do. But, yeah, it's just sort of a fun hook. I like stuff like this. Some people might say it's silly. Oh, they're not books. They're just people, and it's just a Q&A. But I encourage people like that to sort of broaden their horizons, think outside the old box a little bit, and CTFD.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Alternative Libraries
No, you don't want to do that. Hey, you're coming with me. That's called kidnapping.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Alternative Libraries
You got anything else? I got nothing else. Support Little Free Library. Support the Human Book Project. And support all libraries, too. Yeah, those are great also.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Alternative Libraries
That sounds good. That may not be the title, but that's sort of the premise.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
And he actually was one of those deals where you sell the patent rights, but then you come on board. as a sort of spokesman and salesperson. So he led the Rovetta Bakery machine division, selling these things to more and more bakeries. But he never became like some huge name. I think there are many, many more inventors of very common items that are much more well-known.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
He lived a very quiet life in Louisiana. And I think he retired in 71 and passed away at, what, close to 80?
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Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
I don't know what year it was, though. Do you know?
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Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
Yeah, so there you have it with sliced bread, right?
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Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
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Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
That's amazing. I think it's pronounced bink.
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Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
Well, it may have been since they were in Iowa. A lot of people, you know, change their very German or French or whatever pronounced names to more American sounding. Sure. Like Clark. What was Clark? Flark. I think Bryant was probably O'Brient at some point.
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Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
Well, how weirdly inappropriate.
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Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
I said tens of thousands, but yeah, that's a little more specific.
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Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
Yeah. So, I mean, you can listen to our bread episode. We don't need to go over all that. But suffice it to say, for 29,900 years-ish, people were generally tearing off chunks of bread. That's where we get the term breaking bread. There were sandwiches. I believe the first, like –
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Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
Credit for the real sandwich goes to Rabbi Hillel the Elder, who put lamb and bitter herbs in between two pieces of matzo, the Hillel sandwich. And then in 1840, a woman, Miss Leslie, Eliza Leslie, published Directions for Cookery, in which she talked about what's thought to be the first ham sandwich. where she talks about cutting slices of bread very neatly.
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Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
So people were slicing their bread at home. It's not like they were like, I want to make a sandwich, but I just tear it off in these big chunks and I don't understand. People were home slicing bread to make sandwiches. But that all changed on July 7th, 1928, right?
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Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
You're calling him Rohwetter.
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Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
That's right. It's very sad. It took him a long time to get back up to speed. I do think we should point out that this guy was a jeweler. He was not in the food business at all. He had an ophthalmology degree. Yet he became a jeweler and had three jewelry stores that he owned. But he was an inventor and he would sell those jewelry stores.
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Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
And that's what financed his, I guess, just strange idea to slice and package bread.
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Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
Should we take a break? Yes. All right. I'll be right back.
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Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
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Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
Yeah, they were half inch slices because he did a lot of research and came up with a half inch is sort of like the perfect uniform width for a piece of bread for a sandwich or whatever else you want to do with it, I guess. Yeah. And he sold that first slicer to a guy named a friend of his named Frank Bench, who was a baker in Missouri at a place called the Chillicothe Baking Company.
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Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
And that was the first one sold. The second was sold to another baker named Gustav Poppendick. And this is the guy who improved it. He was like, hey, you got these slices that are coming out, but they're all falling apart. He came up with a way to slice it where they stayed, you know, packaged together. They stayed fresher longer, and it just made the wrapping process much easier.
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Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
That's right. Big thanks to historyofbread.com, history.com, our old friends at howstuffworks.com, and the surprisingly instructive goldmedalbakery.com.
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Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
Yeah, I wonder if Rowbetter was like, have you seen a king cake? They got a freaking plastic baby in those things. Right. You can deal with a hat pin.
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Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
It wouldn't surprise me. So the reference, the first reference to sliced bread in print apparently was in 1928 when that local paper from Frank Bench's bread company there in Missouri had an article that said sliced bread is made here. That was the headline. I'm sorry. It was an advertisement. Sliced bread is made here.
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Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
And they are, of course, the home of the original sliced bread there in Missouri, which is quite a claim to fame, I'm sure. But when this stuff came out, it wasn't like everyone was like, oh, my God, this is the best thing since whatever the previous best thing was. People are like, this is weird because they had been slicing their own bread. They didn't know what to think about it.
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Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
They had to convince people to get on board, to get bakeries on board. And who got on board was – And generally, homemakers, which at the time was largely women, these women who were packing lunches for husbands and kids, they were like, this is incredible. You have no idea how much easier this is. And I don't have kids arguing about different size slices. And Johnny's thing is bigger than me.
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Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
And this sandwich looks janky because the bread slopes at the end. And I got a small piece and a big piece. And it's made everything quicker and streamlined my routine. And this is the new best thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
Great, because this is about sliced bread. You've heard the term, of course, the best thing since sliced bread. And oddly enough, well, not oddly, but sliced bread has been around less than 100 years, even though bread has been around for tens of thousands of years.
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Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
Yeah, I got six kids. I got a husband. I got a divorced neighbor who doesn't understand how to make a sandwich. Art. Yeah, Art's divorced. He doesn't know how to make a sandwich. Everyone wants toast. Everyone wants sandwiches. You can't take this away from us.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
Yeah. I mean, didn't the government step in and literally try to stop sliced bread?
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Short Stuff: The Best Episode Since Sliced Bread
Yeah. He put on his canvas wax, his wax canvas field jacket. Right. And he marched out of the room. His veiled backet. Thank you for getting on board. So back to Roveta. He sold his patent rights to a company called the Micro Westo Company in Iowa. I think we didn't mention he was – I think he was from Iowa, right? Davenport. Yeah.
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Short Stuff: The Gaslighting of Martha Mitchell
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Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
I sous-vided some Wagyu steaks. I provided the camp. I think it finally dawned on everyone that that was kind of a big deal. I, you know, I partied in just the right way to impress everybody. Nice. And, you know, some other things. And that's generally how you win it. You kind of go above and beyond. And my comedy was on point. I was just on fire with the jokes. Wow. And DJing.
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Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
Like, yeah, I kind of had it in the bag. But... Long way of saying my buddy Justin, whom you know from London, England, who raises chickens, he always supplies the eggs. And he showed up with some olive eggs, some brown speckled eggs, a couple of sort of light tan eggs. And I just started wondering about it.
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Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
And now I know, and I told Justin the deal as well, why his chickens are making different eggs. Did he want to know that? Yeah, he was very curious.
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Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
No, those brown eggs, you gotta get those brown eggs. They're natural, Josh. They don't bleach them.
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Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
Yeah, and most eggs in the commercial egg industry in the United States are from leghorns, so most are white. So when you see, like, a fancy brown egg, it's the same egg. Well, that's if it's, you know, not, you know, the pasture-raised and the stuff that were already expensive.
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Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
Yeah, and we'll talk about that later. But a white egg is the same as a brown egg, nutritionally speaking. They come from the leghorns, Orpingtons, and Plymouth Rocks. Those are varieties of chickens. They're going to lay the browns. There's a chicken called an Americana, and not Americana because it has an A-U in there.
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Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
That is a breed which gives the, it permeates, that pigment goes all the way through, and so the inside color of the egg is bluish as well as the outside, which is a pretty cool fact.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
I knew you were going to say that because, you know what, I told Justin that. He has chickens and he said the same thing.
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Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
Can you imagine if his name was Greg Fowler?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
Anyway, if you've got a white chicken, it's going to lay a white egg because they probably have white earlobes or generally lighter earlobes or lighter feathers. If they have colored feathers and colored earlobes, they're going to have colored eggs.
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Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
Yeah, for sure. In the oviduct, on that conveyor belt, there are going to be five different sort of in order, because it's a conveyor belt, segments that they're going to go through, that yoke is going to go through, or the ovum. And it's in the fourth one of those five where that shell is formed. It's a calcium carbonate shell that comes from the shell gland, and that is where –
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Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
That's right. And for this episode, we're going to pretend that eggs are not super expensive. Because we're going to talk about buying eggs and stuff like that. Right. And that's just a fact of life. Eggs are really expensive right now. So let's just put that to the side for a moment.
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Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
The shell forms around the ovum, and that's where it gets pigmented. Right.
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Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
Yeah. And do you know, by the way, I heard a recording of the actual sound. They got a microphone inside a chicken. The sound of the pigment being placed on it is kind of like this. Let me try another take just in case.
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Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
Well, sure. You can call it that. Gross. All right. So back to, sorry about that. 12-year-old Chuck showed up for a minute. Those two pigments that, like you said, are the ones responsible for the different shades are biliverdin, biliverdin?
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Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
And protoporphyrin or protoporphyrin. Porphyrin.
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Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
Yeah, that's a solid point. This came about because I just went on our annual, fifth annual rather, Frigid Fiesta, which is my buddies and I try to get together and go to my camp on the coldest, one of the coldest days of the year. I make an MVC, Most Valuable Camper trophy. I earned that trophy for the first time this year. I'm very proud to say.
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Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
I totally agree. And here's the thing. We talked about nutrition earlier, and you said it's all the same, and that's true. The inside of a white egg is the same as the inside of a brown egg. If you get like the really – now they're super expensive.
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Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
Not the free range because I worked in the chicken industry, and I've tried to dispel that myth that generally if it says free range, that just means that – The door is open to the barn, but they're not really out there.
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Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
Yeah, cage-free. But a genuine pasture-raised chicken, they can actually be more nutritious. If they're foraging on greens and eating insects and things, just a better variety of stuff that even the cage-free and the free-range aren't getting. If you get those really, really expensive pasture-raised ones, they may have slightly higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids and vitamins.
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Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
Yeah, and I'm going to recommend, especially now that eggs are so expensive, like try and source them locally. I guarantee you in your town there is a farmer's market with some stinky hippie that's going to sell you some eggs in a funny-looking container or at the very least a used egg carton from somewhere else. Mm-hmm.
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Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
Or if you have a friend like I do that, you know, they'll give us eggs because those used to be like, oh, gosh, they're so pricey. But their prices aren't jacked up because they're not, you know, the locals aren't suffering from the commercial egg industry's woes. So now some of those are cheaper than grocery store eggs. Yeah. And you know where they're coming from.
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Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
And they're walking around eating insects and grass.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
I would not recommend using Dawn, but that's just me.
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Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
Yeah, I'm sure it's free and clear. It is. The good thing, though, about getting eggs from your friends or someone that doesn't wash their eggs is you can just leave them out. They don't need to be refrigerated. True that.
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Short Stuff: All About Egg Colors
Yeah. But I'll tell you, I've eaten dozens and dozens of those eggs from Justin. Never washed them. Never had a problem.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
Like it's got to be a and as you'll see with the Waffle House index, if a Waffle House is closed, that is that is very bad news for the area that that place is in because they stay open at all costs.
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Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
Yeah, for sure. We're going to talk about a few of them here and there. One of them is they have a limited menu, and it's not like, oh, what do we have on hand? It's like, all right, we're going to – I don't know what they call it on the inside, but let's just say we're going to plan B or something, and that means we're switching to the official limited menu.
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Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
When there are food shortages, when the power's out and stuff like that, most, I don't think all of them do at this point, but most of them, and I'm sure they want to have them all on backup generators, that's been a thing for a while. So if the power's out, you can still probably go to a Waffle House and not only get power, but get a hot meal.
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Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
I know I've asked you how you got yours. How do you get yours? Your hash browns? Oh, you do? So chunked is ham, right?
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Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
Yeah, I think I told, I mean, I just get mine straight up. I'm the weirdo that gets unadorned hash browns at Waffle House. But I do get a double order because I just, two of those, one isn't enough.
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Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
But I don't go anymore. I think I mentioned on an episode last time I went, it was actually with Hodgman after he went camping with a group of dudes here on the way out. I was like, we're stopping at Waffle House, right? And he went, oh, yeah, we definitely are.
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Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
No, I mean, that was the only time I've been in years.
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Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
That was just a year and a half ago. But I just, it's just, you know, I went a lot in college, like, you know, late night after the bars. But, you know, you grow up a little bit and you realize you can't eat Waffle House every week. That's true. It's a sad realization, everybody. It's coming your way, though, if you're young.
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Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
That's right. We've talked about Waffle House here and there quite a bit over the years, and I was going to do a full Waffle House episode. That was in the pipeline. Maybe still, but maybe not after this.
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Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
So, you know, we talked about Waffle House being set up with generators and jump teams and limited menus. They also have temporary warehouses where they can store stuff, you know, on that limited menu at least. And this all started after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. I think seven of the restaurants were completely destroyed, very sadly. A hundred of them shut down.
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Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
But they got up and running again very, very fast. And the company – basically decided like, hey, this is such a valuable thing. We need to come up with that official plan, like a literal book of how to open as quickly as possible during an emergency or stay open during an emergency.
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Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
Yeah, for sure, which leads us finally to the Waffle House Index, which is a pretty unique thing. It was the brainchild of a guy named Craig Fugate, who was the FEMA administrator back in the early 2010s. And he had that position after the Joplin tornado of 2011. in May of that year.
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Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
And he had kind of had this idea for a little while because he had noticed after, you know, various hurricanes that Waffle House was one of, if not the only thing open. And he started to notice this sort of trend like, hey, your community doesn't have water, you don't have power, yet the Waffle House was open. And he started looking at maps and realized that like, hey, if you actually look at where
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Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
The weather hit it the hardest and the damage was the most severe. You can kind of rate that according to whether or not that Waffle House is either open, closed or serving a full menu, limited menu and just how they're doing. And he really like that was sort of like the the light bulb above the head moment when he said this could be a real thing. The Waffle House index could really help us out.
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Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
Yeah, absolutely. You don't get the red index a lot. But again, if you do, then that's, you know, that's the really bad sign. If, you know, they know a hurricane or something like that is coming and they like there's evacuation orders and stuff like that. You know, if it's mandatory, a Waffle House might close.
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Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
But the very first chance they get to open that thing up, they're going to open it back up.
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Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
Yeah, I love that story. But I was so ready when I was reading it to hear they cooked by candlelight through the night.
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Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
Sorry. Sorry, Chuck. I didn't say I expected them to. I just that that would have been even more amazing, but maybe also dangerous. So that that might have had something to do with it.
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Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
I looked up, by the way, I tried to find that they have a. A mobile emergency, what is it?
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Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
Yeah, but the only thing I could find looked like a food truck. Oh, is that right? Yeah, I mean, I tried to find a picture, and everything, it just kept showing me this food truck. And I couldn't, when it was called the command center, I was like, is it dressed to look like a Waffle House? Because it looks like a little tiny Waffle House. Oh, does it? And is there, like, communications inside?
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Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
Or are they showing up and cooking? Like, I couldn't figure that part out.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
That's right. And a lot of restaurants and chains may claim to be open 365 days a year. And they, you know, a lot of them are in general. But the Waffle House in particular prides itself and has taken great, great, great efforts to really stay open.
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Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
Oh, Stripes is great, I think. It's a movie in two parts, so the first half is a lot better than when they go on the mission in the RV. Gotcha. Okay. But, you know, not the best movie in the world, but I love Harold Ramis.
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Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
Yeah, I mean, that stuff, I wasn't allowed to watch any of that at the time, so I had to sneak it a little later.
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Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
I learned two things about your mom this week, that and that she played the banjo, which just floors me how cool that is.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Waffle House Index
Yeah. If you've never been, if you're ever in the South, go check out a Waffle House. The coolest, most awesome, fun people work there. And you might be able to get into a fistfight with Kid Rock. You never know.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
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Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Yeah, for sure. If you look at the current use of the term, as we know and love it, it came about in the 18th century, pretty late in 18, well, I guess kind of mid. In 1853, that's when they were talking about feed and starve as far as cold and fever go.
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Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Yeah. You know, that is proof to me that people back then were dumb. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Yeah, I guess they were basing it on if you have a fever, then you don't want to eat hot food. I guess they didn't eat a lot of cold foods back then.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
And if you're cold, you want to warm yourself up because there was only hot food available.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
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Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
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Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
S-Y-Y-Y-Y-S-K-S-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K Okay, so people have basically always said that this was a bad idea. There was a writer in Gentleman's Magazine in 1785 that said it was perhaps more destructive to mankind than the plague itself, this advice, which is definitely overstating things. But – People these days say, no, that's not good advice.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
That's right. Call it old wives tale edition because this is about feeding a cold and starving a fever, which is the old wives tale that when you have a cold, you should, and originally started out as stuff a cold, like eat as much as you can. And then if you have a fever, you should try and not eat very much at all.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
First of all, if you have a cold, you may not want to eat very much. You may not be very hungry. So, like, for God's sake, don't just make someone stuff themselves full just because they're sick with a cold. It's not going to do anything for you.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Yeah, if your metabolism is kicking in in a substantial way, it's going to, you know, if you're just laying around in bed, that'll make you eat up more of your calories and nutrients than you that you have in your body. So you're going to want as much as you can. So if you're hungry, cold, fever or whatever, by God, eat something or drink something.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
You definitely need to stay hydrated, even if you're not hungry. There are plenty of ways to get, you know, nutrients and liquid into you.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Yeah. Pretty neat. Fevers are no fun, but I love when I'm sick and the fever happens, I'm like, okay, this is my body doing its thing, so I feel good about it.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Exactly. It didn't feel great, but there's no better feeling than like breaking that fever, you know?
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Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Yeah, that same article from Gentleman's Magazine from way back when suggested some other things of the time. Barley water, which sounds not too bad. Small beer. You ever seen those little baby beers that are like eight ounces or whatever?
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Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Well, I don't know, but that makes sense.
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Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
We called, me and my friends, Eddie and Allison, called those tiny beers queets. I don't know. I think Allison made up the word, and it just kind of stuck. And the fun thing about drinking those is you look like Andre the Giant.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
What else? Apple water, linseed tea, toast in water. That may be the toast in water. Remember that?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
That's right. They starved. Well, I guess fasted. Same thing. Sure. For both groups for 24 hours. And then the cold feeders, they gave a meal replacement drink. So not hot food in this case. And so after they had this sustenance, I guess, their blood levels of an immune protein called interferon gamma increased. Went really, really sky high. Average increase of 450 percent.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
And interferon plays a role in regulating our response to infections in our immune system. So you would think like, hey, eating is like exactly what you want to do.
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Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Yeah, by an average of almost 400 percent compared to the 450 for the other. And I think there was one patient whose fasting levels rose more than 1100 percent.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
And this is also an important part of our immune response, but it's different kinds of immune responses. So if you're thinking like – Well, hey, if I starve myself, then this one's going to go up. You don't know which cells you need. So it's not sort of a roulette game you should try and play by starving yourself.
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Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Yeah, because what you want is a little bit of both and ideally more of both, but not a whole lot of one and a lot less of the other.
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Short Stuff: Feed A Cold, Starve a Fever
Yeah, I'm not sure about this one. He said the most exquisitely slender diet you should have when the disease is very sharp. So I'm not quite sure what disease he's talking about there. So I'm not sure if that counts.
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Short Stuff: Tick tock goes the Doomsday Clock
You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.
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Short Stuff: Tick tock goes the Doomsday Clock
Perfectly said. Elegantly said. Thank you. Yeah. So, like you said, been around since 1947. They set the time every year. It's sort of a thing where they say like, all right, the time for this year is going to be this. Would they move it forward if something really went down within a year?
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Short Stuff: Tick tock goes the Doomsday Clock
So like in January, they said it. And if like four months later, like the S goes down, they wouldn't be like they'd be like, no, got to wait till next year.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tick tock goes the Doomsday Clock
Okay. But again, we're talking about it this year because there was – and, you know, we'll talk about a little bit how it's fluctuated over the years. But the reason we bring it up is because this year, January 28th, 2025, is when they moved the second hand on the clock forward to 89 seconds to midnight.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tick tock goes the Doomsday Clock
Which means it's the closest that the clock has ever been to midnight since they started, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tick tock goes the Doomsday Clock
It's like bust out the rum, everybody.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tick tock goes the Doomsday Clock
The closest pre this time and 2025 was in 1953. It was two minutes before midnight. So we are 89 seconds till midnight. And the closest previous was two minutes. So that's, you know, it's pretty drastic. And again, you know, I guess we can go ahead and mention one of the criticisms of this is that it's it's something that just gins up.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tick tock goes the Doomsday Clock
Some of the critics will say it's something that just gins up paranoia in people and like pushes the panic button. And what is it even doing? But what it's doing, I think it's a valuable thing because it just raises awareness every year with people. It's just another thing to kind of say, hey, like we're not headed in the right direction as humanity goes.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tick tock goes the Doomsday Clock
My mom wanted us to be independent children. And she would always tell me, stop worrying about your sister.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tick tock goes the Doomsday Clock
All right, everyone, we're back. We're 80 seconds to midnight, not 10 minutes to midnight like Charles Brunson was in that great movie.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tick tock goes the Doomsday Clock
Yeah. You didn't see that one? No. You should check that out. It's got a couple of choice scenes. It's about a creepy serial killer that he's chasing.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tick tock goes the Doomsday Clock
Charles Bronson is always the guy on the hunt for the bad guy.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tick tock goes the Doomsday Clock
Yeah. All the Death Wish movies. I mean, the first one was genuinely pretty good, but they got really sort of over the top after a while.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tick tock goes the Doomsday Clock
That's good. You got the death wish, pal. This is my favorite impression to do.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tick tock goes the Doomsday Clock
Oh, no. I don't think so. All right. So how do we get 89 seconds to midnight? This comes direct from the Bulletin website. Some we can kind of summarize. A few of these I'm just going to read outright because it's so like sort of expertly put.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tick tock goes the Doomsday Clock
But the first thing is the ongoing war in Ukraine and the and not just that, but the nuclear risk therein involved in the third year of that conflict that, you know, hopefully it doesn't go that way. Maybe things are wrapping up. But at the peak of this thing, like any weird bad decision could have led to something like that happening.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tick tock goes the Doomsday Clock
Let's go. This is, well, it's a follow-up to our Doomsday Clock episode, but it turns out we didn't do a Doomsday Clock episode. I know we've talked about this, so it might have been in one of when we were doing videos years ago. I think it was probably in one of those. But I know for a fact the only reason I would have known about this is because of this job and you.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tick tock goes the Doomsday Clock
Yeah, for sure. Climate change is the next thing they have listed. And, you know, this one kind of speaks for itself. We don't need to beat a dead horse. But their take basically is that global greenhouse gas emissions are still rising. No one is doing enough to combat this. This is bringing on extreme weather and climate change events and or climate change influence events.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tick tock goes the Doomsday Clock
And it's affecting people all over the world. And even if we're growing things like solar and wind, it's just not fast enough and not nearly enough to make a dent in the damage that's being done.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tick tock goes the Doomsday Clock
Yeah, but obviously coming out of COVID and with the avian flu now expanding to farm animals, to dairy products, human cases, all this stuff is very scary. And the point of this episode isn't to scare the crud out of everybody.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tick tock goes the Doomsday Clock
But it's hard to read the stuff and not get the crud scared out of you sometimes. Of course.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tick tock goes the Doomsday Clock
Yeah, and this is the one I wanted to read a part or two from this because it just kind of speaks volumes of things. They really put it very succinctly. Spread of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories that degrade the communication ecosystem increasingly blur the lines between truth and falsehood.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tick tock goes the Doomsday Clock
And then they talk about AI making it even – we've talked about deep fake video and stuff like that, like making all that stuff just so much easier. And then this final line is really, really good.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tick tock goes the Doomsday Clock
The battered information landscape is also producing leaders who discount science and endeavor to suppress free speech and human rights, compromising the fact-based public discussions that are required to combat the enormous threats facing the world. So like – All of the problems that we've been listing are bad enough.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tick tock goes the Doomsday Clock
And then when you've got disinformation and conspiracy theories and misinformation thrown on top of that and AI exacerbating all that, that's when it's like they're moving that clock as close to midnight as they've ever been.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tick tock goes the Doomsday Clock
Yeah, it popped up in some place. But what's the doomsday clock, Josh?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tick tock goes the Doomsday Clock
Yeah, maybe. But that's also the world we're living in right now.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tick tock goes the Doomsday Clock
I didn't know that was a thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tick tock goes the Doomsday Clock
Well, you didn't have a fever dream. One thing, whether or not you agree with the doomsday clock or not, one thing I can recommend, because you're too humble to, is a little limited podcast series called The End of the World with Josh Clark. That way you can really learn something and take a deep dive into real existential threats that face humanity.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tick tock goes the Doomsday Clock
Holds up. Still great, I imagine. I haven't gone back and listened to it again. I bet it still holds up, though.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Bourgeoisie
That's right. And he was writing in German. So, of course, he did not say bourgeois. He said Bürgerliche Gesellschaft.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Bourgeoisie
Thank you. Danke. In America, they may translate that as civil society or maybe a bourgeois society. But either way you slice it, what he's saying is the bourgeoisie are the bad people.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Bourgeoisie
That's right. The slang word was bushwa, B-U-S-H-W-A. And what's weird, I think that was in a quote from a 1970 article. What's weird, though, is that that word bushwa eventually was sort of morphed into a slang for BS, like somebody's full of hot air or BS. Someone, you know, is full of bushwa.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Bourgeoisie
Yeah, and that would be B-O-U-R-G-I-E comma B-O-U-R-G-I-E.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Bourgeoisie
Yeah, it is kind of like that new money, old money thing, which is just so bleh, you know?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Bourgeoisie
So if you want to go back to the original bougie, if you want to go back to France, the original meaning is from a French word, B-O-U-R-G, which I guess would that be bourg?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Bourgeoisie
Okay. And that's like a small town or a small market. In the Middle Ages, the people that lived there sort of adopted that name for themselves. So it kind of – this word is just morphing and morphing all over the place over the years. Mm-hmm. They were one step up from like a farming peasant. So they were sort of the middle class of the time.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Bourgeoisie
That's right, and that's what we're talking about today. We're talking about a word, bourgeois, B-O-U-R-G-E-O-I-S. Yeah. Not to be confused with bourgeoisie, correct? Correct.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Bourgeoisie
That's right. And that would be the definition that is most sort of thought of today in the 21st century. When someone says bougie, another modern musical example is Atlanta's own from the ATL Migos. You ever listen to Migos? Oh, yeah. It's good stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Bourgeoisie
They have a song called Bad and Bougie, in this case spelled B-O-U-J-E, and it sort of leans back on that, what the Pips were talking about, sort of a new fancy lifestyle.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Bourgeoisie
Yeah. In modern France, it does not mean pedestrian. It's a little more like good, well-mannered, well-educated. There's like three levels, supposedly, of a Parisian bourgeois. The nobility or people that are kind of close to nobility, the rich or the creme de la creme.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Bourgeoisie
You have the bourgeois de province, doctors, attorneys, middle class types, and then the petite bourgeois who are shopkeepers, artists, kind of self-starting, self-employed people.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Bourgeoisie
Well, we'll follow up in 10 years and see if the definition's changed again.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Bourgeoisie
But if you talk to Americans, a lot of Americans probably hear bourgeois and they think, oh, fancy, fancy, fancy. And that is not the case because bourgeois refers to, like you called me, basics or sort of a middle class basic individual. Yes. Or group of individuals.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Figs & Wasps
Yeah, totally. And we're going to tell you how that happens right now. I was going to say right after this, but that would be way too soon. First thing we need to say is that the fig, the thing that you're eating, it's something within a larger structure, and it's called a zirconium, is what you're actually eating. It's sort of like an inverted flower. It's not really a fruit necessarily. No.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Figs & Wasps
And what happens is these Calamarna farmers in California – They have female trees that are going to produce that edible version of the zirconia, and they have male trees that produce an inedible version called a gall fig. And if they want to pollinate those, a wasp has to crawl into that zirconium.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Figs & Wasps
A female wasp, she loses her wings on the way because she has to squeeze through a tight little passage. It's a one-way trip, which is very sad. And you end up eating that female wasp. She's broken down by something called phycine. It's a protein-digesting enzyme. So when you eat a fig, there is a little bit of female wasp inside of that thing just broken down and becoming part of that edible fig.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Figs & Wasps
For sure. And I mentioned it was a one-way trip. It's fairly sad that that happens, but it's all in good service of that mutual arrangement. Before that happens, this female wasp is going to come out of an inedible male fig. I guess I'm going to call it a fruit because she was born there, and she has mated by that point with a blind, wingless male wasp who never leaves that male fig.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Figs & Wasps
So she exits that inedible male fig. She picks up some pollen. She's got all these eggs. And at that point, she can either go to a male fig tree or a female fig tree. But if she lands on that female fig tree, her ovipositor is too short to reach into this really long-styled female flower. So she can't lay those eggs in there. She does end up pollinating it, but she sacrifices her life in doing so.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Figs & Wasps
Yeah, it's pretty great. Like it works both ways. If she goes into that male fig, then she's going to deposit those fertilized eggs. And that circle just kind of keeps going on and on. Farmers separate these trees out to try and keep them from doing that.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Figs & Wasps
Well, you're wrong, my friend, because this farmer that was interviewed said that they separate those male and female trees. I don't think he's just making that up to aggravate you. What if he's completely off his rocker? I mean, are all the farmers and all the sources completely off their rocker?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Figs & Wasps
Yeah, this is an episode where I was very surprised, and I even went back, that when we did our episode on wasps, we even got emails about this, so I'm pretty sure we did not cover it. Yeah. But we're talking about fig wasps of the fig tree specifically, not the kind that you see, like almost all fig tree varieties are not ones that you eat the fruit of.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Figs & Wasps
So a few things that we can remember is that the female wasp dies inside that edible fig. And there have been people like vegans that there are vegans. There are literally vegans who won't eat that. But it's... There are bugs in almost every fruit that you eat. There are levels of bug, I was about to say infestation, but just bug activity that's acceptable for the USDA.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Figs & Wasps
Tomato ketchup, apparently. It has the highest USDA grade standard possible, and it can have no more than 30 fruit fly eggs per every 100 grams of ketchup.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Figs & Wasps
Yeah, I bet someone or it might be one of those things where like no one's even paying attention to this.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Figs & Wasps
Yes, they're always watching. I did mention, though, that the farmers try and control the, you know, separating those trees out to control because it can be a problem if there are too many seeds. That fruit can burst open and all of a sudden it's not, you know, it's good for the plant, but it's not good to harvest for the farmer. So they're trying to sell these things.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Figs & Wasps
So they separate those trees out over some pretty great distances and also control the number of new wasps they bring in. They're wasp wranglers as well as farmers. And they get these things delivered to their house, to their farm in paper sacks. And they can pretty much control exactly how many females have access to the correct plant.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Figs & Wasps
I mean, it is fig at that point. That wasp becomes fig.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Figs & Wasps
That's a very specific one, the ones like you have out in your yard, They develop without pollination, which means they're parthenocarpic. But the ones where you eat the figs, they are grown commercially mainly in California here in the United States. They are calamurna figs, and they are imported from Turkey.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Figs & Wasps
And the ficus carica, or the fig wasp, is also imported from Turkey because they have a very special relationship.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The wAve
That's right. And he's a great man. He's no John Tesh. But I say keep the wave going, even though I'm not the most enthusiastic waver, and stop that tomahawk chop, Atlanta Braves and Kansas City Chiefs and Florida State Seminoles.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The wAve
I was afraid you were going to ask me that. I knew it. I'm not a waver. Per se. I don't bemoan it. I'm not one of these people that's like, there's a game going on. Nothing like that. I just I got to a certain point where I like I don't want to stand up and throw my arms in the air and wave them like I just don't care.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The wAve
Sometimes if I'm in the right mood and this is so lazy, I won't stand up, but I'll throw my arms up just to be, you know, kind of a good sport. I've seen that. Sure. And, you know, now that Ruby is old enough to go to sporting events, I will, of course, do full wave participant because that's something like a kid would really enjoy. I'm not going to I'm not going to rain on her parade.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The wAve
So they didn't do it at the Wrigley Field. We went to the Cubs game together and I don't think there was a wave. What's there?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The wAve
Yeah. Yeah. It's a pretty crazy story. And crazy being the key word here because crazy with a K, George Henderson, is our first entrant into the wave invention sweepstakes because he was a San Jose State cheerleader who graduated college, I guess.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The wAve
And this is in the 1970s and then was just sort of a freelance cheerleader for different pro teams and was working in A's game on October 15th, 1981, a baseball game for the Oakland Athletics playing the Yankees in Oakland. And you can watch this on YouTube footage from that game where Crazy George has a drum and he gets fans to do.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The wAve
A version of the wave, in this version, though, it's sort of one section goes and then the next section goes, whereas a true wave is just a continuous sort of motion and sections be damned.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The wAve
That's right. And stop your email now if you're thinking Josh, Josh, the Colorado Rockies are a baseball team that weren't even around in the 70s, that was an NHL franchise first, and they would eventually become the New Jersey Devils. I had it right. You had it right. The second entrant into the wave sweepstakes is a guy named Rob Weller. He's from Tacoma, Washington, and was – this is so great.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The wAve
He was known as the Yell King, a.k.a. the greatest cheerleader in UW history. So he would go on to host Entertainment Tonight in the early 80s. So I was a big fan because I was a little 10-year-old that loved Entertainment Tonight. Do you remember him? Oh, yeah. Oh, really? Okay, cool. Oh, dude, I watched Entertainment Tonight every night. I remember when it debuted. I was so excited.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The wAve
Because it was like movie news, and that's all I cared about. Okay. But he called his, and I'm surprised this didn't, frankly, surprised this didn't stick. He called it the expandable cheer.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The wAve
That's right. And maybe we should take a break here and talk about the fight that ensued right after this.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The wAve
OK, so these two guys both lay claim to the wave. They have fought about it in a very childish manner over the years. I think it's really fairly tongue in cheek. It's got to be.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The wAve
I am glad you did this. I was kind of curious about the origins of the old wave. Oh, yeah? I don't know what you mean. Yeah. It's now kind of all over the world in various places, but it started out as an American thing that people would do in the stands at sports games where one bit at a time and all around the whole stadium people would stand up and raise their arms up over their head.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The wAve
Okay. Well, Bissell, the band director that you mentioned before that expanded it outward with Weller's consent, says, well, first of all, that other wave, it's not a true oval. That was a baseball stadium. It's a diamond. And so that doesn't count. I throw water all over that argument because you could do a wave in a square room.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The wAve
You could do it in a, yeah, a literal square room as long as you kept that motion constant. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The wAve
Yeah. By the mid-1980s, the wave had really caught on, though, no matter who invented it. Every stadium had their own version. It might have a special name. I believe Michigan that you talked about had what was called the silent wave. That's creepy. Some places they would jingle their car keys, stuff like that. Sometimes it got really creative and the waves would –
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The wAve
would go around opposite each other and meet in the middle. That's awesome. But this is about when people started saying, this thing is sort of disrupting my enjoyment of the game a little bit.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The wAve
That's right, because it started in Mexico. That's right. Specifically... Or it was spread internationally in Mexico, rather.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The wAve
That's right. And if you're sitting at home thinking, guys, this is pretty good. I know a little history here, but I mean, you guys usually dig into the science of things. Surely there's been scientific studies about the wave, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The wAve
Believe it or not, there have been. In 2002, there was some physicists from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, That built computer models analyzing lots and lots of waves at sporting events. They actually released this in Nature, the periodical Nature, very respected. And NPR reported on it.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The wAve
And they had three key parameters that they kind of looked at, which was the distance between the sports goers, how many neighbors –
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The wAve
that an audience member, an audience member, that's a weird way to say somebody at a football game, but whatever, how many neighbors that you could see and then the readiness or probability of an individual to start standing up assuming others nearby are already standing. What in the world does that even mean?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The wAve
Right. Interestingly, out of all this, I think the most interesting part is that they narrowed it down to like 20 or 30 people is all it takes to start a wave.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The wAve
I'm just trying to picture, like, you know, bottom of the ninth, two outs, bases loaded, and the guy's like, come on, everybody. Yeah, let's give them a wave. It's like, yeah, you're not supposed to do it. Do it when it's a little boring and the crowd needs, you know, everyone's drinking a little bit. Everyone's having a good time. Maybe they're a little bored.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The wAve
And if you look at it as it goes around the stadium, it looks like a wave is moving across the fans.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The wAve
Maybe they're up seven to nothing in a baseball game at the home field. And so people are like, well, let's do something. That's a great time to start the wave. I've never started a wave. I've... Been a part of the saddest thing is when someone attempts to start the wave and it just doesn't happen. It's a very shameful sit down.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The wAve
Yeah. The great comedian Gary Gullman talks about standing ovations and he's like, you're going to be standing in a minute to leave anyway.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The wAve
Announcers, you'll hear announcers get grumpy about it sometimes.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
Yeah. And, you know, that's not the kind of thing we usually highlight when we're talking about women on the show. But you can't ignore that with Morgana the Kissing Bandit. Right. Most notably because it comes up later in a potential defense in court, which if you're wondering how in the world is that does that work, then you'll find out in Act Two.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
And I think the fact that we mentioned it just goes to show how much you can't ignore it. I hope so. She was introduced to baseball by her grandfather who raised her. You said she had a rough childhood, which very sadly she did. She was a runaway at age 13. She was unhoused for a while. Eventually, she became an exotic dancer as a teenager.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
And in 1969 at Crossley Field during a Cincinnati Reds game, when she was 17, she was with a couple of friends sitting, you know, near the field level. And, you know, the baseball players were checking these girls out because it was 1969. And that's what you did when you were a baseball player. You get a little bored in outfield and look to the stands at teenage girls, I guess.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
And everyone was sort of, you know, the players were sort of paying them some attention except for Pete Rose. And they were like, what gives with this guy? And her friend said, hey, I bet you I'll give you five bucks if you run out on the field and, you know, confront him, which she did. Pete Rose played outfield at the time before his move to the infield. She ran out there.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
Yeah, yeah. He was an outfielder at first, but he played everywhere but I think shortstop and catcher and pitcher. Yeah. Anyway, Pete Rose had a brief chat with her. He was endorsing Ballpark Frank's hot dogs at the time. And she said, hey, I buy those hot dogs. Gave him a kiss on the cheek. He said, you're nuts. You're going to get in trouble. But she didn't at the time.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
She went back to her seat and security didn't come by. And she watched the rest of the game with her friends. And a sports writer in Cincinnati the next day dubbed her the kissing bandit.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
Let's do it. S-Y-L-Y-S-K-S-K-K-K-K-K.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
All right, so Morgana is kissing athletes all over the place. She's getting more and more famous. I mentioned that she did this with most of the sports, but baseball was her number one love. But she would show up at a NASCAR race. She'd kiss an NBA player. She'd go to an NFL game. She went to NHL games. I don't know if she kissed a horse or a jockey, but she did this at a horse race once.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
Apparently, George Brett... sort of got back at her in a playful way when he showed up at the club where she was dancing and jumped up on stage and kissed her.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
Yeah, because if you grew up in the 70s and 80s, and you were a sports fan, in particular a baseball fan of Major League Baseball here in the United States, then no doubt at some point you either saw on the news or saw live during a game a woman wearing
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
Yeah, it was this weird cultural moment in time where someone got really famous for doing something just sort of unusual and something that a lot of people did. Like these days when you see somebody run down on a field, especially since the stabbing of Monica Sellis on the tennis court years ago.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
This is all sort of scary stuff, and you never know what someone's going to do. You know, when Hank Aaron hit his home run, the guys ran down on the field. You know, we're patting him on the back. But that was sort of the first like, oh, boy, what's happening here? Like these white guys are rushing, you know, the black man who broke the white guy's record.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
Well, that was what first started. I mean, Morgana came after this, so it clearly didn't change that much. Oh, OK. I think Monica Sellis is what really, really changed it because that was an actual act of violence. Everyone else had good intentions.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
But these days when somebody rushes the field, it's usually a protester and they usually get tackled in a pretty violent manner and they won't show it on TV immediately. All cameras are off. directed to not show any of this stuff so no one's incentivized to actually do this right but not back then man everyone like she was good for baseball you know
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
Yeah. And, you know, I said that's ridiculous because it's different these days and it is a genuine security risk because you never know what someone's going to do because the world is crazy now. Yeah. But back then, like everyone knew who Morgana was. Everyone knew she was going to run out there. It would take less than a minute.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
run out onto the baseball field and chatted up for a moment with a professional baseball player and then kiss them on the cheek and then run back to the stands waving at least for a while until she started getting arrested for doing this. And that was Morgana the Kissing Bandit.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
She would kiss the player on the cheek, not even on the lips, because she didn't like the chewing tobacco in baseball. And there's absolutely no reason to throw this woman on the ground and kick her for sort of a minor disruption. This is a different time. So if people are like, oh, I don't know, man, you can't do something like that. Like, it's just different these days.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
Everyone knew her and knew she meant no ill will.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
yeah this guy his name was richard haynes they call him the racehorse and he was you know one of the sort of showboaty uh would take wealthy clients accused of everything from murder to you know embezzling and stuff like that and uh apparently one time in court he zapped himself with a cattle prod to prove that it wasn't a lethal weapon so he was that kind of guy yeah uh and this is where
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
We mentioned that he used her bust size as part of the defense because he was going to use the gravity defense, he called it, wherein he would argue that she would just lean over the railings as a sports fan and that the weight of her bust would drag her over the rail onto the field. And I guess the court was like, oh, boy, let's just drop the charges so we don't have to go through that.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
That's right. Scotty Pippen of the Bulls was the last player to get that kiss, and that was in the early 90s. And then she was in the movie Kingpin and in a cameo in 96, retired officially in 2000, even though Scottie Pippen was years before that. But I don't think we mentioned she made millions of bucks off this persona. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Morganna the Kissing Bandit
But eventually, you know, like all entertainers, even even kind of oddball pseudo entertainers has to leave eventually and really went underground. And it's hard to find a lot of recent information there. about her, even though we think she is still alive, probably in her late 70s. But who knows? Because she's never been very truthful about her age. You got anything else? I got nothing else.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And these have been the fascination of like everyone from engineers to historians to physicists over the years because they're just so kind of confusing and how they actually work. And I'm still not entirely sure how it works. It seems to be a little magic involved.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
One thing I know goes a long way toward keeping this ice, and we got to say some of this ice is mined from the mountains and brought down and preserved. Some is made on site. We'll get to that. But one big factor is the insulation of the structure itself, which is made from a mortar called cerouge.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
Yeah. Sand, clay, egg whites, lime, goat hair, and ash. Mm-hmm. Quite a mixture.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
Yeah, probably so. So I mentioned that sometimes the ice was brought in from the mountains and kept there throughout the year. But usually what would happen is they would make ice. They would bring in water. They would divert water from an aqueduct. through these underground water channels called canots. And they would channel them to the north side of this wall.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
It's another thing we haven't mentioned yet is they have these very, very high walls that act as shade for these channels to keep, you know, the wind off of it because stuff isn't going to freeze as fast if it's moving. So to keep the water still and to keep it cooler away from that sun.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
Yeah. Another way that helps us out is that dome shape. It's not domed because they like domes, even though domes are nice. It's conical because that optimizes what's called the solar chimney effect. That's when you create a convection current, letting that heat go up, up, up, and out. through these openings at the top and bringing in that cool air from the bottom.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
That's right. And that feels like a good time for a break. And we'll come back and talk about what the heck they're doing with all this ice right after this.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
All right, so they're making ice. They're preserving ice. What are they doing with all this ice? One of the things they're doing is using it as a refrigerator. You know, they'll store food in there that they don't want to go bad and just using it as a cold house. They will also just use the ice to eat in a treat. They have something called faluda over there. It's a Persian traditional dessert.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
It has thin vermicelli noodles made from cornstarch. And then you mix that up with a little semi-frozen syrup of sugar and rose water and then serve it up with a little lime juice and maybe some ground pistachios. And it's like a little Persian icee.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
Yeah, I'm going to say it's spelled Y-A-K-H, you know, as most words are. C-H-A-A-L. I'm going to say YAKALS.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
Yeah, for sure. They would make those delicious faluda. They would make sherberts and preserve them. Isn't that nuts? Fruit and ice. And they would put them on a donkey and go sell them at market and stuff like that. They would sell ice directly from those places sometimes. And, you know, one of the things they're also taking advantage of is the greenhouse effect.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
You know, the earth is going to stay fairly warm at night because of the greenhouse effect trapping those gases in the atmosphere. But if it's low humidity and if it's a really clear night, that effect is going to be weaker and that heat can dissipate and disappear more readily.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
And so that's when they discovered like, hey, we can make these little thin layers of ice and kind of build, you know, day by day, night by night on these clear, low humidity nights eventually to get, you know, some pretty significant ice.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
Depends on how big those cubes were. Were they big, fancy cocktail cubes? That's a lot more ice than an ice nugget.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
Yeah, I mean, these went away, obviously, because of modern refrigeration came on the scene. And also, one thing that was happening was they were making this ice kind of out in the open, and a lot of it would get contaminated with dust, and it wasn't, like, the healthiest ice in the world.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
And so that combined with modern refrigeration coming along, they were like, maybe we should just not have these much anymore. But like you mentioned, there is one still around at least today. And there are groups there that are trying to preserve this way of life and at least keep it, you know, not like a chief refrigerating method, but like, hey, we can't lose our culture.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
And so let's work to take some of these old ones and restore them at least, even if only for like museum and touring purposes.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
That's right. Get some egg whites too. No one likes those.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
We'll see. But what we're talking about is the promise from our refrigeration episode a little bit more on these ancient – basically ancient refrigerators or cooling systems. They were found across ancient Persia at least as old as 400 B.C. This is modern-day Iran.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Yakhchāls - Ancient Fridges
And this is – these are places where, believe it or not, the climate enables freezing of ice when you would not think you should be able to freeze ice.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
Can you believe that? I mean, they're venomous, they're giant, and they are invading, but come on.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
Yeah, for sure. So the scientific name of these beautiful, beautiful spiders are Nephila clavata. And they are from East Asia. And they got over here like a lot of things get over here, which is in like shipping containers and stuff. A lot of times it's like lumber. That's how you get a lot of insects coming in.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
And they came over from East Asia and really made a home here in the southeast since I think 2013 is when they first spotted them in Georgia.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
Well, you're also seeing a lot of them now because the adults come out and spin their webs in August, September, October.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
Yeah, I mean, they're big, they're orb weavers, so they're going to weave those big, beautiful webs that, I mean, their webs can be 10 feet wide. The one I almost walked into the other day, like face first, was probably about four feet wide and strung between two outdoor umbrellas that were not close to each other. So I don't know if that part counts as the width or not.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
If that does, it was more like eight feet wide. But if you've seen these things and you said like, oh, that's just a garden spider. We have those when I was growing up. What are you talking about, guys? Not the same spider. The garden spider looks a lot like it, but there are some differences because they're, well, different spiders. Garden spiders, the females are bigger than the males.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
And as far as the markings go, the garden spiders have yellow and black basically only. And the Joros have yellow and dark blue with a little bit of red on their belly.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
Um, I mean, I've walked through some some spider webs in my day. Like you do that a lot when you're like backup backpacking because you don't see him on the trail. So that happens a lot. And here that like I walked through one earlier just kind of on my arms. But it wasn't, you know, the nightmare scene where it's you realize it three inches from the spider being on your face kind of thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
That is. Is that a good time for a break? I think so. All right. We'll take a break and we'll be right back after I go take a quick shower.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
That's right. And if you think, you know, how far north are they going to get right now? And I read an article, I think, from June 24 that said West Virginia is about as far north as they've gone so far, except for a satellite population in Baltimore. So they, I guess, got on a container, went to Baltimore, and were like, this isn't so bad.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
I think one of the things we didn't mention that, you know, since they're so native to Georgia especially, or not native, I guess, but invaded in Georgia first, the University of Georgia has done a lot of studying on them. And they found that it turns out these guys can live in a lot colder weather than they previously thought they could. So they'll be to you soon, New Jersey, New York, and beyond.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
You know, I just saw a Joro spider today eating, either eating a bee or fighting a bee. I don't know what was going on, but it was tangling with a bee.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
I think a lot of people have that reaction. There's something. And not only that, but the phrase, take a lover, it's just like. Yes. It's so gross to me.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
Oh, goodness me. You need some of that. Eye bleach. Studio 54 joke.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
Oh, goodness. How did this get so dirty all of a sudden? All right. So they live close to each other. The males are trying to get the attention. They may float on little cobwebby type things and just be like, hey, look over here. And the reason they don't just jump up in a web and say, let's get this thing over with. is because the female will probably kill the male and eat it.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
So they're walking a very fine line trying to get some attention without being eaten. So the University of Georgia professor said, you know, a lot of times, like while the female is eating something, they might just walk up and say, hey, are you enjoying that? What do you think of me?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
But, my friend, should people be killing these things because they're invasive?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
No. I think they're basically saying, hey, there's plenty of stink bugs, so that's fine. It's not like they're killing off the honeybees. And if they do bite you, you might get a little local reaction, but it's not the kind of venom that's going to do any kind of harm to you, really.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Joro Spiders
You should reach into all the hidey holes with those things on.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
Brown noise is deeper, has lower frequencies, it's got more bass, minimalizes that higher frequency. And I didn't really know this, but apparently you can liken some of these to sounds in nature. And apparently brown noise is more akin to like a river rapid or a heavy rainfall or thunder sound.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
Yeah, and this is a part, like, I don't know, this is way above my scientific pay grade, so I'm not sure how you go about this, but he devised this mathematical formula to predict the movements of the pollen and used that to generate an electronic sound, and that was Brown Noise.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
Yeah, so the sound of brown noise is literally the formula for the sound of pollen moving, which is just kooky to think about.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
Yeah, we're doing one on the different color noises, you know, white noise, brown noise, pink noise. And Jerry literally just said, hey, I'm listening to brown noise right now, which I've never heard of anyone just listening to noise unless they were trying to sleep or, you know, at a place where they were trying to block out other noise.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
Well, we just had a great conversation about brown noise offline, but now we're going to talk about white noise, the higher cousin to brown noise. Obviously, it does have a range. It's not like it's just high frequency, but it's not as bass heavy. They have the lows in there. They have the The mids and the highs.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
But white noise is used, aside from just sleeping a lot of times with like noise-canceling headphones and stuff, masking other sounds. This one is akin naturally to like a light rain or a gentle breeze through the trees. Very nice. Sounds kind of nice too. Mm-hmm.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
Yeah, I think I remember talking about that game I played, Ghost of Tsushima. I think that's what it's called. It was the sort of feudal Japanese warrior PS4 game that I played. The sounds in that game, it's a gorgeous game, but the sounds of the wind blowing through the poppy fields and through the bamboo forest, you could tell it was a thing that they really wanted to capture, and they did so.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
Yeah. Dying. Dying. All right. What about pink noise?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
Yeah. And, you know, I just realized I have my app here. I might as well figure out what pink noise sounds like because I wasn't exactly sure. So we can just play this if that's all right with you. Yeah, go ahead. So that's pink. Yeah. That's white. Yeah, it could be pink. I mean, that does sound like ocean waves. That's brown. Okay.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
But my app has a bunch of other colors, and I'm not sure if this is like, hey, let's just go crazy, but there's also purple noise, blue noise. Which app? Are you talking about Dwellspring? No, no, no. This is a different one. But, yeah, our friend actually developed a white noise app, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
That's the one I use on my app. But I forgot Brandon had his. I'm going to switch over just to support.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
Oh, buddy. That is niche. Yeah, exactly. So that just put me to sleep thinking about it.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
I'm sure it is. Nice work, Brandon. So back to the noises, like as far as which one is best for sleep, there have been some very middling studies over the years. We'll mention a few of them, but the problem with these is, you know, in 2017, they were like, hey, let's get eight people in here and watch them sleep. Or the one in 2016, they got 16 people. There's just never a lot of folks, you know.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
But I think Jerry just said it like helped her relax or something or concentrate.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
I guess, you know, bed space is probably not the easiest thing to do unless people are doing this at home. But at Oxford in 2017, they got those eight people, and they said that they fell asleep 40% faster listening to white noise, but their overall sleep was about the same.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
Yeah. Kind of the same thing I said, but with a different word.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
They were like the green thing that was a cucumber once.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
There was a study in 2017 from Northwestern of 13 older adults, and they said pink noise provided deeper sleep overall and improved, again, ability to recall words.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
No, it's tough if you've ever had to be at a hospital for a long time supporting somebody or just, you know, being the patient. It is hard to sleep. The beds are not great. And they're always throwing on those fluorescent lights right when you're dosing off.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
Yeah, that's a good point. And we should say the results of the study in the control group, they found the quality of sleep degraded as they obviously spent multiple nights there with all those beeps and, you know, let me check your blood pressures happening. Once they had the ones who had the white noise, their quality of sleep remained basically the same throughout their stay.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
Yeah, exactly. Or, you know, there there there's that app. There's other apps. There are. Stand-alone sound machines that you can get. You know, that's just a little thing that you put beside your bed or maybe Jerry has beside her desk at work so she can sleep on the job. And then as far as like how to use it, like that's up to you.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
Depending on what noise does best for you, try different ones out. The volume, try some different ones out. I find that I get my very best sort of put-me-to-sleep stuff online. When I run it through an actual speaker instead of just through my phone speaker because you get some more deep bass resonance. Oh, yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
And my napping trick is I will put a pillow over my head and face and stick that phone under there with me, and it creates this sort of echoey – not echoey, but like just sort of a – it traps the sound. It's like a cavern of sound, and that really gets me out.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
Yeah, and I have been on record before. I'm a brown nose adherent. Brown noise, I didn't know. Apparently, did Alma say brown nose?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Colorful Noises
It can also be called red nose or red noise, which I didn't know. But brown noise, as I've demonstrated on the show, if this is white noise, this is brown noise.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
I think one foot was bigger than the other one too. Good Lord. I thought it was a very strange little add on.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
So they contend he was never like a Swedish resident? No.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
Yeah. So he could have spoke Swedish. That's what I just wonder about like ice wall climbing and stuff. He could probably do that in Sweden.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
Yes. Yeah. All right. So maybe one day we'll know. Maybe. I mean, we found out the Somerton man's identity, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
Yeah, it's not like Somerton, man, because that was the most interesting thing about that was the mystery of who he was. It wouldn't care. It wouldn't matter if this guy was indeed Albert Johnson, who was his alias. It's a remarkable story that started in July 1931 when this guy, Albert Johnson, came and moved there. They think he may have come from Sweden.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
Yeah, I think we read a listener mail because we got like 10,000 Australians writing us.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
according to certain people who talked to him here and there. But he was a man of very few words, as we'll see, when he arrived in the vast remote area of the Northwest Territories near Fort McPherson and built a little 8-by-10-foot cabin near the Rat River.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
Yeah, I mean, these are the Mounties. So these guys are not messing around. The story is a little confusing because everywhere you look, it's a little different. But from what I gathered, there were three total visits. One visit when he basically said, get the heck out of here and pointed a gun at them. A second visit when two guys came back. And this time he supposedly refused to talk at all.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
And when they went to look through his windows, he just covered his windows up and ignored them.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
I guess four total because the third one was when those two guys plus two more, I think it was Alfred King and Joe Bernard and two more guys, came back with warrants, forced the door over, and he shot King and a brief firefight ensued. And then finally the fourth visit when they brought a bunch of guys with dynamite and camped out for three days outside his cabin.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
Yeah, I saw that it was like a 60-mile hike just to get to his place. So the fact that they came back four times when this guy probably could have opened the door the first time and said, all right, I won't mess with their traps anymore. And that probably would have been the end of it.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
But, yeah, he managed to evade them on this manhunt by stepping in caribou tracks and from these storms that would come through. And maybe that's a good time for a break.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
Hey, everybody. Chuck and Josh here. And I was recently a guest once again on one of my favorite podcasts. It's called The Puzzler with old pal and friend of the show, AJ Jacobs. AJ gives really fun and funny word puzzles to guests like me, like Ken Jennings, like Dax Shepard, and hopefully like Josh because he would be so great on this show.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
Oh, you got to be on it. It's a lot of fun. It's sort of like Wordle or Connections, but for your ears. And I think we should play everyone just a little clip. It's a puzzle that I have to convert movie titles from the metric system back to their actual title. Oh, wow. From my second appearance on the puzzler right now. Nice.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
That's right. The mad trapper of Rat River, a.k.a. perhaps, I don't even know about perhaps, almost certainly Canada's most infamous unknown person on the lam and the largest manhunt in Canada's history conducted to try and get this guy.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
All right, this is going to be great.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
So subscribe to The Puzzler with A.J. Jacobs to tease your mind and tickle your funny bone.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
That's right. They got a pretty legendary WW1 Canadian fighter pilot named Wilfred Wap May to come in. A little side note here, Wap May was in the dogfight that ended the Red Baron's life. So a very sort of famous Canadian fighter pilot flying above for the first time, seeing if he could just spot trails from above.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
Yeah, supposedly this is one of the really first big news stories to be broken via electronic media. So you've got your first search and rescue, or I guess not search and rescue, search and destroy mission featuring a plane. You've got the first big news stories breaking on radio for the first time.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
One of the weird parts of this case, I said he was a man of few words, is as the story goes, this guy didn't say a word. The whole time. Like there was never like, you know, it's my right to be here. You know, get away. I'm just trying to live. Like supposedly this guy said nothing to any of them.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
Yeah, I think the Lusho people were the ones who initially filed the complaint. Did you see which tribes helped out in the search?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
So another part of the kind of a fun fact of this story is or at least part of the lore is that at one point they had him pinned in a steep canyon and he supposedly scaled a near vertical wall of ice basically to get out of there.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
That's right. They got him finally after this long, long manhunt, a very successful evasion for a long time. But, yeah, they eventually got him. No one. I mean, part of the you know, the second part of this is just the mystery. Like not only who was he literally, but like who was this guy to move way out there?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
To not, you know, they supposedly back, you know, closer to town, even though I'm sure that was super small as well. It was like a very friendly place. And he was known as a loner and very unfriendly, which was not the norm. And like, who was this guy who just moved out to the middle of nowhere and like didn't speak a word this entire time? Right. Yeah. Why would he do this?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
Yeah, for sure. I wouldn't would want nothing to do with this guy.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
So like you said, they exhumed his body in 2007 once DNA sampling was, you know, a viable thing. And that has enabled some genetic comparisons to possible relatives. They obviously didn't, you know, no one has come forward with it like a perfect match or anything. But they made comparisons with more than two dozen families.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
And they have some strong circumstantial evidence that what family he may have been from and where they have landed now is that they're pretty sure that his background is Swedish. And he has been linked to multiple descendants of Jews. A gentleman named Gustav Magnusson, who died in 1853, and Britta Svendater, who passed away in 1846. And they are pretty sure that he's a descendant of them.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Mad Trapper of Rat River
But nobody from any of those bloodlines has come forward either.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Drop Bears
Yeah. And luckily, you know, we toured Australia and did some great shows all over that wonderful country. And we both checked in as safe at the end of it from drop bears. Thank God it didn't happen.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Drop Bears
That's right. I'm genuinely wondering how many Australians think that we're being serious right now.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Drop Bears
Yeah. Yeah. A lot of people think it started in either Sydney or South Wales. The early settlers there, you know, playing pranks on people who came probably because they didn't want them there. It would be my guess.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Drop Bears
Yeah, exactly. Apparently, the Australian Museum over the years has kind of kept this joke going by fabricating sightings. It's sort of like a like here in America, like a jackalope.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Drop Bears
You know, like creating these creatures, not like a Bigfoot. It's not a cryptid, but I guess a jackalope probably technically is. But, you know, just sort of a humorous thing to keep going. And the official government even gets involved and kind of plays along.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Drop Bears
Well, and I'm sure they're also like, there's all manner of things that'll kill you. Like the last thing we need is a made up thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Drop Bears
There actually is, like, evidence that there could have been some sort of ancient animal in Australia during the last ice age that is similar to a drop bear. That does have a real scientific name. Thylacoleocarnifex, or a marsupial lion. Apparently the skull does resemble a koala or maybe a wombat. But instead of grinder teeth, they have... shearing teeth.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Drop Bears
And apparently it once belonged to a group of marsupials called the diprotodonts. And with today's koalas, they're in that same group of marsupials. So possums, wombats, kangaroos, and koalas, they were all part of this group back in ancient times. But whatever this more fearsome one was, A, it wasn't a drop bear, but it was similar enough for people to reference it at least.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Drop Bears
Oh, maybe. Who knows? The first official mentions that people know about were in the beginning of beginnings of the 1900s. And it wasn't in a newspaper like the words drop bear until 1982, apparently, when there was a message in the 21st birthdays column of the Canberra Times on 31 July. You know, it's from a different country if they say 31 July. Right. We say July 31st over here.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Drop Bears
And apparently I say Canberra, and that's not right either, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Drop Bears
Okay, I got you. But in this message, regardless of pronunciations, it was Tam, T-A-M, beware of drop bears in the future, for sure, totally, love, Clint. And no one knows who these people were. We'll never find out who these people were, but the word's drop bear, first time in print, apparently.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Drop Bears
I say we take a break. That's quite a cliffhanger when you've got Crocodile Dundee hanging out there. And we'll be right back after this. Crocodile Dundee
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Drop Bears
That's right, because, you know, if you're especially a tourist, or maybe a foreign soldier, you're walking around the outback... Look up because if you walk under a tree, a drop bear might drop down, knock you on the head, and eat your head.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Drop Bears
All right. We promised talk of Crocodile Dundee in 1981 on his show, The Paul Hogan Show. He did a skit where he starts talking about the untold horrors of the Australian bush. And although he didn't use the word drop bear, he talked about killer koalas silently sitting and then dropping out of trees and killing people.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Drop Bears
That's right. And we've gotten real tips because, you know, they like to play along with this stuff. And so you can actually get real published tips on how to avoid being killed by these, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Drop Bears
Yeah, yeah. I'm surprised that's all it was because why didn't they say like human feces or something if they really want to kick it up?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Drop Bears
Yeah, I guess so. I guess they got a little closer to human feces on this next one. A little bit. Yeah. Uh, they said that you got to smear your cheeks and forehead with Vegemite. Boy, I'm going to get killed for that one. You are, but. I'm so sorry, Australia.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Drop Bears
That's right. And you've all got great senses of humor. So I know you'll take that with a plum.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Drop Bears
Yeah, and if all of these things fail, I believe so much of what you say. If you told me I needed to wear that for any reason, I probably would.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Drop Bears
You know if you want to podcast better, put on a neck brace. Apparently, if none of those things work, though, and you are a visiting military soldier and you are attacked, to protect yourself, curl into a ball and protect all of your major internal organs and major arteries.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Drop Bears
Yeah. No, I mean, that was kind of sad. If you look up drop bear, there's some funny pictures of like just photoshopped koalas that look super scary and mean.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Drop Bears
In my mind, I said funny. I guess only the listener will know the truth of which one of us just had a stroke.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tornado Alley
You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. Are there any pictures of you online? Then you could already be in a massive police database without even knowing it.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tornado Alley
In this episode, we dive into how cops are using AI and facial recognition and sometimes getting it wrong and putting innocent people behind bars.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tornado Alley
Listen to Kill Switch on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tornado Alley
That database is now being used by police departments all across the country to match criminal suspect photos.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tornado Alley
This is happening right now. People are getting arrested and doing actual time in jail after being picked out by a computer. I'm Dexter Thomas, host of Killswitch, where every Wednesday we explain the right now of living in the future. You can turn off the computer, but do not let the computer turn you off.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tornado Alley
Listen to Killswitch in the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Outlawry
Yeah. It was a long time ago, though. So who knows what was going on back then? Sure. Mainly medieval England is what we're talking about. But the earliest kind of this outlaw status became a law in 6th century Frankish law called the Lex Salica. This was under King Clovis, early 500s. So this is a long, long time ago. And this is basically like, yeah, if you don't respond to a summons –
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Outlawry
then you're outside of the king's protection. This kind of started the legal basis for that. But medieval England is where it's sort of most known. If you were over the age of 14 and you were a man, if you were a woman, you were said to be waived, even though it was basically the same thing. But if you were over 14 and you were a male, you could be outlawed.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Outlawry
And basically say, like you said, like, hey, anything you do or anything anyone does to you, rather, like we're not even going to prosecute them. Somebody could break into your house and steal your stuff and you're an outlaw. So sorry, T.S. for you.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Outlawry
Exactly. And you mentioned a process. There was a process. It wasn't immediate. It was a pretty slow process even. But what would happen is the sheriff of wherever you were would locate these fugitives. They would do some investigating, see if they owned any property that they could get. to basically say like, hey, we've got your, you know, your stash of chickens.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Outlawry
Come to court, maybe you'll get those chickens back. If that never happens and they can't get them to come to court or whatever, then the sheriff has to sit through this five different times in court calling, you know, the fugitive to come forward. And after the fifth non-appearance, then they hit the gavel or drop the glove or whatever the heck they did back then and said, you, sir, are an outlaw.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Outlawry
Yeah. Every once in a while, a colleague will drum up the nerve to approach us very sheepishly with head bowed, say, what do you guys think about this idea? And Josh will wave them away and say, it shall be on the list in seven years time. Yes. Or so.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Outlawry
Yeah, and even if someone, you know, your neighbor didn't come and rob your house or try and kill you or something, if you had outlaw status, you were definitely not a part of the community anymore. You were totally ostracized and shunned. Sometimes it was just sort of the way that, you know, everyone shuns somebody, which is very quietly and passive-aggressively.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Outlawry
Sometimes it was very much official, though. If they had an outlaw they captured... They could say like, hey, we're going to really ostracize you. We're going to send you to Australia. Have fun over there.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Outlawry
So this was, you know, usually like real outlaws, like real criminals, even if it was something like not appearing in court. You said it was oftentimes a lot worse. But it wasn't always that. In some countries, I know we talked about it in our, I think we had a leprosy episode many years ago, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Outlawry
Yeah. In India, if you had leprosy, you could be banned and ostracized and essentially get something akin to an outlaw status by being sent to a leper colony where you had where you didn't have the same rights as everyone else. I think they call leprosy Hansen's disease now. Is that right?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Outlawry
But no one would know what we meant if we just said that. So.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Outlawry
And I knew the leper was not something that people say anymore.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
Yeah, and also, like, I feel so bad that... That he had that hope that he thought like, oh, wait a minute. So you'll you'll betray the mafia if I just buy you out of this thing. Like, yeah, totally. That's no big deal. And then he actually believed that. I mean, what a what a awful way to die. Desperate and also hopeful at the same time.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
Yeah. Well, let's just describe the crime scene. This guy was found deceased at the scene wearing a bulletproof vest from a gunshot wound from his own handgun to the back of his head. And it did not have his fingerprints on his own gun.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
Yeah. So the sheriff was like, well, it looks like a suicide to me. You know, the guy put on surgical gloves and, you know, shot himself in the back of the head as one does. And then Managed to somehow to take those gloves off and hide them.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
Yeah. His wife said, no, there's no way that this was a suicide. That's impossible. And now we're going to tell you a little bit about Charles Morgan and things will become pretty clear as we do.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
Yeah. Like just putting money in escrow, all of a sudden it's got a little bit more legitimacy to it. Yeah. It's not the most regulated industry, so it's a little easier to get away with something like that probably as an escrow agent, or at least certainly it was in 1977. Yeah. And that's what he was doing, it seems like. You know, from all accounts, it didn't seem like he was a bad dude.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
It seems like somebody – Maybe like in a Sopranos episode where he got in a little over his head, maybe ended up feeling like he had to do certain things once the mafia got their, you know, their finger in his pie.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
But he was doing this for the mafia, and there's a journalist for Unsolved Mysteries at the time named Don Devereaux, who basically was like, this guy was helping the mafia launder money through Arizona as an escrow agent by... buying and selling platinum and gold is how they were doing it.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
That's right. This is the case of a sort of a lesser known unsolved true crime murder, in fact. Yeah. I hope that didn't spoil anything. I don't think so. In this thing you put together, called it bizarre. I take issue with that. I don't think it's bizarre at all. But it is unsolved and interesting.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
Yeah, he's missing a shoe. His hands are zip tied together. There are another set of zip ties that I guess he got out of, but on one of his ankles. And she immediately is like, oh, my God, the mafia has their fingers in your pie. That's right. I know what this means. He was refusing to speak and wrote down on a piece of paper. And this is the part that I just find interesting.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
And I don't take issue with it, but I'll tell you what I mean. He wrote down that his throat had been painted with a hallucinogenic drug that could either drive him insane or his words or destroy his nervous system and kill him. So don't call the cops. and don't say anything out loud, and move my car, go hide my car, because I don't want them to know I'm back.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
All right, we're in agreement then, because I don't think that's a thing, is it?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
Yeah, what I really tried to dig up, and, again, there's just not a lot, is, like, did he experience any, you know, drug effects?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
Yeah, for sure. Super scary stuff, obviously. After about a week, like you said, his Ruth had nursed him back to health and things sort of returned to normal in his life, except that he started wearing a bulletproof vest. He started he grew a beard out to try and kind of disguise himself.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
He started driving his daughters to and from school every day when they used to walk because he was worried for their safety. And he wouldn't tell his wife what was going on. He was just like business as usual. And the excuse was like, hey, I can't tell you what's going on because I have to keep you safe. He might have hinted that he was a government agent. But basically, Ruth, don't ask.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
It sounds like any episode of The Sopranos to me.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
No, no, for sure. I mean, this stuff is a little weird. She got the call from a woman who said he's okay. I think she called him Chuck even. Chuck is okay. He's all right. She also mentioned Ecclesiastes from the Bible, chapter 12, verses 1 through 8. This would pop up again in a second, but I'm sure you went and read Ecclesiastes 12, 1 through 8 as I did.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
The only thing I can sum up is that it sounded like some Sam Jackson kind of stuff in Pulp Fiction.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
Like just sort of a scary, ominous biblical passage is how I interpreted that.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
That's right. Did you say that was in his underwear?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
I was leaving that for you. It was clipped to the inside of his underwear. The bill also had seven Hispanic last names written on it. There was a map showing a known drug smuggling route between Mexico and Tucson. And then the founders on that bill, the founders are signing the Declaration of Independence. They numbered them one through seven. And then the biblical stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
They also found one of his teeth wrapped up in a handkerchief in the car. There was a piece of paper with directions of where he was buried and handwritten handwriting. And someone else's sunglasses were in the car.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
I don't know. Maybe they intended to send it as like you would a lopped finger as a warning and they never got around to it. That'd be what I would say. But why did he have it? Well, that's what I'm saying. I mean, someone clearly was out there in the desert with him in that car.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
Here's the scene. The two mafia guys are driving away, and they're like, hey, nobody's ever going to find this body, right? Hey, not out here, they're not. And you got the tooth to mail to the broad, right? Oh, Vinny, I left the tooth. You left the tooth? Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
So that's what I think happened. But, yeah, that doesn't make a lot of sense. A couple of days after the body was discovered, a woman called the sheriff's department said, I am the person who called Ruth Morgan a few days earlier. My name is Green Eyes. And they said, how pretty. And she said, thank you. And they said, are your eyes green? She said, they're actually a shade of blue.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: The Death of Charles Morgan
She said, but that's not important. She said, I met with Chuck at a local motel recently. He had been hiding out there for about a week and he was on the run. He had a briefcase, like had a ton of money. He said that someone put a hit out on him and he was getting in touch with the hit man to buy back that contract. Obviously, that did not happen.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Can You Not Have A Name?
Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Can You Not Have A Name?
Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Franca Viola
That's right, and that was a legal thing. It was a socially accepted thing to where you could restore honor to that bride. It was a loophole if you wanted to get married and your parents didn't like you were getting married to. But there was a very dark version of this in which a man could take a woman that he wanted to marry, even if she didn't want to. He could take her away.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Franca Viola
He could kidnap her. He could hold her against her will. He could sexually assault her. And then in the same way that that elopement, which was consensual, would have to be, you know, could restore that marriage. They would then come back with a woman and say, well, you are now a tainted woman. If you you're damaged goods, no one's going to marry you.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Franca Viola
So if you want to restore your honor and you want to have a family one day and be married, then you have to marry me, maybe your captor and assaulter.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Franca Viola
Yeah, so this was a thing that went seemingly completely unchallenged as far as anyone knows until the mid-1960s when a woman named Franca Viola came along and Said no. In 1963, in her hometown of Alcamo, she was 15 years old. She was engaged to a 23-year-old nephew of a Sicilian mafioso. His name was Filippo Melodia. And they were headed toward marriage, but he got nabbed for a crime, for theft.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Franca Viola
Six months into their engagement, she broke it off. He fled to Germany to, you know, to escape this going to prison, basically. And while he was gone, she became engaged. She fell in love to another guy, this guy she grew up with named Giuseppe Ruisi. Her former husband. fiance, I guess, Melodia came back in 1965, said, I want you back. And she said, no, I really love this guy.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Franca Viola
That's right. So I feel like that's halfway point. It's a good time for a break. And we'll tell you what happened right after this.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Franca Viola
All right, so I actually kind of spoiled it earlier when I said that she said no, but that's exactly what happened. Franca very, very bravely decided to press charges. And like you said, she was the first woman in modern times, maybe of all times, to say I'm not participating in this. even though her honor was tarnished, her family's reputation was tarnished. They got threats.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Franca Viola
That's right, and we're going to issue a trigger warning on this one. Part of the story has to do with sexual assault, so we just wanted to kind of let everyone know that that's coming. But ultimately, this is a story of courage and bravery.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Franca Viola
Their barn and their vineyard were burned down because, remember, this is a nephew of a mafioso. So some heavy things were going down. And these guys were arraigned for trial. It became an international story in 1966. They knew he did it, so it wasn't like, did you do it or not? He basically said, no, no, no, I was lovesick. She loved me too. And it was the parents who didn't approve.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Franca Viola
So this is just like a good old-fashioned eloping. What was that called? Fuatina. It's like a good old-fashioned fuatina. And she said this. I am the property of no one. No one can force me to love a person I do not respect. Honor is lost by the one who does certain things, not the one who is subjected to them.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Franca Viola
So the media, you know, got a hold of this story, like I said earlier. And you might think, like, the media talked about, like, just how awful this was. They did in a way, but the media in Italy also talked about how pretty she was. And there were, on TV, there were panel discussions where they talked to local men about, like, hey, like, you know, she's good looking. Would you still marry her?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Franca Viola
And, you know, they were all like, no, I still wouldn't marry her. So the media coverage was just very sexist and not fair. But she did get married to Giuseppe. They were married December 1968. She was 20 by this time. He was 25 years old. And it was a national celebration, basically, when she got married.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Franca Viola
Yeah, and this was 1966 when it happened. So you would think, well, in 1967, they probably got rid of this thing. Not so. It took till 1981 to repeal that law, which is staggering. I can't believe it took that long.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Franca Viola
Yeah, for sure. If you think, why haven't I seen this movie? Well, you can. There's a filmmaker named Marta Savina who had an award-winning short film called Viola, and she turned that into a feature film called Prima Donna or The Girl from Tomorrow.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Franca Viola
Yeah. Did she see the movie or was it just from something she read?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Franca Viola
I want to check out that movie and see what that's like.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
That's right. And when you said tulip mania. Yeah. That's really what it was called. You weren't just being cheeky.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
So a little bit about tulips, native to places like Kazakhstan and Eastern Europe and the Himalayas. They don't look like the tulips in their original form that we think of today. But they have been cultivated over the years and, you know, crossbred to where they look like they look like tulips now. These beautiful tulips popping up here in Atlanta already this spring. Yeah. And they're lovely.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
They're grown from bulbs. And they're, I don't know about how easy or hard it is, but they, like I said, are crossbred to create new and exciting varieties and colors.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
So in this case, you had, economically speaking, you had a big time demand all of a sudden. But not only was it a big time demand, it was a big time demand of people that had a lot of money. So the price went through the roof very, very quickly. A bulb, a single bulb, One tulip bulb would fetch 2,000 florin.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
And just to put it into perspective, what you could buy back then for 2,000 florin, 16,000 pounds of cheese. 250 tons of beer, a couple of hundred sheep or maybe 16 grown oxen.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
And they were paying prices in today's dollars. Thank you, Investopedia, for doing this weird translation. But in today's dollars for a single tulip bulb, they were paying 50 grand, 150 grand, even sometimes for the rarest varieties up to a million dollars for a single bulb.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
That's right. Tulip mania was perhaps the first financial bubble to happen and then burst. And we should probably talk a little bit about what an economic bubble is, don't you think?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
Yeah, they're writing out a giant check with a feathered pen and they're just like, I can't believe I'm paying this amount of money for a tulip.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
Yeah, for sure. They were actually sold on the Dutch Stock Exchange. And these were, you know, some wealthy investors. But everybody got in on the gang, like the gang, the game, just regular middle working class people, even like people of the lower classes.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
They started cashing in everything they could, selling their houses in some cases, selling the tools of their trade that they were previously making money on to invest in these tulips. And, you know, what's going to happen is that eventually it's going to burst. And it did so less than two years after this frenzied investment stuff started in 1636.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
Yeah, I mean, it affected the wealthy, obviously, in some cases, but it also affected a lot of those people that were looking to get wealthy and did sometimes, you know, make a lot of money during this, you know, less than two-year period. But, you know, like I said, some people sold their homes and all of a sudden they don't have a home and they're stuck with all these tulips.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
The trades people who, you know, sold their tools Because they were like, hey, I'm in the tulip game now. I don't need these ironworking skills or tools. All of a sudden, they couldn't even go back to that trade because they didn't have the stuff they needed to do it. And the people who bought those future contracts were the people that were really, really in trouble, right? Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
Well, they tried to, yeah, not to much effect. But the courts finally said, all right, we have to do something here. So why don't we work out a deal where the traders pay 10 percent of the contract's face value? But nobody was happy with that because the suppliers were still losing tons of money. The buyers still – were in bad shape because the value of those tulips just, you know, plummeted.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
That's right. Because as anyone who's ever been to a bubble rave or played bubbles with your kids or just adult friends who enjoy bubbling... That bubble is going to burst. They all will eventually. And that's what happens with an economic bubble too. The price will drop usually pretty quickly. And a lot of people start selling off very quickly.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
And 10 percent of a future contract was a lot more than they were worth now. And so, you know, nobody really won in the end. And it wrecked the Dutch economy for, you know, it took a couple of decades to sort of naturally heal itself back to where it was.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
Yeah, it's gorgeous. And I can also recommend a classic Conan O'Brien bit when he used to go on location and do remote stuff. He has a very, very funny one from, I believe, his first iteration of his show where he and Andy went to Amsterdam and went out with a camera to the tulip farms and the tulip markets. And it was very, very funny.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
You got anything else? I have no other recommendations other than plant tulip bulbs. They're gorgeous.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Tulipmania
And those who get out early enough can usually avoid it. But every single time someone is going to be left holding that asset that is all of a sudden not worth much of anything. And a lot of times people have invested their entire life savings in this stuff. A lot of times they bought this stuff on credit. And all of a sudden, this thing isn't worth that much money.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Watch Night
Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees. Just ask the Capital One Bank Guy. It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast, too. Thanks, Capital One Bank Guy. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Watch Night
I say we take an early ad break and come back and talk a little more about this tradition. All right, let's do it. Hey everybody, it's Chuck and Josh here to talk to you about Squarespace. Squarespace makes it easy to build the website of your dreams and do whatever you like with it.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Watch Night
Capital One N.A. Member FDIC. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. And happy new year to you. This is short stuff with the happy new year edition.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Watch Night
Yeah, and when it's time to collect that money, Squarespace offers an easier way to collect payments so you can focus on growing your business. You can invoice clients and get paid for your services, turn leads into clients with proposals, estimates, and contracts, and simplify your workflow and manage your service business on one platform. What else could you possibly ask for?
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Watch Night
So, Chuck, this is very much associated with, again, the African-American and specifically Methodist community. One of the other traditions is that on New Year's Day, they'll have an amazing meal, usually of Southern cuisine, like Hoppin' John, potato salad, which is more German than Southern, cornbread. That's a big one. And it just sounds as delicious as can be.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Watch Night
And a lot of people say like, OK, yes, Watch Night, the first one ever was December 31st, 1862. But what a lot of people don't understand is that Watch Night was already a tradition in the Methodist denomination. So the enslaved Africans who got together for this first watch night were actually doing two things. They were observing that traditional Methodist watch night service.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Watch Night
But this one was extra special because of the Emancipation Proclamation coming into effect the next day.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Watch Night
Yeah, and the original Watch Night, and still today, one of the big threads to it or the point to it is to get Methodists to reflect on just how well they're living their life. I think the Snopes put it in a way that if you basically die tomorrow, where are you going to go, essentially? And that, I guess, is a pretty good thing to reflect on every four weeks. Sure.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Watch Night
Yeah. Happy 2025 to you, Chuck. Yeah. And to you. And to Jerry. Yeah. So it's appropriate that we are talking about Watch Night tonight because it is a longstanding tradition in the African-American community, specifically the African-American Methodist community, that every New Year's Eve, they typically hold a service.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Watch Night
Because a lot of stuff can happen in four weeks, you know? I was doing good last month. This month, not so much. Right. But yeah, that 1862 watch night just changed everything so much that people don't even associate it with that original version, that covenant renewal service any longer. They just associate it with the freedom from slavery.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Watch Night
And of course, the Emancipation Proclamation didn't just like immediately free slaves. It did on paper. Legally, as far as the U.S. federal government was concerned, all enslaved people were free as of January 1st, 1863. But the United States, the Union, was at war with the Confederacy.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Watch Night
And the Confederacy wasn't exactly observing new federal laws, especially ones that freed the enslaved people in the South.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Watch Night
No, it just did not go like that. But just the gravity of what had just happened, this executive order proclaimed by Lincoln, which apparently first came in September 22nd, 1862. He basically said, hey, everybody, get ready for it, because on January 1st of next year, all enslaved people are going to be free.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Watch Night
He said that all persons held as slaves within any state or designated part of a state, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States. And there's probably no sweeter words for enslaved people to hear coming out of Abraham Lincoln's mouth at the time.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Watch Night
Yeah. For those congregants whose services end at 10, they're very well known to hop in a cab and put on their big oversized Nivea hat and say, get me to Times Square stat. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Watch Night
That sounds so terrible. I mean, of course, the legend associated with it, which apparently is quite true, is like if you have to pee, T.S. for you because you have to stay in the same spot that you arrived in. And if you leave, you cannot come back in. So if you want to stay there until midnight... Buddy, you better be able to hold your pee for like six hours.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Watch Night
Yeah. You know, if you look over, somebody's zoned out and they have like a look of relief across their face, they're peeing themselves right then. Yeah. Why is that guy drinking yellow Gatorade? Brody. Yeah. Short Stuff is out. Happy New Year, everybody.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Watch Night
starting maybe around 7 p.m., maybe 10 p.m., and that it traditionally ends just after midnight, after the new year. And the reason that it's so deeply rooted in the African-American community in the United States is because there was what's considered the first watch night in this tradition came on December 31st, 1862.
Stuff You Should Know
Short Stuff: Watch Night
And the next day, Abraham Lincoln's executive order, known as the Emancipation Proclamation— would come into effect.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Oh, look at us. Yeah, let's do that. And we'll talk about opening night right after this.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
I mean, I would have been six years old to nine, so I probably could have gotten into Studio 54.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah, they I mean, the pre hype was there in full because well, because of the PR push for one. But also because they were selling memberships before it opened. They had 18000 people apply. to get a membership card. So here's how it worked.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
If you just showed up and you were lucky enough to get in and had to pay the cover, I think they landed on like $10, even though I saw everything from $7 to $14. $10 is around close to $50 today, so it wasn't cheap to get in for a cover charge. But if you bought a membership card for between seventy five and one hundred and fifty, you were guaranteed.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
And that's in scare quotes because nothing was really guaranteed as far as entry goes there. But you were supposedly guaranteed entry, but you had to pay with a three dollar reduction in charge. Eighteen thousand people applied for that card and only three thousand got it pre opening.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah. The Quaaludes thing is weird because there were people in the documentary saying, like, nobody was ever on a downer in that place and it was all uppers. And so I don't know. It's just very strange. Maybe it went well with cocaine and alcohol.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
All right. So people are showing up. You mentioned you mentioned Brooke Shields, right?
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Okay. Well, Brooke Shields was there. She was 11 years old. That's my opening joke there. And she was taken there by Robin Leach, who would later go on to host Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
I love it. So you did, what was the first one? Robin Leach. Robin Leach. The last one?
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
And then the actor who played a commercial spokesperson.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah, I mean, I was doing like Wolfman Jack and John Travolta back then, so I was also at the time.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Okay. Or Drew Carey. Let's just move on, shall we? All right. So we mentioned that they were called the Broadway Catering Corporation. And that would make sense later. And that moment comes right now, everybody, because they didn't have a liquor license, permanent liquor license, that is.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
So every day, if you're like a catering company in New York or I guess a lot of other towns, you can get a temporary like one day license. liquor permit to do your catered event. And they did that every single day for a year.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
So just mountains of drugs and then fruit juice and soda.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
All right. The Monday after it opened, I think they were usually closed on Mondays, but they would have special parties on the Mondays, which became a very big thing there, like renting the place out for like a $50,000 to $100,000 party, which at the time is, I mean, it's a lot of money now, but back then it was a ton of money. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
But Halston, fashion designer Halston, threw Bianca Jagger a 30th birthday party there the Monday after it first opened. And they were like basically kind of putting it together up until the minute that the doors opened.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
I mean, that's the legend. I don't know. I didn't verify it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah, for sure. And just five, six, seven years ago, Bianca Jagger very forcefully wanted to make it clear that she did not ride a horse around Studio 54 because she's a big animal rights activist now. And she really wanted that cleared up. So we would be remiss if we didn't say that that's a fact. Folk tale in that she claims she sat on it for like two seconds and then got off of it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
And she makes a distinction between that and riding a horse around a nightclub.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah. I mean, that's not because there was so much of it. It was because they didn't want the bank and the IRS to find out about it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Oh, no. I wouldn't say it was a ton of money. I'm just saying it was all in an effort to obfuscate.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
So, Rebell was the – he was the guy who was – I guess sort of the host of the whole thing. He loved being out there. He loved hobnobbing with people. It was his biggest sort of dream in life to be a part of that crowd. Where Schrager was kind of like, he was the guy behind the scenes.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah, there's a documentary on Netflix that's okay called Studio 54. Yeah, I saw it. From filmmaker Matt, I guess, Tiernauer. There was a very bad movie about Studio 54, like a movie movie with Mike Myers playing Steve Rubell.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Seemed like, I mean, they were both smart guys, but he was definitely more of the brains behind the operation that would go there for a little while, then go home to his family.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah. Well, and the good thing about the documentary is he's still with us. And it was sort of the first time he had talked much about it because he's, again, just sort of famously averse to attention. But he's he's one of the main, you know, interviewees in the doc.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah, I mean, that was 90% of the crowd were just people, because in a room of 2,000 people, there's, let's say, 10 to 12 celebrities getting all the attention. That's a lot of other regular folks out there, but they still had to get in. In order to get in, they had to pass whatever sort of secret test, rebel, and the other door people, I think the head doorman's name was Mark Benecke.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah, but he was a good-looking guy, and he had never done anything like that, and they were like, well, you're handsome, so you should be able to judge other people on their looks. Rebelle famously said a year ago, I wouldn't have even let myself in. And this is another one of those things where of two minds, like on one hand, he was like, you don't have to have money to get in.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
You can be gay, straight, black, white, Hispanic. Like he didn't judge people on that. And so I'm like, oh, that's pretty cool. But he's like, I'm really just judging you on how you look.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
No, I think it's funny that you sat around and thought about whether or not he would take money or not because he had enough money.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
So Henry Winkler didn't get in. Some of the Kennedy kids didn't get in. There were a lot of people who didn't get in that were even famous because, you know, Henry Winkler's a Fonz, but he wasn't some cool guy in real life. They didn't want him in there.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
No, Mike. It turns out Mike Rebell or I'm sorry, Steve Rebell, Mike Myers, young Billy Joel and Alex Edelman all sort of are the same person.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah, supposedly when they didn't get in, because Grace Jones did not leave their name on the list, they wrote that song, but it was instead of Ah, Freak Out, it was Ah, F Off.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah. But if they did have some criteria as far as like not necessarily the person on the street that they would look in, which one commentator from the time described as it was like the damned looking into paradise, like all these people on the street, like trying to look through the blacked out doors when they would open.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
But they had a list of like, you know, what kinds of designations people had. There were the no goods, which they designated as GN on the sheet instead of NG. They had regular guests who were pay guests who could get in, but they had to pay the whatever, 10 bucks. They had the comps list. who were the freebies, and then the NFUs, which were the no F-ups.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
They all look alike. But it's interesting when I was watching the documentary, Emily was floating through the room here and there and people were just like, oh, my God. And we would just do this and this and this and this. And she finally wandered through and just went, these people sound like idiots.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
And by that they mean, like, you can't screw this one up. They're very important. You have to get them in and get them straight to Steve Rubell.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Maybe famous squares or narcs or competition or something.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah. Look in the park. They used to say polyester melts under the lights. So Rubell would chide people and say, go home and put on a cotton shirt. And then one guy, and this is from a 1978 New York Times piece, said the doorman told me to go home and read Freud's essay on rejection.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah, there were reports of people climbing down ropes from other buildings into the courtyard that had secret maps of the subway system supposedly to get them in there. And then, and this is confirmed, there was a gentleman who was dressed in a tuxedo, tried to sneak through an air vent, and was discovered dead.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah. Who played Halston in that? I meant to look that up. Tommy Lee Jones, I think. Oh, wow. Do you want to take a break? Yeah, let's take our second break, and we'll be back with Act 3.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah, I think. And it's sort of like it, it reeked of a documentary on like the, you know, the, what was that? Ill-fated doomed Island music festival.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
All right. So I don't know if we mentioned it. Yeah, I think I did. That it was closed on Monday. It was open Tuesday through Sunday from they opened at 10 p.m. They closed at 6 a.m. ish or whenever the party was over, really.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah. A thousand percent. Yeah. I mean, I may sleep until seven here and there.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah, it was kind of like that where she was just like, these people are idiots. Like, how long can you just sit around and talk about doing cocaine every night and dancing until the sun came up?
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
But the days of staying out all night are. Long in my past.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah. I mean, it was fun a little bit back in the day.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Speaking of total butt, if you want to see a picture of Tennessee Williams looking really out of his mind, there's a fun picture of Tennessee Williams in a Studio 54 couch. Oh, I want to see that. Yeah. He's bloodshot eyes. He looks like he's, you know, been through it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
I mean, I think Divine went by the tag of drag queen back then probably, but I'm not really sure about these days.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah, and I saw that sort of the heartbeat of that crowd, like the real regulars, because, you know, Mick Jagger and Elton John and Robert De Niro, like everyone who was anyone would pop in there. But like the heartbeat of the regulars were Liza Minnelli. Halston, Bianca Jagger, and Andy Warhol. And I think Truman Capote was like the fifth of that foursome.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah. She just sort of, it's like, all right, Grace.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
She was a well, I think she was an attorney or former attorney and a widow who just like this lady loved to dance. And in the documentary, they were like at first the doorman, Binnicky, was like, no, man, this this isn't. It's going to be like a, what do you call it? Like a gimmick if we start letting people like this in.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
And he said Ravel was adamant and just said, no, she's exactly who we want in this place.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah, I bet it kept her young and alive and also killed her somehow at the same time.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
I guess we could go over some of these parties. We mentioned that they would throw these huge, huge private parties. And they did everything from throw a country western party for Dolly Parton with more live animals, goats and sheep and pigs and stuff. Yeah, God knows what happened to those sheep. Yeah. I don't like the animal stuff in there. Like nothing good is happening to those animals.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah. Yeah. Don't take your goat to a cocaine disco.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
That's an epitaph. What else? Liz Taylor had a big birthday party there with the Rockettes, among other things.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah, New York is always fun at Halloween. I imagine in 1978 and 79, Studio 54, it was crazy.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah, I had a couple of fun Halloweens in New York back when I was living in Jersey. I was the bridge and tunnel guy.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
One of the outer boroughs. I gotcha. Because you came in via bridge and tunnel.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah, Steve Rubell was very mouthy about how much money they were making in the paper. He was quoted as saying only the mafia does better. Not smart to be sure, but at least according to the prosecutor in the documentary who prosecuted the case, it's not because Steve Rubell was mouthy. He said, we had a confidential informant on the inside that told us about the fact that they were skimming money
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
80% of the money. And this guy was like, you know, if they were like, businesses skimmed back then with this kind of business, like skimmed 20% and they would have gotten away with it. He said they got greedy and were literally skimming like 80% off the books and keeping very, very, very detailed records about their skimming.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
So it was all there and they had to inform it, kind of tell them where everything was hidden and where the books were. And I tried and tried to see if I could find anything about like who that might have been. And I came up completely empty.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah, he disputes in the documentary that it was on him. He was like, this was stuff that they collected from around the club. But, you know, the prosecutor said that he had it with him. So either way, lots of cocaine, lots of cash, lots of skimming off the top. They would change the cash register tape midway through the night to have another set of books that were on the up and up.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
But they would eventually hire famous... scumbag attorney Roy Cohn to come in and defend them. And he very poorly gave them the advice of like, hey, flip over a bunch of tables and stuff and make it look like worse than it is. And let's get these pictures out there. And that just bought more, you know, disdain and retribution from the state. Yeah, smart. Or the city, I guess.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
So Jack D., the silent partner who invested to begin with, was indicted along with him in a grand jury in June of 79. Mm-hmm. That did not stop the club. They were still upgrading it and building new things. That's when that wipe clean rubber came in. They pleaded guilty in 79 of November 79 to tax evasion with Jack D testifying against them.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
The two guys were sentenced to three and a half years, went to prison together, thankfully, and paid a guy for a year of protection while they sold out their competition and turned state's evidence against them, informing on other discos and their skimming. And they got out after but a year.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah. I mean, on one hand, there's a couple ways to look at it. It was a symbol of something more than probably anything was a symbol of that era. Yes. Of that excess and decadence and everything. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah, I think Schrager felt bad about it. He was like, you know, my dad, he was in the gambling business and all this, but he was like, Max the Jew was a stand-up guy, and he was gone, and I'm glad because he would have been ashamed of me for being a rat.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah, they sold the studio space to a guy named Mark Fleischman. He was a hotel guy, so they took over one of his hotels, rebranded it as, you know, this new concept of boutique hotels. And that's what, you know, Schrager did for a long time.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah, but what is it even? Just not part of a big chain? Or some of them are even parts of big chains?
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
and on one hand like my brain goes yeah but you know what this is great because it was uh these nightclubs were were havens for uh minorities and for for gay people uh to uh for that community to get together in a safe place where they could be themselves uh because like you literally like the documentary even says like if you were a transgender person you were taking your life in your hands walking down the street some nights you know you could get just assaulted
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
What's the new thing? There isn't. I'm calling for it. Oh, okay. I got you. I thought you had an idea or something. I was like, man, let's talk after we hang up here.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
I got you. So they also opened a Palladium nightclub. That was their last foray into the nightclub business to sort of partially help finance their hotel aspirations. And very sadly, Steve Rebell died of complications from... AIDS in 1989. And that left Ian Schrager alone and very sad because that was his bestie.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah, he's like, does this mean I can stop paying protection to that guy from prison? Right.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
I'm going to call this cool email, an addendum. Hey guys, the episode on widowhood just popped up. You mentioned federal elected officials and how often the widow is appointed. It's quite common in my state of Kentucky in the past for the widow of a sheriff who dies in office, line of duty or not, to be appointed to that office, mainly because the sheriff's
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
A personal estate is wrapped up in his office. So letting her finish out the term gives him time to figure out if his tax books balance. Wow. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. If they don't, the estate will owe more to the county. There have been several notable widowed sheriffs or widow sheriffs in my state.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
One being the first documented one, Mary Roach, who served from 22 to 27 after her husband was murdered in office. And she was a real sheriff, went out with her deputies at work even.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
A woman named Sheriff Florence Thompson, who took over after her husband died in 36, she oversaw the last public execution by hanging, was apparently the first and probably last woman to be in that role in the United States just three months after she took office.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Maybe. Maybe. That's, by the way, from Sean Herron, attorney at law, Louisville.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
You can still get assaulted for for for that, but especially back then. So part of my brain goes there and part of it of it goes to like kind of what Emily said, just like what a vapid material just sort of seen based on how you looked and who you knew. And part of it part of it was like, oh, wow, what a cool time. And then part of me was like, geez, what an awful time.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah. Well, as we get older, I think I tend to look at things a little more with like an eye like that rather than just like, yeah, man, what a cool party that was.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah, I guess we should get to the building first because it was a history building. It was located at 254 West 54th Street. It was originally an opera house in the 1920s. And then in the 1940s, kind of through the 50s and into the 60s and 70s, it was a CBS studio. They had a $64,000 question and Captain Kangaroo and What's My Line? Oh, Captain Kangaroo.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
It was called Studio 52, weirdly, at the time. It's so square. But they all eventually moved their operations to Los Angeles with the CBS studios there in central Hollywood. And it sat there empty in 1977.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
So the guys that noticed that studio was sitting empty or this large theater, I guess, were two guys named Steve Rebell and Ian Schrager, who were Brooklyn guys from sort of working class to middle class Jewish families who met each other at college at Syracuse.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah. So after they graduated, Ian Schrager went to law school at St. John's and started practicing law in the early 70s. Rebell got into the steakhouse business and was apparently opening steakhouses a little too quickly because he overextended himself. Did you see the one ad for one of his restaurants?
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Well, this one was at least. Steak loft, make love to your stomach. And in the subheading it said, all entrees include soup, salad bar, baked potato, and shrimp.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
But he had these steakhouses. He got into a little financial trouble and his old pal stepped in to help keep creditors at bay as his attorney. And then by this point, though, in the early 70s, they were already sort of co-owners in two different discos, one in Queens and one in Boston.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
I thought it was, but I actually can't remember now from the documentary that I watched three hours ago.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah, it was about a half a million bucks. It was kind of a crazy idea at the time, even though discotheques were big. West 54th Street at this time was really, I guess the best way to say it is sleazy. Is it near Times Square? Uh, yeah, I mean, that's all sort of in that, that theater district, but, um, at the time it was just, it was dirty. It was dangerous.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Uh, people thought like, if you're trying to open a high end discotheque, like this is not the part of town where you want to be doing that, but they did it anyway.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah. And they just kind of got to work. It was, you know, sort of a time where you could just get away with stuff until you didn't kind of under the table style. And that's what they did. You said they started with nothing, but not quite because the theater was it was an old theater.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
So they had a stage and they had a proscenium arch and they had a lighting rigging system that was there from the TV days. And because they sort of got not blocked, but Their rivals in the other discotheques were basically saying like, hey, don't go work for these guys.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
If you're a designer or, you know, someone who would help them open it. And so they went very smartly to Broadway and got people who worked in the theater to come in. And they were like, this place has got all the bones in this lighting rigs already set up like this is not going to be too hard.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
and talk about how awesome this club is going to be and uh it worked very well yeah for sure uh there were other pr people that worked with them that literally got paid for uh placing story uh placing stories in the newspaper like you get 500 if there's a picture of lisa benelli and truman capote going into studio 54 in the new york post and you get this much if it's in this magazine and
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Yeah, this is one I'm surprised we didn't tackle shortly after our disco episode as like a two-parter.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
That was a pretty smart way to do it. It was incentivizing these PR people to get the biggest stars of the time very publicly through usually the front door, but sometimes they would slip in through the stage door.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
Well, I mean, those big old theaters in New York were huge and vast and still are. Okay. So that's what you got to remember is this was a performance theater turned into a nightclub.
Stuff You Should Know
The Filthy Magic of Studio 54
On that 11,000 square foot dance floor. And, you know, while there was a scene happening anyway, a lot of it was really about the dancing there. There was a mezzanine lounge on the second story, a second story bar and a balcony that kind of looked down upon the whole thing where you could go up and drink and do mountains of cocaine and have public sex.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
And a lot of this is going to be I mean, it's mainly about sort of, you know, Chinese food, although we're going to talk about origins and stuff like that. Origin stories is mainly like what Chinese food has become here in the States, although we'll talk a little bit about other countries later. But it's through our lens. Yeah, there you go.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
yeah and he's the one who had the quote it's a as an american as pork and beans
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
Yeah, but it's possible that it was Chinese in origin initially because apparently there are some dishes from the Pearl River Delta that are pretty similar. And some of the earliest Chinese migrants to the U.S. were from that area. I can't parse out what's so different from chop suey than any stir fry.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
Okay, that makes sense. I do know that when I was a kid going camping growing up in Georgia, I loved nothing more than taking a can of La Choy. Really? You know, it's like veggies and sauce, basically. Just sipping on it the whole weekend? A lot of water chestnuts, yeah, put it in my canteen.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
And, you know, making some some campfire rice and dumping that stuff on top, you know, heating it up and dumping it on top. I thought it was like the peak of, you know, fine cuisine in the woods.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
Yeah. But they were LaTroy was around since the 1930s doing that, you know, canned vegetable sauce. I was going to say trick, but, you know, it's a thing. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
Right. Another, like, pretty startling factoid is that it was in – well, this part isn't. It was in the 1942 edition of the U.S. Army Cookbook. But as a result, when U.S. troops were stationed overseas in China and Japan in World War II, restaurants would put chop suey on the menu to cater to those American soldiers because they came in. We're like, where's the chop suey?
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
Yeah. And this came from a historian named Heather Lee. And she makes a case. It's like, you know, this addition to that list basically meant you were going to get a lot of like higher grade chop suey palaces. So the restaurants kind of got nicer. And you had to in order to qualify, you also if you were an investor, an owner, you had to spend a year managing the restaurant.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
As the manager and not like, you know, working in the kitchen or something like that. And you've needed, of course, this had to be thrown in there. You needed two white witnesses to vouch for them. But because of these strict rules, you got, again, these nicer Chinese restaurants opening up that were qualifying for that merchant status.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
And then you would get investors getting together and saying, hey, let's start this restaurant. We'll take turns running it for a year and get our family members over here. And as a result, I mean, this is not the only reason, but this definitely helped. Chinese restaurants in the U.S. doubled between 1910 and 1920. And again, between 1920 and 1930.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
And by 1930, they had overtaken laundries as the largest employers of Chinese workers in the United States.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
Yeah, for sure. And there was an article in 2014 in The New Yorker by Lauren Hilger's And this was 11 years ago, but I imagine it's not, you know, completely different now. But how the labor arrangements work then, and probably these days, is if there's a Chinese restaurant in the U.S., there's more than 40,000 back then, and there's probably a few more now, but that's a lot of restaurants.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
Generally run by families, but staffed by new immigrants. A lot of them are undocumented. A lot of them apparently are coming from the Fujian province. And they're providing the labor. So what will happen is they'll they'll have a restaurant. A new immigrant will come to town, probably a hub city. I think they concentrated on New York, San Francisco and Chicago for the article.
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Chinese Food: Best Food?
But any major city in the U.S. probably. And they'll go to a Chinese language employment agency and they'll say, all right, I got a job for you. They'll say this in Chinese, though. Go get on this bus. Here's the person's name. Here's their phone number. Go to this restaurant and you can probably get a job there. And that's how they staff their restaurants.
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Chinese Food: Best Food?
Yeah. And you know what I love about that? This whole story is like everywhere Chinese people went, they were like, get a load of this. Yeah. And everyone was like, oh, my God, that's amazing. Yeah. And it took. Yeah. Big time. I mean, I'd have I have no examples of places where Chinese immigrants have brought their food and people are like, nah, no, thanks. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
There's probably, well, there's not because we know that number too. I was going to say there's probably 14,000 Panda Expresses, but we'll get to that later. Yeah, it's close. The long and short of it is, with how the staffing arrangement works, is these cooks are moving around a lot. They'll sometimes work at a place for just a few months and go to a different restaurant, maybe for better pay.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
Oftentimes outside of city centers, you can get paid more, which sort of surprised me. I guess it makes sense, though. But if you're getting Chinese food for years and years from the same place, a lot of times there will be a different cook every few months, and hopefully you won't even notice.
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Chinese Food: Best Food?
Yeah. Now we're going to talk a little bit about General Tso, another classic Chinese dish that I've never had. Yeah. Oh, really? No, I've never had it. I mean, maybe I've had it if someone I was somewhere and they ordered just a ton of food and I was kind of just dumping all of it on the plate, which is the best way to eat Chinese food.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
But that's something I've never ordered myself. I kind of just stick to my main order and General Tso's chicken is not it.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
There's a funny Judge John Hodgman episode about that too. There's a funny dad, or at least he thought it was funny, and his kids were trying to get him to stop making the same joke over and over. Wherever this guy goes, it could be like a toll booth worker will ask what kind of ticket he wants, and he'll say, I'll have the Kung Pao chicken.
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Chinese Food: Best Food?
And he'll just say that to answer any question asked by anyone ever. Really? And the kids are really annoyed. I think it's hysterical. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
Yeah, and I could also see how children of that dad might get really sick of that joke. Totally.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
The only one I could find was Belize. Oh, I know you're kidding. I'm not going to fall for it. And the reason why is because, I mean, I can live on many, many, many cuisines from Asia. I love Japanese food. I love Thai. I love Vietnamese. I love Filipino. I like Korean food. I love it all. But at the end of the day.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
Yeah. Apparently, if you're in the Boston area, it's going to be called General Gao, either G-A-U or G-A-O. Did not know that.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
Yeah, I feel like I have too. So it may exist outside of Boston or maybe it's just more New England regional. But Chinese food is very popular as a delivery thing. I can't remember the last time I actually – actually, I can. Rarely, rarely do I eat in a Chinese restaurant, but I ate in Las Vegas.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
There's a very popular, very upscale Chinese restaurant in one of the casinos, the kind of place where like a week ahead of time you tell them you want the duck, that kind of deal.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
And our friend of the show and friend of ours, Adam Pranica, made that with Ben Harrison and our booking agent and friend, Josh Lindgren, and all our wives, we all went and had this beautiful big, big meal. But almost always I'm ordering takeout or delivery Chinese food.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
And Grubhub, and this was 10 years ago, but they said that General Tso's chicken was the most popular dish that they deliver, fourth most popular overall. And just last year, they reported Chinese takeout or delivery, I guess, is the third most popular food overall, I guess, behind pizza. And I can't think of what else. I would figure Chinese would be second, but I don't know.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
Yeah, and I think this guy from Grubhub named Garfield was reporting on that.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
Yeah. And I know I'm retelling this, but I'll have to just quickly say one of the funniest things from when I was a kid was when I was like 12 years old in a restaurant and there was a gentleman ordering takeout from the counter. And after like six dishes in a row, he asked if it had cheese on it. And the very kind restaurant owner kept saying, no, no, no.
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Chinese Food: Best Food?
And at the very end, he said in his very sweet, broken English that no Chinese food has cheese on it. And I think the last time I told that story, you and I thought about like a slice of American cheese just on some stir fry. And then we were like, I think we might want to try that.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
Good old fashioned like Chinese takeout is just one of my favorite all time things since I was a kid.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
That's right. You know, a lot of them were changed to fit our tastes, including the ingredients sometimes. And one example that Laura found, of course, is beef with broccoli. That is not, you know, they don't have that kind of, you know, as far as I know, they don't have that kind of broccoli in China.
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Chinese Food: Best Food?
What they use is Chinese broccoli or gai lan, which if you look that up, it looks it's more like bok choy than what we think of as broccoli.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
Well, we got to talk a little bit about fortune cookies because that is not Chinese either. That is originally adopted from something called the Japanese cracker, which is a savory thing. But in the early 20th century, Chinese restaurants were owned a lot of times by Japanese people. Japanese bakeries were making these cookies. And then after Japanese internment.
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Chinese Food: Best Food?
A lot of Chinese Americans took over these cookie factories. And that got me down the road of like, well, who's writing the fortunes? There's a guy named Donald Lau, who's the CFO of Wanton Food Company, the largest fortune cookie maker in the world. And he was the sole writer or has been for 30 years of writing these fortune cookies.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
If we missed him, I can't believe we would miss that guy. There's no way. But as a recap, he wrote him for 30 years. He used to write two to three per day. Now it's two or three per month because they have just thousands of them. And he got that job by default because he spoke the best English at the company. And his quote is, I am the most read author in the United States.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
Yeah, because that's kind of what you, and if you grew up in the 70s and 80s, that was sort of the first, you know, probably one of the first, you know, cuisines from another country you ever ate. Yeah, for sure. You know, maybe Mexican food wasn't that big back then. That's only become more popular, I think, in the 80s and 90s even.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
There's another one, and I don't know if you looked up a picture of this thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
But if you go to Fall River, Massachusetts, do you have your phone with you or a computer or a means of looking up a photo? Yeah, sure. Let me do that. While I'm doing this, you should check this out. It's called a chow mein sandwich. It hails from Fall River, Massachusetts, but it's in surrounding towns there and who knows, maybe elsewhere in New England. But it is exactly what it sounds like.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
It's chow mein on a sandwich on like a hamburger bun. But if you look this thing up, it's not a sandwich. It is, you can't see the bottom bun. It is just chow mein all over a plate. I guess there's a bun underneath and there's just a hamburger bun sitting on top. Like it is a full plate of chow mein with just a bun in there somewhere.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
It's not the kind of thing you would ever pick up and eat as a sandwich.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
Yeah. Should we take another break? Yeah, let's. All right, we'll take another break and we'll finish up with an ode to Panda Express and P.F. Chang's right after this.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
All right, so we're going to start off talking a little bit about how P.F. Chang's came about, a restaurant that I think I might have been to once. I definitely picked it up a lot as a PA in the film business for big production meetings. So I can't speak to its quality. It's supposed to be pretty good, right? P.F. Chang's?
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
Yeah, for sure. And I want to quickly plug, since you mentioned Cheesecake Factory, our, again, friends of the show and friends in real life, Adam Pranica and Ben Harrison of the Greatest Generation podcast have a side podcast called Factory Seconds, where they're working their way through the menu of the Cheesecake Factory one item at a time.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
Adam's uncle actually is the voice of the Memphis Grizzlies as the announcer, basketball team. And apparently Cheesecake Factory is huge with NBA players. And I was like, why? And his uncle, he was like, because there's one in every city. It's the same menu. It's a huge menu. The portions are huge. And the quality is always the same.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
Economies of scale. Well, I was wrong. Apparently they make all their stuff fresh. It's not like bagged food.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
All right. Well, I'm going to be a guest on that show at some point. So next time I'm in L.A., we're going to go to one, and then I'm going to be a guest. Okay. I can't wait. Good. Anyway, a long way around describing P.F. Chiang's. There was a woman named Cecilia Chiang with an I in there from San Francisco.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
And she in, I believe, before 1965, before that immigration law opened a high end restaurant there called Mandarin. And she said, no chop suey in my menu and no egg foo young. All this Chinatown stuff is a no, no. And she owned a restaurant, a Chinese restaurant in Tokyo years ago. And her husband got a diplomatic post there. So that's why she was, you know, doing Chinese food there.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
And Mandarin opened in 1961. And that's where all of a sudden people were exposed to like Kung Pao chicken. tea-smoked duck, mooshu pork, potstickers, like some of the really good stuff. And authentic stuff. Yeah, exactly. She sold her son, Philip, the restaurant, Mandarin, in 1989, and he is one of the co-founders of P.F. Chang's.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
Yeah, I have. I used to eat it when I was younger. I'm not going to say it's like not any good, but, you know, it's Chinese fast food. And it's just not something I would eat now. I would in a pinch. It's not like I'd turn my nose up at it. But I have been there before. You? Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
Yeah. I mean, I'm a simple guy, like a pork fried rice and an egg roll. And I'm just now realizing we're not even going to talk about egg rolls in this and I'm panicking all of a sudden.
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Chinese Food: Best Food?
I like it. Apparently, it's a family-run business, though, even though it's this huge chain. And in the 70s, they just had a few little sit-down restaurants, and it kind of grew very fast. Naturally and organically is this family business, which I never knew, which is pretty cool.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
Yeah. What's your order in a Chinese restaurant or for takeout?
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
Oh, I love peas. I hate peas. Yeah, I gotta get that fried rice. I'll get a lot of sweet and sour chicken or sesame chicken. Gotta get the egg roll. I'll take a beef and broccoli if people have ordered it, but that's not my order. But I'll also try a lot of stuff. If I'm at a big group and someone's just ordering a bunch of Chinese food, I'll eat almost all of it. Do you ask them first?
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
Oh, yeah, for sure. And then, you know, if you're in a place, not all cities have this stuff, but if you're in a place that has the really good authentic stuff and you get dim sum or some pork buns or soup dumplings, like all that stuff is great, but you can't find that everywhere. No.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
It's going to happen. That's the first thing I ordered after our week at the beach in South Carolina after eating, you know, coastal seafood, American seafood. I was like, I can eat some Chinese food.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
Yeah, I didn't see any of that either, but apparently it was pretty funny. Apparently the food in the UK, the Chinese food, is a lot different than here in America. It is very popular over there. Maybe even one of the top two, maybe even the top food in the country.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
Oh, really? Okay. So they love it over there. They will have things like French fries, what they call chips, a lot of curry sauces, which is different than us because there's a lot of great Indian food, obviously, in England and throughout the UK. And they also have something called a chicken ball. And that's just what they call it. I looked it up. I tried to find any difference.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
It looks like the exact same thing we get here in like a sweet and sour chicken. It's just a fried little chunk of chicken.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
I couldn't determine, though, from looking at first if it was ground like a meatball, but it's not. And they're not even usually round. They're just, you know, chicken shaped. Yeah. Like a little chicken finger kind of thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
The same for Latin America. In the United States, Chinese Cuban restaurants started opening in New York City, of course, in the 1970s. And then what they call, would it be China Latino restaurants? I'm going with Chino Latino. I mean, Chino Latino is what I want to say because it sounds so great. I just wasn't sure if that was right. But they started opening later on.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
They're in decline in New York now. But apparently, just like everywhere over the course of centuries, Chinese workers were brought over to Latin America. for a lot of reasons, but usually servitude, sadly.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
But again, they brought their food with them, and their food existed alongside stuff like Cuban food and Peruvian food, and then they start to blend it together, and all of a sudden you have these cool sort of mix-up dishes.
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Chinese Food: Best Food?
Yeah, it's going to happen. And we're recording earlier, so it's like creeping onto lunchtime right now.
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Chinese Food: Best Food?
Oh, no, no, no. I can't get it for lunch. Well, I'll probably do a skip lunch and order it for dinner.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
But this has inspired me to... I've been wanting to do... An episode on Cajun food, but it was very intimidating, like Cajun sort of Creole stuff because there's so many influences. I was just like, we're going to screw it up. But this this is maybe more brave.
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Chinese Food: Best Food?
I'm just realizing I didn't look up a couple of these. So maybe you did. But the regions as described. agreed upon right now are, and they have different names for each one. So the first grouping is Szechuan or I didn't look up C-H-U-A-N.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
Who wants to do that? This is a correction. Hey, guys, heard your short stuff on Tulip Mania and wanted to point out that Tulip Mania is now largely believed to be a myth. I only found out about that a few years ago myself when I heard an interview from the author Anne Goldgar.
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Chinese Food: Best Food?
She discovered the historical reality when she dug into the archives to research her book, Tulip Mania, Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age. The myth was largely promulgated, great word, by Scotsman Charles Mackey in his book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. And he sent along articles from Smithsonian and History.com
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Chinese Food: Best Food?
and even Wikipedia that said, although McKay's, I'm sorry, Mackie's book is a classic, citation needed, his account is contested, citation needed. Many modern scholars believe that the mania was not as destructive as described. I'm a little behind on some of the shows, guys. Perhaps others have written in, but no one else has written in, Richard. So you're the only one. So way to go.
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Chinese Food: Best Food?
So let's go with Szechuan Cantonese, Hunan, which is also Zhang. Let me see here. We have Shangdong. We have Jiangsu. We have, oh, I did look that one up. Zhejiang.
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Chinese Food: Best Food?
Well, I heard it pronounced as if it had a Y in there almost, like Foo. Okay. Foo-gee-on.
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Chinese Food: Best Food?
Yeah, and how they achieve spice is kind of different depending where you are, too. Sometimes it's those numbing Chinese peppercorns. I can't. You can't do those?
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
Yeah, I've learned to eat a lot of spicy food over the last five or six years and increase my spice level. But there's something about the numbing peppercorn that I have a hard time with it.
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Chinese Food: Best Food?
It's tough. But I can, you know, it depends on the cuisine. Other sort like the chilies that they use, I can handle that pretty well. It's hot, but I like it. And sometimes it's just the chili flakes.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
That's right. I mean, if you've ever had dim sum, that's Cantonese. If you've never had dim sum, I highly recommend it. I hate to say, like, because it used to annoy me when a certain person I knew used to say, like, tortillas are like American bread. And I was like, no, they're just tortillas. Who said that? I'm not going to tell you. I'll tell you offline. But...
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Chinese Food: Best Food?
I was going to say, like, if you've ever had tapas, dim sum is kind of like the Chinese version of tapas. But it really is just dim sum. But it's like shared small plates, a lot of steamed stuff, but also fried stuff, baked stuff.
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Chinese Food: Best Food?
A lot of dumplings. You know, just go to New York, go to Hopke, get some dim sum, and thank me later.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
okay it's amazing i will thank you later i've never really had dim sum actually now that i think about it oh boy uh i mean i like all kinds of food in chinatown in new york but um dim sum is definitely one of them but i'll also go to just the you know because if you're staying in hotel you can't get these huge orders and just like take tons and tons of food with you right so my move now is generally just to pop down there by myself and get a couple of gigantic egg rolls
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
But you did mention San Francisco in 1849 was the first operating restaurant in North America. And by 1851, when the population of San Francisco was but 34,000 and change, there were seven full-time Chinese restaurants open, which, you know, for that few people is pretty good for that time period. Yeah, it's not bad. Like people liked it, clearly.
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Chinese Food: Best Food?
That's right. A lot of caveats on this. Can I list off a few? Sure. All right. First of all, this is going to be a very broad overview of a cuisine that we could probably do like a 10-part at least episode series on.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
Yeah. And this is also sort of the... kind of right away when racist feelings toward Chinese immigrants started, racist feelings toward their food even started arising right out of the gate. In Leo's book, there were a couple of examples that she cited.
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Chinese Food: Best Food?
One was a criminal lawyer defending a white client following a race riot in 1865 and told the judge, why, sir, and I'm not going to say the racist Chinese name, but they live on rice and, sir, they eat it with sticks.
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Chinese Food: Best Food?
And then there was a pamphlet from American Federation of Labor President Samuel Gompers in 1902 titled Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion, colon, meat versus rice, American manhood versus Asiatic coolieism. And apparently coolie is a pejorative term for a low wage worker.
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Chinese Food: Best Food?
Is that true? No. Because that I could believe, actually. Yeah, me too.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
I looked at that place to see what it looked like, and it looks like a Chinese restaurant in a building of an old west town. Man, I'll bet it's so good. Exactly what you might think. And there's a big neon sign that says chop suey. And I realized that chop suey is not a dish I've ever had, but chop suey is sort of the beginning of— of Chinese food in America.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
That's the dish that first sort of captured young America's attention. And there's some debates on whether or not it's even American in origin. And we're going to talk about chop suey right now.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
Yeah, maybe 11. So just, you know, have your expectations set going into this one. When you talk about Chinese food, there's a lot there. We are going to do our best to pronounce things correctly. I looked up a lot of stuff and I'm doing my best, but some of this stuff is hard for my dumb American mouth.
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Chinese Food: Best Food?
No, that's pretty close, actually, because some people say the name came from a Cantonese T-S-A-P, Tsapsui, S-U-I instead of S-U-E-Y. That seems to be an Americanized spelling, which is mixed bits or odds and ends, a.k.a. probably leftovers.
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Chinese Food: Best Food?
I'll be in your camp. Okay, thanks. At least we can hang out and play cards. What do you want to play? I don't know a lot of card games. I like Gin Rummy. I was going to say Gin Rummy, too. I do love spades, but we need Emily and Yumi to come along.
Stuff You Should Know
Chinese Food: Best Food?
Yeah, soon to die. Yeah. Anyway, that's a weird sidetrack. A quote that, and we're going to explain the origins of this quote, but you may have heard that chop suey is as American as pork and beans. And that actually comes from a lawsuit from the early 1900s. In 1904, a guy named Lem Sen said, you know what? I invented chop suey. I made it for a Chinese diplomat who visited in 1886.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
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The Gullibility Episode
I think you're great. They did another study at the University of Leicester where they found that childhood traumas can really affect you later in life in terms of gullibility, like any kind of bullying, a death of a family member or something like that. It leads you more susceptible to fall for tricks later in life.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
And apparently they say it could be because that kind of trauma just makes it hard to trust your own judgments and, you know, I guess everyone else's intent.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Oh, I know. I mean, we're pretty good parents, but I often think, like, how are we messing her up? Because I know we are in some way.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yeah, I think just try to limit that stuff as a parent. Like, you can't be perfect. I mean, my brother's a perfect parent, but there's only one. Scott. Another thing I thought was interesting, and this makes total sense, is if you rely on your intuition a lot, you're a lot more vulnerable to being duped by something.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Just like, you know, some people have a good gut and some people think they have a good gut, but do not.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yeah, it's funny. I'm okay. You know, things subside in the early afternoon, so I'm actually feeling a little better than I was like 20 minutes ago even.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yeah. And I think, you know, that kind of suggests that if there's like a country with an authoritarian leader in place, like the simple sort of easy to understand radical solutions that are pitched out oftentimes in those situations are very easy to fall for if you're a gullible person, because that itself is a mental shortcut. Well, we just got we just got to do this.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yeah, I just got to go to the doctor and just get it over with.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yeah. Should we take a break? Yeah. All right. We'll take a break and talk about mood right after this.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
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Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
All right, we're back. We promised to talk a little bit about mood because the fact is you are not always gullible or always not gullible. Everybody could get duped at any time from, you know, that changes from day to day, sometimes from hour to hour, depending on a lot of factors like mood. If you're really, really tired, if you're super distracted, if you're upset.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
You may not notice something that can, you know, make you fall for a scam. Also, the same holds if you're in a really good mood. You know, if you're just feeling great about everything, you're like, yeah, yes to life, yes to everything. There was a study in 1938 by a researcher named Gregory Razran. who found that giving a free lunch made people more receptive to a political message.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
I'll try. But I'm hanging in there. I am working on less than 300 calories a day for five days now. So I am a shell of a human.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
And apparently that is sort of where like the sales lunch started, taking people out to sell them something and feeding them. You were more likely to close a deal. And I'm sure the same thing, like golf course sales things, like the salesperson's not out there beating the person in golf that they're selling to. I guarantee it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
I don't know how that works, but I imagine you're letting them win and feel good about stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Right. So overall, if you think about people who might be gullible, you might think, you know, if you're going to stereotype it like people like kids, very young people, very old people and people that aren't very well educated.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
But it's not necessarily true. What? Yeah. There is a lot of factors, one of which I mentioned earlier. You can get a lot of skewed studies about the gullibility of someone who's older because if you're older, you're more likely to have a cognitive ability that's literally keeping you from being able to determine whether something is true.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Have you been doing push-ups? I can't do one push-up right now.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
But they've also conversely found that sometimes they're a little more protected because they're constantly have their children and everyone else saying like, no, no, no, watch out for scams. They're trying to scam you. Everyone's trying to scam you.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, thankfully, nothing like that's ever happened to my parents. But it's you hear the stories all the time and it's just, you know, it's tragic and shameful.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
There was a study in 2018 that I thought was pretty interesting. A woman named Monica T. Witte, another Aussie. When you talk about like being catfished, which is if I guess I threw that word out, assuming everyone knows it. That's like when you get scammed in a sort of a romantic thing online by someone who's pretending to be someone they're not generally.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yeah. Let's put that down. That would be super interesting.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
No, I don't think he's in the league anymore. He played in the NFL for a little while, but he was a linebacker for Notre Dame that was famously catfished and like, you know, smart, handsome, young athlete guy. So it's not like just, you know, the lonely loser in the basement that falls for stuff like that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Oh, man. Little River Man. So good. 2018, Monica Witte did one on sort of catfishing, but really just romance scams is what they called it. And she said if you fall for something like that, you obviously will be a little more impulsive and sensation seeking. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
And so if someone's building up about all these great stories and these big travels and, you know, it's always it's never just like, well, I just kind of sit around at home like,
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
they always present themselves as offering some uh new exciting life it seems like right uh but she also found that they were more highly educated than average uh and livia i think is on the money kind of speculates that could be uh i and i think it's true when we did our thing on online dating it's generally people that are college educated that participate in online dating a little more right statistically but um also maybe that
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
If you're more educated, you just think like, I'm not going to fall for catfishing. I know all about that. And this is not that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
I agree with that. In the old days, I think that's changing because I've never seen a generation as phone addicted as boomers are. Oh, really? Oh, man. You don't hang around a lot of boomers, do you? They have Gen Z beat? Every boomer I know just obsessively stares at their phone and looks things up and, yeah. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
No, no, no. They want to show you all the information in the moment.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Right in the middle of dinner at a nice restaurant even.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
That's right. This is on gullibility. We were just talking offline that there are, I think, a hundred different ways to approach this kind of topic, and sometimes that's freeing, and sometimes that's really frustrating. And I think this one is a little frustrating. Livia put together a great article, I think, but It's just a hard one. When I pitched it to her, I was like, you know what?
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yeah, which I think we'll get to in a minute before or after the next break. But can we talk about science? Because this is one thing when I sent Libby the idea, I was like, I think I'd read an article about scientists being gullible. And I was like, no, not scientists.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
But it turns out they very much can be because a lot of times when you are that well versed in a field, you might kind of think you know it all. And like, oh, no, I know what I'm doing. And so you might be more apt to believe a result that isn't accurate because you think you did it the right way. Like, that's just one aspect of it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Well, that was probably a scientific method, huh? Maybe.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yeah. Or like the little student in Rushmore that picked the results.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
You know, Max has his sort of little budding girlfriend at the end. And he says something about she won some science award, and I think she had to give it back or something. And he's like, why? She said, I faked the results. It didn't work, so I faked it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
No, I don't think she does. They were on Charlie's Angels together and had some words.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yeah, I was being sort of opposite with my Lucy Liu joke.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
You know, I'm not firing on all cylinders. I'm doing my best. I'm not either, apparently. All right, we'll be right back, and Josh will lead off with a little bit on trust.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
I feel like, especially here in America, we're at peak gullibility as a nation. And I just wondered, is there any science to that? Are people more gullible than others? And can science be gullible? And this is what we came up with.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
That's right. LinkedIn knows hiring is a big deal for small businesses, not only because small businesses are wearing so many hats, but also because every hire is crucial for a growing company. And that's why LinkedIn pairs you with the best candidates using data that you won't find anywhere else.
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The Gullibility Episode
So post your job for free at linkedin.com slash sysk. That's linkedin.com slash sysk to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
You can trust people and think the best of people and still not be gullible.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yeah, I kind of understand this, but not 100 percent. But I think I get it. So what he would say is, Bill, your friend Bill stayed at a hotel for a week. He was only charged one day. Do you think he would tell the cashier about this, even though there's like no chance? Let's say there's no chance of him getting caught later on. Do you think he would do that?
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
And people who scored high on their trustworthy score, like people who were trustworthy, they were more likely to say that Bill would do the honest thing. But when he added in a twist here, which is to tell them some negative things about Bill, like, by the way, just want to let you know, Bill also cut in line the other day.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
It makes his stepson feel stupid. But if they added in a couple of nuggets like that, negative things about Bill, the people who had high trust in people generally put a lot more weight on that additional information than the other people did, the people that were low in trustworthiness.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yeah. And that can be a very freeing thing. And that's how Yamagishi sort of thought about it when he talked about his emancipation theory, which is if you're trusting, you're kind of or if you're untrusting, I guess you're kind of shackled in a way. Because you may just be stuck in a place because why hire a different person to do it because they're just going to be a scammer too.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
And so you can get stuck in this cycle. But if you free yourself from that with his emancipation theory and you break those shackles and you start trusting people, it makes you much more apt to make a positive change in life because you trust somebody or something or some situation.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yeah, for sure. There are people that think we are actually not as gullible as everyone thinks. There's this writer, Hugo Mercier, who wrote a book in 2020 called Not Born Yesterday. Great title for a book like that. And he's like, people are less gullible than we think.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
And there are a lot of criteria people use to work out if they believe something or not, and we're better at it than we all think we are. Most people, or I guess in his idea, most people are actually looking for well-informed or well-intentioned information or if it has logic to it, if it's logically strong information.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
That's right. I guess we can start by talking about, I mean, we're going to talk about a lot of different people, a lot of different people that study this kind of stuff, a lot of different studies, some of which make more sense than others. But this guy, Stephen Greenspan, is an author. He wrote a book. He wrote the book on it, Annals of Gullibility, colon, Why We Are Duped and How to Avoid It.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Or, you know, maybe people are less like this, which is I'm just going to accept something or I'm sorry, I'm not going to accept something as a new piece of information because it's not something that I have found to be true. He argues that people are less like that than they say.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yeah, exactly. He also points out in the book when it comes to like propaganda, that propaganda isn't something that can usually really completely changed someone's mind. What propaganda is good at is taking someone who already has those beliefs and putting them on turbo speed and reinforcing them. Even like the Nazi propaganda machine, he contends probably wasn't making someone anti-Semitic.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
But if you were anti-Semitic, then it really drove you down that road at a pretty fast pace.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yeah. I mean, I think political ads are terrible and ridiculous and so overvalued. But I feel like these days it's less like it's more just beating that drum of like, aren't you mad? Aren't you mad? Go vote. Go vote. I know, man. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
And one sort of important thing he does up front is say, hey, there's a difference between credulity and gullibility. Credulity is if, you know, you'll believe something just without looking at all the evidence. And gullibility means you have an active response to perhaps being conned.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Uh, we get, I'm sure anyone, um, who works for big companies get these and maybe even small companies do this, but when they send out the, the test, like the test fishing emails and then like the next day you'll get an email that's like, did you fall for it? Right. Uh, it's always, I'm always nervous. I'm like, Oh God, did I click on that thing that, you know, from, you know, facebook.gold.au.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
I got nothing else. I think, you know, we did a pretty good job on this one.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
This is a great current listener mail from Thursday's episode yesterday to us on Automats. Hey, guys. Two friends and I gave each other a graduation present from high school in 1970 and spent a week by ourselves in New York where we went to the Automat, and it was still great in 70. Four years later, this gets so good.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Four years later, as a senior in college, a group of us did an independent study in humor and music as an excuse to do a concert of Bach stuff. I got to be the soloist in the concerto for horn and hard art. Nice. And he sent a video. Unfortunately, it was just audio. I mean, it sounded like a hoot, and really, it was great, but I wanted to see everything. Because here's what they did.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
This piece is for orchestra and also a table filled with various household items to play. Ideally, they should have been picked out of an automat on stage in order to play them. However, this is beyond our set construction abilities. We did have the recommended...
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
We did at least have the recommended banner overhead reading, in Latin, Less Work for Mother, along with trying to master the rather challenging music. It involved me running around Gettysburg with a pitch pipe, trying to find bells, pots, uh... Ooga horns and lots of other items that played specific notes. This is so great. Thanks for speaking those wonder, sparking those wonderful memories.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
I discovered you during COVID and have been an extremely faithful listener ever since. Nice. And that is from the Reverend Dr. Mark Oldenburg, Steckmiller Professor Emeritus of the Art of Worship and the music chair at Gettysburg United Lutheran Cemetery. Pronouns he, him.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
I totally agree. I thought that definition was really weird. And I'm glad both are in here, though, because sometimes it's a nice contrast. But along the lines of what you were saying, there's a group of researchers, social psychologists from Macquarie University. There can be a lot of Aussies in this.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Alessandra K. Tunis, maybe? That's what I'm going with. Defined it much in the way you would and I would and I think a lot of people would, which is simply the propensity to accept a false premise in the presence of untrustworthy clues. That's it. That's it. You don't have to act on it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
No. And there's a lot of factors. And this is where I think Greenspan did kind of hit on something is four factors of gullibility situational. Like if there's a lot of if everyone else is doing it and there's a lot of social pressure, like all the bros are investing in the same cryptocurrency and it's at a great price. And you're like, oh, man, I got to get in there. All the guys are right.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
You know, everyone's in on that. So there's social pressure where you can fall for something. And cognitive issues like, well, as we'll get to later with, you know, our senior friends, sometimes there's like legit brain cognitive issues. That's a different thing than this. But this is just lacking expertise.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
And, you know, you can't evaluate what you're being told because you're just not I don't want to say smart enough. You're just not an expert in whatever that is.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yeah, I totally think it makes sense, you know, because it happened to his cousin. That's right. Emotion can play a big factor in a lot of ways. And we'll talk about some of those with some studies later on. But one way is like if if let's say we're specifically talking about being kind, if it gives you a positive feeling, whether it's a.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
So somebody catfishing you and making you feel loved or, you know, some sort of financial thing that you think might provide for your long term security or like, oh, man, no one else knows about this deal but me. I'm so smart for getting in on the ground floor here. That kind of thing.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
I love that you barely use an accent. You just say it seriously. And that gets the point across.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
uh yeah so this gullibility scale was self-reported uh basically like do you self-reported meaning um do you think others do you perceive yourself as gullible and do you think others perceive you as gullible uh and then they you know they filled in with some other questions like how persuadable are you and stuff like that and it actually for a self-reported study which you know a lot of those can be tough um this seemed to work out pretty good for them don't you think
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
I didn't think you would take advantage of this today.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
It's okay, buddy. All for the show. On that scale, they found some traits that were common among those that scored high in gullibility. Social intelligence was one of them. That'll keep coming back over and over. Vulnerability, emotionality, which we've talked about a little bit. Weak sense of self, which also comes up in different ways.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
I think you found an article about how parents can wreck kids by not giving them self-confidence, right? And they'll end up gullible.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yeah, I have a good friend who had a pretty bad stepfather, and the abuse in this situation was exclusively he made him feel stupid at every opportunity.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yeah, I mean, this is kind of, I mean, I don't like playing it this close, but it's kind of fun to be a little more current with, like, listener mails and updates and stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
he's passed on now, but it's, I can't think of any, I mean, there are all kinds of things that are worse, obviously, but something so damaging for such a small person to do that to a child.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
And literally like, oh, you think so? Like, you know, just that's how he was talked to his whole life growing up. It's awful.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
One thing we should mention, though, because this pops up a couple of times and I think it's super fascinating, is another trait they found on the gullibility scale, if you're very gullible, was belief in paranormal activity.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yeah, so this will be out on Tuesday, I guess. And in real time, this is the day after the automat oyster stew debacle. I don't know if it was a debacle. That turned out to be a pretty good ep. And Aaron Cooper already came through. Oh, good.
Stuff You Should Know
The Gullibility Episode
Yeah. And it's a trait I think that you can't necessarily teach, but is really beneficial to have as a human.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Yeah, pretty much. I mean, at this point, he did make a deal with Spectrum Holobyte for the Nintendo Famicom console. And, you know, this is all early days. So the Game Boy had not quite debuted. That launched in 89. So it was the timing of it was really, really key, because as we'll see, the Game Boy is where it really, really took off.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
But he made a deal, sort of a handshake deal with the president of Nintendo of America to put Tetris in Game Boys. And he was like, hey, listen, you know, you're selling these Game Boys. You're including Mario, which the boys love. But if you want to appeal to everyone and sell more of those include Tetris. And I think that led to like thirty five million units of Tetris Game Boy being sold.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Well, the only way I ever played it was on a Game Boy. I don't know if I had a Game Boy, if it was Scott's. I know he had one, but at any rate, I played it on the Game Boy only and really, really loved it and got into that for a while. I wasn't like obsessed with it or anything, but I did have the Tetris dreams. I did walk around seeing things as Tetris on the landscape.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Oh, no, no, no. I remember that. I think I was one of the few people that was like, oh, nice. I like you too.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Goodness me. So you mentioned that he was sort of bumbling around Moscow and they were like, hey, no, thanks, spy. He eventually did get that meeting with Elorg because he's still trying to secure all these different, you know, license rights. And he they weren't too pleased with him.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
But luckily for him, Pajitnov was in that meeting and he liked Rogers and they became buddies and that helped them secure the rights on the Game Boy.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Yeah, for sure. And by the way, I did go to eBay. I haven't picked the one out yet, but there are plenty of Game Boys with Tetris cartridges. They're supposedly in good shape. That's awesome. I'm definitely looking forward to that. Although Emily says, I still have mine somewhere. I was like, all right, I'll just get it on eBay.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Yeah. And they range in price. I think, you know, some of the more dubious ones are like 30 to 40 bucks. And I just wonder about the stickiness of buttons and pads and things. But the one that's like 110, I feel like is probably a safer bet. But who knows?
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Oh, God. Yeah. And cotton candy and stuff like that. But the Game Boy one, though, the reason I bring that up again is because that's the one with that classic type A theme song. Oh, yeah. From sound engineer Hirokazu Tanaka, which is hard to believe, but it's an actually Russian folk song called Koro Bioniki, which means peddlers. And you can hear like a symphony doing that in a Russian symphony.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
And you're like, oh, wait a minute. I know that song. That's the Tetris song.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Yeah. The judge was like, don't you have a burial site for the game?
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
So they've sold a lot of these, but marketing of the game initially was a challenge. It didn't have like cutting edge graphics or anything. You really had to play it to kind of understand how addictive it was. So just looking at the game and selling the game was tough. So they... sort of weirdly at the time, really leaned into the Cold War and the Soviet stuff. They re-skinned it to have St.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
So it definitely invaded my consciousness for a while, but I never played it on anything but the Game Boy, so I don't know how to play it with a regular controller or whatever.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Basil's Cathedral in Moscow on the title screen. They had all sorts of little Russian Easter eggs in there. At trade shows, they had Reagan and Gorbachev impersonators playing against each other and stuff like that. And that actually helped sell the game as this weird import from behind the Iron Curtain. Like, what are they doing over there?
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Yeah, I mean, he didn't try to fight this early on. Like, you know, if it was in the United States, somebody would have taken him to court probably over the fact that, like, yeah, I was your employee at the time, but blah, blah, blah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Like, he knew that was a lost cause, so he never even tried to fight back and I think wanted to get in line as a good Russian state employer and was like, okay, 10 years, you've got it. And, you know, turns out patience is a virtue because he made, you know, he did pretty well on this thing in the long run.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
thing to be tacked on to you know what's just widely considered such a fun pastime around the world yeah uh this there's a documentary or docu-series rather called the tetris murders about this and i did not watch it but i looked more into this and i'm not conspiracy minded at all but this seems very very pinky um there were three murder weapons to kill his wife and kid and himself.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Yeah, I was going to try and play it today, just like whatever. I'm sure there's some free online version you can play on your desktop. But I was afraid. I was a little behind today. I was like, I'm not going to do it because I'll be 30 minutes later. Right. I will still be playing Tetris because it's a very addictive game.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
There were two different hammers and a hunting knife. Multiple murder weapons is just strange. There were documents burned on a grill. Everybody to a person they talked to were like, this guy was a super good dude, loving father and husband. Like there's no way he could have done something this brutal.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Apparently, the blood spatter analysis made no sense at all, and there were other people that were asked to sign off that were like, I'm not going to sign off on this. Like, there's no way this guy slit his own throat. Look at the blood. And they also found a note that they initially said was not a suicide note, but they would eventually say it was, and it said, I've been eaten alive, Vladimir.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Just remember that I am exist, the devil. It's very strange. It is. So I don't know. It just a lot of this stuff doesn't add up. So I'm not really sure what the deal is.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
It's got, what's his name? The Kingsman, Taron... Edgerton. Taron Edgerton, yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
I do too. I like that guy. I think he's a very talented actor.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
I do, too. We walk that fine line of like saying something nice about someone. Are they a monstrous scumbag or say something bad about someone? And we'll just get back to them.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Well, I got one. I got Jared back in the day. That's about it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Speaking of that, guys, should we take another break or should we talk about gameplay first?
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
All right, let's break and we'll talk about how you actually play this thing right after this.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
And part of why it was successful is because it seems like everybody that ever tried Tetris early on, at least, loved and became pretty addicted to Tetris.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
OK, so if you want to play, if you've never played Tetris, you know, a lot of this kind of assumes with that many hundreds of millions of games sold, plus many more people that played that didn't actually buy it, that most people have probably played this game. But the idea is that, you know, you have this horizontal screen and these different shaped blocks are coming down.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
And when you do a complete horizontal line across with these different shaped blocks, that block, that line will disappear. And all this time, more blocks are falling and falling and falling. And the key is to get to different levels by completing more and more lines. And they start going faster and faster. And you can spin them to get them into position and into place.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
And in different versions of the game, you can see what's coming, sometimes just one, sometimes a few. And there are other variations along the years. But that's the basic gameplay of Tetris. It's a very, very simple game.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Was it good, though? For sure, yeah. Okay. That's what I'm saying. It was the best. I just thought you meant it was short, and that'll suffice. No, no. I thought it was great. Okay, thanks.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Yeah, and I think, did you mention that a true Tetris is when you get, what is it, I guess four levels at once?
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Oh, boy, that's so satisfying. I remember that feeling. I can't wait to get that Game Boy. Should we talk about the pieces? Because you found some kind of cool stuff, as did Livia, that I never knew is that these pieces have names.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Yeah, for sure. When it starts invading your dreams or you start, you know, if you're walking around a city and you start looking at an alleyway that you could drop a long I-beam into, then it's in your bones.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
All right. The J and the shape also refers to or the letter refers to sort of the shape of the piece, right? Yes. OK, so the J is the blue one. I never knew that there were colors because on Game Boy, obviously, it was not colored in the initial ones. But the blue one can also be called the gamma or the the the G or G or I think the official the blue Ricky.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Yeah. Oh, boy. You might be on to something. What is a gin Ricky?
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
So kind of like a gin and tonic without, but with soda instead of tonic and a little sweet.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Genius. That's known, you can call it a square or the zero or the smash boy.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Z, there is a Z, is the mirror, the red mirror of the Z. And that is, you can call it a lightning bolt or the left dog or the left snake or the Cleveland Z. Also, what I said before.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
The Tiwi. OK. And then that that I called it the I-beam. But that's the cyan four line clear. That's also the one that if you if you put it in the wrong place, you can really screw you. But that that can produce that full Tetris. You call it the stick, the line, the slim Jim, the long, skinny one.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
That's right, which is a key distinction when it comes to competing, I guess, because I would have been I would have been pretty lost, although there's no way I could. I wasn't like competition level. I was just OK at it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
No, when you watch like real time speeds of what these people are doing, it's crazy. Like that's when I'm like, I mean, I'm way done by that by the time they start going that fast.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Yeah, if you're trying to get something going down, that's coming down very, very fast, all the way over and fit it on the left side of the screen and it's dropped on the right, you've got to hit that D-pad, like, go, go, go, go, go.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
And you can only do that, like, you know, humans can only go so fast until they invented hypertapping, which was about 2011, according to Livia's research, which I found that to be pretty much true. Early 2010s, it checks out. Uh, that means you're like, uh, you're sort of vibrating your thumb actually, instead of pressing it, you're sort of vibrating your, you're like flexing your bicep.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
So you're not fully releasing and pressing. It's just like a hyper press, a hyper tap.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Yeah. So then in 2020 comes along a guy named Christopher Martinez, also known as Cheese, capital C, capital Z.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
So he introduced a technique called rolling. It's also called fly hecking, H-E-C-C-I-N-G, after a guy named Hector Fly Rodriguez, who developed this technique on arcade game consoles, not even for Tetris, just on arcade game console, like, you know, how to press the buttons faster. And I'm going to do a little audio, Josh, if you'll allow. Yeah, please. Because did you see how this was done?
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Did you see Hector's fingers? I did. It's amazing. This guy has like, they look like breakdancing fingers. They're just so fluid. But if you imagine like a stand-up arcade game and those big round buttons, if you want to press that really fast, you can go tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap with one finger. Or you can do this with your four fingers.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
So that's what he's doing. He's using all four fingers to, you know, kind of like the I'm bored thing when you do that on a table. He did that on a button and found like, boy, that's even faster than the fastest hyper tapping. And cheesy cheese. I don't know if he stole that, but he got that from him.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
So what you do in the case of a Nintendo, because they have tiny little buttons, you can't do that with your four fingies. No. You hold the D-pad down just enough for it to engage, and then you do that to the back of the thing, and it essentially is making your D-pad move that fast because it's already engaged and you're going... Really fast.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
To the back of the controller, making the back of the controller essentially one large button.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Man, that's a tough one because you really got to see it in action.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
How old was he? What's his name? Give this kid his due.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Are you going to drop the level? I think you should. All right. This guy, after playing for 38 minutes, hit level 157 and crashed five times as much as the best players in the world and crashed the system. Did I say system?
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
This is very weird. I was. And everybody was going crazy over this kid except for Pajitnov. Who said, yes, well, you know, you beat the 40-year-old version of the game. Nice accomplishment.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
No, and big thanks to Olivia for this one. I had this idea when I recently remembered that I had not watched the Tetris Cold War thriller movie that is a very loose sort of story about how this game was developed because it's a very interesting story set against the backdrop of the Cold War. They really... It's a fictionalized version, so it sort of loosely follows some of it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
All right. Should we talk a little? We'll finish with Tetris on the Brain because we started the show talking about Tetris getting into your dreams, getting into your When you're packing your car, I still call that tetrasing as do a lot of people when you're packing stuff, packing moving trucks. It's kind of the vernacular now, but it does have very distinct impacts on your brain, right?
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
That is super cool. That was coined by a psychologist in Russia, Bluma, well, Zigerink, or I'm sorry, Zigernick.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
I know. This is in the 1930s. And she noticed that at restaurants, when a server had a large table of like, let's say, 12 people, they could remember their orders, which was remarkable. But then when it came time to deliver food to the table, they had forgotten them.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
So the idea here is that the, you know, with the Zeigarnik effect is that the brain really, really wants to store information about a task that isn't complete yet. Right. like taking an order for 12, or in the case of Tetris, they're exploiting it by like constantly creating a little unfinished mission to create a line of blocks that you get fulfilled and then they drop another one.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
So it's just triggering this constant feeling of satisfaction because you're completing these tasks by completing these lines over and over and over.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Yeah, yeah. There have been other studies, of course. There was one that found that Tetris may reduce the strength of cravings. This was in 2015 by the British and Australian psychologist. Oh. The British and Australian. Is that a band?
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
It's like a British sea power, one of my favorite bands. Right. Yeah, so just by psychologists in Britain and Australia, I think. Got it. Basically where they used iPods to check in with undergraduates seven times a day to see if they were craving drugs, food, sex, and other things. They just said yes. Yeah, that you might crave. Yeah, they're like, we're undergrads, duh.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
And playing Tetris for three minutes lessened the cravings. I'm curious if that's just because they're preoccupied with it. They argued that it was effective because it involved because cravings involve working memory and visualizing the object of desire. So maybe that is it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
You're occupied with another cognitive task so much that you're not thinking about the heroin you want to do in your desk drawer.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
But it looked like a really fun movie that I kind of forgot about. So I asked Livia to put this together and I'm going to watch the movie sometime this week, I think.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Yeah, for sure. I'd be way into that. They also found that potentially your brain might physically change. And then if you play Tetris enough, you might have a thicker cerebral cortices and more flexible cortical matter. So maybe your cognitive functioning and memory could improve. Although there have been other studies, weirdly, this is very strange to me,
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
that found that playing Tetris does not improve things like spatial cognition. And you would think that's the one thing it would help with.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Studies be damned. You got anything else on Tetris?
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
This is a timely one because our bet date has passed. We got a few of these from people. Hey guys, I'm from Brazil and I started listening to your show during the pandemic. But I love those older episodes and I was recently listening to one from November 2019 augmented reality coming soon at the beginning of the episode. Josh and Clark. We get that a lot. That's okay.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
I'm sure my tombstone will say Charles W. Chuck Clark Bryant.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Well, I'm going to be between you and Yumi, so you can constantly just be talking over me.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
That's what we should do. You should do Yumi, me, you, Emily.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
And we're not going to talk about pets or children because that's too sad.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Oh, yeah. Or a sky burial. Throw us all up in a mountain and let the crows eat us or whatever. Vultures.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
All right. Well, we'll work this out. Okay. Anyway, Josh and Clark made a bet that in five years, augmented reality glasses would be all the rage because Josh said that he thought they would be commonplace by Halloween 2024. Here we are, Josh. What do you think?
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Yeah. I think it is. And he was throwing Tetris pieces at them and building Tetris walls. That's the movie they should have done.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Well, Elisa says, I think Chuck won this one. It is funny, though. Recently, someone I know saw me. I had my camera because it was an event. I was taking pictures. And I said, can I take your picture? And he said, sure. And I took his picture. Then he went, now can I take yours? And he touched his glasses and looked at me and walked away. And I was like, that dude's wearing photography glasses.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
You didn't chase after him? No, I knew the guy. Those meta Ray-Bans that you can, like, whatever, interact online through your glasses. Basically what they're... Yeah, that's what you thought would be commonplace, I think.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
All right. So you mentioned a guy that's very key to this. In fact, he's the most key because he is the creator, Alexei Pajitnov. The year is 1984. Very big key year in American history in a lot of ways. And he was working at a place called the Gerard Knitzen Computer Center, Centra. which is a part of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
And he came up with this game that he originally called genetic engineering. Great name. Eventually would land on Tetris, but it was a copy initially of his favorite puzzle game when he was a kid called Pentomino.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Yeah, exactly. And it was like any other puzzle. It was a wooden box and you had these pieces, 12 wooden tiles, each represented a different shape that can be made with five squares. And it was just a physical thing. It was in a rectangular horizontal box.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
And you would just, you know, it was one of those puzzles where you would put the things in there and it wouldn't make like an Elton John album cover. It would just fit and you would be like, hey, I won. I fit all the pieces in here.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Yeah. And this initial version, like I said, it was called genetic engineering. And at first it was just a horizontal. But he just basically did the exact same thing. digitally that he had in his physical, I guess, sitting in his closet somewhere with Pentomino. It was a horizontal square with these pieces that you would, you know, click. I don't know if you dragged at that point or not.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Anyway, you could get it over into that box and fit it. The pieces didn't fly down and they didn't disappear when you would complete a line like the classic Tetris. That would come later when he would make it a big. And that was sort of the key, basically, was he found that that first version of genetic engineering was boring. And if he made it vertical, he made the pieces fall.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
And if he made those lines disappear as you went, that created this addictive quality that made Tetris Tetris.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Yeah, he was interested in doing puzzles in relation to his psychological experiments. Gerasimov and the other guy, Pavlovsky, were porting games over to IBM PCs, which a lot of people in the Soviet Union – or not a lot of people, but that was sort of one of the main computers that they could have access to at the time –
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
And they had this idea like, hey, we might be able to like profit from this one day, but that's going to be a tricky thing because, you know, this is the Soviet Union and everything that we do belongs to state.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Yeah, that became kind of a common refrain in this story as it goes along, as more and more people are like, why are all my employees crowded around the computer monitor? And they would go in and find them playing Tetris.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
It spread to, like I said, IBM PC users in the Soviet Union, was copied onto floppy disks, transported across borders, and eventually got him Robert Stein, who owned a UK-based company called Andromeda Software, LTD. He saw this in Hungary. He was like, hey, Hungary gave us the Rubik's Cube. Here's another puzzle game. This is pretty interesting to me.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
So in 1986, he realized that he had a or I guess he got a hold of a telex number for that could reach Pajitnov. And he sent him a telex and they started telexing back and forth saying like, hey, I'm interested in this. He ultimately got a reply that said, yes, we are interested. We would like to have this deal. And Stein didn't realize in broken Russian that just meant, yeah, let's keep talking.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
He thought that meant, hey, sounds like we have a deal.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Yeah, here's where it gets a little confusing, because this whole story about who has the rights gets really in the weeds. And what happened was Stein started. He thought they had a deal. So he started developing the launch of this thing because he thought he had a deal when he did not even have these rights.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Like they literally made a deal with a guy named Robert Maxwell, a British newspaper mogul. there's a lot more to this guy than, you know, we could probably do a whole episode on him. But he had a couple of companies, one called Spectrum Holobyte in the United States and one called Mirrorsoft in the UK.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
And he made licensing deals for PC and console rights with Mirrorsoft for the UK and Europe for 3,000 pounds plus royalties. And then for Spectrum Holobite for North America and Japan for 11,000 plus royalties when he didn't even own the rights to do so at this point.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Yeah. So in January 29th, 88, Spectrum Holobite released it in the U.S. and he didn't get his deal signed with Elorg because they weren't like, hey, shut this down. You can't do it. They said, hey, let's talk. He didn't get his actual deal signed with them until the end of February. So he was selling these things for a month in the United States before he even had a deal with Elorg.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
And at that point, he got, I think, like a 10-year licensing deal from them. So it was all... That part of it was legit by this point.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Yeah, he didn't have those rights. So you could have it gets a little confusing, but you can have like PC rights, but not rights to do it on like a handheld game or like a stand up console arcade game or something like that. Or what was to come, which was, well, they already had Atari and stuff like that and Sega, like you mentioned. But, you know, all these are different licenses.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
And this guy, Stein, was just kind of going full steam ahead without even owning these license, basically saying like, hey, I'll get these. Don't worry.
Stuff You Should Know
The Wild History of Tetris
Yeah, the Tetris edition. How much Tetris have you played? What's your background there?
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Yeah, from visiting the museums, but it's certainly not something I don't think that's like super widely known.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Yeah, I mean, I'll go ahead and read it. He talked about not being around. He said, like anybody who would like to live a long life, longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And he's allowed me to go up to the mountain and I've looked over and I've seen the promised land.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land. So a definite sort of eerie thing to happen the night before his murder.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Yeah, I mean, he had seen what happened with Kennedy, obviously what happened with Robert Kennedy afterward. But yeah, it was those kind of things, you know, very sadly, were just much more common back then.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, King, Malcolm X, the two Kennedys. Yeah, it's just a very fraught time in our history, for sure. For sure. So he's back in town to hold a march to set the previous march right, and one of the things he had to do was get the invaders on board with not doing this again, so... At the Lorraine Motel, he was actually meeting with them.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
One of the things he did there was meet with them and negotiate a deal where like, hey, you guys don't turn this thing violent. And they said, okay, we can do that. Give us some money, give us some cars and give us a little more influence. And we'll do that. So they were negotiating that. The march was actually planned for April 4th. And this is one of those sort of sliding doors thing.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
It was actually put on hold because the city got an injunction to stop it from a federal court. And if that hadn't happened and he would have been marching on April 4th, perhaps James Earl Ray would have continued to sort of pursue King because, as we'll see, he had been following him around for about a month. Or maybe not. Maybe that assassination never happens.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
But because of that injunction, the march was delayed from April 4th. King stayed in town to go to court to help appeal that injunction, was in court on April 4th through the day. And then late that afternoon, the judges said, all right, we can do this march. It'll be next Monday.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
And King, so late that afternoon, the judges said, all right, the march can go forward, but it's going to go forward next Monday.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Yeah, did you know they corrected it?
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Yeah, I never listened to much of it, but they put out reimaginings of a bunch of their songs called Songs of Surrender. And like you said, it was early morning, April 4th, shot rings out in the Memphis sky, and the song cried in the name of love. And he changed it to in the evening, April 4th.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Yeah, for sure. I mean, you know, we'll talk about it some, but I went to I've been to the King Center. I've been to the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis at the Lorraine Motel. And like I've thought I knew a lot about this stuff. But until we do our job like we do, I learned a lot more. So it's pretty great.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Yeah, sort of in the chin and jaw area and the neckline. There's that very famous photograph of the people, you know, his group standing on the balcony. I think like three guys are pointing across Mulberry Street, which ran between the Lorraine Motel and the, what was it, the Bessie what boarding house?
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Yeah, Bessie Brewer's boarding house. And they were like, that's where the shot came from. The picture was taken by a South African photographer named Joseph Lau, L-O-U-W, became one of the most famous photographs in American history, of course. And the gentleman kneeling, attending to King. trying to do whatever he could.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
That was a guy named Merrill McCullough, and he was an undercover cop who had infiltrated the invaders. So just by chance, he was on hand as an undercover cop there. And he's the one that's kneeling, kind of trying to tend to King. Again, he was shot at 6.01, was alive, even at the hospital, barely. But he died just an hour later. He's pronounced dead at the age of 39 at 7.05 p.m.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Yeah, he was apparently just hanging on. He was alive in the ambulance. He was alive, I think, shortly after he got to the hospital.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Yeah, but when Francisco, that doctor, he described the gunshot wound, but he didn't fully dissect the path of the bullet. He said he did that because he didn't want to deform the body any further. But that, of course, would help out later with conspiracy theories as far as not having a full accounting of the path of the bullet.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
uh which we'll get into all that i believe in part two yeah um but right after the shooting like literally the minutes right afterward there were two men in that boarding house who saw a guy leaving with a suitcase and like a blanket bundled up that had a bunch of stuff in it big enough to where it could have held a rifle
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
And what happened was, well, there was another witness that said they saw a man passing, I don't know how it's pronounced, K-A-N-I-P-E, K-N-I-P-E.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
That's what I'm going with. Knieps? Okay. Knieps Amusement Company. And just drop this bundle on the front door of the store. You can, you know, there's a picture of it if you look that up. And you can kind of see the rifle poking out even. And that's what they found. They found some aftershave. They found
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
portable radio, they found some brand new binoculars, a couple of cans of beer, and precisely a .30-06 Remington 760 Game Master rifle with a scope, which is a hunting rifle. It's kind of a unique gun in that it's a long-range rifle that's a pump-action rifle, which usually they are bolt-action rifles.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Also, like two minutes later, the shooting had been radioed into the police. And just five minutes later, at 6.08, the owner of that amusement company told police that he saw a white man running through the alley and like actually saw him drop that bundle and then flee the scene in a white Ford Mustang.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Yeah, for sure. And all this is just, you know, so we're setting the table kind of as a lead-in to where things were in April of 1968. Yes. So like you said, you know, 12-ish years earlier is when he really rose to prominence, and so much so that in February of 57— He was on the cover of Time magazine. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
so uh you know very famously walter cronkite came on the news and very somberly told the nation what had happened on the cbs nightly news president johnson declared the next day april 7th the national day of mourning flags went to half staff a lot of businesses around the country closed for the day and he said johnson said on tv the dream of dr martin luther king jr has not died with him
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Men who are white, men who are black must and will now join together as never in the past to let all the forces of divisiveness know that America should not be ruled by the bullet, but only by the ballot of free and of just men.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Yeah. And hey, we did do a good episode on Roberto Clemente. Remember that one?
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
So all across the country, You know, people react with extreme upset, which led to violence and some rioting and uprising in like 125 cities over the course of a few days. 39 people were killed. 3,500 people were injured. 50,000 federal troops, you know, dispatched all over the country, basically, except New York and Los Angeles.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
They were a couple of the only major cities that they managed to kind of talk people down. Atlanta, too. Oh, Atlanta as well. That's great.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
So in 1963, he was Times Man of the Year after being on the cover just a handful of years earlier. And in 1964, he won the Nobel Peace Prize. So he was one of the most famous Americans by the early 1960s.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
So despite the fact that, you know, black folks and a lot of white folks are mourning this this death, it also sort of widened the rift because it became a symbol all of a sudden as white America's rejection of equal rights, basically, and white Americans rejection of nonviolence. by literally dying by a bullet, a nonviolent man. But there were, you know, it wasn't just this.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
This was sort of the straw that broke the camel's back with just sort of every, the state of things in 1968 with race relations.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Thank you. Thank you for watching.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Yeah, and we haven't done one on Malcolm X yet, so maybe we should hit that up as a follow-up at some point.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
But, yes, this was, you know, sort of the other side of the coin. Malcolm X believed in black separatism. He was like this nonviolent approach isn't isn't working. And black people cannot integrate into white America. It's a racist society and it's just not possible. So we need.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Self-determination, violence, you know, by any means necessary is an acceptable sort of avenue to achieve the goals of black determination. And especially considering violence is being inflicted upon black people by white people constantly. So it's time to fight back, like with fists and clubs and whatever else.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Yeah, I mean, and we know this because they did polls back then. There were Gallup polls that found in 1963 through 1966 each year found that fewer than 40 percent of white Americans viewed Martin Luther King Jr. favorably. So one of the other things that didn't help besides his work in civil rights was his stance on Vietnam and the war in Vietnam.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
He was always against it, but really changed his stance in 1967, started being really, really vocal about it as far as publicly condemning the war. started leading anti-war marches, giving speeches against the war.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
One very famous one was Beyond Vietnam, colon, A Time to Break the Silence, a speech he gave in New York City at Riverside Church in April, actually exactly one year, April 4th, 1967, before his murder. Mm-hmm. And it was a very controversial speech because it was his most adamant anti-war, anti-Vietnam speech yet. And he specifically called out America and the U.S.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
military by sending a disproportionate number of, you know, kind of poor black American boys to fight that war.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Right. Yeah. And, you know, this ship. So he already had, you know, people coming at him from all sides. And now even within his own camp, they didn't love it either. His advisors and his staff didn't love this change of direction. So, you know, by the time April of 1968 rolls around. He's exhausted. He's tired. He's got people coming at him from every angle, even within his own camp.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
And he just wasn't at his peak personally or with his career.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Yeah. We've set the stage with where King was, and we'll come back and then set the stage with Memphis and where Memphis was. Well, it was in Tennessee, but how Memphis was in April of 1968.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
That's right. We haven't done a two-parter in a while, but as we got into the originally one-parter of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., you were like, man, there's a lot more here that we can just kind of explode this into a two-parter.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
Yeah, but before these marches, there was, you know, there was already a strike going on. It just wasn't, you know, full throttle at this point. What would really kick that into gear were the very tragic deaths of two sanitation workers, Echo Cole and Robert Walker. They were crushed to death. Their truck malfunctioned. They were trying to take shelter from the rain and were crushed by the truck.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
And the city didn't pay any compensation to their families at all. So this is what really kind of triggered the mass walk-off the job. Almost all the workers, black sanitation workers, went on strike at the time.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
And King was like, all right, I got to get to Memphis. It's in trouble. It's an opportunity for me as well, like you said, to sort of help me segue into this other movement. And there were a couple of different marches. On March 28th, he led a march. of 5,000 people through Memphis, and almost right away, it turned violent, not by his hand, but it was a group called the Invaders.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
It was a militant group of young African Americans who were not on board with King. They were not on board with nonviolence, obviously, and they started looting. They started breaking windows in stores. Police came in and, you know, we all know the drill at this point. People scatter. Police are beating people, shooting at people.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part I
There was a 16 year old named Larry Payne that was shot and killed by a police officer named Leslie Dean Jones. 60 people injured. And then all of a sudden Memphis is under curfew and close to 4000 National Guardsmen are brought in.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Hey, real quick before we get started, and this just hit me. I went to a work function yesterday wherein we celebrated... Jonathan Strickland, still our colleague, but our old buddy from the old HowStuffWorks Early Stuff podcast days, who was the long, long, long, long, long time host of Tech Stuff. And he has hung up his tech boots as far as hosting that show.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
No, I get it. I don't know if you have your phone, but I just texted you a picture of and I just want to shout it out because it looks so darn good on Etsy. A hand of glory candle.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
The company is Wailing Dip Candles, and it is a frighteningly realistic old hand with candle wicks coming out of each of the fingers in the thumb.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
It looks like a real hand. And I'm hoping we move these things for this company. It's kind of pricey. It's $85, but I reckon if you amortize that over like 10 Halloweens, that's not too bad. It's like $8.50 a year to have a good spook.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Unfortunately, attaching the word glory to other objects is just not so good.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Yeah, just ask Jerry Jones. So... The idea that it's witchcraft was, like we said, really just sort of invented by Margaret Murray, who happened to be there investigating another case altogether.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Yeah, that's right. So that wasn't witchy either. It was just like, I'm pitchforking your hay and I get mad at you. And so I'm going to kill you with the thing in my hand.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
He's still around and executive producing a slate of shows, but... He decided not to host Tech Stuff any longer. And we just, it was great seeing him. It's been quite a while and he's doing great. And just hats off to Jonathan and what a great body of work he's given the world over all those years.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
All right. So I mentioned a cliffhanger. It wasn't really a cliffhanger. I'm not sure why I said that. But let's jump forward a little bit to 1953, where the story takes a turn. There was a journalist there named Wilfred Wilfred Byford Jones apparently had a pen name that was Quaistar. It's basically, yeah. Q-U-A-E-S-T-O-R.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Yeah, I could see that. But old Wilfred wrote a bunch of very speculative articles about Bella's murder, which only led to confusion and falsehoods. A lot of it had to do with witches, of course, and blaming stuff on the Romani people, you know, what they called gypsies at the time, like coming through town, doing something like that.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
And all this to say, one of these stories was caught by a reader who wrote in to Byford Jones under the name of Anna of Claverley. And basically it was like, I know the deal. I'll just read it real quick. Finish your articles, R.E. The Witch Elm Crimes. By all means, they are interesting to your readers, but you will never solve the mystery.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
The one person who could give you the answer is now beyond the jurisdiction of earthly courts – in other words, dead – The affair is closed and involves no witches, black magic or moonlight rights. The only clues I can give you are that the person responsible for the crime died insane in 1942 and the victim was Dutch and arrived illegally in England about 1941. I have no wish to recall anymore.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Yeah, I guess they they found Anna and like brought her in for an interview.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
But keep your head on, Strickland, because you got that bald head. We don't want to get sunburned.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Right. Said, you know, pale as a ghost. He said he'd been at a pub with Van Ralt and what he called a Dutch piece. Who is this Dutch woman? I didn't know they use that kind of language back then. Or maybe it meant something else. I have no idea. But that's those were the words that he used. And then he said things got awkward. We can just chalk that up to understatement of the year.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
She, I guess, was also drunk, passed out in Van Ralt's car. And Van Ralt supposedly, as this story goes, had a very strange idea was, hey, let's go stick this woman in that tree and she'll she'll sober up in the morning and come to her senses. And Jack, apparently, Una said, was never the same. He started drinking more and more, quit working, still had this money.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
But eventually Una said, I'm out of here and I'm leaving you. I'm taking our kid. She saw him again about a year later in 1942 when he was really coming apart at the seams, saying that he keeps seeing this woman in his mind, in the tree. She was leering at him and he was eventually committed to a mental hospital where he died about eight months before Bella's body was discovered.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Yeah, it was good. I saw some of the old crew and it's just, it's been too long. Uh, cause you know, we don't go to the office much anymore and nobody does. So it's not like if I went there, we, I would see all the old gang, but, uh, it was good. It was nice to catch up with some people.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Yeah, I mean, it's a weird thing to do to have that idea like, hey, let's go stuff that woman in a tree. I mean, it's. Oh, God. Beyond the. No, that's weird. And then it's a weird thing for that not to have happened. And for this woman to sort of invent it, it's all just beyond the pale.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
No, I agree. You know, cops obviously searched for Van Ralt. They searched for, you know, records wise, a Dutch national who may have fit the description that Una gave. But it went cold yet again. And then we flash forward to 1968. There's a writer named Donald McCormick who picked up the case for a book he was writing called Murder by Witchcraft.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
And this is when he I mean, this guy doesn't have a very good reputation as a writer because it seems like he would just they call them a fantasy historian, like he would just make stuff up, make a lot of weird claims and theories. He would say things like, you know, I was able to interview someone exclusively who was anonymous and that no one else could talk to. And here is that interview.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
And in this case, he said, you know, this interview that I got with this guy that no one else knows about or will talk to and who shall remain anonymous was a former Nazi spy recruiter hiding in Paraguay. And Bella was a Dutch born German spy named Clara or Clara Bella. And I've even got Nazi intelligence files on this. I'm not going to show you.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
But it says that she parachuted into Birmingham in March or April 1941. So the timeline fits. And she happened to look just exactly like who was described by Una.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
That's it. Smells awful. It makes much more sense because you were talking in those sort of ways about it. And I thought it was recent. And I was like, that's a weird nostalgia for something that happened a few weeks ago. It makes me nostalgic for yesterday. I can still remember that moment in December. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
All right. So that's that book aside. Another twist came in 2013. The Independent ran a story about Bella connecting it to a spy named Joseph Jacobs, who is a German spy who evidently parachuted into a field near Cambridge in February 1941. Got hurt really badly. Could not walk. Fired his pistol in the air to attract some help, ideally. He said, hey, fuzz. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
So the cops come and he's in police custody. He has a wireless transmitter, a fake ID, almost 500 pounds in cash. But also a headshot, a photograph of a woman, but like a professional headshot of this, you know, attractive, smiling woman. And on the back of it in English, it said, my dear, I love you forever. You're Clara Landau, July 1940.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Yeah, they they did some research. They looked for obviously for records for Clara Bowerly. And they did find information and confirm, yes, she was a cabaret singer in Germany. She would have been 35 years old at the time of the murder, just like the skeleton, you know, seemingly confirmed. But had she had she come to England was the big question.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
All they found was a Clara with a K, Clara Sophie Bowerly, who was 35, who did go to Germany. I'm sorry, from Germany to England and stayed from 1930 to 32. But that was kind of it. No information at all about what she did in England. But they ran with it anyway.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Yeah. Uh, they said, uh, here's what she did. She parachuted into England in 1941. Um, she was, you know, trying to catch up with her parachuting boyfriend, Joseph Yakups. And they thought that was the only way to get into a country, I guess, to drop into the middle of a field. Um, and they said, Hey, what if this Clara was, who was in that tree who was killed by Van Ralt?
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Um, like we think that that's who was in the witch Elm and that graffiti artist, uh, had to have known that Clarabella or Bella was her name and tried to get justice for this murder.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Yeah. Those two very large problems with this story that did not keep them from running the story.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Yeah, finally, which is great. If you're wondering about DNA, you know, sometimes they can, you know, find DNA on old stuff. But everything has been lost, apparently. Everything was being passed around and moved around in different boxes and different labs. And this is in the 1940s and 50s.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
And no one knows if it even exists at all anymore, if it's, you know, hidden away besides the Ark of the Covenant in some warehouse or something. You know, I mean, it's possible that someone will find it at some point, you know? Yeah, it might still be out there or it could have been lost or a building could have burned down. Like, who knows? Like our lost episode, Jerry has no idea.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
I'm going to read this and preface it with, we got quite a few emails. Remember when you tied John Williams, I guess Star Wars people are going to be so mad. Is it Darth Vader's theme or the Imperial Death March, one of those?
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
imperial something or other something like that uh you tied that to um who was it bach i don't remember chopin's funeral march and i said that's right that's right and we got quite a few uh music people that wrote in and were you know gave us the old hey well actually uh these differences here and there and here and there fair enough not knocking those people for knowing much more about that kind of thing than us you just know what your ears told you
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
He wrote our theme song, too, by the way. Sure. No one knows that. No. But this is from Ladd, who gets your back. Hey, guys, hope all is well. Finally, somebody said it. Josh, John Williams likes to borrow heavily from classic works.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Please listen to La Sacre du Printemps, The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky, and you will hear the theme from Jaws, as well as many other hits that Mr. Williams has taken on loan. Not saying he hasn't done a lot for the genre, but if this is a sampling issue, he'd be paying a lot of money to those composers. Keep up the work and stay sexy. And that is from Lad. Thanks, Lad. Appreciate that.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Yeah. And I, by the way, we watched the Lost Boys with Ruby the other night. What'd she think? That's her second sort of adult movie in a row after Terminator 2. She loved it. I looked it up beforehand. I was like, surely Lost Boys has some gratuitous nudity or some awful, like, sexy stuff. And it really doesn't. It's some kind of gruesome stuff, but she's totally good with that.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
And a little bit of language, and she knows all that stuff. Sure. And she really dug the Lost Boys because she likes all that spooky, witchy stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
And, you know, it was pretty fun. It holds up in the way that 80s movies like that hold up.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Yeah, this definitely smacked of like Tales from the Crypt or a Weird Stories entry or something like that. This goes back to World War II in April of 1943 specifically. Robert Hart, Bob Farmer, Tommy Willits, and Fred Payne, four teenage boys, went to what was called the, or what is called, I guess, Hagley Wood.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
This was a time in World War II where they were rationing things like food in Britain. So they were looking for food. They were looking to catch some rabbits or maybe get some eggs from bird's nest. And 15-year-old Bob Farmer saw an opening in a tree, went up to check it out, and it looked like an eggshell. Um, it turned out it was a skull.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
And so he got a stick, wrapped it with some cloth and lifted the skull up out of there. And they were like, what kind of animal is this? Um, turns out it was a human animal. It had a clump of hair, a couple of crooked teeth had clearly been munched on by some animals. And so they were like, we're trespassing and we don't want to get like most kids would do like, uh, we don't want to get in trouble.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
So we're just going to put it back and never talk about it.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
That's right. So he cut this tree open. He found most of the skeleton in there. It was missing some small bones, and I think they got a tibia nearby. There was pieces of clothing. There was a shoe. There was a wedding ring.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
And they, you know, when you get a skeleton like that, you're going to reconstruct it and try and figure out who this person was or what they may have been, you know, shaped like. And they said, well, this is a woman, probably about 35, five feet tall. So, you know, quite, quite short with brown hair, because I think I mentioned there was a little bit of hair very gruesomely still on the skull.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Yeah. Did you see the picture of that? I did. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
And she's probably been gone about 18 months, maybe longer. And like I mentioned, animals had gotten into these bones and, you know, munched on them some.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
The other thing they had to go on was, as far as clues go, was they had most of the jaw intact. And so they thought, hey, maybe we can find a dental match. They were not able to. Now that they had this kind of rough physical description, they thought, well, let's come through missing persons reports. Did not find anything matching that. And so the case went cold for a while.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
They just kind of put it on the shelf. Hagley Wood itself, we should describe it a little bit. It is on a private estate, but it wasn't like gated and walled up such that you couldn't access it because people would use it. People would have picnics there while the Blitz was going on and cities were being bombed.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
People would leave Birmingham sometimes and even sleep out there around Hagley Wood where it was a little quieter. And then a weird thing happened in March of 1944. So this is about almost a year afterward. Graffiti started popping up around town, around Birmingham, and we'll see elsewhere, with white chalk letters in all caps on these brick walls. Two messages at first.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
One said, HAGLEY WOOD BELLA. And another said, WHO PUT BELLA DOWN THE WITCH ELM WYCH-HAGLEY WOOD?
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Totally. And by the way, I don't know when credit cards came about. Maybe that's a good shorty. So if I'm wrong, I imagine they sprung from credit accounts like with a store or something. But yeah, maybe we should do one on that. I bet it's Diners Club.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Oh, yeah, yeah. Was it? Okay, because he was a player.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Yeah, you noted some other graffitis. One of the ones that seemed to be from the same hand. This was in Hale's Owen in another town nearby. This is different just because it had a different name. And this one said, who put Lubella, L-U-E-B-E-L-L-A, Lubella, in the witch elm?
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
And we mentioned that even though it seems like a copycat had done it because it was in different script, it just gave them another name to look for. And so they looked for Lubella as well and came up cold as well.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
You never know when he's going to pop up on the show.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Pretty good. If you don't know what we're talking about, it's just an Easter egg and listen to every episode and you'll learn.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
Yeah. So she wrote a book, a prominent folklorist and archaeologist. She wrote a book, you know, many books, but one of them was called The Witch Cult in Western Europe. So she was really into this this thing and this kind of idea.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
And she had a theory that she had been promoting that European witches were in part of this ancient fertility cult where they had, you know, sacrifices and things like that made. And she was there in Birmingham in 1945 investigating a different occult murder where a farmer had been killed through the chest and pinned down with a pitchfork.
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
While she was there, she hears about Bella in the witch elm, and she's like, well, that's right up my alley. And very quickly was like, oh, well, this was clearly some kind of witchy witchcraft occult sacrifice that happened because putting corpses in a tree is a form of ancient tree worship. And so that's obviously what happened here. Also, you know, this severed hand that we found near the tree
Stuff You Should Know
Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
With the bones, I guess the hand bones, that's part of an ancient thing called the Hand of Glory, which you dug up some stuff on, which I thought was super interesting.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
Yeah. I mean, the spin doctors even wrote a song about it.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
I agree. Oh, now that stupid song is going to be in my head.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
Has it really? Yeah. Because of this episode?
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
Oh, I didn't even think about it until two seconds ago. So you were on that already.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
So, like you said, they were last seen summer of 1483. Of course, they're the, you know, we'll just call them Team Anti-Richard. They were the ones that were saying, like, this guy clearly murdered these boys and everybody knows it. He got his henchman, Sir James Tyrell, to do so in Shakespeare's play.
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Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
He whispers to that henchman, come to me, Tyrell, soon at after supper and thou shalt tell the process of their death. So Shakespeare certainly bought that.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
Yeah, you know that one part where he's kind of scatting?
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
So the montage could have happened for sure. If you are Team Richard, they will likely say, man, there's no way he would have been fool enough to do that. He didn't kill those guys. Maybe he moved them up to the north and hid them away because he wanted them to be safe or something. But Richard never said anything about it.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
There was no evidence for centuries, like literal evidence tying anything there. But fairly recently, there was a British TV historian that discovered a will that included a necklace that belonged to Edward V, the boy who would be king.
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Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
This will was drawn up 33 years after he disappeared, and it belonged to a wealthy London widow named Margaret Capel, who just so happened to be the sister-in-law of that henchman, James Turrell. So the man who either possibly murdered those two guys, or at least was in on the plot, ended up with this necklace that was given to his wife 33 years later.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
So it's not like, hey, this is literal evidence, but it's pretty shady.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
Yeah, I mean, one reason is just that history wasn't recorded the same and there's just a lot of stuff that wasn't noted at the time, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
Yeah, for sure. And that's, you know, that's why people still debate this stuff today. And there's, you know, pro-Richard team and anti-Richard team. As far as his rule, he only ruled for a couple of years from 1483 to 1485. And this is, again, where people will debate what kind of king he is, because some people... We'll say that, you know, he fought for the rights of the poor.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
He only convened one parliament that he used to pursue like some pretty progressive agendas for the time, like presumption of innocence was created under his watch.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
A lot of his rule was pretty tragic, though. There was a lot of war. One of his closest allies ended up turning against him. The Duke of Buckingham switched over in a line with the Tudors, Henry Tudor specifically. They were a different family who had this, you know, they had a they said they had a claim to an ancestral line that was, I guess, to our modern eye seems fairly vague.
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Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
But back then it seemed important enough to go to war over.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
Yeah. And, you know, he also had personal tragedy. A few months after that, his only child, Edward, died. His wife died not long after that. And then Henry Tudor comes to knock in again. He goes, you might have stopped me once, but you're not going to stop me again. And on August 22nd, 1485, They went to battle again at Bosworth Field outside of Leicester.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
And this is where Richard, as king, fought and was killed in battle. I think the last English king to actually die on the battlefield, right? Yes. But he was the last king and he, by all accounts, died in a pretty brutal way. If you consider like, you know, blunt force trauma and head damage to be a brutal way to go. And I do.
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Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
No, they he didn't get the head on a pike with a paper crown. They instead stripped him down nude and paraded him through town on the horse. And apparently people were like, you know, jabbing and stabbing at his at his body on the horse. And he was literally had stab wounds in his butt. He was buried.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
Historically speaking, he was buried in a place called Gray Friars, a Franciscan church in Leicester. And other people say, no, it was he was exhumed by a mob. They threw him into a river. And that was sort of we'll get to that. But it was I guess we've already ruined the fact that it's not a mystery anymore. But it was a mystery for a while.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
Yeah, the earliest, like, historical records we really have on Richard III are from that Tudor period. They are not flattering at all. One guy named John Rouse, he was a guy, and this is kind of pretty decent evidence that it was a smear campaign. He was... a historian who wrote about him before and after his death. While he was alive, he was saying, great leader. He helped the rich and the poor.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
I'm up with King Richard. After Henry VII and the Tudors take over, he's like, no, actually, he was a monster and like maybe a literal monster because he was born At two years old, he spent two years in the womb. He came out with a full set of teeth. He had hair down to his shoulders. He was excessively cruel. He's basically the Antichrist, and he actually used that word.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
Then a guy named Sir Thomas More picked up where Rouse left off. He was alive when Richard died. He was only eight years old, though, but he was a close advisor to Henry VII, that Tudor king. And he wrote that Richard was a malicious, wrathful, envious person from before his death, ever perverse.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
And this is where you get the idea of him being deformed or something, what we would now call a body-physical difference. He was little of stature, ill-featured of limbs, crooked-backed, his left shoulder much higher than his right, hard-favored in appearance.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
I agree, because otherwise they'd be like, hey, we're good. Everyone hated that guy. Exactly. I was just thinking how awful it would have been. I mean, up until recently, really. But back then, if you had some sort of physical difference, you were just born a certain way for people to think like, that means they're like an evil, awful person on the inside as well.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
I did want to mention quickly, I saw The Goodbye Girl the other day, the Richard Dreyfuss movie, the Neil Simon movie. Okay, whose movie was it? Well, Richard Dreyfuss starred and Neil Simon wrote it. Okay. Marsha Mason was in it too. It's just a classic film.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
But Richard Dreyfuss very famously is in New York to play Richard III and is trying to do this very, very strange – or he's sort of forced into doing this very strange portrayal of Richard III after he was ready to play it straight as an already weird Richard III.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
It's such a classic film. I love it. Back when somebody like Richard Dreyfuss could be a leading man in Hollywood.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
Oh, yeah. I saw it in the theater. That's when I was living in New York or New Jersey. So I saw it in New York. Yeah, it's good. Very good.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
So Shakespeare's play, like you said, was hugely popular. So this was really the image that we were stuck with. Maybe we should take our second break. Let's do it. All right. Well, we're going to come back and talk about people that tried to to redo that redo right after this.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
That's right. And this story will get a little confusing as we go back and go through it because there's a lot of Richards. There's a lot of Edwards. Yeah. But it's not the hardest thing to keep straight. We're going to do our best. But in order to talk about Richard III, we have to talk a little bit about the War of the Roses.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
All right, so I mentioned that people came to redo the redo of Richard III's reputation. They are called Ricardians. And this happened in 1924, where a group of people finally stood up and said, you know what? We're tired of this rewriting of history. We're going to form an actual society called the Richard III Society.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
And our goal is to redeem his reputation, to, quote, strip away the spin, the unfair innuendo, tutor artistic shaping and the lazy acquiescence of later ages and get at the truth, end quote.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
You know, it'd be funny as if you went to the website and it was like one of those early aughts. It's like black background with like shaking pink letters and it's got the spin doctors playing in the background.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
So that went mainstream in the 1950s because of a book. It was a very popular detective novel called A Daughter of Time, in which they reimagine the disappearance of the two princes as a modern murder mystery where Scotland Yard gets involved. And Scott Lanyard says Henry VII was the guy who murdered these two boys. It wasn't Richard III. It was a very big book, a bestseller, in fact.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
And it kind of helped shape the narrative starting or reshape the narrative, I guess, starting in the 1950s by saying, stick it, Shakespeare.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
which were these bloody civil wars fought over the 1400s, basically in England, like, hey, who's in control here? Which family has a right to the British throne? Most of it was between the House of York and the House of Lancaster, whose symbols were the white rose for York and the red rose for Lancaster. There we go. War of the Roses, white versus red.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
Yeah, somewhat. The other interesting thing, and this is where, like, again, we sort of gave it away, but there was a mystery for a long time of what actually happened to Richard III. Was that body really buried? Was it tossed into the river? When a really well-balanced biography came out in the 1950s from Paul Murray Kindle,
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
called Richard the third a woman named Philippa Langley read it and got very interested she's a historian and a screenwriter obviously a Ricardian and she was like I want to figure out what happened to this body that's still the mystery of what happened to Richard the third and so I'm gonna get on the case and sort of mountain amateur which turned into you know sort of a professional investigation
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
It's always correct. That's the beauty of the phrase.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
Yeah, I mean, she had been there in 2004 and 2005 and I guess just had a feeling like he's under this frigging parking lot, I'm telling you. Except she didn't say frigging because she's from England. She said fracking. Fracking, that's right. So she approached the University of Leicester and said, hey, how about this? I think Richard III is over in that parking lot.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
uh under that parking lot why don't we excavate that thing at great cost uh and it's going to be expensive and it's in the middle of the big city and probably won't find but i feel pretty sure that we will but other people are saying that there's no way and University of Leicester said, sure. I think she was pretty doggedly persistent.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
Took a few years and a lot of calls and a lot of meetings. But finally, she got the permissions. She won the support of the city council, even those Ricardians. The Richard III Society chipped in thousands of pounds to make this happen. University of Leicester also pitched in a little bit.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
They finally had enough money, 5,000 pounds, to rent a ground-penetrating radar system to survey that parking lot, and they went, something's down there, you guys.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
I fought in the War of Roses and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
Yeah. Or, you know, they discovered a skeleton and they excavated the rest of the area. They found, all right, this is definitely beneath the former Greyfriars Church here. And so everyone's getting pretty excited at this point. Yeah. A few weeks later, September 12th, they finally call a press conference and they say, everybody, we have a skeleton that's an adult male in his 30s.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
Richard died at 32. It's got severe curvature of the spine that looks like scoliosis, which, you know, is consistent with maybe one shoulder being higher than the other. Had some serious head trauma. Looks like a death blow to the head. And the date, you know, matches the historical record. So we are pretty sure we have Richard III here.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
Yeah, I mean, it was one of those 99.9% certainties, basically, through DNA. They got them. They found them. Some people say they called it the luckiest archaeological dig in history, which to me sells her a little short because she did a lot of good work. It didn't seem like luck to me. She literally found the place and said, dig there. That's not luck. That's like good work, I think. Sure.
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Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
I mean, they did say it was like a one in a million thing, but again... I don't know. Call it a great discovery, but when someone says, I think he's buried under this and he is, that's not luck.
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Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
Oh, well, it won the Oscar and it was a little weird. But yeah, that's Sally Hawkins. I love her. She's great.
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Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
She was in the Paddington movies, which are fantastic if you haven't seen them.
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Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
Yeah, it's like one of the sequels outdid the first kind of things. Well, there's not many, but yeah.
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Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
And he's like, do I get anything else? Like, can I be king?
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Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
Yeah, with a swab. Put that in your mouth. So, yeah, I mean, they they they they tracked down a relative and made that certainty certain, which is just remarkable. I mean, that's DNA changed. It was just such a game changer for everything. There was always so much guesswork before, like, hey, we're pretty sure. But now with ninety nine point nine percent certainty, like they found their guy.
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Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
So they were able to to give him like a burial fit for a king. Eventually, they had a big he was reinterred at Leicester Cathedral. Benedict Cumberbatch was there. The queen was there. Cumberbatch read a original poem that he did not write. But like it was it was a lot of fanfare. It didn't really I mean, it proved that he wasn't like a quote unquote hunchback.
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Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
He may have had scoliosis, but he wasn't some like deformed monster. It did not answer anything, obviously, about what happened to the two princes. It's not like he they buried him with a, you know, a confessional scroll that he had written down or anything like that.
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Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
Yeah, but Chris Barron hit him with a cease and desist and shut it all down.
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Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
Oh, okay. But that is the weird kind of musical stuff that I remember. I just didn't remember that. Emily's always like, how do you remember the bass player from Poison or whatever?
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Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
That was Ricky Rocket, guitar player. Bobby Dahl was a bass player.
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Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
I got nothing else. This is a fun one. If you can keep track of all the Edwards and the Richards, it's actually not the hardest thing to follow and super interesting.
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Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
Yeah, so he was born in 1452. He was Team York. His dad, Richard, was the third Duke of York, and it was his dad who was a big player in the early part of the War of the Roses. In 1455, he went to dethrone King Henry VI, who was a Lancaster, and that really kicked off the Wars of the Roses. I think I've been saying singular like the Danny DeVito movie, but technically it's the Wars of the Roses.
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Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
And you know what? This is another rare shout-out because we want to honor a Boy Scout, an Eagle Scout. And this is from Rebecca Joyner. Hey, guys, my son John just achieved rank of Eagle Scout, and we'd like for you guys to come to his Court of Honor in Michigan this June. It's a tradition in the Boy Scouts to invite some of their Scouts' favorite celebrities to their Court of Honor.
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Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
John is 16 years old, part of the troop. I told her I wouldn't say the troop on the air, but part of a troop here in Michigan. He has served in the Honor Guard twice, spent a week at the Scout Ranch, and started a 5K to support type 1 diabetes in honor of his brother Beau. His Eagle Scout project was to retire over 6,000 flags from the Grand Rapids Home for Veterans and Cemetery
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Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
He also cleaned and organized their outbuilding to protect future flags. We listen to you guys as a family at least once a week. And between you and Joe Rogan, I feel like he's getting at least a somewhat balanced view of the world. Please, guys, just let me believe that. So thanks again. That's from Rebecca Joyner. And Rebecca, we just wanted to give a big shout out to John.
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Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
Congratulations, buddy, on achieving the rank of Eagle Scout. That is quite an achievement. And all the work you've done, all the volunteer stuff you've done is just awesome. And I'm sure you're just headed toward great things in life.
Stuff You Should Know
Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
So after Richard's father, Richard, once again, died and his head was put on a pike, his big brother, Edward, I think he had three kids total, took up the mantle to take up the fight. And he defeated the Lancasters at the Battle of Towton, in which I think it's the bloodiest battle in British history, 28,000 deaths.
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Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
Which is just remarkable loss of life in any war, much less one in the 15th century. So after that happened, Henry VI goes to Scotland. He's like, I'm out of here. And Richard's brother was crowned King Edward. So all of a sudden he's King Edward IV. The Yorks are in power. And Richard is second in line at this point behind only his older brother, George.
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Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
Yeah, for sure. Previous to that, when when the Yorks were in power, it was only for a couple of years because in 1469, Henry VI was reinstalled. He's like, I've been to Scotland for a while. I'm coming back because my wife, Margaret of Andrew, led a orchestrated a rebellion that worked. So thank you for that. Now I'm back in charge.
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Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
But then Edward and both Richard and George, because George is not dead at this point. They came back, defeated Henry VI again, and this was basically for good in 1471. Yeah.
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Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
Yeah, so he had to do a little bit of other maneuvering to get this done. At one point, he met up with two of his deceased brother's closest advisors, a guy named Anthony Woodville and a guy named Richard Gray. And this was like, hey, the coronation's coming up for this 12-year-old to be king.
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Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
And the very next day, he had Richard III had Woodville and Gray arrested on charges of trying to usurp the throne. And they were executed very quickly, along with another close friend of his brother's, William Hastings.
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Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
So like he was, you know, if it looks as if it appears to look, Richard III was just kind of cleaning house of anyone from his brother's old team that would have supported the boy king, basically.
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Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
Yeah, so while this is going on, these two boys in line in front of Richard III are basically hidden away in the Tower of London. And all of a sudden, the Church of England says, you know what? That marriage wasn't even legitimate. King Edward IV, your older brother, and his wife Elizabeth, It was an illegitimate marriage because Edward, I think there were a couple of things.
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Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
One was Edward had supposedly been engaged to another woman when they married, which would be bigamy at the time. But didn't they also say that Elizabeth had a previous marriage or something like that?
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Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
Right. And that was June 26, 1483. And maybe we'll take a break and talk about what happened to these boys. Yeah? Yeah, I need to take a breath. All right. We're going to figure all these dicks and eddies out, and we're going to come back and talk about it right after this.
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Richard III: Good Guy or Evil Putz?
That's right. This is where we don't debate because we don't really do that. We're going to talk about the merits of Richard III and the people that say that Richard III was a lousy king and terrible person. And other people will say, no, that was rewritten by people who didn't like him. And he was actually a pretty great king.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Did you ever, I mean, I'm going to ask you two questions. Did you ever read High Times much, and did you ever subscribe? Yes.
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The Ballad of High Times Magazine
That's right. I love my Bombas socks. They are super cozy and the secret is in their fabrics. We're talking about the really good stuff like Merino wool, which feels as cozy as a ski lodge. But if you want to brave the cold on the slopes or on a snowy run, Bombas has athletic socks built for that, too.
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The Ballad of High Times Magazine
That's right. And if you get cold feet, then you got to try those slippers that they have. They're warm because they have that fluffy, sharp aligning and the marshmallow-like cushioning. Really good stuff.
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The Ballad of High Times Magazine
All right. So we've introduced our protagonist, I guess, in the in the first act. We can't. And, you know, Dave helped us put together this article. And he he points out that if you try to get I mean, you could do a whole article on this guy and talk about all the all the wacky things he did over the years, like concert festival promotion.
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The Ballad of High Times Magazine
He snuck allegedly pipe bombs into the 72 Republican convention.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Yeah, so he was a busy guy doing a lot of stuff. But this is about High Times. So the origin story officially for High Times magazine is that he thought of it with his friends while he was huffing nitrous oxide. Other people say it might have been an acid trip. But either way, the early idea was, hey, how about a magazine, like a marijuana-themed magazine? They've got Playboy.
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The Ballad of High Times Magazine
And some people say, like, the initial idea was just a one-off kind of spoof of Playboy. Right. Everyone that worked there said, no, no, no. The idea was always to have like a real magazine that was cheeky and fun, but also like real journalism and tackle real topics about activism and marijuana and growing it and all that stuff.
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The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Yeah, I think for one year in college, I actually subscribed because and this is High Times magazine. We're talking about everybody. I was going to say notorious, but not really notorious. The infamous Weed magazine. Sure. But I subscribed for, I think, a year because it just seemed like, you know, I wanted to have that house that had that on the coffee table with our address on it.
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The Ballad of High Times Magazine
And I think I mean, I think it absolutely did that. I think one of the missions was, hey, let's really convince people that. Not convinced, but let's really show people what the truth is, which is that this is a plant that can be grown like plant versus, you know, illicit drug, you know.
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The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Yeah, absolutely. So that very first issue came out summer of 74 is when it debuted. I had a 10,000 copy print run and it didn't really light the world on fire. I guess no pun intended at first. It was it had like an excerpt from a Timothy Leary novel, of course, articles about hemp and marijuana and how great they thought it was.
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The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Um, there were some interviews and very importantly, they had a, uh, something that would, you know, stay in the magazine, which was a feature called the trans high market, uh, market quotation, which is a, uh, a listing of like, Hey, in Chicago, this is how much a dime bag costs. This is how much it costs in New York. This is what an ounce of weed cost in Phoenix.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Um, you know what they use, I guess they still call it street value, which I always thought was really funny.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
I just thought it was like the cool thing to do, you know.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
But that's what it was, and it stayed in there for a long time, even though, as we'll talk about later, it changed a little bit over the years. But this first issue, like I said, was not – I mean, they did eventually sell out of that $10,000, but it wasn't through – it was through a lot of hustling. It wasn't like, hey, it's on your newsstand. Farsad said – Here, let me get it into head shops.
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The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Let me send them to record stores. Apparently, drug dealers bought copies and gave them away to people. So it eventually did sell out the two printings. But it was the second issue is when it really, really took off because of their, you know, kind of ingenious promotion.
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The Ballad of High Times Magazine
I could see that. Apparently it was also, if not the first, one of the first times live television showed people doing drugs. There was one of the local news stations, according to Rolling Stone, showed people on camera, on the news, snorting cocaine, And I'm sure people at home are watching this just going like, what is going on? But it was huge publicity.
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The Ballad of High Times Magazine
And they sold out their 50, this time 50,000 copy run in four weeks. And it became like a genuine sensation. That's when also the second issue is when they started Also as an homage to Playboy magazine, their centerfold. But of course, their centerfold was always these big, beautifully photographed pictures of buds, marijuana buds.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Hey, that could have been the original lyric. You never know. It depends on the day, probably.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Have you seen the Yacht Rock documentary yet on Max?
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The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Well, I mean, the people who came up with the term yacht rock are featured in it, but it's about the genre of music.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Watch what you say, though. I've learned from recent emails there may be a 50-year-old out there that thinks side time is cool that's going to be very upset.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Oh, you mean like the Yacht Rock Review? Yes. No, no, no, no.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
The term Yacht Rock came about in the early 2000s from a web comedy series. Okay. Which I never knew until I saw this documentary. But no, it's about just, you know, Christopher Cross and Michael McDonald and Seals and Croft. All the great people. You'd enjoy it, I think.
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The Ballad of High Times Magazine
I mean, you can say more, but I just mean I'm into that kind of thing.
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The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Well, see, I always say these things in a recording, and then I don't remember afterward.
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The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Why don't you text me right now while I talk? Black does.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
I'm sorry. That's right. So mid-70s, when high times rolls out, Those very first years, the magazine was doing really well as sort of a new magazine, but Forsad was not. He was on the FBI surveillance list. He was very paranoid because of the massive amounts of drugs that he was taking.
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The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Yeah, absolutely. The magazine itself was doing well. Like I said, the staff, I mean, it was just, I mean, if you think like the Lampoon and Mad Magazine was kind of crazy in their office, like everybody in the High Times office was huffing nitrous and smoking weed and snorting blow. Like as they were working. But it was, you know, it was creating like some really relevant journalism.
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The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Even when I did read it occasionally, I even at the time was like, this is the articles, the way they're written. There were so many puns. So kind of corny. Yeah. And so it never felt like as good as I think they might have thought it was. Does that make sense?
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The Ballad of High Times Magazine
They were exposing, you know, government activities as far as the drug war goes. Like when putting Paraquat, which I cannot help but think of Big Lebowski when I hear that word. I don't remember that part. It's when the dude called the real Lebowski a human paraquat when he was mad. I think he said human even. Human paraquat.
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The Ballad of High Times Magazine
But paraquat was the pesticide that was in marijuana fields under orders from the U.S. And this article helped promote a congressional investigation. They interviewed the Dalai Lama about drugs. There was Hunter S. Thompson and Of course, William S. Burroughs doing writing. There was Truman Capote did a guest interview with Andy Warhol. Bob Marley was in it.
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The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Like it was really the heyday of that magazine as far as being like a real like they achieve what they wanted to achieve in the first few years.
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The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Yeah, I mean, by year four, they had a subscribership that was about the same as Rolling Stone magazine.
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The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Which is, yeah, it's just nuts. In 1978, Forsythe had previous attempts at suicide, but he succeeded in November of 1978, very sadly, when he was just 33 years old. I saw different things that he, you know, it was after the death of a friend. that had him really upset. And like I said, there were previous attempts. So he was a troubled guy, to say the least.
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The Ballad of High Times Magazine
But they held his memorial atop the World Trade Center at the Windows of the World restaurant. And as legend has it, smoked, I think Keith Richards snorted his dad's ashes supposedly, but they rolled up some of Forsad's ashes in joints and smoked them as a staff.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
It's weird for Claire to be judgy like that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
I wonder if she was upset about her art class at the time.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
So High Times, this is before, as far as the magazine itself, before Forsyth died, they did start to sort of stray from their mission statement a little bit as far as coverage of harder drugs. They started writing a lot about cocaine.
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The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Like in a big, big way, they even started including cocaine and and meth and LSD in that trans high market quotation as far as how much it should cost in different cities. And it was sort of like I think the adherence of the magazine even were a little bit like, hey, this is not what I signed up for. Like this was a weed magazine. So they kind of got back to the weed thing more in the 80s.
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The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Cocaine, you know, the reputation started to get a little bit more like, hey, wait a minute. This stuff is, like, really dangerous, and there's a lot of violence attached to it in the trade. And so they really got back to the pot thing again in a big way.
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The Ballad of High Times Magazine
And they were just getting going again in the 80s, back to their mission statement, when the DEA launched something called Operation Green Merchant,
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
in which they really wanted to target marijuana growth and not the growth of marijuana, like growing marijuana plants and advertisements for this equipment that was sort of thinly veiled as like, oh no, these lights just help you grow your oregano at home or whatever, your lettuce.
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The Ballad of High Times Magazine
And so Operation Green Merchant was to target those ads and the publications that sort of taught you step-by-step how to do this.
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The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Yeah. And High Times Magazine, I mean, they rolled right with it. I mean, right into the 90s, all of a sudden it's like, oh, well, now we can put Ice Cube on the cover and, you know, write about this other sort of I mean, I guess you call it a subculture that, you know, we hadn't been highlighting in the past.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
And, you know, beyond making it relevant again, I think they they found out they were missing out on an entire like readership that they had never targeted before.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
I was talking to my friend Clay the other day because he is who introduced us to the Chronic when we would, I think I've said this before, but we went over to his house and played like the Nintendo, whatever the system was. What was the one back then?
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The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Yeah, so we'd go over there and play Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, and Clay one day was like, dude, listen to this.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Puts on the Chronic, and Snoop Dogg's voice came out of the speaker. And we were all into hip-hop at the time, but Snoop Dogg, he didn't sound like anybody else at the time.
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The Ballad of High Times Magazine
So when his voice came out, we were like, who is this guy? Yeah. It's like, oh, my God. And, like, how funny. And I was talking to him the other day. I was like, how funny. And back then, like, would you ever think that now Snoop Dogg is like this – I mean, one of the most famous people in the world.
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The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Yeah. I mean, working with Martha Stewart, it's like I don't think anybody saw that coming.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Oh, I haven't seen that one yet. It's good. Is it good? Hey, I don't know if everyone knows this. Jerry's been to Martha Stewart's house.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Yeah, she told us a while ago. At one point she was doing something with the company. I don't know if whatever happened with that, but Jerry, like, went to her house. And she said it was a real mess.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Hodgepodge bottles just spilled all over the place. No, it was perfect. So high times, back to high times. From 88 to 2013, there was an editor-in-chief named Stephen Hager that ran the joint. And he was, God, man, I'm not even meaning to. I swear I'm not. He ran High Times Magazine.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
This is when they I mean, they had always talked about legalization, but this is when they really, really got into writing and beating that drum about about not decriminalizing, but like legalizing weed for everybody.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Yeah. The normal N-O-R-M-L. That was it, right?
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
I went to one of the Atlanta Piedmont Park used to have in the 90s, the normal pot rally concerts. You went to that? I went to one of them one year when the Black Crows played, and it was a lot of fun. It was a great show. I liked them for a little while back then, and it was really good.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Yeah. Well, nobody was smoking weed. It was really weird.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
So, yeah, they were advocating it such that there was an article in 2013 in The Nation that said High Times Magazine may be the most influential publication of our era. So it wasn't just, you know, cheeky articles and pictures of beautiful buds. It was like they were doing real work toward sea change, and it worked.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
No, no, no. It's funny. I'm not saying it wasn't. I'm just saying like, yeah, that's got to be the sketches that he he has no memory.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
I feel like I saw it back then. But I do remember that one of the issues I had and this had to be from the 2000s was Tenacious D was on the cover.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, let's just get into it then. Okay. No more needs to be added.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Well, I mean, he is one half of Tenacious D. But I mean, just without Kyle, he's like, let me do one without that guy. Yes. All right. We have been remiss and not taking a second break. So we're going to do that now. And we're going to talk about what has happened over the last decade or 20 years or so right after this.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Hey guys, it's Chuck and Josh from Stuff You Should Know. If you're anything like us, you've got a lot on your plate this new year. You've got summer beach trips to plan, a work-life balance to balance, and pickleball opponents to beat.
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The Ballad of High Times Magazine
That's right. The nerds have done the work for you, everybody, researching and reviewing over 1,100 financial products to bring you only the best of the best. Looking for a lower rate on your auto insurance? They've got a winner for that. Or a balance transfer credit card with 0% APR? They've got a winner for that, too.
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The Ballad of High Times Magazine
You know, we've all been there. You're sick, you're trying to schedule a doctor's appointment only to spend hours on hold, and then you find yourself crammed into a crowded waiting room with other sick people. And don't get me started about the prescriptions. That's a whole other story.
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The Ballad of High Times Magazine
That's right. And with Amazon Pharmacy, your prescriptions are delivered directly to you quickly and affordably. That means no more trips to the pharmacy and no more surprise costs at the cash register.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Yeah, I might have said 2013, too, which was it was probably 2003.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
I thought you were going to talk about editor-in-chief bona fides.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Yeah, it was ill-conceived. I think they didn't quite know where to go after the sort of – it's not like the hip-hop era ended any mention of weed or anything like that. But it was sort of past that. You know, everything changes from decade to decade culturally, and they didn't quite know what to do, I think. So they said, hey, why don't we do this?
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Why don't we try and sort of change the image of the magazine and become just more of a sort of a cultural magazine? Like, essentially, let's stop writing about weed exclusively and let's really stop writing about weed almost altogether. And that lasted for about a year. They did not stop.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
like that the readership was like what are you doing the whole point of this magazine is that it's high times and it's not you know about freedom it's about freedom to smoke weed specifically and grow it specifically and like i said about a year later in fact it was one year later i think they were like we really screwed up here and so they went back in 2005 with a big cover that said the buds are back
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
All right. Great. He looks like if you look up this guy, you know, when I went to look up, I'd never seen a picture of him. I expected I didn't expect to see someone so cool looking. I mean, he looks like he stepped right out of the Allman Brothers band or something.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
and 30 pages of pot picks on the inside. And everyone was like, oh, thank God. And it was one of their best-selling issues of all time.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Yeah, I mean, that's the irony of this whole thing is right when they achieved all that is when they tanked because of what's called the green gold rush. Wall Street, of course, anytime they're like, oh, wait a minute, somebody's making money over there doing something? A lot of money? Well, how can we get involved? And that's exactly what happened.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Investors started throwing money at every cannabis startup you could think of as states were rolling out legalization and making tons and tons of money. And so they realize, hey, this High Times magazine is just sitting there. It's a very recognizable brand. The magazine's okay. Their website's all right.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
But they make like 80% of their dough from what's called the cannabis cup, which is, I think it started out as a smaller thing in Amsterdam, but then became the official High Times Cannabis Cup in the United States in 2010, which is a weed-growing competition. So bring in your new strains of exotic crossbreeds and high-potency buds, and you can win the Cannabis Cup, and it's a big deal.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
It received a lot of coverage. They did concerts. They did festivals. They did trade shows. And it was a big moneymaker. So I think they were like, hey, we can invest in High Times. We can open up a casino in Vegas maybe. They bought up a dozen dispensaries and made them high-time smoke shops. They talked about delivery services. And they talked about an IPO for a while, which never happened.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
But all of this stuff – A lot of these big deals never came to fruition. And so they found themselves eventually $100 million in debt as these deals fell apart after going through just a string of CEOs, which is never, it's always a bad sign for a company, you know, when you have that kind of CEO turnover.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Yeah, for sure. And if you're thinking like, what do you mean? It was like a pot magazine. Why do you think it'd be cool? It's because I usually expect them to look sort of like wavy gravy. Any like weed activists to be just decked out in tie dye and kind of just wearing some sort of wacky handmade hat.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
And a lot of those dispensaries closed. And in the middle of the boom of the real marijuana industry, High Times was struggling and basically dead.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Yeah. Seven million bucks will get you the magazine, the cannabis cup, the dispensaries that we still have open. Nobody came forward, which is shocking. I think the most shocking thing to me, and I'm going to say this publicly, I'm going to call out publicly even. Why hasn't Snoop Dogg and and freaking Martha Stewart? They would miss seven million dollars. They wouldn't even know it's gone.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Why have they not bought this brand? Because that sort of public like purchase with those two names or even if it's just a Snoop Dogg. But Martha Stewart would add a funny sort of cachet to it. Yeah. Like it would all of a sudden be a relevant thing again. And I don't know. It's just it's shocking that nobody came forward to buy it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Maybe somebody who knows Snoop hears this and they're like, hey, Snoop, he may not even know it's for sale, you know?
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
And this guy, like he looked like he could jump off of a chopper and like hit the stage or something, you know?
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Yeah, for sure. I also just realized with the ultimate 50-something-year-old white guy, I think it would probably be for shizzle and not for schnizzle. Because for sure would be for shizzle, right?
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
That's right. They make it really easy to sell access to content on your websites like online courses, blogs, videos, and memberships. You can earn recurring revenue by gating your content behind a paywall even. Simply set the price and choose whether to charge a one-time fee or subscription for access.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Ignominious? Ignominious? Ignoramus, I think is what you meant.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Yeah. Maybe Jack Black, he's not going to miss seven million bucks. Maybe. Maybe. I mean, he might miss it for the afternoon, but then he would say, but I've got this magazine now.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Yeah, this is from Rosalie, and it's just a very kind sort of gentle reminder, which is always nice to hear. Hey, guys, it's taken me a while to get this into words, and I hope it comes across with care. It does.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Yeah, he's wearing his own handmade knit hat.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Yeah, exactly. As a woman in science who does science every day, I just want to point out that technicians are still scientists. In your episode on chemistry sets, you rightly pointed out all the sexism in the past and present and how science is presented to girls versus boys.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
But you also feed into it a little bit when you said that girls were funneled into technician jobs instead of being the scientists. There are a lot of ways to be a scientist, and technician is definitely one of them. That's like saying that nurses aren't healers like doctors are.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
A more accurate description is that women were and are funneled into technician and now communication jobs in the sciences and men to the professors and principal investigators. It is better than it has ever been, I have to say, but academia still hasn't figured it out, among other things. And that I'm glad to know that, Rosalie. And that's from Rosalie Maltmead.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Yeah, so, I mean, regardless of how you feel about that or him or any of it, he wasn't just some guy saying, like, hey, let's try and make a little dough off of this marijuana people are smoking. Like, he was knee-deep in the business. Right. This was after coming out of...
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
seemingly to avoid the Vietnam draft, a short stint in the Air Guard, where he was discharged after convincing them that he had schizophrenia. And at that point, he went back to Arizona in Phoenix, changed that name, which was his mother's, I'm sorry, grandmother's maiden name, And, you know, got into the underground zine scene.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
You know, that was a big thing back in the late 60s because of the ubiquity of like being able to print your own stuff in an office or I don't know if they had Kinkos back then, but he got into those and founded his own first underground magazine called Orpheus, which had some politics to it, but it was kind of just a little groovy psychedelic thing that covered like music and pot and stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Yeah, there was a peace sign on the cover that actually had a real bullet hole. So instead of just drawing a bullet hole, he shot them up himself.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
I'm not sure. I always saw it called UPS. UPS.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Yeah, and he eventually worked his way up to national coordinator for the Underground Press Syndicate. And that's where he learned how to run a magazine, basically. That's how he learned about ad deals, distribution, printing, like efficient printing, real printing, for a little while. And I figure we should probably do something on Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies at some point. All right.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
You don't want to highlight boomers, do you?
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Hey, if you want to learn about Abbie Hoffman, you're not going to learn about it here, everybody. Go steal his book. Yeah. Very nice. I got that one. So he did join up with Hoffman, though, and his yippies.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Again, if you want to read about them, they were a group that did a lot of like kind of social pranks and media grab, you know, activist stuff for their radical causes in 1970 for said for side, he said.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
I think you're probably right. But I'm just I've been saying it wrong all day. So it's in my head. So it's going to take a minute.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
That's right. Just go to squarespace.com slash stuff for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code stuff to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Wow. You also sent me a lot of fun ads for cocaine paraphernalia. Dude. That was crazy.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Yeah, and then McDonald's hired them to develop their Happy Meal prizes.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
They're like, this guy's really good at these tiny little baubles.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
All right. So 1970, that's where we were for Saad testified before Nixon's presidential commission on obscenity and pornography. And this is when he got a real chance to, you know, take the national stage and talk about, well, the quote was the only obscenity is censorship. And it's the first and I feel like we talked about this in our pie in the face episode. It had to.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
But it's the first incident that we know of where a protest pie in the face happened when he pulled out a cream pie and face pied Dr. Dr. Larson, Dr. Otto Larson.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Yeah. And that must be the first one. I mean, it's cited as the first time, you know, not in a Marx Brothers movie. Somebody's like, let me make a point with this.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
Yeah, and he also let that pie sit out the day before in Phoenix, so it was rotten green.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
All right. Let's take a break, and we'll talk about the beginnings of the magazine right after this.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
That's right. They make it really easy to sell access to content on your websites like online courses, blogs, videos, and memberships. You can earn recurring revenue by gating your content behind a paywall even. Simply set the price and choose whether to charge a one-time fee or subscription for access.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
That's right. Just go to squarespace.com slash stuff for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code stuff to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain. Hey guys, it's Chuck and Josh from Stuff You Should Know. If you're anything like us, you've got a lot on your plate this new year.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
You've got summer beach trips to plan, a work-life balance to balance, and pickleball opponents to beat.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ballad of High Times Magazine
That's right. The nerds have done the work for you, everybody, researching and reviewing over 1,100 financial products to bring you only the best of the best. Looking for a lower rate on your auto insurance? They've got a winner for that. Or a balance transfer credit card with 0% APR? They've got a winner for that, too.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Right. So, yeah, Pseudocide, I'd never known that before, but Pseudocide is a different term for faking your own death. Like pseudo, like fake, inside, death. That's right. So, I don't think side means death. I think it's a little worse than that, but you get the point.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Right, right. I thought those doorstep cameras were to create a sense of community, like you would find out what a great person your UPS driver is. Isn't that what they're for?
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Right. It just tangentially helps to track people who fake their own death.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Du solltest es posten zu Yakety Sachs. Ich könnte das eigentlich machen. Es gibt viele Wege, in denen man in diesen Tagen getroffen werden kann. Wege, die man vielleicht nicht gedacht hätte. Hier ist ein Wort für die Weisen.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
And I don't remember what brought this up. I just had this idea to do this one. I don't remember what it was. But it turns out that there's like... This is a thing. It's not just something you see in the movies, like... Eine überraschende Anzahl, ich will nicht viel sagen, aber eine überraschende Anzahl von Menschen hat das versucht. Ja.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Wenn du versuchen wirst, deinen Tod zu bestätigen, und jeder, der etwas mit der Forschung dieses Artikels zu tun hat, sagt, du sollst dich nicht kümmern, dann wirst du es wahrscheinlich auslösen. You had better researched every single aspect you can possibly think of and started a long time before. It would really help if you had thought about this 10 years ago.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
The best time to start planning your pseudocide is 10 years ago. The second best time is today, but it's not really a good time second best. That's the old saying. But if you had started thinking about it 10 years ago, you could have really actually given this identity, your new false identity legs by like getting credit cards in its name, building a credit history.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Like it would be way easier to step into that life than say like, you know, figuring out what Tor is and then buying like a false identity the same day. You want to plan it better than that.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Yeah, I think so too. I think, you know, that's the kind of thing where you're like, would a fake person have a boat operator's license?
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Nein, er ging auch noch weiter. Er hat seinen Ausdruck ausgeschnitten. Ja, du musst das tun. Ich glaube, ja, für deine ID, weil es sehr einfach wäre, jemanden zu scannen, ein Database von Fahrerlizenzen, der für jemanden die Gesichter sucht. Das ist in diesen Tagen einfach.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Aber was er gemacht hat, war, dass er seine Fahrradlizenz-Foto genommen hat und es dann mit ein paar anderen Leuten verglichen hat, um eine völlig synthetische neue Person zu erschaffen. Und das ist, was er für seine Fotos benutzt hat. Ich glaube, es war nah genug, dass, wenn du es jemandem gezeigt hättest, würden sie nicht sagen, was ist das für eine verrückte Sache? Du siehst aus wie ein Picasso.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Aber es würde trotzdem volle Facialerkennung geben.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Ich bin alt genug, aber erinnere dich, das ist 2010.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Und es ist wahrscheinlich, dass noch mehr Menschen es versucht haben, als wir denken, weil diejenigen, die wir wissen, sind diejenigen, die getroffen wurden. Wahrscheinlich sind es viele Leute da draußen, die es versucht haben und es erfolgreich gemacht haben.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Es ist, und ich weiß nicht, was du mit AI meinst.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
No, it's kind of coming out that way though, huh?
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Ja, auch Bitcoin. Obwohl die Bitcoin-Transaktionen selbst anonym sind, oder wer was kauft, ist anonym. Die echte Transaktion ist öffentlich und ist öffentlich auf der Bitcoin-Blockchain gelistet. Und wenn dein echter Name irgendwo auf der Reihe mit deiner Bitcoin-Wallet verbunden ist,
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Und wenn die FEDs einen Bitcoin-Track machen, gehen sie in deine Wallet, dann wissen sie, dass du nur einen Bitcoin gekauft hast. Und so können sie dich folgen und sehen, was du mit diesem Bitcoin tust. Also ist es wirklich, wirklich schwer, auch mit Kryptowährungen, anonym zu bleiben, was auch eine andere Grund ist, warum du das Jahre vor Ort machen würdest.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Du hast es erwähnt, alles mit Geld zu kaufen. You don't want to, on the day before you disappear and allegedly die, you don't want to clean out your bank accounts. That's a big, big red flag.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Yeah, don't look at me. So, yeah, you want to have been stocking away cash, maybe burying it in mason jars in your yard. Who knows, while you also have your regular legitimate bank accounts that you do not touch when you leave. Because dead people don't withdraw a bunch of money from their accounts the day before they die. It's just a bad look.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
So it's another reason to start planning this long ahead of time if you have any opportunity to.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Okay, sicher, ja, das ist ein guter Punkt, auch ich habe nicht darüber nachgedacht.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Ja, es wird wie dein Toast, Mann, wir haben dich erwischt. Ja. Es gab noch einen, hast du den Pet Chip erwähnt?
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Ja, du könntest einfach so etwas überlegen. Nehmen wir mal, dass du deinen Hund oder deine Katze mitnimmst, richtig? Du hast sie auf dem Boot genommen und der Boot hat sich verletzt. Also klar, sie sind auch tot. Wenn sie mikrochippt sind, hast du vielleicht vergessen, dass du jemals einen Mikrochip hattest. Dein Pferd kann ziemlich einfach getrackt werden.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
That's right. I wouldn't say that, because I love myself.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Und wenn sie dein Pferd herunter tracken, werden sie dich auch herunter tracken. Also, ja, ich denke, wenn wir, wenn wir, wenn wir es herausfinden, dass es wirklich schwer ist, es erfolgreich zu machen, dann fühle ich mich, dass wir wirklich unser Ziel erreichen.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Oh, that's so like 2010. I forgot about that. Can you believe that was 15 years ago?
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
I was about to say, too, go ahead, though.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Sehr lustig. Das war ein seltsamer Episode. Ja, verstanden. Also, du hast gesagt, dass wenn du jemanden Identität stehst, das ist offensichtlich ein Verbrechen. Für sicher. Wenn du eine komplett falsche Identität erstellst, Du hast es nicht von jemandem gekauft, es ist einfach komplett hergestellt. Du wirst immer noch ein Verbrechen machen.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Okay, so even if you, so you said that even if it's just totally made up, it's still identity fraud?
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Okay, good. Because yes, eventually you're going to have to legalize it. And once you do that, you're in trouble. There's a lot of laws you're suddenly breaking. The thing is, though, is there is something you said earlier about the cops is kind of being like they can't really be bothered. Je nachdem, wie gut man das ausübt und wohin man geht, z.B. wenn man in ein anderes Land geht,
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Yeah, they were. They were all rage. So why would anybody do this, Chuck? I think we should start with that.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
It's gonna be tough for the cops to track you. Even if they really want to. Everyone who's ever seen a movie like Beverly Hills Cop or whatever knows that the captain is gonna be on that detective's butt to clear that case and go ahead and move on to the other ones because they have a backlog. So they're not gonna track you to New Zealand.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
They're just gonna have to move on and take on another case that's maybe a little closer that doesn't involve New Zealand. But again... If it has anything to do with insurance fraud, there's probably going to be an insurance investigator who will show up in New Zealand disguised as a sheep and then pounce the moment that you walk past.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Sie werden einige PIs anbieten, um auf diesem Fall ziemlich gut zu sein. Auf jeden Fall. Und seitdem es 2008, 2010 ist, muss ich den obligatorischen Eindruck an Magnum PI geben.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Na, das war, als ich ihn am meisten liebte.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
I think I just started taking him for granted. Same old story.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Okay, so we're back and you said you promised everybody without consulting me first that we would start talking about what life insurance companies will do to find you.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Yeah, apparently they think of basically any payout under a million dollars as small potatoes.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Ja, im Grunde genommen, je nachdem, wann Dein Tod plötzlich, unerwartet oder schuldig ist, sie werden es beurteilen. Nicht unbedingt, weil sie denken, Du hast einen Todsfraud verursacht, sondern weil sie es beurteilen müssen, um etwas wie Suizid zu beurteilen, weil es eine Ausgabe für Suizid auf Deiner Politik sein könnte. Das ist ein großer Punkt. Sie suchen auch für Ungleichheiten.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Wenn es irgendwelche Ungleichheiten gibt, z.B. bei deiner Fahrradlizenz oder deinem Todeszertifikat oder so etwas, wird das auch ihre Aufmerksamkeit aufgreifen. Das ist alles nur die präliminäre Sache, die sie nachschauen, bevor sie wirklich entscheiden, in eine Befugnis zu kommen.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Ja, oder sogar eine Freundes-Adresse wäre auch eine rote Flagge.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Wenn du super müde bist für eine Lebensversicherungs-Polizei und sie finden heraus, dass du mit einigen verschiedenen Anbietern zusammengearbeitet hast, all das gleichzeitig, das wird rote Flaggen erheben, besonders wenn die Ausgabe dementsprechend unabhängig von deinem Netzwert ist. Also du bist wert von 300.000 oder 50.000 Dollar, aber die Ausgabe ist etwa 10 Millionen Dollar.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Yeah, apparently. So Olivia helped us out with this. And she found that there seems to have been an increase in pseudocides or people getting caught trying their hand at pseudocide after the 2008 financial crisis. Yeah, I mean, speaking of tranches. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Yeah, that's just just by virtue of that being very tantalizing. It's going to be it's going to be a red flag.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Yeah, I have to take that medicine because my heart is so big and tender.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Yeah, and then also there's some missteps that people who try this often make. One is staying in the same city. That's mind-bogglingly dumb if you're trying to fake your own death.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Oh yeah, I mean, you're pretty famous.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Not that famous. You're famous enough that somebody would narc on you.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
I was thinking that too, man, after all the research I've been doing that is surely just hanging around in my browser history. If I ever tried to fake my death, it would be pretty obvious that I tried it just from all the research for this one.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Ja, und dann auch, wenn deine neue Identität ziemlich nah an deiner alten Identität ist, dann könnte es sein, dass du ein wenig weiter nach links oder rechts gehen möchtest, um deine neue Identität, nicht sogar politisch, ich meine nur wie Vier.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Yeah, there's this guy named Josh Clark, who is a Republican, who I think is in the Georgia House. I could just take over his life. Yeah. And still be Josh Clark. But a totally different Josh Clark.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Pretty much. Yeah. Yes. So like we said, Chuck, this happens. People do this. And when they get caught, it makes the news. So there's pretty good documentation of people all over the world trying this. One that comes up quite a bit is a German student who in 1984 was 24 years old. Her name was Petra Pazica. Yeah. And she went missing from Braunschweig, Germany. Nice one.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
So another big one too is if you are about to be incarcerated for a very long time and they happen to have let you out on bail, there's a higher likelihood that you're going to try this than say, you know, when you're gainfully employed and you're sitting around reading the newspaper fairly content.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
I'm not doing very well with this. No, that's perfect. Braunschweig makes me hungry for some sort of sausage.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Yeah, she finally got caught. It turns out she had been living by working, being paid under the table. She seems to have had no credit or any need for anything like that. She was just living a very modest, quiet life, paying for everything with cash. So she got away with this for more than 25 years. And she was burgled at some point. She called the cops.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
And I guess just as routine, they asked to see her ID. And she hadn't bothered to get any other kind of ID. So she's like, you caught me. I'm Petra Pazicka. And they said, we've been looking for you forever. And apparently they did not press any charges because they couldn't find any crime that she'd actually broken. She didn't defraud anybody. She hadn't gotten any false documents.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
She just left her life, essentially. No one knows why. That's the weird thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Ja, aber auch nachdem sie herausgefunden wurde und die Geschichte in der internationalen News groß war, würde sie einfach nicht sagen, warum sie das gemacht hat. Sie hat einfach gesagt, ich will meine Familie nicht kontaktieren.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Yeah, I think this is not actually that case. I saw somewhere, if I'm not mistaken, that her family was baffled by why she left and why she didn't want to see them.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. And hats off to any cop that protects somebody like that, you know?
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Who said, you need to turn yourself in. This is a terrible idea and you are a terrible, terrible pseudocytist.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Yeah, that actually, that does happen to a surprising degree. My favorite is John Stonehouse, who was a huge, this was a big deal in the UK in the mid 70s, because he was a member of parliament. And in 1974, he went missing off the coast of Miami when he went for a swim. Oh, that was one other thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
If you are, if you disappear in the water, you're automatically going to get investigated by an insurance company, because it is just so... Oldest trick. Ja, das ist es. Das war vor dem Krieg. Er ging nach Australien. Er ging mit seinem Sekretär. Während er tot war, begannen die Leute in der Parlamentarierung, sich gegen ihn zu beurteilen. Zum einen hatte er Feinde in der Mafia.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Eine andere war, dass er ein Spion für die Tschechoslowakei war. Das kam seltsam wahr. Und dann kam eine Frau nach vorne und sagte später, dass dieser Kerl zu meinem Haus kam. Er sagte, er sei ein Zertifizierer, ein Zertifizierer. Und er begann, wirklich seltsame Fragen über meinen Mann zu stellen. Hatte er jemals einen Passport? Endlich wurde er in Australien gefunden. Etwa einen Monat später.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Ja, er musste einfach nach vorne kommen und alles erzählen, was passiert ist.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Oder du willst deine Frau wie in dem Film Double Jeopardy mit Ashley Judd.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Ja, deshalb fragte er um den Passport. Er nahm einen Anwalt namens, der nie einen Passport hatte und dann einen Passport in seinem Namen bekommen hat.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Bra, man, that was dumb. Yeah, we could keep going on. There's a lot of these, but those are, I think those are some of the highlights, don't you?
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Weißt du was, das fühlt sich wirklich an wie ein früherer, was du wissen solltest, Art von Episode. Also lass uns das machen. Lass uns das machen. Tronches überall. Ashley Judd Appearances. Wir werden es herausfinden, als wir weitergehen, okay?
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Ja, es hat. Und um klar zu sein, ist das sehr anders als jemand, der versucht hat, eine Sicherheitsfirma zu verlassen oder von einem verletzten Schwester zu fliehen. Das ist strikt, weil sie Aufmerksamkeit, Sympathie und oder sie wollen andere Menschen kontrollieren und sie manipulieren wollen. Es ist sehr anders. Ja, ich erinnere mich daran.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Sie war eine kleine Star der Chat-Forums und so etwas. Sie hatte eine große Support-Gruppe online und sie hatte Leukämie. Sie postete also über ihre Krankheit und den Verlust davon. Das hat 1999 angefangen. Und im Mai 2001 gab es eine Notiz auf ihrem Blog, die sagte, dass sie verflucht war und die Leute waren einfach von diesem Thema gestritten.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Right. I didn't look deeply enough into it to find out how she was finally outed, but a 40-year-old woman named Debbie Swenson admitted that she was behind the whole thing, that Casey Nicole had never existed. She stole the photo of a local girl basketball star's picture, her photo. Yeah. und das als Casey verwendet hat. Das war das.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Ich glaube, die Polizei hat der FBI darüber gesprochen, und die FBI hat gesagt, wir werden das nicht beurteilen. Sie hat niemanden gefeuert oder Geld davon ausgegeben. Sie braucht nur ein bisschen Hilfe. Ja. Das ist genug schlecht, zu sagen, dass man einen fiktiven Teenager kreiert, der von Leukämie stirbt. Das ist ziemlich schlecht.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Es gibt einen Artikel in Gizmodo, der einen Psychiater namens Mark Feldman interviewt. Und er stellt es ziemlich klar. Er sagt, weil der soziale Stigma und das emotionale Gewicht mit dem Tod verbunden sind, ist es besonders mächtig. Und wenn man das benutzt, um Leute zu manipulieren, ist man am Peak der Manipulativeness.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Ja, und dann sagen die anderen Leute, was ist ein Podcast? Genau. So, let's see, what else? Oh, I think this one's probably, it's pretty niche, but if you're a lottery winner and you have a bunch of family you don't care about that are coming out of the woodwork, you might try this as well.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Und das ist genau das, was ein Autor namens Susan Meechan in 2020 gemacht hat, glaube ich, oder?
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Yeah, so she was outed. I think she carried this on for two years. And then she suddenly showed back up in her community, her writing community forum and said, hey, I'm alive. This is all just a fake. She said, there's going to be tons of questions. Let the fun begin. I can't imagine a more arrogant way to announce that you didn't actually die. So people, of course, were appalled and angry.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
And like she was, I think, I think she expected people to be like, oh my god, thank god you're alive, that was amazing. It did not go like that at all. She became reviled and hated. And I think rightfully so, that's a really horrible thing to do to people. And also, on top of it, to exploit... Online-Bullying. Ja, absolut. Weißt du, nur für dein eigenes Ego. Das ist einfach schreckliche Dinge.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Es gibt noch einen, den ich kurz bemerken möchte. Das ist mehr als einmal passiert. Leute haben ihre Todeserfahrung online gefeuert, um sich von einer Verpflichtung zu entfernen. Ich habe über jemanden gelesen.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Ja, genau. Ein Knitting-Forum-Partner ist gestorben, anstatt zu sagen, ich kann nicht mit den Pattern, die ich gesagt habe, kommen. Das war einer. Der andere war ein Fan-Fiktion-Seite von Percy Jackson, an dem jemand seine Todeserfahrung online gestartet hat, weil sie keine Fan-Fiktion geliefert haben, die sie gesagt haben.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Weird stuff. At least that's less manipulative. It's just being afraid of confrontation, I guess. That's right. Since Chuck just said that's right, I think it's time for listener mail.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
That's awesome. Thanks a lot, Madeline. I had never heard of that and I would really love to see some of those abandoned apartments that were just left as is.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Oh, I can't wait to see that. Thank you for telling me that, Chuck. And thank you again to Madeline. If you want to be like Madeline and send us an email the exact proper way, you can do that. Send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Genau. Also ja, es ist fast eine Art Selection Bias, weißt du? Ja, absolut. Männer sind auch eher möglich, das zu probieren, oder zumindest eher möglich, sich zu befassen. Ja. Und ich sehe das als der Fall, anstatt einfach zu sein, ja, eher möglich, es zu tun.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Und auch, wiederum, wahrscheinlich, weil es ein bisschen Selection Bias ist, sind Finanz-Bros eher möglich, als andere, das zu probieren, oder zumindest, sich zu befassen. Ja.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Right. It just didn't work out, bro.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Ja, und du hast gerade die Versicherung für die zweite oder dritte Zeit erwähnt. Die Leute, die für Versicherungsunternehmen arbeiten, sind sehr sicher von all diesen Dingen, die wir auslösen, und mehr. Oh ja. Weil, wie wir später sehen, gibt es viele Dinge, die du falsch tun könntest, die ein Versicherungsinvestitor aufnehmen wird. Darüber sprechen wir später.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Aber das ist ein großer Teil dieser ganzen Sache. Es ist ein großer Grund, warum Leute das tun, Versicherungsverletzungen. Und es ist ein großer Grund, warum Leute getroffen werden. Ja, sicher.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
We should probably give a pretty big shout out at the outset here to Elizabeth Greenwood. She's an author. I think her day job is a creative writing professor at Columbia. But she wrote a book, which, as far as I can tell, is the most exhaustive look at pseudocide anyone's ever created. Her book was released in 2016. It's Playing Dead. A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
And I guess she had a conversation with a friend about how she could get out of her student debt. And somebody said, you should fake your own death. She said, you know, that's a great idea for a book. And here we are ipso facto talking about it now.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Wer wusste das? Sicher. Das ist auch eine andere Sache. Wenn du in den Philippinen gestorben wärst, wird dein Versicherungsbefugnis sehr genau untersucht werden. Ja. Nur wegen dessen.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Ja, also Elisabeth Greenwood ist nicht die erste Person, die das probiert hat, aber nur aufgrund ihrer Erfahrung fand sie, dass man ziemlich einfach Leute findet, die dir mehr als glücklich sind, dich mit diesem für eine Karte zu unterstützen. Und eine relativ günstige Karte. Besonders wenn man sich die Art von Dokumentation betrachtet.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Ich denke, für ein paar hundert Dollar kann man ein offizielles Todeszertifikat vom philippinischen Regierung bekommen. Und das ist ein großer Teil, weshalb die Philippinen so, ähm, wie der Hot, der Zentrum all dessen, weil du keine geformten Dokumente bekommst, du bekommst falsche offizielle Dokumente. Ja. Because somebody's got a friend on the inside and they're taking bribes.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
So you're getting good actual documentation. It's just all based on falsehoods. But that's not it. It doesn't end there. Just hold your credit card for another second. Because they're going to double this offer.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Yeah, their driver's licenses didn't even have pictures on them. Yeah, exactly. It's nuts.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh and there's Chuck and it's just us because we don't know where Jerry is, but that's okay because this is stuff you should know.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Yeah, we can get you an actual dead body.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Right, and that's going to, probably, that's going to sit in for you. Apparently, this really kind of drives it home. If there's a cadaver and you're not just missing presumed dead, that's definitely going to help your pseudocide become successful. Like you said, there's black market morgues that essentially, if you're unidentified or unclaimed in the Philippines...
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
There's a chance somebody's going to hang on to your body and you might be sold to fulfill someone's pseudocide attempt. And it's not just the Philippines either. I saw at least one story here in Georgia. I think Coffee County. God knows where that is.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Where this, I guess, an undertaker at a funeral home had a ton of bodies that he supposedly buried that he was selling for this reason or for other reasons. But also this was one of the things you could buy a body for. Und sogar eine legitime Geburtstagshalle hat die Möglichkeit, einfach zu sagen, ja, es ist schön, dich kennenzulernen, Cousin Ed.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Gib mir einfach das Geld und du kannst diesen Körper nehmen, richtig?
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Es ist alles wieder. Wir müssen dieses Episode zwölf Minuten lang machen.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Ich denke, Kremation zerstört DNA ziemlich gut. Also warum sagen sie nicht einfach, hier ist eine Tasche von Zähnen und Schmerzen? Some people do. Okay. You just have the cremains and it's like, well, you know, what are you going to do? This is supposedly the dead person. It makes way more sense. It's way cheaper. It's way less of a hassle. And like I was saying, some legitimate...
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Funeralhäuser, wenn die Regeln in deinem Land sagen, eine der Rolle, die du spielst, ist die Behandlung von unbekannten Leuten, wie z.B. einer unbekannten Person, die stirbt. Du bist verantwortlich dafür, ihnen einen respektvollen Geburtstag zu geben. Wenn du zu einem dieser Plätze gehst und sagst, oh ja, das ist mein Cousin.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Und sie werden sagen, hier, gib mir ein bisschen Geld und du kannst alles von dort beantworten.
Stuff You Should Know
Faking Your Own Death: We All Do It, But Why?
Yeah, and that definitely does sound like something Jerry would do.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
So you've mentioned this guy, Ross Ulbrecht, the founder and creator. We need to talk a little bit about this dude. He went by the alias Dread Pirate Roberts, even though later in his defense, it would be brought up that there were many Dread Pirate Roberts over the years and that he sold it at one point and wasn't even involved anymore.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
If you follow the court case, it gets really, really in the weeds.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
Right. Yeah. They were like, why would you name yourself that? Right. And he said, have you never seen The Princess Bride?
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
Yeah, for sure. So Ulbricht had a very, very smart guy, is a very smart guy. He had a bachelor of science in physics, got his master's in material science and engineering, and was in Austin, Texas in 2009 when he tried a few different initial companies, basically. He had a video game company he tried. He found the most success with a
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
a secondhand book retailer called Good Wagon Books, where he kind of learned how to do web development and inventory management and e-retailing, kind of a starter kit for what he would need to start Silk Road. But it still wasn't making the kind of dough he wanted to make. I think they were pulling in maybe low six figures in a year.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
That's really funny. That sounds like something I would do.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
I wouldn't set it on fire and walk away, but I'd just walk away.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
What does that help? 20 dwarves took turns doing push-ups on the lawn. I'm ready. Okay, good.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
So Silk Road grew. He started it was not just a one person operation. It was too big for that. So he needed some employees. These people all went by these kind of fun little nicknames, including Variety Jones and Inigo. Oh, also from Princess Bride.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
Didn't notice that. Libertas Smed. And then another one, chronic pain, one word. The first C is capitalized. And that person's name was Curtis Green, and he was the first person that would be arrested in the Silk Road operation. And so you'll just sort of put a pin in that guy.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
Just wait until you hear the way my lips move in this episode.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
Yeah, for sure. So as the site is, you know, kind of going along and it's making all kinds of money and getting more and more popular or as popular as something is on the dark web. He started getting a little more political under his his moniker. DPR Dread Pirate Roberts started making these big statements about just sort of his philosophies about politics.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
He would say things like stop funding the state with your tax dollars and direct your productive energies into the black market. So it started sort of bordering on manifesto kind of stuff. I think they would have shut it down anyway just because they were dealing in illegal drugs. But the U.S. government definitely hates it when they don't like the word manifesto.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
So I think I think all this other political stuff definitely drew even more attention and ire maybe than it would have.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
Yeah. He thought he kind of thought and he kind of was leading a revolution in a lot of ways, because as we'll see later on, a lot of more sites like this were born in its wake.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
I thought you were going to say something about sinking ships. No, I didn't, but this is a good one. If everyone heard our episode on the dark web from 2020, some of this will be familiar, but this is just more in-depth about the notorious Silk Road itself.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
Yeah. He created a kinder, gentler drug trade in a lot of ways. Yeah. If you're wondering, like, yeah, but this guy could get shut down in a lot of ways that don't have anything to do with the government, like a denial of service attack or something like that. Supposedly, he was paying a lot of money for protection for this kind of thing, maybe up to $50,000 a week. Wired did a really great job.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
And I remember reading this back then. I didn't go back into it, but a big two part report on this. And they had it up to 50 grand per week in protection. But considering they ended up making about a billion dollars over what, two years or so, that's, you know, pennies in the fountain.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
Totally. And besides the drugs, he also had a team of crocheters making those strawberry oven mitts. Lots to keep up with.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
So how did it all start? go bad, well, it's because, again, the government was very, very keen on getting this thing shut down as fast as they could. But like you mentioned earlier,
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
the very way this thing was built made it really, really hard, almost said impossible, but clearly not, but really, really hard to find out any real information about who these people were, where they were, where their computers were. So the FBI got involved initially in trying to take down Tor. It was called Operation Onion Peeler, and I'm pretty sure we talked about that in the Dark Web app.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
But they, in 2013, there was an agent named Chris Tarbell that identified a secret server at a data center, a Tor data center in Iceland, and this is really what got the ball rolling.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
That's right. That was the FBI's line. If that seems a little hard to believe that they would just sort of get lucky, you're not the only person who thinks that. None other than, oh, geez, was he Bill or Ted? Bill. Alex Winter from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
He made a film called Deep Web that, geez, was that out this year? I think so. Or last year. Very recent. Yeah, pretty recent film. I think 24 where he you know, he doesn't he didn't like create this contention, but he basically brought to light like, hey, a lot of people say that. No, no, no.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
That's not how you found out what you did was trampled on old bricks, Fourth Amendment rights and that you hacked Silk Road. You didn't have a warrant to do so, and you had some sort of mass scanning going on on the internet for passwords, and you lied about all this.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
Yeah. And if it's all just sounds like weird and screwy because it's online, it would be no different than if they like broke into someone's house, took some evidence and then said, now that we have the evidence, we're going to get a search warrant to go illegally back into that house.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
Yeah, for sure. All right. So the FBI gets that copy of the server contents from Iceland. They look at all the traffic and they found traffic to the administrator's login and then narrowed that down to the most recent traffic was in San Francisco at a place called Cafe Luna on Sacramento Street. They did some more investigation through the IRS, chipping in this time.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
Like you said, so many agencies involved. And they matched the San Francisco lead. So they were like, this is all lining up, you guys. There was an IRS agent named Gary Alford who saw a post about Silk Road on forums in, I think, a couple of years, 2011 and 2013, from a user named Altoid. And the email in the post history said Ross Ulbricht at gmail.com.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
They found out that he lived near that cafe and all roads all of a sudden were pointing to Ross Ulbricht.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
Yeah. And then it went down like a movie. And you know what? Maybe that's a great time for a little cliffhanger, huh?
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
All right. We're going to see what movie we're talking about right after this.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
I was going to spoil old Yeller, but I decided not to. Watch it. That dog may live. You never know.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
Well, we're talking about probably some sort of a courtroom thriller because what happened was they went to a library and And literally and this is what the prosecution said, literally caught him with his fingers at the keyboard running Silk Road. They were in the library. They had a an agent, you know, chatting with him and obviously surreptitiously undercover.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
And while this was happening, they drew his attention away by starting a little, like, quarrel among some other people, also, you know, FBI actors or whatever. And there was a woman, another FBI agent, sitting across from Ulbricht at the time when this happened. And Ulbricht turns around and is like, what's going on over there? She grabs that laptop and –
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
Because he could probably in a single swipe of a keystroke or something, like encrypt everything on his laptop if he saw somebody coming at him. So they knew that could happen. They diverted his attention just long enough for this agent to grab his computer. And that was it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
That's great. Boy, there were 15 filthy jokes I was going to say when you said the most outrageous thing anyone had done on the Internet up until that point. I was like, I had a...
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
Yeah. So they also traced about $80 million in profit to him. This is a dumb question that I'm just now thinking of, but what did he just take a cut from every transaction? Was it that simple? Yes. Okay. That's what I figured. I just didn't know for sure.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
So he would get his his small percentage, a bottle of Dilaudid and a strawberry oven mitt for every transaction.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
So we mentioned earlier that as part of his defense, they were like, you know what? He may have started Silk Road, but he sold it. And there were many Dread Pirate Roberts, and one of the other ones framed him. All of this stuff was just a small part of his defense. It was not an easy sell. It did not work.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
He was convicted for creating and operating Silk Road and got five sentences, got a 20-year sentence, a 15-year sentence, a five-year sentence, two life sentences with no chance of parole. And the judge said it was your opus, you wanted it to be your legacy, and it is.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
rolling terminator like scroll about all the early internet nasty memes that would go around you couldn't pick any of them no i just didn't want to say any of them out loud because then kids would look them up i gotcha yeah i was wondering and we probably should have talked about this before we recorded are we gonna like call out any active sites or anything like that Nah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
Yeah, he was actually would likely have been indicted for a murder conspiracy in Maryland. It was dropped because he got convicted, you know, for whatever life and beyond. It was dropped because he was convicted on the other charges for a gazillion years or whatever with no chance of parole. But it was a pretty interesting situation with what ended up being a.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
A corrupt DEA agent and a Secret Service agent and a sting operation basically, right?
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
Yeah. Yeah. I guess there's no point at that point, especially because it's not like it was carried out. If there was like a, you know, if it had been carried out and there was a murder victim or something like that, they probably would have. But right. Yeah. There were never any.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
Just to be clear, you know, no murder for hires ever took place, but it was just the hint that that was going on really influenced the judge and the sentencing and everything. He was, I believe, in Alex Winter's documentary. He points out that a lot of the people
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
that were also brought to trial for this got very, including some of the drug sellers, people that ran Silk Road 2.0 after this, they got sentences of like six years on average. And so there's been a lot of calls for clemency that it was too stiff of a sentence.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
Yeah. I mean, the idea may have been to send a message like, hey, this will never be tolerated. This is the first example of this. And we're going to throw, you know, 10 books at them. But, you know, it didn't stop anything. Like I just mentioned, there was a Silk Road 2.0 that was closed in 2014, along with 26 other sites closed. doing similar things.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
So Silk Road definitely opened that whole door, and I don't know if they can shut them down as fast as they can be born at this point, probably.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
Yeah, the night sky thing. It's definitely better than saying Olive Garden. Get more sympathy.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
Yeah, and I had never really eaten there much, and that was one of your special things as a kid, right? Eating those cheddar biscuits or whatever?
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
I think so. I may have had one when I was a kid, but we just didn't go out to eat a whole lot, and Red Lobster was far fancier than we could even afford on special occasions.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
Yeah, no, that's fine. Red Lobster was a very, or I imagine is a very doable fancy dinner. We just didn't go out to eat much. Don't feel bad.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
Yeah, I've read quite a bit about that for some reason because it was just so interesting to me. And sad, you know, it's an American icon. Who knew?
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
I'm going to call this the Stuff You Should Know Bump. Hey, guys, long-time listener, first-time caller, love the show. I'm curious if you've ever tracked the Stuff You Should Know Bump. Does it even exist? I know that every time you mention a documentary with more info or something like that, my wife and I end up coming through our streaming services to find it and learn more.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
Most recently, we watched Tread after the Killdozer episode. Now I'm teeing up American Anarchist after Swatches. He said, oh, wait, I may have mixed that up with the anarchist cookbook episode. Anyway, and by the way, everyone, we forgot to mention the swatch guards. I feel so bad about that. We heard from a lot of people on that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
I totally forgot about swatch guards. Yeah. Anyway, swatch guards are little rubber things that went over the glass, not the bezel. I was wrong about that. The bezel is the ring that holds the glass. Man, I understood it before, but not now. You look at a watch face, and I think I said the glass was the bezel. I just misspoke. The bezel is the ring that holds that glass in place.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
All right, back to the email. Anyway, guys, it made me think that other viewers like me, if there were other viewers like me, there could be a noticeable bump in views or listens every time a documentary or song or something gets mentioned. Creating your own version of the Colbert bump. We need statistics. We're getting meta. And do a SYSK episode about the STSK bump.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
I think you just goofed up on that last part. That's Andy from Baltimore. Andy, we don't have data on this, but we definitely had people send in. I can't remember what song it was that you referenced, but it ended up like ranking and Spotify or something. And we like to think that was because of us.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
So, hey, I guess we should plug Silver Spoons then, the Josh Clark life story, and we'll see if that gets a bump on wherever that's streaming.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
Yeah. Big thanks to Kyle. First of all, our friend and contributing writer from across the pond for his work on this. But Kyle is keen to point out just a little bit about the dark web. You know, we have a whole episode from 2020 if you want to go listen to that. But. If you don't know what the dark web is, it's a part of the web where you can go and do things anonymously.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
And that's just the simplest way to say it. It's much more complicated than that, obviously, if we did a whole episode. But it's where you can go if you don't want to be indexed by Google, if you don't want your traffic monitored, and if you want your anonymity insured. It doesn't necessarily mean you're some awful person doing awful things. There's a lot of people there that just –
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
believe in the freedom and anonymity that you should have on the internet.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
Yeah, for sure. And, you know, Bitcoin was huge because it was they were good for each other. Like Ross Ulbricht sort of embraced Bitcoin in a big way, which even though it was on the dark web and even though Silk Road was, you know, as you'll soon learn, dabbling in illegal drug trading, they use Bitcoin exclusively.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
So the rise of Bitcoin and the rise of, you know, things on the dark web kind of go hand in hand.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
Yeah, and you know what? I think we need to add a fourth on our Silk Road Mount Rushmore because we have to mention Adrian Chen, who in 2011, when the Silk Road went live, wrote for Gawker and wrote this big expose on the Silk Road just a few months later, including like how to get there, what you can do there.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
And it would have been a thing anyway, but the fact that it was kind of exploded on Gawker made it – bigger, quicker than it would have been, I think.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
Yeah, and they also were pretty smart early on, or I guess Ulbricht was, by making it a familiar online shopping experience. I mean, I never saw it. I think I managed to find some screenshots and stuff. But it supposedly looked and operated much like any other –
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
e-retailer you would go on there and you would have your little shopping basket and you would have your items that you could you know are all categorized and listed that you could sip through and you could look at customer reviews and uh you know i'm sure there were bad deals that went down but supposedly uh it was it worked because the the people selling the drugs believe that you should really sell the thing that you're trying to sell and you'll stay in business
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
Yeah, they had a seller's guide where if you were going to sell your drugs, they would say, hey, here's how to do that. Here's how you can ship drugs through the mail, you know, pretty safely, vacuum sealing and, you know, all kinds of tips and tricks. And not that many packages supposedly were intercepted, a very small percentage of them.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
But you mentioned some of the things in your, I thought you were singing that Queens of the Stone Age song there for a second. Which one? I don't know. They had that one song that was, I thought it was not so great. Cocaine and ecstasy and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they were just like rattling off drugs or whatever.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
No, it wasn't one of their best songs. I was into them for a minute. I like that one hit song of theirs. It's really good. No One Knows, maybe? Yes, that's the one. I didn't know. It's a good song. Yeah. So you could buy anything you want. And it wasn't just like, hey, here's some cocaine if you're interested in this upper.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
It was very, very specific stuff, like a very specific strain of Colombian cocaine or a very specific strain of heroin, tar heroin that you could find. You know, if you've ever been to a a legal cannabis shop in any of the states that allow that here in the U.S. It was sort of like that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
You know, you get very detailed descriptions of stuff and, you know, you could have a customer service representative help you find what you wanted. And it was like if you were into that kind of thing, it was probably pretty great for you and probably much safer than going to some drug dealer's house, maybe. I don't know.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
Yeah, and I don't want anyone to misinterpret that I'm saying that like, hey, you should just be able to buy drugs in the mail and it's totally safe and you should trust that. But they seem to be setting up a situation where they were trying to ensure that there was a lot of trust between buyers, sellers, everybody.
Stuff You Should Know
The Saga of Silk Road
Like a situation like this doesn't happen if there's not trust between all the participating parties.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah, exactly. All right. We should take a break. And we'll come back and talk about David and Stanley Bard right after this.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah. I mean, Chelsea is a neighborhood and every hotel in there is a Hotel Chelsea.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
And Chelsea. Yeah, I like it as well. And I have stayed at the Hotel Chelsea a couple of times.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah, and I found this funny little fact that, you know, how little things can change history. David, in 1943, the elder Bard, he got together with some other investors to buy the hotel out of foreclosure. And the reason he did that is because he was a furrier who was allergic to fur and couldn't take it anymore.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
So the reason the Chelsea Hotel, one of the reasons that it kind of stayed that thing is because when David Bard took the reins in 1943, he kept that spirit alive with the artist and like taking a painting in lieu of rent, like had it gone to just some money hungry, greedy people. It may have completely changed in 1943, and we wouldn't even be talking about it today.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
So had he not been a furry or allergic to fur, it may have been a completely different scene there. But he ran the hotel until he died in 64. And like you said, Stanley, his son, took over. And Stanley Bard was great. He was, I've got a pretty fun, like, apparently there was never any, like, problem he couldn't handle.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
He was known for being able to handle like whatever weirdness was going on there at the time. And Arthur Miller, when he was divorced from Marilyn Monroe, lived there for a period of years and wrote a lot about the Chelsea Hotel. Here's one good example about Stanley Bard.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Arthur Miller called down after being so frustrated with how disgusting his carpet was, said, for Christ's sake, Stanley, don't you have a vacuum cleaner in the house? And he said, of course, we have lots of them. He said, well, why aren't they ever used? He said, they're not used? Stanley, you know GD well that you don't use them. I've never heard such a thing. Why don't they use them?
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Well, you're asking me why they don't use them? Well, you're the one who brought it up. Look, Stanley, just get a vacuum cleaner up here and let's just forget this conversation, please. Fine, how are you otherwise? Truthfully, there is no otherwise. All I am is a man waiting desperately for a vacuum cleaner. And then Arthur Miller said, and then he would laugh, grateful for another happy tenant.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
And that was like, And nothing was like ever wrong at the Chelsea. People were dying and being wheeled out of there and overdoses. And he would make jokes that like, no, the cops were here because they live there. And the body bags and the gurneys are just props.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah. And Stanley ran it for 40 years after his dad died. But like I said, his dad had the same attitude. They asked David, the elder bard, why he didn't ever evict a tenant who apparently was playing the drums and everyone was complaining and it was even driving him nuts. And his answer was, I like people.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah. I got to read this other Arthur Miller quote is pretty good, too. He said the Chelsea and this is, by the way, from the Chelsea affect a FFCT about the bards. He said the Chelsea, whatever else it was, was a house of infinite toleration. Yeah. This was the bards genius, I thought, to have achieved an operating chaos, which at the same time could be home to people who are not crazy.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
No. Bob Dylan, if anybody. I got you. No, I mean, from staying there semi-recently, and that's the great thing about our job. I was like, yeah, I wish I knew a little bit more about this place. And here we are.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah. So let's jump into the 60s and 70s, because that's when the Chelsea seemed like it had some of its most notable events and residents, even if they were part time. My my favorite guy, Bob Dylan. Um, stayed at the Chelsea, stayed in room 211 for about three years, you know, off and on.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Cause he was going up to Woodstock as well, but 61 to 64, uh, is when he was hanging out with Ginsburg and, and doing his thing. Uh, he wrote most of, if not all of, uh, blonde on blonde, which is his seventh album. And very specifically in the song, Sarah, which was about his wife, uh, his first wife, Sarah, that he married in 65, uh, There's a great line in that song.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
No difference here. This one is very scathing, tough song. Bob Dylan was the champion of the anti love song. And this is kind of one of them. But he said he writes about staying up for days in the Chelsea hotel. writing a sad-eyed lady of the lowlands for you.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah, it's a song to his ex-wife, and he said, basically, I remember staying up for days writing sad-eyed lady of the lowlands for you.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Have you seen the Dylan movie? Do you care about that at all?
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Well, you know, as you'll learn, if you don't know, the Chelsea Hotel was renovated over the course of many, many, many years after being closed for those renovations. We'll get into all the ins and outs of that. But I thought, that it was a top-notch renovation that, from what I've read, even though it's a fancy-pants place now, everything I've read says that they did a very tasteful job.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah, for sure. And it's also mind-blowing to know, while Bob Dylan's up there in room 211, literally typing out one of the seminal albums of all time, at the same time, Arthur C. Clarke is adapting the screenplay for 2001 A Space Odyssey on a different floor in a different room. So, like, these kind of creative, you know, and Andy Warhol is in there shooting parts of Chelsea Girls, like...
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Stuff was really, really happening. It didn't earn its reputation. Just it wasn't overblown at all, you know.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah, for sure. I mean, Gabby Hoffman, the actor, she was raised there from birth till she was 11 years old. Her mom was Viva, who was another one of Warhol's superstars. And little Gabby Hoffman from Sleepless in Seattle, you know, she's a grown lady, you know, middle-aged woman now and has talked a lot about it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
She loved living there, but, you know, she was stepping over people, you know, passed out with heroin needles in their arms and you know, on her roller skates and just, you know, kind of a crazy life. But to her, it was just like, yeah, I just lived in this sort of legendary divey apartment building. Like there was a gazillion non-famous ones in New York. This one just happened to be famous.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
I did see where her mom, Viva, eventually, I don't think it was ever published, but she wrote a book called Uh, because writers always like very cheekily say that like Gabby Hoffman was sort of the Chelsea, uh, hotels answer to Eloise, uh, the children's book. And apparently her mom wrote a book called Gabby at the Chelsea, but I don't think I've tried to find, I don't think it was ever released.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah. Like liaisons, uh, Janice Joplin and Leonard Cohen. That's a big one.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
In fact, let me read, in fact, so I'm not just talking out of my butt. But one of the people in the New Yorker or something that wrote about it said, it presents itself subtly and doesn't scream, I've changed. Due largely to the fact that the building was landmarked in 1977. So many elements such as its facade and famous stairwell cannot be changed in accordance with this landmark status.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
That's right. I have that book. I haven't read it yet. It's on the shelf with a bunch of other rock and roll books that I have yet to get to.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah, exactly. What a rock and roll story. Patti Smith's book that she wrote about her time with Mapplethorpe. I think it's called Just Kids that I'm looking forward to getting into. But, boy, can I tell a quick Patti Smith, Bob Dylan story?
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Well, you know what? I'm going to say it does. I'll say she told him here. Okay. If you're a Dylan fan, you'll like this. You can just check out for a second. But on Bob Dylan's very famous Rolling Thunder tour that he took up in 75, 76, some people look at that as like some peak Dylan live performance. Unbelievable stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
But he has a performance of his song Isis, one of his great songs off the record Desire where – It's just one of the great live performances of anyone ever is his performance on Rolling Thunder of ISIS. And he doesn't play the guitar and he's just standing there and he didn't do that a lot. And he, Patti Smith is the one who encouraged him.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
He said, Bob, you should, you should do ISIS without the guitar. And he said, Patti, I don't know what to do with my hands. And she said, make them into fists.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
And Patti Smith wrote also about the Chelsea a lot in the restaurant there. It's not officially part of it, but it's connected. You can get to it through the hotel El Quixote. underwent a lot of renovations to reopen. It was a pretty big dive of a place back then, but it was cheap food and it was Spanish food. And so people ate there, even though apparently the food wasn't good.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
I saw it described, was it the paella could have been consistency of yesterday's oatmeal. The taste of the sangria might be best described as purple. Yeah. Uh, but before the Woodstock Music Festival, Patti Smith went to the Chelsea or was living there, I guess.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
And she said, I walked into El Cajote's bar one afternoon in 1969 to find musicians everywhere sitting before tables laid with mounds of shrimp and green sauce, paella, pitchers of sangria and bottles of tequila. Jefferson Airplane was there. So was Janis Joplin and her band. Jimi Hendrix sat by the door. Like, can you, like, just walking into a restaurant and seeing something like that happening?
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Incredible. Yeah. You'd be like, I don't really care about any of these people.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Right. You were like, one day, you don't know it yet, you're going to write a song called Sarah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
All right. We'll be right back and we'll finish up on the Chelsea Hotel right after this.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Current owners instead have worked with it and around its physical history and the enhancements are fitting.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
158 rooms in 15 room categories from 200 square feet to 1700 square feet. And there you go.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
All right. We talked about people dying at the Chelsea. So we we should probably talk more specifically about this because it seemed to happen a lot. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah, that's a good point. There was a very notorious death there, depending on who you ask. Sid Vicious murdered his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, there in room 100 in October of 1978. We can't say for sure because he denied it to his last days, which was before he went to court. He died of a heroin overdose before he was able to go to trial for that. But what we do know is that Nancy Spungen Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah, I know Rockets Red Glare from a lot of those early Jim Jarmusch movies. Interesting dude. Rufus Wainwright lived there in 2000 to work on a record. And there's a pretty funny story there where he was he called down to the front desk and asked if they could send up a quart of milk.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
And apparently the bellman arrived with a tray full of just tons and tons of drugs because milk, unbeknownst to Rufus, was the code word at the Chelsea for drugs.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
And you mentioned Ethan Hawke. I was about to say our old friend. We have nothing to do with him. I know. I love Ethan Hawke. I think he's a great, passionate, artistic dude. But he lived there for three years when he was sort of, I don't know, I think he was fully divorced, but when he was with Uma Thurman, they were kind of on the rocks. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
And he made the movie Chelsea Walls in 2001, which is a series of short films about a day in the life of people at the Chelsea Hotel. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
I think he's, I like the guy a lot. And I like his daughter and I like Uma. I think I'm a big fan of that family.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Up and coming. She's on Stranger Things. It's probably what most people know her from these days.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah, it's really funny. I mean, a little bit of Ethan in there, but she's got Uma's mannerisms and voice. It's pretty cool. Nice.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah. And I should also say, too, that a lot of people, I'm sure, think it's an abomination. And a lot of times these are the same people that were like, you know, Times Square was better or New York was better when it was a dirtbag city crumbling. And you were as likely to get mugged walking the streets or spray painted on if you stood still for too long as anything else.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah, it's a very controversial renovation because, like you said, there are still people living there. Some of those residents held out and fought it for as long as they could. Some other residents were mad at those residents because they were like, we're just living under construction because it's taking forever because you're fighting this. Like, it's going to happen.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Just give up so we can at least get this finished and live a normal life again. So it really, you know, depends on your perspective. There's a really, really good documentary that I highly recommend called Dreaming Walls from 2022, where they go inside a lot of these original residents apartments, see what they're like. There are also some good books about this.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
From what I found as of now, I think there's about 40 of them still there. original residents in those apartments. And when you stay there, you're walking down the hall to your room and all the doors look the same. And then you'll come across a door that's not the same. And that's an original resident.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah, oh, for sure. Yeah, and it's just one of those things where I really like staying there, but I feel like, man, I bet these people hate people like me that like staying here.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
I know, and like, you know, with my nine-year-old daughter, who's not Gabby Hoffman.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
I know, so I have very mixed feelings about the whole thing, about, like, does staying there support that kind of action in general?
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
I know I'm with you. And also the notion of like it's a pretty easy target, but like. You know, I bet the Holiday Inn Express in Times Square kicked out some residents for whatever building they took over. You know, like, is there any hotel group on the earth that isn't gross and did things like that in these dense cities?
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah, for sure. But, you know, El Quixote is awesome now. They've got some really good chefs that work there. You know, big shout out to John Pacini. He's the general manager there. He's a stuff you should know listener. He's always been very kind to me. So big shout out to him. And he's just he's done a great job. And the pie is good now.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
And I've had some really great experiences in that restaurant and in that hotel. The lobby bar there is amazing. Like it's a truly great place to go have a drink. And if you if you stay there, you can get in. But if you don't stay there, you can still go get a drink there. I would recommend it. Um, so I don't know.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
It's, it's definitely makes me question things, but like I said, is, is there a place in New York where original residents weren't screwed over in some way or another to make way for some new expensive thing?
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
I know. I know. And a lot of those 40 residents or some of them are still artists making art there.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
They just got to. I don't know if that documentary was accurate, but I think that the residents either aren't allowed to use the main entrance or maybe they just prefer not to. I could see either one, actually. I really could, too, actually.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah. I mean, let's quickly mention that there were some very famous things auctioned off, like some of the famous doors. Bob Dylan's door was auctioned off. I think either Leonard Cohen or Janis Joplin's door was auctioned. And that iconic sign, as best I can figure, was renovated. But part of that renovation included replacing the letters and those original letters were sold off.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah, I think just pieces of the original. You know, you got a C on both sides, an H and E on both sides. And, you know, I think you found even that they had them wired so you could put it in your loft and light it up. Pretty awesome.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
That's right. And to prevent another listener mail, yes, we know Naked Lunch was written there.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
And a lot of other stuff was written there. You can't cover it all. No. Hey, guys, this is about inner monologues, too, because I mentioned, aside from me thinking weird things when I'm falling asleep, I mentioned Emily's thumb spelling. And it turns out a ton of people do stuff like that. And I told her and she was just delighted to find out that she is in a club.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Hey, guys, after a decade, I finally have the inspiration to write. In the latest episode, Chuck mentioned Emily spells out words with her thumb. While stressed, I do something extremely similar. Instead of tracing the letters, I spell them out in the sign language alphabet. Wow. And there were all kinds of variations. Some people air type. Sometimes it's cursive. Sometimes it's sign language.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Like, it's really interesting. Mm-hmm. I spell them out in sign language alphabet, been doing it since I was at least 11, and I've never heard of anyone else spelling out words while stressed. I would love to know the reason, but I'm also just content to know that someone else has a similar eccentricity. Thanks for sharing such a lovely anecdote of what it means to love someone.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
with all their little oddities and peccadillos. One of my favorite words. It's the acceptance and joy in the mundane and extraordinary in life that keeps me coming back every week for a new episode. I'm a sandwich listener. I'm sure you're going to get dozens of these emails claiming to be Emily's long-lost finger-spelling twin, but I had to write in because I've always wanted to stay weird.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah, it seemed to have a very familial quality to it. And for good reason. So let's jump back to the beginning when it was built. First of all, it's right there at West 23rd Street in the Chelsea neighborhood. And it started in 1884 as the Chelsea Association Building. Nuts and bolts, it is a 12-story building. It was one of the taller buildings in New York at the time. It is Victorian Gothic.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
And Lauren Neider, or Neider, I'm not sure how you pronounce it, you are in a larger club because we heard from a lot of you.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
I feel like these are always me, so I'm sorry if I'm foisting these.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
It is a beautiful, gorgeous building if you look at it from across the street. It's just one of the one of New York's greatest landmarks designed by architect Philip. Is it Hubert or Hubert?
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
All right. We'll go with that. And Hubert designed it on the philosophy of a French philosopher that he was a fan of named Charles. What is it? I think Fourier. Yeah. Fourier, who was a utopian socialist and kind of thought this concept of a co-op of a community should work in co-ops called phalanxes.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
And that's what the Chelsea started out as was one of the first housing co-ops in New York City, where if you live in a co-op, then you own a share of that building along with all the other owners. And you also are responsible for the monies that help maintain and keep up that building.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
They're also in that very first iteration. And this is very key. You mentioned artists, but there were the top floor had 15 artist studios up there. And that really kind of carried on throughout the history of the Chelsea until most recently. That version of the Chelsea was around for about 21 years. It went bankrupt in 1905. Some of those residents stuck around and then the rest became a hotel.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
But it's I heart New York. It didn't say you heart New York. I took it all wrong. But now I love that city. So I want to know more about it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
And the Chelsea for decades functioned as a place where you could stay there as a hotel. You could stay there for a month. You could stay there for a week, like weekly and monthly rates, or you could be a resident and live there. It's a very unique situation.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
And also, you know, the human brain works in funny ways. And once a place and gets a reputation is that you go in there and that in itself, you may think you're being inspired just by being there. And that ends up inspiring you. You know what I mean?
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
I know exactly what you're talking about. We're not talking about O. Henry, though, who stayed there a lot, or Mark Twain, who stayed there a lot, or Sarah Bernhardt, who stayed there when she came to New York to perform. Yeah. Those were all, like, frequent guests in those early years. They were artists, you know, very famous artists at the time, occupying those artist studios on the top floor.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
From the very beginning, they even – held some Titanic survivors in 1912. That's where they went when they were brought in, shivering in the cold.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah, like a bohemian. You'll hear those words thrown out a lot when the Chelsea Hotel is described or its tenancy over the years.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Right. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Thomas Wolfe was a frequenter there. In fact, he died. He spent the last years of his life there in room 829 writing things like you can't go home again. And he died very young, though, from tuberculosis at the age of 37 and was known to kind of, you know, pace the halls looking for inspiration or that next paragraph or sentence.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Oh, OK. Yeah, that's pretty cool. We still haven't done one on Hunter S. Thompson either.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
So you mentioned a lot of people have, you know, done their odes to the hotel, whether it's movies or songs or whatever. Perhaps the first one was a guy named Edgar Lee Masters lived there from 31 to 44 and wrote a poem called The Hotel Chelsea. So he kind of got the ball rolling.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Well, let's read this first couple of lines then. Anita, don't know who that is, but he's writing it to Anita. Soon this Chelsea hotel will vanish before the city's merchant greed. Wreckers will wreck it, and in its stead, more lofty walls will swell.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah. You know, it's kind of had its ups and downs as far as how nice it was, I guess. It fell in pretty hard times after World War Two. But it was always, you know, Dave described it as gruff, but lovable. I mean, it never lost that charm, it seems like. Yeah. Even at its diviest. Dylan Thomas, the famous author, was a heavy drinker, as I think everyone knows.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
He drank himself to death there at the Chelsea in 1953. And they have a plaque. They don't have plaques for everybody, but there's a Dylan Thomas plaque. Dylan Thomas lived and rode at the Chelsea Hotel. And from here, he sailed out to die.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
Yeah, it can be a little confusing. Same place, though. So don't sweat it. So you can say either one.
Stuff You Should Know
The Chelsea Hotel
No, but that makes that joke a very deep cut. So I don't even feel bad this time.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
No. I mean, you can freshen it up, but it's not stale.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah, 1954, best featured actor in a musical. And not only that, but around the same time, in 53, he made his first two movies with Dorothy Dandridge. And the second of those, Carmen Jones, Dorothy Dandridge, became the first African-American woman nominated for a Best Actress Oscar.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
So he's among this group of young African-American entertainers that are just knocking doors down left and right and getting, you know, real recognition kind of for the first time.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah, and we should mention before we break here that his marriage to Marguerite was dissolving at the time. But he would go on to marry again, as we'll see. But maybe we should take that break. You want to take a break? Yeah, let's take a break. We'll be right back. We will.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah. And, you know, Banana Boat was a cover song. It's an old school song that had been around since the turn of the 20th century. And like you said, they they had a more upbeat version and it was a huge, huge hit. He got a little, you know, as we'll see, there are people within some of the communities even admired and worked with it often didn't love him back as much.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Calypso was one of them, some traditional Calypso purist, apparently, especially like in Trinidad, where Calypso was born. We're like, hey, this guy's coming in. He's in New York. He's not a real Calypsonian. And, you know, he's kind of changing it up, adding like American folk music. sort of interest to it. And he was like, you know what?
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
He, I think in 1959 in a New York times interview, he said, purism is the best coverup for mediocrity. There's no change. We might as well just go back to the first, which may have been the first song or which must've been the first song. Uh, and I think at which time took, took a tear rolled down his cheek and he went back to the fire.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah, and he's awesome. And, you know, I watched that We Are the World documentary not too long ago. Oh, yeah? Is it good? Yeah, it's really good. I think you would enjoy it.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah. But Harry was like, you know, I'm taking it. I'm making it popular. I'm making it my own. I'm finding my own voice. And it's, you know, it's my version of Calypso folk music.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
His 1956 album, Calypso, came out after that TV special. It was a huge, huge hit. It stayed number one for 38 weeks, knocked Elvis out of the number one spot at the time, and became the very first record in history to sell one million copies in its first year out.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah, it was incredible. He was one of the biggest performers in America all of a sudden. One of the biggest singing stars. Big crossover success, obviously. And for all of that, this is how he was treated on the road. He would not be allowed to stay in the hotels when he performed in Vegas because of segregation.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
When he was touring the South with a Broadway show, Almanac, a state trooper threatened to shoot him in a whites only bathroom in L.A. He was stopped by the cops for just taking a walk through Beverly Hills at night. So these are the kinds of this. This was the world he was living in. Even one of the biggest stars in the world was not immune to the just blatant racism that was going on.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah, it's actually really, really good. And you walk away from it thinking, well, thinking like Harry Belafonte is awesome along with a lot of other people. But you walk away thinking, man, I just want to be friends with Lionel Richie. Oh, yeah. I can imagine. He's just the coolest. And he tells really great story. He's a great storyteller and funny.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah, for sure. In real life, IRL, he married his second wife around the same time. Her name was Julie Robinson. She was a dancer and she was white. And they were probably, I would not even say one of the most, they were probably the most prominent interracial couple in America at the time.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Look out, Marlon. Harry Belafonte. Pretty handsome guy.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah. I mean, he was offered and that's just kind of what I was alluding to earlier. He was offered roles. He called them Uncle Tom roles. And he said that's about all you could get at one point in Hollywood or on stage. And he just wouldn't play those roles. He you know, it depends on who you are and where you draw the line. And I mean, that's where he drew his line.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
His good friend Sidney Poitier would take not necessarily those roles, but other roles that Harry Belafonte didn't think had enough sort of nuance for a black actor or spoke to his truth. Sometimes his friend Sidney Poitier would take those roles, not in any way like a sellout or anything like that.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
And like I was like, man, Lionel Richie is awesome and fun.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
He had his own ideas of how to advance the cause and advance his career and stay in the limelight so he could do his good work as well. But they were rivals in a way, but also best friends.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah. Highly principled decision making career wise.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
That's very tough to do, period, but very tough to do trying to make it in a cutthroat business like Hollywood, you know, for sure, man. So in 56, this was kind of right around the time he had gotten married and that Islands in the Sun had come out. Just before that, he got a phone call from Martin Luther King Jr.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
And they ended up meeting in person and having a four-hour meeting on their first meeting. And this is sort of what lit the fire for Belafonte to really, really get into very public civil rights work. It was his awakening in a lot of ways. And he wasn't just like, yeah, you know, I'll show up and I'll be a celebrity face here and there. He was bailing civil rights leaders out of jail.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
I don't know what Kylie Jenner looks like. Does she look like, is it sort of like Frank Sinatra's son, Ronan Farrow?
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
He and Sidney Poitier were smuggling cash, 70 grand into Mississippi during the Freedom Rides. And, you know, with the Freedom Schools, we I think we did a whole episode on the Freedom Schools at one point. He helped. He didn't just show up at the March on Washington. He was one of the organizers. So he was he was in deep doing the hard work.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah, absolutely. So his, you know, entertaining or entertainment career kept blossoming as well, kind of in conjunction with this. And he would use that to sort of, you know, help subtly raise awareness just about his community and what he's like and what his people are like. And The Tonight Show is a big example in 1968.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Johnny Carson invited him to host for a week to host The Tonight Show, you know, take Johnny's seat. First black guest host in the history of the show. And this is in 1968. You know, everything going on in 1968 seems fraught and race relations certainly were a part of that.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
And he wasn't like, all right, I'll go host the show and I'll get in and just kind of tried out the usual guests that Johnny might have. He said, no, I'm going to have Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
and Aretha Franklin and Dionne Warwick and, you know, Paul Newman and Nipsey Russell and all these people who had these progressive causes or were just famous black entertainers who didn't get that kind of stage very often. And opened every night with a song. Obviously, Johnny didn't do anything like that. So it was still fun and entertaining.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
But it was also educating people and talking about serious issues in these interviews.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Well, let's talk about Harry B then, the guy. I love this guy.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah, for sure. I mean, all of the major causes that you've heard from, you know, basically starting then even and especially through the 80s with apartheid in South Africa, South Africa, Kenyan independence. And, you know, I mentioned early on, we are the world. Ethiopia and the famines there, he was the guy that, you know, called up Quincy Jones and was like, hey, we need to do something here.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
And We Are the World was a huge, huge hit that sold, I think, 20 million copies and raised 65 million bucks for famine relief. And if you were a kid in 1985, We Are the World was like... That and Live Aid were two of the biggest deals in music history. And, you know, I was 14 years old at the time, and it was just, like, it was incredible to see all these people together.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
And, like, even as a kid, even as a, like, little snot-nosed 14-year-old white kid from the South, I knew that I was watching was important. I didn't maybe fully understand it. I had seen stuff about the famine on television, but... It was it was raising awareness for everybody, including little white suburban kids from Georgia.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
That's right. And including just I accounted for one of those.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
All right. Maybe we should take our second break and come up and talk some more about Harry Belafonte. Okay.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
All right. So Harry's doing his activism. He is still an entertainer. He never, you know, sort of fully left that behind. And, you know, he started doing less and less of that as like through the sort of 80s and 90s when his activism was, I think, at its peak. But he was still doing his thing. 1960, he became the first black American to win an Emmy.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
for Tonight with Belafonte, one of his TV specials. Again, which they were all super big hits, even though people loved them and the ratings were through the roof. It was that silent majority complaining about Petula Clark holding his arm, a white woman holding his arm in a special that drove away some advertisers, which is... Just, you know, very sad to say the least.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
But he was still serving up this sort of Caribbean tinge folk music to people. CBS ordered five more episodes after Tonight with Belafonte was such a big success. But, of course, that was one of the ones where sponsorship was pulled because he had black people and white people dancing and singing together. They said, no, no, no, no, you cannot do that.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah. I mean, he was doing those things back then, too. The CNN documentary that Kamau Bell did was... Very upsetting to see. But the way they did it, I think I mentioned it before, was it was they were just sort of tracking his career and like and he was the biggest star and on TV at the time. And this was 1960 something. And then it was like in 1960, whatever, he sexually assaulted this woman.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Right. And it was it was happening the whole time. Yeah. So I'm with you. It's impossible to watch that stuff, but you can watch Buck and the Preacher, though. Right. He's not in that. That's right.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
So hearing all this, you're like, wow, Harry Belafonte was Superman, and he never got in a bad mood, and he never got tired, and he was never frustrated, and it was just wine and roses all the time for Harry Belafonte, and that is not the case. It was a serious...
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
fatigue on his life um to to do what he did was hard work um emotionally hard work physically demanding um going all over the place doing his thing while also being an entertainer um and you know in 1968 i think this is a little bit after martin luther king jr was was murdered he was belafonte was asked what it's like being such a prominent civil rights leader And he was pretty testy.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
He said, you know, I'd like to take my family and go live in Africa and be able to stop answering questions as though I were a spokesman for my people. I hate marching and getting called at 3 a.m. to bail some cats out of jail. And this is just the toll that that takes on anybody, even like a Superman like Harry Belafonte.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah, for sure. And it wasn't always a love affair with within the black community with Harry Belafonte. He he was criticized at various times for marrying white women. He married two white women after splitting up with Julie Robinson in 2004. He married Pamela Frank in 2008.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
uh he don't he doesn't think you know uh he was of mixed race himself so he didn't feel like uh at times he was always fully accepted by the black community um and he would you know be critical of that uh in 1996 in the new yorker he said And again, that's a great, great read. He said, let me tell you something.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah. And as you'll see, you know, throughout his career, he missed opportunities because he refused to cave, lost opportunities, had opportunities taken away from him. And he was just like, you know, I'm going to be Harry Belafonte and no one is going to change that. Yeah. Career be damned.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
I don't know of any artist at my level who has ever been as much on the line for black liberation as I have and has as few black people in attendance at anything he does as I do. And he described one of his typical concerts. I never saw so many white people in my life. So he never felt like he got the support. from the black community that he thought he deserved and he thought he earned.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
And when it came to who he married, he said, you know, I didn't marry anyone to further an integration cause. Like I married who I fell in love with and they married me because they fell in love with me.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah, he passed away just a couple of years ago in April, April 25th of 2023 at 96. So just a very full, long life and received lots of accolades during that lifetime. I mentioned that he got part of that included. The Oscar was the Gene Herschelt Humanitarian Award in 2014 and a Lifetime Achievement Grammy in 2000. You can add the Kennedy Center Honor in 1989 to that list.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
And the National Medal of the Arts, old Billy Clinton gave him that one in 1994. And what else? In Harlem, he had a library named after him. In 2017, near his childhood home, it was renamed the Harry Belafonte 115th Street Library.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah, and there were plenty of non-quote-unquote rock and roll bands in that Hall of Fame.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah, like is anyone going to really protest that?
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Oh, did he have something to do with Beetlejuice? Yeah, obviously people were already typing their emails. Beetlejuice featured not only the Banana Boat song, but Jumping the Line, which I like more than the Banana Boat song. I love that song. To great effect. I think Tim Burton apparently wasn't super keen. He didn't think it was funny enough. And I'm like, dude, it's not funny. It's fun.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
You added two extra letters. It's it's not supposed to be like slap your knee funny, but it is certainly fun. And the little dance routines, they're almost like apart from the movie itself, like additional like an additional music video or something like in the movie. But they are part one small part or I guess a large part, really, of what makes that movie so great were those two numbers.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah. Go listen to some of his stuff. I've been listening to it for two days. Harry Belafonte and the Belafonte folk singers. Mm-hmm.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
This is just a little quickie. Hey guys, I heard on a recent Christmas episode that you're desperate for new Christmas material. A few months ago, I sent in a show idea about the Halifax explosion. Did you know that this has a Christmas connection? Halifax was so thankful for the help from the city of Boston that we continue to send Halifax their city's Christmas tree to this very day.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Pretty cool. Boston does or Halifax does? Boston sends, I don't know, Halifax sends Boston the tree, I guess.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah, yeah, it is. All the best from your neighbors in Canada.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah, I mean, we did a whole episode on it, but it's a nice addendum.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Well, I mean, there's an H in there. I don't know if it's pronounced that way.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah. You know, actor, stage performer, Broadway star, EGOT winner. Yeah. If you don't know what he got, that's if you have won the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony in your lifetime, which Mr. Belafonte did. It's a rare feat indeed. But he was born to, you know, a very humble upbringing in March of 1927. Harold George Belafonte Jr. in Harlem, New York City, to Caribbean parents.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
His father, Harold, who was actually a cook on a banana boat, was from Martinique, and his mother, Melveen, was from Jamaica. And he was raised in Harlem until he was eight, at which time his mom Said you and your little brother, Dennis, are going to live near in my hometown in Jamaica. And so from the ages of eight to what, like 12 ish, he lived in Jamaica.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
And that's where he really sort of saw the light as far as this, you know, Caribbean folk music that would become his staple.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah. So, um, he hears this music down there, the, the sort of call and response work songs that, um, I mean, that's where the song, should we talk about Deo real quick? I mean, as we're getting going. Yeah, let's. Yeah, because if you've heard the song, you might be thinking, and you never, like, did any research, you wonder, what in the heck is he singing about? Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
You know, come Mr. Tally Man, tally me banana, daylight comes and we want to go home. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
It was a work song, and it was a call and response song of these guys who worked on banana boats, and, you know, they would work through the night, and the morning is when they were allowed to leave if the tally man, the person who counted the bananas, tallied that they had enough bananas to, you know, tally the end of their workday.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah. I mean, I didn't know what a tally man was, but it makes perfect sense to someone who tallies.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah, pretty cool. So he ends up back in Harlem, though, supposedly had dyslexia. So he wasn't a great student. So at 17 years old, he quit school. He joined the Navy in 1944. And this was another sort of eye opening experience because he served in World War II in an all black unit. And at first was like, you know, I don't like the segregation of the army here.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
But he met a lot of guys in that unit that turned him on to a lot of stuff that kind of laid the groundwork for what would be his social awareness and activism.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah, he had two daughters with Marguerite, Adrienne and, of course, Sherry, who went on to become a successful actor herself. And then served his time in the Navy. They eventually lived in Harlem, you know, as a family. And he worked as a janitor's assistant at an apartment building. And that's when another sort of monumental moment in his life happened.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
He fixed the blinds in someone's apartment, in a tenant's apartment there. And Just as a thank you, they gifted him some tickets to the theater, to the American Negro Theater, which he had never seen live theater before like that, never seen black actors on stage performing. And to say he caught the bug is an understatement.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
He immediately tried to get a job there, applied to be a stagehand at that theater. And this is one of those life things where you're just like, are you kidding me? This really happened? He got that job and another young janitor there, his name was Sidney Poitier. And it's just incredible.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Like, what are the odds that these two incredible, talented performers, you know, get jobs as like stagehands and janitors at this theater when they were just in their, I guess, early 20s?
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Oh, if you just go to one act and split it with your friend?
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
I didn't know Matthau was a singer. No, I didn't see that yet. It's good. I'm going to.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Except he looked 50. Yeah, pretty much already. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah. And I'm sure Belafonte was like, this Brando guy's got some promise.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Yeah, Brando's. He's worth an episode at some point, to say the least.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
Right. So Harry Belafonte is in the new school. He's, you know, doing what you do in theater school like that. You're doing movement and voice and eventually like some singing. And he was like, oh, wait a minute. I can sing pretty good, too. And everyone else said, yeah, you can sing pretty good. And you're handsome to a fault. So you've kind of got it all going on.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
There weren't a ton of roles for black men in the theater at the time, or at least, and this is something that we'll see he did throughout his career, not the kind of roles that he wanted to take that he thought were, you know, dignified, I guess is the right word. Yeah. So he's like, I'm not going to play the parts that are available to me. I'm going to start singing.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
So he went to jazz clubs like the, you know, the legendary Blue Note. would sing jazz standards on stage. And then in the 1940s, spurred by the interest in, it was like a renewed interest in square dancing and folk dancing at the time that led to what was called the folk music revival.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
This was in the early 1940s in Greenwich Village, which, you know, would eventually culminate in the sort of the peak of that movement in the mid-60s with people like Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan. Mm-hmm.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
It all started in the early 1940s with people like Harry Belafonte going to the Village Vanguard, this legendary folk music club, and seeing Lead Belly perform and was like, all right, well, now we're on to something here. It's all happening, and I'm right in the epicenter of it.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
It was around this time that he met a pretty monumental figure in his life. It was one of his idols. It was an actor and singer named Paul Robeson.
Stuff You Should Know
Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal
and he was most famous probably at the time at least for uh his his version of old man river from showboat from the musical showboat and harry was like yeah nuts with this jazz stuff i'm into the traditional music i'm into folk i can you know i'm trying to find my own voice and he found that in what ended up being um sort of like the the calypso folk music of the caribbean um you know going back to his roots
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah. No, I just feel like I'm the one that's like 45 minutes and you're like, no, let's make it three hours.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
That's right. In this anecdote that he sort of preached around as if it were real, he said, then I did this. It worked so great. Schmidt was so happy and rolling in dough.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
I got all of his coworkers to jump aboard because I showed them what a Mr. Big Boy pants look like. And everybody wanted big boy pants. And so everybody, as long as you just do what your boss says, then you're going to make more dough. And forget the fact that I'm choosing, you know, the very strongest workers to set the standard for everyone. And then in 1911, a U.S.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
House committee said, yeah, but we can't just forget that because you can't just pick the strongest worker and say that's the standard for everyone. And so he got into a bit of a tit for tat in that process. committee meeting, I guess, with Chairman William Balshop Wilson. And he said, you know, what about if you don't have big boy pants men on your staff and like or all big boy pants men?
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
And he said, well, it has no place for a bird that can sing, but won't. And he kind of got smacked down for that because he was just lifting lines out of books that he had written.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
That's right. The long and short with Bethlehem Steel, at least, was that they fired him. They quit the Taylorism methods that he had brought in. And he said, all right, pay me $100,000 and we'll call it even. Yeah. Which is about three and a half million bucks today. And that's probably a good time for a break, eh? Agreed. All right.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
Big thanks to Livia because she pushed out another banger here. Thanks in part by this great, great article in The New Yorker from Jill Lepore, who Livia calls a genius. Absolute genius, in fact, is a quote.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah, for sure. And two of their kids wrote that book in 1948. And, you know, it was fun. It's a classic for a reason. They remade it for a reason. For sure. To make money. Frank was a bricklayer in his earlier life, and he was one of these people that thought, including too, but not limited to cat skinning, that there was one best way to do any task.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
And so he was one of those guys where he was like, hey, that scaffold for laying bricks is kind of great. But what if there was a shelf on the scaffold for those bricks and mortar? You don't got to bend over and pick that stuff up. And what if you had some really low paid laborers that would stack the bricks on the frames for them positioned in the right direction?
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
So they don't even have to turn the bricks like really drilling down on these efficiencies.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Do you think when they met Taylor initially, they were just like, oh, my God, you're into efficiency and so are we. And Taylor said, I think you mean a fish. And they just like fainted.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah, Thurbligs. So they were also big into Rich Hall and Sniglets. Not to date myself, but yeah, they made up a word and they said, any action you can take is a Thurblig. And we want to get rid of as many Thurbligs as possible to make efficiency the most, to maximize it as much as one possibly can.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Great article anyway. I think the setup that Livia gave is kind of worthy of going over a little bit, because when you look at the, you know, 1900 through the 1920s and 30s, you looked at an America that was really changing in that these huge industrial revolution born industries were all of a sudden like, hey, now we're.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah. I mean, Taylor, you kind of talked about a little bit early on, but he did think it was a win-win. He was like, this is great because it'll run more efficiently and it'll trickle down, essentially.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
They didn't call it that yet, but that's sort of the same notion that it'll just trickle down to the worker, all this efficiency, and they'll get better wages and stuff will be cheaper and stuff like that. Management will never, ever take advantage of that and make you work harder just to increase profits. Exactly. And of course, that's exactly what happened in every case. But Um, I don't know.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Like, I'm kind of wondering about Taylor's heart and like what was in there, you know?
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
I don't know. I think he's one of those guys that was so brain obsessed on efficiency. I don't know that he had like, I don't know if he thought that part through such that he was like some evil person set out to exploit a worker.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
I wonder if he might have been in an age where there weren't certain diagnoses available for what he, you know, may have had going on.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
It'll be interesting. You mean like there's no perfect person and everyone has an issue that they're dealing with?
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah, yeah, for sure. I don't know. I think sometimes that thing empowers people.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
I'll tell you all fair. Okay. Ironically, it was a Supreme Court justice who we've talked about, I feel like, quite a bit on this show, who kind of bumped Taylor up to celebrity status. Yeah. How did we pronounce his name the first 25 times we said it? It's Brandeis. Okay, that sounds right.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Now we're kind of corporations and now we have middle managers and CEOs and things. It's a little different than it used to be.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
What does it do with that? Ice brewed? What even was that?
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Oh, okay. All right. Anyway, back to 1910. Brandeis, Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court Justice, called a meeting with the Gilbreths. And the Taylorites, Taylor couldn't come, but he sent his representatives and said, I want to talk about what I'm calling scientific management. And I am concerned because I see what's happening with big business. And I think it's getting out of hand.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
I want to break up these monopolies. And I think the consumer and the worker should be served. And I think I called one couple here who's probably interested in that and another group of people who sounds like they probably aren't.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
And so we need to start kind of really thinking about how to squeeze every dime out of this company we can and make these workers. We'll call it efficiency. But between us, let's say let's call it working them to the bone until they're near exhaustion so we can maximize profits.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah, and there was a lot of press coverage on this, and this is really what pushed Taylor over the edge as far as becoming kind of famous for what he was doing. And that is the year – I'm sorry, the next year is when he put out The Principles of Scientific Management, which was –
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Probably easily the biggest business book, maybe at the 20th century, but at least the first half of the 20th century.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
That's right. And one thing about Taylorism that we would learn soon enough, and I guess Gilbreathism, did they even call it that?
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Well, I'm going to call it that. Gilbreathism was that it didn't have to be kept to the workforce because Lillian Gilbreath found herself alone for the last 48 years of her life when Frank died of a heart attack at the age of 55 in 1924. And she said, all right, Don't tell anybody. I'm no homemaker myself. Not into it at all. I don't even do the cooking in my house.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
But I think I can shift these efficiency ideas to the house and make the home place a more efficient workplace for getting everything done from like vacuuming to baking biscuits.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah, and eventually you could even find Taylorism in public schools. And it's interesting to think of it this way. There was a Massachusetts superintendent who told the National Education Association that educators needed to analyze the returns of their investment rationally. We ought to purchase no more Greek instruction at the rate of 5.9 pupil recitations for a dollar.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
The price must go down or we shall invest in something else. And it sounds silly, but I get that. It just sounds like a funny way to talk about it. Right. But it's basically like we need to invest in these kids the things that really matter and not necessarily reciting a Greek poem or something like that.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Shop, yeah. Yeah. I had shop. We didn't have auto shop, though. Did you guys have that?
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
It felt like something that was in generations previous to us. We just had shop class where you made lamps and stuff like that.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
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Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Okay, we're back. By the way, I think the kitchen triangle is probably the fridge and not the dishwasher would be my guess.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Thank you. I bet you're right, though. I bet it's sink, stove, oven, and fridge would be my guess.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
All right, so we're going to talk a little bit about just sort of what did Taylorism accomplish ultimately. There is a lot of irony in that, you know, a lot of it was so scientific supposedly, but a lot of the stuff was made up or just sort of, you know. Yeah. Made up or kind of a sham. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
This wasn't new stuff like timing people on tasks and teaching people to do more specific things had been around for a long time. But one of the effects of Taylorism is definitely like. You know, de-skilling a worker, making them feel and not that working is all about emotions, but you don't want to make your employee feel like a robot that can be replaced by a robot.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
You want to give them a little bit of agency, ideally, in a job and not just say, move your body this way, move your hand that way, punch that thing and then return back to position one.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah. Another effect. I mean, I guess we've kind of said it in several different ways from the beginning. But, you know, the idea that the Gilbreths had that there would be a happiness quotient involved and where you could do work more efficiently so you could just have more time and better wages to spend with your family.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
That's right. And a lot of the work being done on efficiency can be laid at the feet of a person and then some other people. But initially, at least this guy that you mentioned, Frederick Winslow Taylor, who was from Philadelphia, born in 1856, had an attorney father, an abolitionist mother, a very smart guy and was all set to take Harvard by storm before his eyesight started to fail. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
It just, you know, it didn't work out that way, even though the whole idea of Taylorism and it's at its base isn't. inherently anti-worker, it sort of ends up being that way when the profits are being spread around the top tier and all they want is more and more of those profits.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah, for sure. I mean, probably the most, you know, the biggest contribution was it just raised the awareness and an obsession with productivity and productivity is great. It's not like that's a bad thing. But again, like when you're dealing with human beings to feel like a cog and to feel completely replaceable.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
There's no way like you're not serving your own purpose as a as a business owner because you're not going to have good and happy employees ultimately and replacing employee after employee, even if you're just training them to put the oven door on. That's still an inefficiency, you know.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah, for sure. And it created the management consultant industry. I think we should do one on that. I don't I'm sure you remember. And I won't be very specific here, but because we've been owned by a lot of companies over the years. But one of one time, one of the companies that just hired a dude that came in and we're like, who's this guy?
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
After that got better, he may not have gone to Harvard, but he was still a really smart guy and ended up studying engineering at night and became a chief engineer for the Enterprise Hydraulic Works in Philly and then Midvale Steel Company.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
And I can't remember someone who knows how these things work took us aside and they were like, he's, I guess, I don't know if he was a management consultant or what his official job was, but they're like, his job is to come in here and fire people and rip this place apart and then probably get a nice exit and move on to another job where he'll do that exact same thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
I know Jerry is like screaming his name off air right now.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
That wouldn't have worked with the other guy that I mentioned. He was unflappable.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
This is just a nice thank you. Hey, guys. Heartfelt thank you. Started listening in 2012, and although my time spent listening to podcasts has fluctuated, yours has been one of the constants.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
Started listening to keep my mind occupied when I had hours of mundane tasks in the lab where I worked after college, and I've continued to listen through a career change, relationship changes, getting my first dog, Luna. He sent a picture of Luna this week. And becoming a homeowner. I'm listening still as I'm planning a second career change and going through a little lonelier stretch of my life.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
And your podcast has kept me laughing and feeling connected to the world through challenging times. And I sometimes feel like there isn't the right combination of words to express my gratitude completely.
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Taylorism: Work Faster!
I feel like you're right. Some of my favorite moments in recent shows have been Chuck's throwaway line about a fairy hoax confession happening at a Men Without Hats concert. I got Josh chuckled not once, twice, but three times.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
And in the 15th annual SYSK Halloween Spooktacular, the curious sound like laughter, yet not laughter that Josh made, which sounded like it had Chuck literally crying with laughter, which is absolutely true. That may be the... Most I've ever laughed at something that you did. I think it is, man.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
I hope that you know for some of your listeners, your podcast has been as meaningful to us as The Simpsons or Peanuts may have been to you.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Stanley knows how to drive it home. He signs it all the best. Stanley, a hayseed.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah, I think this is a certain kind of brain because I am on that spectrum a little bit in trying to weed out inefficiencies with certain things. But I'm on the side of the spectrum that is also it comes from laziness. So I'll try and do that because I'm inherently kind of lazy, I think. So I'm like, I look for ways to cut corners to still get the job done.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
And I've had people compliment me in the old days, like on film sets. Like, hey, you know, I see what you're doing there and you're the kid I would hire twice. Whereas the guy next to you who's just like, no, man, let's just make eight trips and just hump it and do it.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
He's like, I know he thinks he's getting it done just the old fashioned way. He's like, but you're the guy we would hire a second time.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
But that was always my aim. But it's interesting that, you know, I had that a little bit in my brain. But not like this guy did. Like he was obsessed with efficiencies such that he thought and he's kind of right in some ways that one of the biggest threats to getting something done in a productive, efficient way was slacking off and what he called systematic soldiering.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah. And to be clear, because I think it seems like I might have been mischaracterized here. The film set thing, I was I wasn't like, let's just do the minimum. I was I was in a situation in this specific incident where I was trying to do a little extra work by getting a cart loaded rather than just making a ton of trips. And the guys and he was like, no, don't mess with getting that card out.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Let's just hump all this stuff back and forth. Right. And they were like, hey, guys, or to me, hey, guy. And I said, my name's Chuck.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
And they said, hey, Chuck, you're the guy I would hire twice because you were taking the time to do it more efficiently. Not like, hey, I admire like the lazy side of you. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Right. But it was lazy and that I didn't want to do all those trips. That's where it initially sprang from was I don't want to have to tote all that stuff eight times. Does that make sense?
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah, but you only do that if you've got a little laziness in you.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Uh, well, I'm going to look it up. Go ahead. We'll do a rare, uh, a rare look. Okay.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Oh, well, no, that doesn't make any sense either. Like soldiering on. Right. Persevering. Yeah, I don't, doesn't make any sense to me officially as well.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
That's right. So he was at Midvale and he sort of started breaking down the operations of the jobs that they had there at Midvale. And he was like, you know, there are some elementary operations that happen here. So we're going to form an estimating department where we're going to sit around and do time studies, which he got from class at Phillips Exeter.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
And we're going to time workers doing all these little small tasks. We're going to add that up to the to the whole. And kind of average it out and say, hey, you should be able to do this in that amount of time. And we'll adjust accordingly. We'll incentivize accordingly. And he said, and you know what else? This is now a new career. I'm going to be a consulting engineer in management.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
And I'm going to charge you to tell you how bad you're doing things.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Yeah. And you know what? We should we should give a good example here, because what he was really most or not most well known for, but something he became very well known for was his work at Bethlehem Steel.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
And he started looking at the process of loading iron onto rail cars, pig iron, and said, all right, we need to figure out how much of this stuff is reasonable for one of these men to load onto a rail car. The average right now is 12 and a half tons a day. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to get 10 large, powerful Hungarian workers to and say, hey, load as much as you can, as fast as you can.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
16 and a half tons is your goal. And they did that in 14 minutes, whereas 12 and a half tons was the daily rate for their average worker. So that's 71 tons in a 10-hour day. He rounds it up to 75 and then said, yeah, but you know what? People get tired and they need breaks. So let's whack off 40% of that.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
And we'll just call it even at 47.5 tons per day, which is four times as much as you've usually been doing. That's the new expectation.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
All right. So when this happened, some people said, I ain't doing this. They quit. They got fired. Some people tried and couldn't do it. Some people were so tired from trying to load that much or that they couldn't come back the next day. And things got really heated. He needed he hired armed guards to walk him home at night. Taylor did because he was so worried.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
And then he said, all right, I'm going to create a new fake scenario. And this is something that I've seen businesses do that I hate when they create like, you know, here's our worker, Todd. And Todd, you know, and it's all just made up BS. And that's what he did with Schmidt.
Stuff You Should Know
Taylorism: Work Faster!
Was that me or Jerry? That was Jerry. Okay. I'm usually the timekeeper.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
Yeah, we could have changed the name of the show to things that you might find interesting. But then again, you might not as well. But that doesn't have a ring.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
I think so. So how he gets Donald McLean on the dole is he goes to dinner. And he sort of hints around, you know, like, hey, you know, what do you think? And McLean was like, I'm all in, buddy. I've been waiting on this. So he had to do the same thing Philby did was, you know, like leave all his sort of leftist friends behind, publicly come out in favor of fascism.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
And his other buddy, Guy Burgess, saw this happening and was like, hey, what's going on here, dude? This is really fishy. I want in on this. Like, I see what's happening here. And Burgess was not I think McLean was a pretty decent fit for a spy. But Burgess was very loud, apparently a pretty obnoxious guy. And he was a barely closeted gay man at a time where homosexuality was illegal.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
It was a crime in England. All that all that to say he was not a real sort of low key under the radar. You'll be a good spy kind of guy. But the Soviets were like, he's fine.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
Yeah. And they became known as the Cambridge three. I think eventually there would be a Cambridge five in total, though. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
Right. And ended up being Soviet spies.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
Yeah, like later on, they literally asked about the vetting and like, how could this get past you? And they were like, yeah, you came from the right family and we knew the same people, basically.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
And this is how it was back then. By the way, look for a little preview. We got an episode on MI6 coming out at some point. Nice. Looking forward to that. But he's all of a sudden working for MI6 is in the perfect position to be a double agent because of where he worked. But also because he was I mean, this is why they get Guy Pearce to play this guy.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
He was really, really charming guy, apparently just very smart, very quick witted. Apparently, he would just make you feel like you're the only person in the room. People really, really loved him and thereby trusted him very quickly. And a legendary drinker. He could drink anyone under the table.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
And if you're in a cocktail party and you get people a little a little tipsy on on on whiskey, on that fine scotch or British whiskey.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
They're going to start spilling some secrets. And he he's like Karen Allen in in the first Raiders. You know, she could drink that guy under the table. So don't get into a drinking contest with Kim Philby or Karen Allen.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
I haven't seen Heretic yet. It looks good, though. I heard it's pretty good. Oh, have you seen Talk to Me?
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
I have not seen that. Oh, it's so good, Chuck. I would have remembered that.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
You've become quite a horror movie guy over the past years. Yeah. I mean, you like all kinds of stuff. Right. Is Yumi into these scary movies?
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
Well, and you've got an A24 tattoo on your lower back, so I know you're an adherent.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
All right, where were we? We were at Hugh Grant.com. And we were talking about the drinking. All right. I guess let's talk about what was going on then with the Cambridge Three. This is a very successful. Well, all the Soviet spies combined were really successful, including the Cambridge Three.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
They over the course of their work, they sent the Soviets more than 10,000 documents during World War Two.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
Oh, yeah. And like the D-Day invasion advance notice, stuff about the Manhattan Project, like some really big fish, they were getting fed this information. And sometimes this would, you know, this would lead to people dying because of information shared by Philby and others.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
Yeah. Is it military based? Because you said military intelligence. I thought they were just like the CIA.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
Your voice is going up like you're going to say something else. Is that it?
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
Yeah. So that's just one example of many where lives were lost due to his intelligence gathering. After World War II, this is when obviously the Americans and the Brits sort of turned toward the Soviet Union and the threat of communism as the main enemy. And, you know, kind of pre-Cold War stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
So big thanks to Dave who helped us with this. But Dave also wanted us to shout out and we want to shout out a book by Ben McIntyre, A Spy Among Friends, colon, Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal. And also a miniseries that I have not watched that I think I probably will now, a six-parter on Amazon, MGM.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
And you would think that this would be a tough thing all of a sudden because Philby is really the enemy. But he was so good at what he did, he just had an inside position. So it was not easier, but all of a sudden he was really in the mix.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
Yeah, exactly. Get that old boy cowgirl on it. And Philby was like, oh, that didn't go down like I wanted because I really need to head up this organization and not have this guy cowgirl all of a sudden sniffing down my neck. So he starts a whisper campaign to sort of get cowgirl out of there. That's exactly what happened.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
And within a few months, Philby is standing there, you know, at the ready to take over a Soviet spy all of a sudden in charge of the Soviet counterintelligence for MI6. So McIntyre in his book, this is a pretty fun quote. He said, the fox was not merely guarding the hen house, but building it, running it, assessing its strengths and frailties and planning its future construction.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
called A Spy Among Friends from 2023, starring the winsome Guy Pearce as Kim Philby or Harold Adrian Russell Philby as he was born in India in 1912 because his dad was a colonialist. I can never say that word right.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
And they said, oh, boy, that's quite a sweetener. So Philby hears about this. And instead of like, you know, freaking out, he was like, no, no, no, I've got this. He said, you know what? This this if it's that inside, we need to get an interview with this guy. Somebody needs to go interrogate Volkov. And how about I do that? And they're like, no, exactly. And he said, you know, I should do this.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
And they, you know, they trusted him so much at this point. They're like, yeah, sure. Like who better to send? Right. He goes to Istanbul to meet with Volkov, but he never showed up because the Russians took care of that. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
i mean he was always one step ahead of things uh so much so that you know the the soviets eventually thought that he might be like a triple agent or double crossing them or something um because you know they were like how's this guy moved up so quickly and all of a sudden he's running the department mi6 that's to like it's pretty genius comrade but it's all very suspicious to them and they were a pretty paranoid bunch uh at that point they probably still are
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
And they always wondered what the deal was. But like his information always checked out. It was always golden. So they they really had no choice but to go along with things. He would eventually go to America. He was assigned MI6 chief in D.C.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
So if he was like a charming guy in England with that accent and his drinking ability, he was like just multiply that times 100 in the United States as far as the charm factor goes.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
Yeah, for sure. One of the guys he really buddied up with, his name was James Angleton. He was a counterintelligence chief of the CIA for two decades. So good guy to know. They had already met, apparently, from when they were younger in England. So they were hooked up again and became really, really close. And so he thinks they're like really good friends.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
So he's just spilling everything to Philby because they're buddies. One example is he told Philby about a military operation called Operation Valuable. where the Brits and the Americans were going to overthrow the dictator of Albania to keep them from joining the Soviet bloc. And they were training exiles to sort of mount this fight, you know, against their dictator.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
And Philby passes this along to Moscow. And before you know it, these Albanian authorities are like ready and waiting when this uprising happens and just slaughtered all these foreign trained exiles and basically quashed everything. The revolution was no more.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
Yeah, we should probably take another break. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
All right. We'll come back and talk about, well, Kim Philby right after this.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
Yeah, it really is. Because he got this nickname as a kid, like before he knew he was going to be a spy.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
All right, so we're back here for Act 3. It is now 1946, and we're going to talk a little bit about something called the Venona decryption. That was, you know, everyone had their secret codes that they used to encrypt things in those days, and they still do. But 1946, American cryptologists cracked that code that the Soviets were using, the Venona decryption.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
And they said, hey, let's just not use this going forward. Let's go back and dig through all the stuff from World War II and see if we can get anything out of that. And in 1950, they decoded a message from the past that identified a Soviet spy. No, not Yuri. It's not. Well, I was about to ruin No Way Out, a movie that came out like 30 something years ago. But I'm not going to do that. OK.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
I'll just say Yuri because it's a really good movie and you should see it if you haven't.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
But they identified a Soviet spy named Homer. uh who worked at the british embassy in dc in 1944 and philby was like oh man i'm reading this thing homer's mclean it's my friend right and if they if they get him then my cover's blown and You know, right now he's in a good spot because everyone thinks he's he's like me, just a straight up Cambridge boy who's who's doing God's work for the crown.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
But more evidence started coming out and another decoded message came out saying that Homer's wife was pregnant and staying with her mother in New York. And he was like, it's really obvious it's you now. So I got to I got to kick this thing into action.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
Yeah. And he was holding the bag because he didn't know this was coming. Moscow didn't say that was going to happen. So word gets out. It's pretty clear that there's a third man, Q the Zither, and that had said, hey, Moscow, here's what's going on. So the writing's on the wall. He knows he's about to be found out.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
Even though he had all his protection as the Cambridge boy, these other two guys being Cambridge gentlemen, being moles and just sort of disappearing, you know, it could be anyone. So he knew that the writing was on the wall. He's everyone starting to remember, like, wait a minute. All three guys were super leftist, like communist in college.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
And they really turned they really changed their mind on how they felt about things ideologically really quickly. And then there's also the Volkoff affair and Operation Valuable and like all the things that Philby's assigned to are going tits up.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
Oh, wow. Well, at any rate, he was born to a well-heeled family. His parents were gone a lot. He was raised by his Indian nanny. He went to Cambridge. So he was sort of on that track of not, you know, royalty or anything, but probably aristocracy, you could say. And when he went to Cambridge, it was the early 1930s. Pretty, pretty rocky time. The Great Depression was happening.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
Yeah, and those were James Angleton, who we talked about, the CIA guy for 20 years, and a guy named Nicholas Elliott, a career guy at MI6. So they they kept him from being prosecuted. He couldn't still work at MI6. He was forced to resign. They couldn't save his job. But when this all came out, he should have been it should have been like over for him. But he held it again.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
The wave was in the sky. He holds a press conference at his mom's house in London and like live on camera, just very openly and convincingly answers all these pointed questions from reporters. saying like, my two friends deceived me. Everyone ended up believing him. And while this made him like technically a free guy, he didn't have that job anymore. And he thrived on that job.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
So he was pretty miserable at this point and drinking way, way too much.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
And while this happened, or sort of shortly after this happened, Elliott said, and you know what? You can start working for MI6 again, just on the down low. We'll throw you some bones here and there. You can go to work. So now Philby has this, once again, he's a journalist again. He's quietly working for MI6 again.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
And he could have just, you know, played it straight from this point forward and been like, all right, I got back on track. But he calls up the Ruskies and is like, guess what, old boys? Guess who's back in? And immediately, you know, because of his his love of communism is one thing, I think.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
But the author of that book, McIntyre, also makes a point that and I think a good one that he was he was sort of addicted to this kind of lifestyle, the deception lifestyle of of drinking and philandering and leading these two lives like he seemed to really thrive off of that subterfuge and could not give it up.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
And that's when the fascists, especially in Germany and Italy, saw their sort of opportunity when people were wrecked by poverty to step in and start controlling things.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
I feel like those kind of loose ends don't happen in intelligence anymore. Like, oh, this woman who you tried to recruit as a spy is just out there with this information. I read why. Why?
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
So where were we? OK, so he was in trouble. He couldn't deny, you know, what was going on any longer. His buddy, Nicholas Elliott, was was pretty upset. Obviously, he volunteered to go to Beirut and get a confession out of Philby. And he tried to deny it to him still. But Elliott was he was super upset at this point. And he was like, you're my friend. You know, pulled a charade over my eyes.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
The charade over my eyes. The wool, the woolly blanket has been pulled over my eyes, old boy. And he was ticked off. And finally, he was like, hey, listen, give me a full confession. I can make sure you're not prosecuted for this.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
Philby knew that like even if that happened, he wouldn't be like a free man like the MI6 was all of a sudden going to put the thumb screws on him to try and get all the information he ever had about the Soviets. Right. The Soviets were probably going to try and snuff him out.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
So he's like, I got to just leave. I got to get the heck out of here.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
Yeah, and he may have because just to let him quietly leave was a lot less embarrassing for England than to put him on trial and to go through this big public spectacle where all these people are trotted out and asked, like, how did this guy get away with this for so long under your watch? Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
so he he left he lived in in moscow for the rest of his life for 25 years uh you can google pictures of like an elderly kim philby walking around moscow he eventually would die in a russian hospital in 1988 and never said a bad word about the reign of terror from stalin or anything like that he got the order of lenin like you said was awarded the the highest honors uh in in
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
Three different, very opposing places. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
Because he was so good at lying in his spy craft.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
Yeah. I mean, if it could have been them, it could have been anyone. And it was also this sort of bedrock thing that up until then had been, you know, if you come from the right family, if you come from the right world, then you're to be trusted as an insider.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
Well, no, but since you said chap, I think you know what that means.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
That's right. This is from, it says Emily, but there's a little, is it Accentagu or Grave? Which is the one that goes from northeast to southwest?
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
Okay. That's above the E, so I'm not sure how Emily pronounces the name there. Might be Emil.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
All right. Hey, guys. Been listening since around 2018. Provided me much comfort, entertainment, and knowledge. So thank you. I'm from Montreal, and I love your poutine short stuff episode. I'm somewhat of a poutine super fan and purist. It's been on my mission to try and rate as many poutines as possible throughout Quebec to find my favorite.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
I thought I'd share my personal poutine rating system with you because I found it to be a rigorous method. Nice. Four criteria. Number one, cheese curd. How squeaky? Are the curds too big or too small? Okay. Number two, gravy sauce. Too sweet? Tomatoey? Not salty enough? Too runny? Tomatoey? I don't know. Okay. French fries. Too limp? Is the cut too thick? Are they tasteless? Boo.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
Pretty good dipped in a frosty, though.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
Assembly. Is the cheese gravy fry ratio just right? That's a big one. Yeah. Is the portion too big or too small? And bonus fifth criteria, the value for money.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
Yeah, pretty good. Even though poutine is a simple dish, guys, the beauty of it is so that it can be adapted to everyone's own personal taste. Thank you very much for the podcast. To all the team, have a nice day. That is from Emily.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
Yeah. And it was especially a way for, you know, kids to to rebel against what their parents loved, which is a classic thing that that kids and teenagers and young adults do. And in this case, these like you said, these young Cambridge elites were like, hey, communism is where it's at. Forget the this was about to say patriarchy, but it was really, you know, everybody, the upper class altogether.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
And, you know, as far as Philby is concerned, he didn't. He wasn't out there calling for a revolution or anything and let's go burn it down. He apparently never officially joined the Communist Party, but he was a communist through and through, like up until the very end. He was very committed to it, something he did not grow out of. Like his parents probably hoped he would.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
Yeah. And as you'll see, there were plenty of chances to go a different way, and he never did.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
Yeah. He was like, oh, I was thinking a letter campaign or something. But sure, I'll go to Austria and fight a ruthless dictator. While he was there, he went to Vienna. Lovely town, by the way. One of my favorites in Europe. He fell in love with a woman named Alice Litzy Coleman, who was another young communist. They became friends.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
a co-revolutionaries and they, you know, hooked up also in, you know, in a more romantic way, hugging and kissing that kind of thing. Okay. And Dolphus, the, uh, the fascist dictator said, all right, we got to get rid of these communists and we will do so by whatever means we need to. And that Litzy, uh, woman was on that list.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
She was pretty well known or, you know, well known as far as the, the insider fascist dictators go. Yeah. And they said, all right, we got to get out of here. They realized the writing was on the wall. So they got married. They fled to England.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
And in London, he finally, Kim Philby, got in touch with a real Soviet operative at a secret meeting in Regent Park that was arranged by one of Litzy's communist friends. And it was game time. It was on from that point forward.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
Yeah, he was pretty ideal for that position. But he was like, how good of an actor are you, though? Because that's what really matters if you're going to get into this. And Philby said, well, let's just say this. One day Guy Pearce is going to play me in a streaming series. And he was like, what does that mean? That makes no sense at all.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
He said, OK, I'm a pretty good actor and a good actor will eventually play me. He's really got to fall into this part, you know, in such a perfect way that obviously no one's going to find out. That's the ultimate goal of being a mole is to be a great liar. And he was really, really good at it. One of the things he had to do, though, was find a job to, you know, as cover.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
And he's like, the perfect job for this would be a journalist.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
Yeah. You know, here's the thing. I never thought about – seen so many stories on this kind of thing. We've read so many books and seen so many movies about double agents and people, you know, lying for cover. But I always think about like, oh yeah, to live that lie and to keep that up, that must be hard. Until we did this episode, I never thought about how hard that would be to just
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
like be sleeping with the enemy essentially full time. And like all your friends, all your social circle, everything that comes out of your mouth, like it has to be the thing that you hate the most. Right. It's incredible. I never considered how hard that would be.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
Yeah, and it's just further reinforced the more he does it because he's not printing that stuff. So you're like, oh, Philby can really be trusted because I told him all this off-the-record stuff and he's not printing it. This guy's great.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
So to to sort of bulk up his cover, he got this job at the Anglo-German Trade Gazette, which was a British newspaper, but it was at least in part financed by the Nazis. And it was about just trying to get trade relations between Britain and Germany. It was like a friendly newspaper between them. Yeah. So he had to, you know, play this role of sort of quasi Nazi sympathizer.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
And lose all of his friends in his life because all of his friends were these, you know, sort of fellow ideologically aligned people, fellow leftists, maybe not all of them communists. But he wasn't hanging out with these people until he started doing this, this right wing sort of Nazi sympathizing group.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
Right. Do you think there was ever any confusion about those two leaders?
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
I was trying to like sniff you off the case, but in a way that made me look as least dumb as possible.
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
so uh we should mention you know sort of neither here nor there but he and litzy had been divorced by this time he was married four times total but um he would do things like strike up affairs in order to get into uh the places he needed to be in this case uh he he had an affair with an older woman franco's inner circle but while he was there he uh his his car was was bombed essentially not a car bombing but just hit by a shelling uh during a bombing raid and all three passengers
Stuff You Should Know
Kim Philby: Greatest Liar of All Time?
in the car that were not named Kim Philby died, and he just had minor injuries. So he was actually awarded the Red Cross of Military Merit from Franco himself, gave him this award.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
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WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
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Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
And I'm like, do I even know how to do this anymore?
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
And also this topic, it's good, but we'll try and keep it as streamlined and easy to understand as possible. There's a lot of moving pieces. Sure. And there's a lot of Norwegian names that we've, I still don't know how to say the letter with like the null set.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Yeah, it was tough. I would say you'd need one of those cool old army Jeeps if you wanted to get there back then.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
It was surrounded by a plateau, a mountain plateau called, here we go, Hardanga Vida. Perfect. That's got to mean danger or something.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Vita might be a plateau. Really? Maybe Hardanger. I don't know.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
That's right. Shout out to Menudo. Who knew that was coming?
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
I didn't know they were going to make an appearance. All right. So it was surrounded by that mountain plateau. It is a very, very cold place. I think Livia dug up this kind of old factoid. It freezes flames in the fires is how cold it was there. Not literally, of course, but, you know, those Norwegians are, for the turn of a phrase.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
So Americans came in and they said, why don't we just drop a bunch of bombs on this plant? What's your problem with these saboteurs? And they said, no. Tronset was like, we've got ammonia tanks there, liquid ammonia. You're definitely going to kill a bunch of civilians nearby. And all this stuff is underground, under concrete and metal in these bunkers.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
And it probably wouldn't destroy everything you wanted to destroy anyway. He also, you know, didn't say this out loud, but was like, I don't want you to destroy the only hard water plant we have because this is a valuable thing. And all of a sudden you would kind of own not the patent, but the process for that.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Is it? Okay. I mean, I'm going to treat them as umlauts.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Okay. Okay. We're still going to screw up some of this, but don't worry about the names too much. You know, we should just name everyone, you know, Bill 1, Bill 2, Bill 3.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Yes, exactly. So they're there. They set up their camp. They're eating reindeer. It's very sad for reindeer. Sad but delicious. You've never had reindeer, have you?
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
No. I was about to say, where the heck do you even get reindeer?
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Yeah, yeah. I'm sure there's people in Maine right now that are like, you've never had reindeer?
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Exactly. So about a month after that, they launched another operation, Operation Freshman, because they were like, these guys are going to need some real, you know, some muscle behind them. Yeah. So they sent in two air gliders with 39 British soldiers. And they were just kind of coming in, you know, behind them as backup. It did not work out so well, though.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
One of the planes crashed into a mountain and killed everybody on board. The other one crashed into the ground, not where they were supposed to land, but, you know, a distance from that. And it didn't kill everybody, but they, you know, they saw this happen. The Gestapo found the people.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
the survivors and executed them basically on the spot and also found a map that showed that they were headed for the hard water plant. They didn't locate those original people and they just sort of stayed there, you know, hunkering down in that cabin for a while and surviving undetected.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
I love this kind of thing. It's just the kind of thing. And if you're thinking, oh, man, why is there a movie about this? There was an older movie with Kirk Douglas that I don't think, you know, set the world on fire. But I think this could go for maybe a Guy Ritchie update. Totally. Yeah. I doubt if he would do it after the other one, but, you know.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
But anyway, we're going to give it our best go. Welcome back, my friend. I'm glad to be back in the studio after this wonderful break.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Yeah, he made a lot of those. There were several of those Sherlock Holmes movies, I think, right?
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Yeah, and I can also recommend for kids, especially younger girls, Enola Holmes. The Enola Holmes movies are pretty good.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Yeah, we totally have to because I don't really know anything about much of that.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Are there homesies that get upset?
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
What are the clown, what's the clown band? Insane Clown Posse? Yeah, but what are their people called? The Juggalos? Juggalos, yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
I think those are two words you'd like to hear together.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Yeah, yeah. It's like former Holmesy.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
After they leave that world behind, you know.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Yeah, we are at Operation Gunnerside. This guy, Rundberg, he didn't know even why that plant was a target. They basically just said, here, old chap, we want you to go destroy some pipes at the plant, and the people that tried before you all died, and you might as well. Pip-pip. Yeah, that's basically it. That's all the information he had. But he was game. He was that kind of guy.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Yeah, yeah. There's a suspension bridge. There's one we could get through. But, of course, they had Nazi guards there, so that wasn't the best route. The other options were like a literal minefield or I guess mine forest that they could have crossed through at great peril. Or they could hike all the way down into the gorge, which had like a half-frozen river running through it.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
and then go to the plant that way and then hike back up and so they said they took a vote i guess and they said minefield no good nazis on the bridge no good let's just get on our skis as we do and hike down that gorge and That's how they did it.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
We do need to mention one little side thing that we've failed to mention is that before this all happened, when Rundberg was, I guess, debriefed and sort of getting his act together to go, he went into a hardware store
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
and apparently on a whim as the story goes bought some heavy duty uh bolt cutters like metal bolt cutters and so just park that right there because you know if you introduce bolt cutters and i guess in this case act two you know they're gonna cut something in act three right so he's got those bolt cutters and they decide to go down into the gorge as their route to the uh hard water plant
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Hey, that sounds pretty good to me.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
That's right. Snip, snip. So that paid off pretty quickly. Yeah, that was still act two. Well, I think I got the saying wrong. If you introduce bowl cutters in Act 2, they're going to snip something in Act 2. Yeah. They're on the property now. Five of the people, five of the nine provide cover. The other two, and they had Tommy guns. They had chloroform. They were set for an attack if need be.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
And they were keeping a watch on like the barracks because there weren't like, you know, hundreds of German soldiers. I get the idea. If they were going in with the initial 29, that it was probably a couple of dozen maybe. I mean, that's just a guess.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So they were keeping a watch on the barracks. They were keeping a watch on that bridge for the guardsmen there and just sort of waiting around for any, you know, activity so they could get those Tommy guns out or maybe silently chloroform a Nazi, which was a dream of any Norwegian saboteur.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Yeah. So the other four guys split into two pairs. They each had, and I get the idea, they split up in case, and they each had enough to like blow it up in case like two of them got caught or killed. The other two could still complete the job. They got in through a second gate.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
And they had arranged with one of the coworkers there to, I guess, you know, one of the inside moles to leave a cellar door open. But unfortunately, that person called in sick that day and I guess didn't seem to think like, hey, I had this important other task to do. And Tronstad had previously told them, though, like if you can't get in that way, there's a cable shaft.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
You can probably slip through. And that's what they ended up using.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
He could have gone home right after that.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
And been like, I just threw up. I have to get out of here.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Yeah, I'm sure you got that email and you're like, unsung saboteur story, defeating the Nazis? Be still my heart.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
That's right. They're like, it's just us guys. We're all here together so we can get this thing bombed up quicker. They set up those explosives, the four of them, I guess, at this point. And the fuses at the time were two-minute fuses. That would have given enough time to get the heck out of there. Rundberg said, no, I really want to make sure we hear this thing go off.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
So we're going to go down to 30 seconds. I imagine everyone said, well, how about a minute? Yeah. He said, no, 30 seconds is plenty. So they're getting ready to light the fuses. The guard that they had at gunpoint said, can I get those glasses? Yeah. You know, if they blow up, my optometrist has quit and retired. I'm not going to be able to replace those things very easily.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
So they said, sure, get your glasses. And at that point, another civilian employee, Norwegian, obviously, comes into the room. and is now another temporary prisoner. Roneberg lights those fuses, counts to 10, which means they only have 20 seconds, and then says run to the two civilians. They get the heck out of there as well.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
I reckon in the movie, Guy Ritchie would really have to sort of fudge things because what is not exciting in a movie like this is when... is all you hear. And that's kind of all they heard. It wasn't a huge explosion. It's not like they were blowing up this entire plant like you would probably do in a movie. They were just trying to damage these pipes.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
And he said that later on, he said they heard a tiny, insignificant pop. Also, because it was underground under that concrete and stuff. Windows did break, though, enough at least to rouse some sleeping Nazis. This part is very movie like because the four that were guarding kind of watched as a half-dressed Nazi gets out and was like, oh, do I hear anything? Do I hear anything?
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
But apparently that was a pretty noisy plant. So he just goes back to bed.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
That's right. But that is not the end of the story. So maybe we should take our second break. Yes. And we'll come back and finish up right after this.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
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WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
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WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
All right, so as you said, the saboteurs got away. I think one of them, Polson, took off to Scotland by sea. Rundberg and the rest of the gang stayed on their skis, as the Norwegians do. They skied about 200 miles, which is like nothing for them. They skied to Sweden, in fact, with Nazis chasing them. They had planes above trying to locate them.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Like that part would be a pretty good part of the movie, I guess.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
But they got away, and there was a German, head of the German Special Forces in Norway, who called it the most splendid coup ever. However, it only took a few months before the Nazis were able to restart production at the plant. I think this happened in February. So in May of that same year, they had ramped back up to full capacity, which seems like a big disappointment.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
But no, because here come the Americans with their initial plan to just bomb the plant. And just like they were warned, it did not do a ton of damage to anyone but the 22 Norwegian civilians who were killed.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Yeah, especially the bombs back then, you know.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Yeah. I mean, it was sort of a race to see who could get there first. And I mean, I learned a lot researching this. I didn't know a lot about a lot of this stuff, even though we've done episodes about nuclear fission and and the like. But there's more than one way to skin a cat, as it turns out, if you want to try and make a reaction big enough to cause a big boom.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
That's right. So they come up with another plan to further thwart their efforts. And they determined the best way to do this was to sabotage the ferry that's going to be ferrying everything over to Germany. So they knew it would cost them civilian lives, but they figured that was their best chance to get it before it even had a chance to get, you know, set up again.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
And old Knut is back on the scene. He was the second in command there at Gunnerside, if you remember. And he was leading the team this time. He had been promoted, I guess. And in February 1944, they set off explosions on the bow of that ship. It was a ferry called the Hydro. And 14 Norwegians, sadly, were killed, along with four Germans.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
and this again was a big big success um they for a long time they weren't even positive that there was heavy or they couldn't prove at least that there was heavy water on board right and there was a german heavy water expert after the war that said no those were just those were dummies dummy uh and i guess to try and undermine the idea that it was a success but pbs nova to the rescue in 2003
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
they organized a salvage of one of those barrels from that sunken ferry, and they proved that it contained heavy water. So it was a great success after all.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
And one of the routes that was taken by, well, not the Americans. I guess the Germans were trying to take this route was to use something called heavy water. AKA, how would you say that? Deuterium oxide? Mm-hmm. Okay.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Yeah. And it resulted in the loss of so many civilian lives.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Yeah, for sure. The official historian of the SOE, MRD Foote, great name, said that it changed the course of the war. The fact that they were denied that regular steady supply of heavy water really put a dent in their operation.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Livia very astutely points out another factor was that key scientists were, a lot of them were Jewish scientists that the Nazis were using, and they either escaped or were murdered.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
which also slowed down the Germans' pursuit of the bomb. But also, I think you found out too that, was it the Germans regretted pursuing heavy water? Was that what it was? Instead of graphite?
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Yeah, we used graphite. They went with heavy water, which was a mistake.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Yeah, that's right. If they had have calculated correctly, then they would have known from the beginning, right?
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
D2O, which is like H2O, it's like regular water, this heavy water is, except instead of a normal hydrogen atom there as an H2O, that is now replaced by a hydrogen isotope deuterium, which makes it literally heavier.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
The Nazis being involved in heavy water production sounds like some sort of weird Oktoberfest slogan.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
I mentioned that film, 1965's The Heroes of Telemark, with Kirk Douglas as sort of a mashed up fictional character based on both Ronneberg and Tronstadt. That, like I said, wasn't like the biggest film ever, but it was an American film, so we did know about this operation more than they did in Norway until like 2015.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
State broadcaster NRK ran a mini-series called The Heavy Water War in 2015, and that's when a lot of Norwegians kind of first learned of this operation. And if we're talking Trondstad, if you want to button up his story, You feel bad for this guy because he didn't get to parachute in and actually have feet on the ground for this kind of thing.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
He finally got to do that kind of thing in October of 1944. He got under that parachute for Operation Sunshine, which was, you know, protecting Norway's some of their industrial assets and infrastructure from German saboteurs as the Nazis were on their way out. So he got his... his hands dirty, which he always wanted to do.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
But very sadly, the following May, I believe, in 1945, he was shot dead by the brother of a Norwegian collaborator who he was questioning. So he tragically died as well.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
I wonder if he got to use any chloroform.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
You want to go ahead and tell everyone? Yes. She titled this article, Like Water for Nazis.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
That's right. This is from Justin Meeks about Tavern on the Green. Hey, guys. This shows you how long we've been off because I've been holding on to this one. My grandma had a wonderful related story to Tavern on the Green. She was from rural Montana and traveled to New York in the late 90s with a group of old ladies over Thanksgiving. One of her traveling group actually...
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
had sold David Letterman his Montana ranch. So they went to a taping of a show and he invited them backstage. He found out they were going to be in town for Thanksgiving and invited them to have Thanksgiving dinner with him at Tavern on the Green.
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WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Yeah. Grandma said that was one of the first Thanksgiving she could remember that she didn't eat turkey dinner because at Tavern on the Green they had to order the steak and lobster. especially because Letterman was paying for it. Grandma never missed an episode of Letterman, even before this, certainly never did afterwards.
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WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Letterman is seriously a great dude and love that grandma got to meet one of her heroes like this. Thanks for the many years of the podcast. Keep up the great work. Come back and see us in Denver. That is from Justin Meeks. And Justin, we're going to head back to Denver at some point. But we should probably tell people, since we're getting emails, that we are not doing live shows in 2025.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Yeah, we're just taking a down year from doing live shows. We're going to be back out there again, so fear not. We're just taking a down year, and that's like four less trips that we're going to take, and we're going to be with our family, and that's a decision we made that we feel good about.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Look around, everyone. Every car you see is probably on AutoTrader. Like that sleek convertible that turned heads when it picked you up from the airport, or the custom ride from your favorite van life couple on social media. Even that vintage sports car that's tailing you a little too closely. New cars, used cars, electric cars, even flying cars.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Yeah. And I'll be buried next to you and it'll just say, sadly peaked at platinum.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Yeah, it's super rare and it takes a long time to get just a little bit of it. I think it's like if you're just looking at a regular water source, there's one deuterium oxide molecule for about every 20 million regular ones. So it's not needle in a haystack territory, molecularly speaking. But it's not far off. The Germans went the route of heavy water as their moderator.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
The Americans looked around for a moderator, and they said, what about Josh Clark? He's a pretty level-headed guy.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
By the way, our first sidetrack of the year. I reminded Ruby last night that we had a TV show for the probably 15th time in her life, and she was like, you did? Yeah. And we tried again and actually watched an entire episode. Which one?
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
We watched the one with John Hodgman and also starring my neighbor, Catherine, which was the final episode, how we wrote it, but not the final episode and how it aired. Right. We won't get into that. But I have to say, dude, you were, like, pretty good in a lot of that as an actor. And I was not. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Okay, no flying cars yet, but as soon as those things get invented, they'll be on AutoTrader. If you see a car you like, it's probably on AutoTrader. That's kind of their thing. AutoTrader.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
I think I think you're it's very nice of you to say, but like from and I think I had a real like outside point of view last night. I was like, you know, Josh was pretty good in a lot of this. And Emily said he really was. And I said, I never felt that comfortable and like I was doing a good job. Like every once in a while I was OK, but I thought I think you had real possibilities as an actor.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
And Ruby made it through the episode, and I was like, hey, that's our neighbor, and that's John. You know John. So that, I think, helped hold her interest a little bit more.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
It was pretty good. So, long way of saying you were not available as moderator because you weren't born yet. So, the U.S. ended up pursuing graphite as a moderator. Either one can be used. We went graphite. The Germans, I guess we'll get to the reason they went with hard water toward the end, right?
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
All right. So, anyway... Hard water is what they're after. And as it turns out, there was a chemist in Norway named Leif Trondstad. Leif T. Leif T. Yeah, exactly. Who was who understood how to find these molecules in the best way possible because he was doing it for a different reason there. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Yeah, exactly. So that's why he was pursuing it. And he was doing that for a company called Vimork Norsk, not Norsk or Norsk, Norsk with a K, hydro plant. And that was in the county of, of course, Telemark. Right. In the country of? I guess Norway, right? Sure. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Yeah, so he's at work producing a few milliliters of that, what, like every day or so?
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
No, I was making sure I didn't screw something else up. Sorry.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
That's right. All right. So park that to the side. They're producing heavy water at a rate no one had ever seen, like a cup full a day. Yeah. And World War II begins in 1939. And like I said, the Germans were like, hey, we should try and get on this heavy water train. And that's not why they invaded Norway. They invaded Norway because they were Nazis. Sure.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Norway was neutral, had declared themselves neutral. But in April of 1940, they invaded anyway. and were defeated pretty quickly. It took a couple of months, even though they had help from the allies. They were no match for the German army. And the Germans did as they do. They established a Nazi government there. And the people did not like that because they're Norwegian.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
They were like, no, no, no, we're going to resist. They went on strike here and there. They didn't cooperate in other ways to kind of just, you know, get in the way of progress, of Nazi progress. And so the Nazis says, all right, martial law has been declared. If you resist, you will be put to death. And so a lot of Norwegians left, obviously, fought from other places.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
And a lot of them said, you know what, we're going to stay here and maybe work with the Allies kind of undercover as moles.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Yeah. I'm surprised you called up that name. Nice work.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Yeah, a little bit of a, well, not a COA, I guess just sort of updating is this is our first recording of the new year. And we had our longest break ever. You know, I think everyone knows we take a nice long Christmas break, but this year it stretched into November. And so we've been gone for a long time.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
Yeah, it does. So he, like you said, went to the UK there. He met up in real life with the intelligence people he'd been working with. you know, on the down low from a long distance, which I imagine was a pretty fun meeting. Sure. They probably had some tea and caught up in person.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
And he started training these commando units to be saboteurs to eventually do their, you know, saboteur work in Norway. And the whole time was staying in contact with his allies at the plant there at Vimork. And eventually, and we're just going to say these names again. I wish we could all nickname them all to make it easier to keep up with.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
But one of the guys there that he kept in touch with who will play a part in this story is named Einar Skinnerland. That's pretty easy. Swallow Blue was his code name.
Stuff You Should Know
WWII Sabotage Spotlight: Operation Gunnerside
All right. So we do remember how to do this. And we'll be right back right after this.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
That's what they are, right? Yeah, where you just don't eat. No, of course I eat plants. You know, Emily, I would argue, has a plant-based diet. Now that I know that a plant-based diet doesn't mean that you're vegan or vegetarian. And, you know, as you'll see, depending on the percentage of the website you look at,
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Plant-Based Diets
yeah and if you're wondering like well how does that affect the rate of vegetarianism in israel uh they are second behind india that's not the only factor of course but uh i think the the highest percentage of veganism is in israel too which is uh yeah that i don't know why that surprised me but it did Okay, good. Noted.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
I wonder if 165 days a year they just party down on some steak.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
What, Seventh-day Adventist? It's not a requirement to be a vegetarian, but they're like, it's not a bad way to live. They kind of endorse it.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Yeah, they endorse the movement generally, but about 36% end up lacto-ovo vegetarians and then 16%, I'm sorry, an additional 16% eat plant-based diet with maybe a little fish, maybe a little bit of meat.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
I heard that word last night on the TV show The Pit, and I realized I just don't use it much.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Or perhaps we are both peaked and peckish. Yeah. Yeah. At all times. We're always hungry and we're always not looking so good. Hinduism at almost 80% eats a plant-based diet, but they, again, it's not required. It's just like, hey, why don't you do this? That kind of thing. Heavily suggested, maybe.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
A lot of people say, like, you know, it really depends on how much you eat and a certain percentage, like maybe 80 percent of your diet is plant based. And that's easily Emily. She eats vegetables constantly.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Yeah. Or show up to a Jane party with a rack of ribs. That's probably not. It's probably frowned upon, I would say. I would think so. All right. So if and of course, I'm kidding. No, no offense to any Janes out there.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Right. So if you're going to eat a plant-based diet, it can look many different ways depending on what you're into. We found some information from Harvard Health. And obviously one thing that you're going to do is eat lots of veggies like Emily does. They say like, hey, fill half your plate up with veggies and vary the color. Don't eat just like a bunch of green veggies.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
No, but just her meals like her meal. She'll cook like we try to eat the same stuff, but I don't want to sit down and eat Brussels sprouts, broccoli and cauliflower for dinner.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Yeah. I'll have the cream spinach, a side of broccoli and a thumb of steak.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
For like that's the healthy way to eat meat? Yes. I don't think I've heard that, but I could see that.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
I can. I've done that dance, but I did not know that was a eating scale.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
It's a great name. What I do, we host a lot of, especially in the spring and summertime, of people when we go to the lake and just at our house here. We throw dinner parties. We just do a lot of that kind of stuff. And aside from being exhausting, one thing... I'm just kidding. It's actually a lot of fun.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
But one thing I do, and this goes along with like how you think about meat and how much meat you have, is I don't cook up like, you know, 20 chicken breasts if there's 20 people there. I cook up a bunch of, you know, whatever kind of cut of chicken and or steak. Sometimes I'll do a couple of meats and I will just I will slice it all up on a big platter.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Yeah. But she'll throw some chicken in there and some fish. So she's sort of pescatarian plus maybe.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
And then you can just get a portion of something rather than saying, like, here's a gigantic chicken breast on your plate that you now feel responsible for. Right. And people seem to really like that, you know, like maybe I'll have a little bit of this and a little bit of that. And then the rest is our veggie sides. Nice. Yeah. So that's a tip from Chucky.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Yeah, you can get used to something like that. And I think what you'll find, if you think you need meat because it's more filling, that's just not true. You get plenty full eating all that other stuff. So, you know, you can give it a whirl. I do that stuff every now and then. Whole grains at breakfast is great. This is basically, again, what Emily does. A lot of oatmeal, buckwheat, barley, quinoa.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of terms for all this stuff. I didn't know about a third of these probably.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Yeah. I have just retrained my brain to where I don't seek that. And it's not like I was eating dessert every night. Like the only time I literally have dessert, like a dessert is... Kind of either if a bunch of people are out to eat and it's an occasion or maybe on vacation or something like that. But it's not like even eating out in a restaurant. We we never eat dessert like that.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
But I have found just one square of dark chocolate scratches that itch in a nice way.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
You know what? I used to not be into dark chocolate, but I love it now.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
But I don't do that every night, but I'll still, you know, when I want that, when I find myself like, God, I got to have the sweet thing tonight, I'll do one square, sprinkle a couple of little dabs of sea salt on top, and that does it for me.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
I know. Because I don't have a mayonnaise store. Greens, too, obviously, like leafy vegetables, salads, just eat as much stuff. Like, I love a salad. Emily, you know, she grows that stuff and prepares fresh salads, makes her own salad dressing. She's gotten more into cooking. She never used to do stuff like that at all. But I found myself eating a lot more salad these days.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
I had never heard of lacto-vegetarian, which basically means throw out all the rest, but I'll eat dairy.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
No, I mean, as you know, it's my favorite food, and I just, you know. I heard you. I got to pick and choose with that stuff, but it's not removed from my life, thank goodness. That's good. But you're going to get lots of vitamins and minerals and fiber and antioxidants in your veggies.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
If you eat legumes, if you're a vegetarian, you probably eat lots of legumes and chickpeas and lima beans and stuff like that, soy. You're going to get lots of protein, amino acids. lots of fiber and antioxidants there and also no cholesterol which is you know i have cholesterol problems genetically speaking so and a lot of people do so that's a good way to get your cholesterol down
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Yeah, for sure. Obviously, you know, we've mentioned the concerns with red meat, but with beef and pork, people have been, you know, calling for years for less of that in your diet. And, you know, health practitioners and doctors, because obviously, you know, heart attack, stroke, cancer, all the things that can lead you in that direction once you eat too much red meat.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Yeah, for sure. Another big, big reason is animal welfare and just maybe your moral values as a human. That is a lot of people switch over to vegetarianism or veganism because the modern factory farming system in the United States is is a horror show and everybody knows this. Some people, some people do it anyway.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
But it's a big reason, you know, like vegans are like, no, all, all animals have a right to life and a right to freedom. And we're not doing it right here in the United States. So I'm not going to take part in it.
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Plant-Based Diets
I think some vegans, I found a lot of support behind vegans saying like a processed wasp part in a thing is fine.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Yeah, for sure. I'm not going to tell that story. Mindful eating is another one, which is, I mean, exactly what it sounds like. Just instead of, like, falling into a pattern and I'll just eat that because that's what I've always eaten or, you know, grab that thing that's quick and brainless to put in my mouth.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Yeah, to really just have a heightened awareness of what you're eating, what's going in your body, And every impact from your health to to what it means to the world and to that animal. Just being more mindful is another reason that people will go to a plant based diet.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Yeah. And we'll we'll put environmentalism in its own category because there's a whole section on that. But that's another reason.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Yeah, I'm not a vegan, but it's I can still say, you know, word of caution if you go that route that you have to be more active and in meal planning and because what you really want to do is eat whole foods and eat real foods. So if you're like, I'm going to go vegan and and just sort of buy this, the ultra processed stuff that is technically vegan, you're not doing yourself any health favors.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
I mean, you know, you're still doing and, you know, as far as your moral values are concerned, you're doing right by that. But you want good outcomes all the way around. So just lean toward whole foods and the Mediterranean diet, which, again, people around the Mediterranean just call it eating food.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
That has roundly been shown over the years to be kind of the one of the ideal diets that you can lean toward.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Yeah, for sure. As far as the individual, you know, we'll kind of go through a little bit about like who's deficient and what, depending on what you eat. If you're looking at protein and saturated fat, you're going to have, obviously, if you're a meat eater, you're going to have the highest intake among anyone. And the lowest is going to be among vegans. That just makes a lot of sense.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
If you're a vegetarian or a fish eater, you're going to be somewhere in the middle. And vegetarians are more likely than meat or fish eaters to have, as a result, inadequate protein intake. And vegans even more likely to have inadequate protein intake, I think, more than vegetarians.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Yeah, ripped vegan. You might have a vitamin B12 deficiency if you are a vegan because plants don't have B12. I think 52% of vegans are B12 deficient, 7% of vegetarians. And if you're a meat eater, you have a less than 1% chance of being B12 deficient.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Yeah, for sure. Here's one thing, though, and this is something that was controlled for BMI even. If you're a vegetarian or vegan, you have a – kind of a remarkable statistical risk or higher risk, I guess, of getting bone fracture than a meat eater.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
And especially when it comes to your hips, the risk of hip fracture with vegetarians, you have a 25% higher risk of fracturing your hip as a vegetarian, controlling for BMI again, and vegans, 131% higher chance of hip fracture.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
That's right. No comment on what that does to your butt. What, if you just eat seafood? No, if you eat nothing but broccoli and cauliflower all day long.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Yeah, yeah. I did mention cancer. You know, I think we often talk about like heart attack and stroke and stuff like that by eating too much red meat. But cancer is another factor that I sort of briefly mentioned. But if you're a vegetarian or vegan, you have a 10 to 18 percent lower risk of cancer than meat eaters. Although, All Cause Mortality, that's another good band name.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
All Cause, see, that can't be our band name because I can't even say it at the end of the show. All-Cause Mortality was not different, which is surprising, between vegetarians and meat eaters and vegans.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Yeah. That's just a weird stat. Yeah, it is. The all dash cause. Yeah, I don't know. I can't explain it. Maybe someone will have some more information on that. But earlier we did promise an entire section on the environmental impact of eating animals because that is that is yet another reason.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Yeah, but it's very good for you. She's a much healthier human than I am.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
And, you know, obviously people have all kinds of reasons and it's usually a combination of all these things. But we were learning just it's become plainly obvious more and more. This isn't the kind of thing I think that especially in America people like to look at a lot in the past. But it seems like in the last like 15 years or so
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
People are sounding the alarm like, hey, besides ethical concerns and health and all that other stuff, like raising animals is to eat is kind of a or the way we do it is a disaster for the environment.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Yeah, of course. One thing we should point out early on is that there's a sort of exhaustive look at how much meat people eat around the world at a certain point or kind of peppered throughout. And just for comp purposes in the United States, we average per capita meat consumption between 123 to 150 ish kilograms, depending on where you're looking. So just kind of
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
I didn't kill that chocolate. You know, coffee and chocolate are two pretty notorious, you know, environmental disasters as well on the on the non-meat side, for sure.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Yeah. And if you're like, well, I like eating some meat. The biggest offenders there are beef, lamb and mutton.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Beef produces 60 kilograms of greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram and a kilogram of poultry is only six. And but you compare that to a kilogram of just some some English peas. That's under one kilogram of greenhouse gas emissions produced. So you might think that as far as water consumption goes, the plants would far outpace like a meat diet because you got to water vegetables.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
But generally, there are just a few plant-based foods that have a bigger water footprint than beef.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Yeah. And just so you know, there are like zero sort of vegetables that outpace beef. The two that do outpace beef that I was referring to are chocolate and almonds.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
And I think as far as lamb and mutton go, the two other biggest offenders in the meat category, only cashews, pistachios, and hazelnuts consume more water to produce than lamb and mutton.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
I can just see Jimmy Carter holding a big thing of peanuts and roots with dirt falling off of them.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
That's right. The U.S. maintains about 9 billion livestock to get the meat that it needs, or wants, I guess is the better way to say it. And if that grain went to humans, it'd be enough for 840 million people that have plant-based diets.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Put that in your back pocket when we start talking about other countries.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Yeah. The other environmental disaster of raising livestock, and this is more and more lately, is the habitat destruction to raise all these animals. You're talking about extinction of plant and animal species and thousands more being threatened in the years upcoming because of habitat destruction. And it's also true for some kinds of agriculture.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
You know, we've talked about palm oil cultivation being a big problem for a lot of stuff, specifically orangutan populations, or at least by example. But beef, once again, is the biggest factor. Beef drives 41% of tropical deforestation globally, whereas palm oil and soy, which are two sort of offenders on the other side, are only 18% combined.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Yeah. But I mean, the one takeaway here is, is beef, uh, beef bad.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Yeah. I mean, it's far and away leading the way in all the bad categories, you know.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Yeah, I eat more vegetables now. I eat way less red meat than I used to. Yeah. For just like all the reasons that we talked about.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
All right, this is from a Smithy because of us, actually. Oh, yeah, I saw this one. Hey, guys, I've always had a bit of an interest in metalworking, and as of about five years ago, I've had an interest in your show. I'd say your show has been the longest-running podcast of my life, actually.
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Plant-Based Diets
I remember listening to your episode about blacksmithing four years ago and that kind of set off the domino effect of me getting really into blacksmithing as a hobby. I'm definitely one of those that like to collect hobbies with most passing in about six months and I never pick it up again, but not true with blacksmithing.
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Plant-Based Diets
I've stuck with it since your episode came out and I'd like to say I've come a long way with it. I've attached a few pictures of my work, which was very good by the way, starting with early works and all the way to the two I completed about a week ago. I thought you might be interested in seeing how your show kicked off. One of my favorite hobbies I've ever had. So thanks for that.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
And that is from Tate Avent. And you can find Tate. Just look up Tater Makes. T-A-I-T-E-R-M-A-K-E-S. And check out Tate's work.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
So clearly with those kind of numbers, the U.S. is a meat based culture. I mean, plenty of people here do not take part in that kind of thing, obviously. But as you'll see, many cultures around the world historically have plant based diets and still have plant based diets.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Depending on who you ask, they might say there's about two billion meat based eaters in the world and about four billion plant based eaters.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
I'm saying 2 billion and 4 billion. I'm not weighing in on percentages.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Yeah, I mean, it's in some cases or actually in a lot of cases, especially historically speaking and still in some places today, it's sort of the de facto diet because that's what you have. And you may not have the kind of money to like go get really good meat or something like that.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
So if you look back through time and you go back to, say, like Ireland in the 19th century before the potato famine, they were eating tons of potatoes. There were a lot of poor people in Ireland that were like, hey, we can grow potatoes. They have some vitamins and minerals. Maybe we can milk a cow and eat a little pickled herring. But other than that, we're eating lots and lots of potatoes.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Well put. Yeah. Everyone knows what we mean by that. Yeah. And, you know, there's a who helped us with the original version of this. Was it Libya? No, Laura. All right. The claw. Dr. Claw. Dr. Claw. She dug up a graph basically about how Italians eat and.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Prior to, well, not that long ago, they ate what you would call the Mediterranean diet now, and they just called it what we eat because that's what's around here.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Yeah, exactly. Fruit, vegetables, olive oil, legumes, fish, cereals, not a ton of dairy or meat. But they after I believe after World War Two, they started eating a lot more meat. Before that, it was basically a plant based diet. Because as you'll see, once again, no, no, no, Chuck, they're eating lots of fish. Plant based diet is we're talking about meat here.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Fish get a pass, I guess, as far as plant based diet goes. It does not mean vegetarian or vegan.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Yeah, which, you know, a cynic might say, well, if every nation was prosperous, everyone would just eat tons of meat. And it sounds cynical, but like the data sort of says what you just said. Right. You know, if you look at the U.S. in the 19th century, They were roundly encouraging that people eat lots and lots of meat.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
There was a cholera outbreak in 1832 and the US government said, eat more meat and drink more alcohol and lay off the fruits and vegetables. Obviously because of cholera, but there was also just this idea in America early on that like, you know, we're well fed and we're well bred because we eat red meat and we grow and big here in the States.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
We're not sitting around eating rice and grains and potatoes.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Man, because of, well, it's about to say me. It's not my fault.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Right. Yeah. And hey, what a great time to set up where countries are now, because remember those numbers I told you about the United States. We're going to walk you around the world, everybody. Not in the Wayback Machine. What do we call this? Yeah. When we're just currently. The Gophar Machine. Yeah. The Gophar and Wide Machine.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Nice. Modern day, jump in the go far and wide machine and come with us at first to Africa. If you look at continent wide, the stat is about 65 grams, I'm sorry, 65 kilograms of meat per capita
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
I wonder about that number, because if you break it down for per country, South Africa, they eat about sixty five point two kilograms compared to, let's say, the Democratic Republic of Congo at just over four kilograms. Who's who's eating more red meat in Africa than South Africa to make that average sixty five?
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Not even. But who cares about computers? This is, I mean, this is probably literally the opposite of computers because we're talking about plants.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Well, no one's ever asked me how much meat I eat. I could skew that. Oh, really? Have you?
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
No, no, no. I mean like an official study. Like I don't know how they do any of that stuff. It's sort of like weird black magic to me. But we do know that generally speaking, West African nations eat a little more meat. It's a little more meat heavy than East African nations.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
But even in West Africa, that's again, I mean, if the average per capita was 65 kilograms, that's like less than half the United States per capita.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Yeah, if you look at the top 10 countries around the world with the highest rates of vegetarianism, India and Taiwan are on there. So two of the top 10 are in Asia. Japan and China, they aren't on the list of top 10 percentage vegetarian-wise, but they eat a lot less meat than the U.S. at an average per capita consumption under 75 kilograms.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Yeah, and this was another— Like if you look at Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Myanmar, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Vietnam, they're all under 20 kilograms and Thailand is it like 25 and Laos at 30. So, uh, I mean, that's way less than the 75 average in Japan and China.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Yeah, which we'll get in. Well, actually, we should take a break before we do that. But we'll talk about India real quick because they have the highest proportion of vegetarians in the world. Close to 40 percent, 38 percent, 39 percent are vegetarian in India for obvious reasons. And 6.6 kilograms of meat per capita compared to as many as 150 for the U.S.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
That's very low. It is very low. All right. We promised talk of religion because who doesn't love that? But this is religion as it relates to diet, because depending on your religion, there may be a lot of, you know, rules and restrictions on what they say you should eat because of a bunch of reasons. It can sometimes it shows like purity.
Stuff You Should Know
Plant-Based Diets
Sometimes it's like, no, it shows how dedicated and faithful you are. Sometimes it's like, hey, you get it following rules. Don't eat this on this day. And let's see how you do with that. But for whatever reason, there are plenty of religions that have rules sort of surrounding meat for sure.
Stuff You Should Know
Kids' Chemistry Sets: KABOOM!
Yeah, we can't get worse than that, right? Yeah, I'd rather go to Halifax than have a hometown show be undersold. Yeah. You got any barns in Halifax, Matt, that we can do a show in? I bet Matt has a barn.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah, you know, I looked up this James Bruneau, and, you know, we get a lot of great information a lot of times from New York Times obituaries. And he was a friend of Butts, and so they used to play Scrabble together on occasion, like their homemade version. And once this guy took it over, he and his wife Helen, like, operated out of their house
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
And he was like, at a certain point, like, all that was in our house was boxes of tiles and racks and boards. And we couldn't move around. So they had to, they moved to an abandoned schoolhouse. And then eventually a converted woodworking shop. And they had 35 employees working two shifts, producing 6,000 Scrabble sets a week. Wow. By 53, by 1953. Wow.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
I mean, we should probably just say that Scrabble, if you don't know, it's a board game in which two to four players use letters, little tiles, to spell out words on a board in a crossword-like fashion.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah. Or like a T-O-N-N-E of bricks, which is worth more than T-O-N.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
So that's selling pretty good. I think they've sold they estimate about 150 million total sets as of, you know, kind of now. Yeah. Even though it's hard to get a real firm number on that. But they bought that trademark sell show and writer. I want to say Richter there, but it is writer.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Bought that trademark from them in 72. Bruno got a million and a half bucks, which would be about 12 million today. And this, by the way, was like he was looking for something to do in retirement. So he really scored. That's a triple letter retirement gig, I would say. Right. Or triple word even. And then the inventor, Mr. Butts, got 265 grand, which would be about 2 million bucks.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Plus he got a very small royalty that he seemed to be pretty happy with.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
I think so too. He would have been in his 80s then too because I think he died in the early 90s in his 90s.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
In other words, you know, the words have to intersect each other. You can't just throw a random word out there in the corner if you feel like it. They have to touch and use a letter, or I guess a blank space, for another word. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Oh, really? And I was like, that's so weird. Like, I grew up with Coleco toys. Yeah. And I just kept seeing it as Colco. And I was like, wait a minute. Dummy, it's Coleco.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
And, by the way, I just want to go ahead and – because Scrabble people are probably going to get mad at us, but I'm going to go ahead and throw out a suggested rule change. Okay. There is a word, Scrabble, and that means to – as a verb, to scratch or grope, to try and collect something, or as a noun, the act of doing that. And I propose –
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah. No, it's interesting. I mean, I mean, have you ever dug into like TV rights for professional sports leagues?
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah, it is. And it's gotten really, really expensive. Like when you see the numbers like, you know, Amazon acquires the right to air whatever Sunday night football or something. It's just.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Anyway, I guess we can move on to competitive Scrabble because, you know, a lot of people just play for funsies at home. I know our bud John Hodgman and his lovely wife Catherine play like for decades now because they're high school sweethearts. So they're long, long, long term Scrabblers, you know, against each other.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
I kind of wanted to find out if there was a lifetime record that they keep up with. Surely. But then I just decided not to ask.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
I bet they're both good because Catherine's an English teacher and John knows a lot of words.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah, he would smoke me. In fact, I feel like I might have played him once on one of these trips that I used to do with him for maximum fun. But I don't know. If we did play, it was not even competitive at all.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
I don't see why he would have played me because I'm really just, you know, I'm like Steve Carell and Anchorman. I like I'll try to spell lamp just because I looked at one. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah, you and I would probably be a pretty good matchup.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
that if you play that eight-letter word, that not only do you get your bingo bonus for playing a seven-letter word, I think you should, if you play the word Scrabble, you should get an extra bonus on top of that. Of how many points? A million? Whatever's fair. That's where I just step back and say you guys handle it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah. And before anyone writes in, technically, they didn't completely shut down the NSA. They just stopped there. They weren't in charge of the tournaments anymore. They just they moved them over to another program called School Scrabble.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
You mentioned ups and downs over the years. You know, I guess all board games go through kind of boom periods and bust periods or at least low periods. And Scrabble is no different. There was an early 2000s boom. There were televised tournaments. It's interesting what drives this stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
I don't know if they know on the inside, but I couldn't figure out why it would have had a boom in the 2000s, early 2000s.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Oh, I bet the New York Times crossword documentary, too, kicked that up a notch.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
But we're not talking crosswords again, so don't worry.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
There were 75,000 rated Scrabble tournament games in 2004, and that number by 2019 was cut almost in half. That went down to 40,000, and the Nationals went from 837 players to 280 over that same span. So it just seems like that documentary really caused a resurgence, I guess, and then it kind of went back to level set maybe.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah, or play Scrabble with. Right. If you're in a tournament, you're going to see some big scores. They have scores over 800 points at times in tournaments. The highest scoring legal word, I don't think it's ever been played officially, but that would be a 1,784-point score.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
score if that was across three different triple word scores right that word is oxy oxyfin butazone yeah it's a now banned um nsaid pain reliever that's right and since i know you looked it up because i did too i'll let you give the definition of kazik which is the highest score ever for a word played in a tournament 392 points for kazik
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah. I saw that the Taino people like the indigenous Bahamians.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah, I think it's almost like Tetris-like in their brains at a certain point. Like they might as well just be Tetris blocks that are trying to fit in. Obviously not Tetris because you can't make, you know, your own size and shaped things, but you know what I mean? Sure. I know what you mean.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
There's some other cool studies that there are, you know, kind of findings they found from different studies. The setup of this one is basically that if you have a college degree, They have found that you're less likely than those with less education to get age-related memory loss and Alzheimer's. But in terms of Scrabble, they found that that gap can be closed a lot.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
If you don't have that college degree and you play a lot of Scrabble, You can close that gap to where it's almost the same as people with higher levels of education as far as acquiring that memory loss and Alzheimer's. Pretty great. Take that, college boy. What about the Ruskies? That was interesting, too, I thought.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah, that's super cool. They've also found that for tournament play, men dominate tournament Scrabble tournaments, generally speaking. But they've done studies of this and they're like, hey, it's not because men have big brains and women have little tiny brains. It's not because guys can learn words better than women. It has nothing to do with any of that. It has to do with
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
The fact that in general, overall, men start younger than women do. Boys, I guess, start younger than girls when it comes to Scrabble. And women generally and girls play more Scrabble, but they say that's not necessarily how to get better at Scrabble. They're playing for fun and just having a good time.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Whereas to get better at Scrabble, what these boys and men seem to be doing more of is like anagramming stuff and analyzing everything. And instead of just like, hey, let's just play some Scrabble and have some fun. Like, let me research and analyze this stuff so I can dominate in a tournament.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah, and I think it's changed a lot over the past couple of decades too.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah. When it comes to like, all right, what words, like what dictionary do you use? There is a Scrabble dictionary. It's called the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary. It was released in 1978, again, by Selchow and Ryder, even though they worked with Merriam-Webster to produce the game because, you know, they're dictionary people.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
And this has caused a lot of controversy over the years because words have been added, words have been taken away. And every time that happens, the Scrabble community, you know, some people are like, great, great change. And some people are like, no, I hate that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Right. And as I said, that seven tiles played at once is called a bingo. You add up your score at the end and tack on 50 points at that point. Right. Or however many you get. Apparently, experts can play like... you know, three, four or five of those in a game sometimes.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Some of the worst and the worst racial slurs out there have been in the Scrabble dictionary.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Well, I mean, I'm not going to say those, but there is a list. I think there was a woman named Judith Grad in the 90s who kind of. It got on her, I don't want to say got on her soapbox because that indicates a bad thing. She got a campaign going to have the slurs removed. The Anti-Defamation League got involved.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Hasbro eventually said, all right, we're going to remove these words from the next edition of the dictionary. Booby, gringo, farted, honky, defamation. Whitey's, Pissed, Fatso, Redneck, and Wazoo.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah, and that was in the early 2000s. And then in 2020, the official tournament removed a lot of those slurs that they previously allowed for tournament play. Right. And I also mentioned, you know, adding words. Over the past few years, they've added hundreds of words. Jedi, subtweet, Vax have been added. Birria, as in Birria tacos, has been added.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
All right, do it. They also had slang from time to time. Apparently, I'm a, I-M-M-A. As in, I'm going to. Like, I'm about to do something.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
There has been some cheating over the years. We'll talk about a couple of these incidents. In 2011, there was a world Scrabble championship between a Thai player named Cholapat Etare and a British guy named Ed Martin because it was a missing G tile. And there's a lot of versions of this story. Apparently, Time magazine and some Scrabble websites say that E.T.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Ari called for Martin to be stripped, searched for that G. And the tournament officials were like, no, we're not going to do that. We don't want to see that. In Mental Floss, they said that, you know, they asked them to turn their pockets inside out. And that eventually just escalated to like, hey, maybe they hid it in their pants. They should be stripped, searched.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
And then what they eventually found out was that the missing G was in the pocket of another player from a previous game. And what I want to know is like, who who's running these tournaments? Like, how are you not counting the letters before the game or cracking open a brand new Scrabble factory sealed Scrabble? Like you got to count those letters.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
You got to make sure that's like playing chess without like a pawn and just being like, oh, it looks good to me.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah, they should have made that kid pay that money back with interest. Yeah, they should have. What else? They had their own little Me Too incident at one point, too, didn't they?
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah, I mean, if you're just sort of amateur, funsies, Scrabble people, one big bingo like that can seal the game for you.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
By the way, we live update. We did text John Hodgman just to find out. I was kind of curious about a couple of things and about his highest Scrabble total ever. And if he and Catherine have a running record between them and he says we have old notebooks full of score sheets, but we never go back and look at them because as we know, John Hodgman only looks forward. Time does not go backwards.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
We were both consistently in the 300 to 350 pretty good mode. Okay, that sounds high to me.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
He said that's good enough to make me happy. He said we had both probably broken 400 a couple of times. I remember words better than scores. 25 years ago, I added S-T-E-R to joke to make jokester on a triple word square while playing with some friends of my parents. And I don't remember the points, but I was really proud of myself.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Oh, man. This opens up a whole new world of possibilities for the show. Live updates.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
I don't remember Scrabble. It was a long time ago. I love this one. Frank, old Frank, the chairman of the board, Mr. Sinatra, in his version of the 12 Days of Christmas added nine games of Scrabble. Yeah, that's right. Which is actually Joe Piscopo doing, Frank.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
In France, by the way, the bingo is called a scrabble. Just other nuts and bolts. You know, the tiles come in a little. They're little wooden tiles, little wooden square tiles. And on the tile is a letter and then a point value sort of as a subscript. And then you keep your letters on a little wooden tile rack. And you ideally your opponent does not see those. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah. And then they brought in, I can't remember his name, but he was the dad in Arthur and Oh, was he the dad in Arthur? He was Liza Minnelli's father in Arthur, yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Oh, God, I used to know his name because Arthur's, you know, one of my, like, top ever comedies.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Oh, you. Hi, guys. or basically just the voices that live in my head permanently because I listen to you two all the time. Nice. A while back, I have no idea where the idea came from. I wonder whether everyone sees concepts the same way in their head as I do and started asking around because she's referencing like the inner dialogue gap where people don't hear words, they see images.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
And Daisy says this, and this is very interesting, I think. I noticed that for me, the calendar months of the year in my brain are arranged like this, January, February, March, April, May, June, July, December, November, October, August. On the line below, it's very important the way it's spaced out, I think. And it's also indented.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
So December, November, October, August is on the line below and indented to about mid-February. So going from left to right and then making a curve to continue from right to left. No need to point out how weird this is, guys, because no calendar ever was drawn this way. However, this is how it is normal for me in my head.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
You can imagine the weird faces I got when asking this question enthusiastically to find out about other people's head calendars, especially when I told them about mine. Anyway, all this to ask, when you picture a yearly calendar in your head, what does it look like? Immediately when...
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
I read that the only thing that popped into my head was a like the back of a of a like a wall calendar you would get as a teenager where it had all all of them listed. That's what I picture.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
I don't know, but I guess it would just be four, four and four. OK, that's how I picture it in my head. January, February, March, April, and then four more than four more in order because I'm not weird.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Like, you know, it's they're facing away from you if you're opposite your opponent. and that's a big part of like an expert or at least an accomplished or experienced scrabblist is dummies like me and i guess you if you and i played we'd just sit down and try and spell fart every chance we got If you're an experienced Scrabblist, you're almost like counting cards.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
That is Daisy, and Daisy is from Belgium. Thanks, Daisy. That's the problem.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Like, you know how many letters are in the bag of like how many of each letter in the bag and you see them being played. You know how many are on your rack. You know how many are still in the pile. So you're sort of trying to figure out mathematical possibilities of what's still out there and what can be played. Like that's the next level stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah, you've also got your blank tiles, which are worth zero points, but those really help out in making words possible that you couldn't get ordinarily. And then you've got your one-pointers, A-E-I-L-N-O-R-S-T, and you.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
All right. The two pointers are D and G. Dave and Gary. Okay. I would say doggone. Three points are B, C, M, and P. That is be chewing and masticating pizza. Does someone really suggest like, hey, use these and don't make up your own? No, I'm making this up. I got you. This is all a bit.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Okay. Four points. We got F, H, V, and W, and Y. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
That was probably it. A big thanks to Laura for her help on this one. What was your nickname for her? Dr. Claw. Dr. Claw. Do you play Scrabble? Are you a Scrabbler? I just kind of wanted to get that out of the way.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
And then your 10-pointer, Josh. What are we going to end up with, Q and Z?
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
I think I got it. You got it? Yeah, give me a quiz at the end. I'll put this away, and then you can just quiz me.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
There is a statistics professor at Carnegie Mellon, Andrew Thomas, who, who says if you go first, you have an advantage of 14 points. If you have that blank tile ever in the game, that's an advantage of 30 points if you're good at Scrabble, not like me.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
I wonder about that. I'd like to hear from from Scrabblers. I mean, if it's fair game, it's fair game.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah, that's a good point. Let me see here. What else do we have? We have X and Z give you a three to five point advantage. Mm hmm. even though they're tougher to use. And the Q is a five-point disadvantage because, I mean, I was about to say you always have to have that U, but I'm sure there are weird Scrabble words that don't have a QU. There's two that I know of. One is key. QI?
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah, I wonder if, because I did the same thing you did. Every time Laura found an example of a word that's unusual or high-scoring, I always looked it up because I was curious. I wonder if that's part of the love of Scrabble is actually learning what these words mean or if they're like, I really don't care. I just care how much it's worth.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
That's true. The highest scoring three-letter word is Zach's, a 19-pointer. And Zach is 16. Quiz is a four-letter word worth the most at 22. That means like a test of sorts. Okay. And then Zippy, what does that mean?
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah, same. I mean, we own it, and I have played Scrabble here and there. If somebody's like, hey, let's play Scrabble, I won't go like, no, sorry, not going to do it. But, you know, I'll play very occasionally, but I've never been a regular Scrabbler.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Ah, okay, good point. Thanks. You can't use proper nouns. No, you can't. Might as well go ahead and say that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
See, I'm a house rules guy, so I can, you know, as long as everyone's on board, I think you can have your own house rules for stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah, but like if I were to play with Ruby, and I'd probably say like, hey, we can use proper nouns because she'll want to put our dog's name or something.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
I did look up the highest scoring bingo, and that is Muzjiks, M-U-Z-J-I-K-S, which is a Russian peasant.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Well, what's weird is your college band, I know for a fact, was Jay Clark and the Muzz Chicks.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
And we should also say that Scrabble, I think, is now up to 30 languages all over the world. And apparently that can be problematic. Like in France, you can add an E and an S to many, many words. So it can kind of get out of hand with the score totals there. And in our beloved Germany.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
And I never really thought about this, but German words are long, so there's not a lot of, I mean, sure, there are obviously words shorter than seven words in Germany, but a lot less than a lot of other languages.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
So it must just be bingo city or whatever bingo city is in German.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Nor am I very good at it at all, especially if I'm playing against somebody who, you know, because there's a lot more to it than just like knowing words.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
All right, we're back. And if you're going to talk about Scrabble, you got to talk about Alfred Mosher Butts, because he is the gentleman who invented this game. This is in 1938. He was an unemployed architect at the time and just into games. He's from Poughkeepsie, but I believe the game was actually invented.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Actually, I know this for a fact in Jackson Heights, Queens, because at 81st Street and 35th Avenue, I believe, is a Scrabble style street sign. I think it's I think it's 35th Avenue has below each of the letters is the little number value subscript, which is kind of just a little nice, fun, cute nod.
Stuff You Should Know
The Scribble on Scrabble
Yeah, at the time. And he was just into gaming and wanted to invent a game that was part chance, part skill.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Like, I don't see Jerry. She has a setting on her on her setup where it's like show camera only to Josh and not Chuck.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Two things. You just name checked Mainers. That's another one.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
That's true. But one thing I did want to mention, and that's a nice little segue, was just to plug a little Instagram post I made recently. I was cleaning out my closet and I found a bunch of old schoolwork from elementary school. And while this part was from high school, I did a satire, an extra credit satire on Thoreau about someone who went to live deliberately in the woods.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
And, you know, the big joke at the end is they made it like 30 minutes or something. Yeah. It wasn't the best comedy work, you know, for a ninth grader. It was OK. Sure. But people should go check it out. I did a bunch of screenshots of various projects, a lot of space travel stuff and book reports. But one big one was on ancient Egypt. Mm hmm.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
And I literally in the thing was like, hi, my name is Chuck Bryant and I'm going to be your guide through ancient Egypt. And at the end, it was like, I hope you enjoyed your tour. And once again, signing off, I've been your guide. And people are like, oh, my God, you are doing stuff you should know as a fifth grader. That's awesome, man.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
It's really pretty cute, but you can go to Chuck the Podcaster Instagram to check that stuff out. People got a real kick out of it.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
I just don't go on Instagram much, okay? I know that, buddy. I know you're telling everyone else that, but I know that's not your jam. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yeah, but she has you can't smell her. She has a button to allow me to smell her. Oh, even though she's in L.A. and you know what it smells like? Miso. Yep. But she may have gotten that miso from the fridge.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Also, before people write in, they were definitely pickling things before they were canning. So you could still pickle things.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
What, for canning? Yeah. I don't know. Maybe how to seal something properly would be my guess. Although, I don't know. Maybe like wax sealing. Maybe canning should be an episode. And we can figure that out.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
I can regale everyone with more tales of being drugged to the cannery as a child.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Which is actually true. It makes me sound 100 years old, but that's actually true. So, yeah, when artificial cold came on the scene, that really, really, really changed the game. There was a physician and chemist from the University of Glasgow in the 18th century, 1748, named William Cullen.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
who it looks like did the first experiment on artificial cooling and kind of demonstrating how that was possible. And he, like you said, it was just sort of a version of what they had done in ancient times with those water in the clay jars and exploiting that phase change from liquid to gas using the thermal energy. But he used instead of water, diethyl, diethyl, diethyl ether. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
And he would pump it out of of a container and it would come to a boil and that heat would pull all the heat from the surrounding area, just like it did back in old days. It was just sort of different, different medium. And that would cool things down.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yeah, for sure. A guy, an American this time named Jacob Perkins, came along about 50-ish years later in 1834. And he's credited basically for developing the first working what we would call refrigerator in his machine. And, you know, again, it's just not too different from how they do it today. They just do it a lot better. But he used a vapor compression cycle. Again, it's all about the...
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
the thermal loss of that phase change. But in this case, they're just exploiting it, you know, because if you move the pressure back and forth between the two, it keeps a constant cool.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yeah. Big thanks to Livia for her help with this. And this was a me idea because I think after our history of dentistry, I just sort of got turned on by the idea of the history of like certain just commonplace practices and things these days. And maybe I got something out of the fridge one day and was like, oh, man, refrigerators, they really changed the game.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yeah, that's super cool. I love that. They've used various liquids over the years. Ammonia is one they use for a while. Methyl chloride for a while. All of these things were toxic, though. So until they figured out a safer way, which they would soon enough, people would actually die. In the 1920s, there were cases where Methyl chloride leaks happened, actually killed people.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
And then they said, you know what, maybe we should come up with a synthetic substance that does basically the same thing. So they came up with dichlorofluoromethane, a.k.a. Freon. And until the 1990s, Freon was the go to. And then we said, hey, that's not so great either because of our environment and the ozone layer. And so let's develop even newer, safer chemicals to keep things cool.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yeah, that's probably true. To me, this is where this episode gets super interesting. And this is kind of what I was really after when it came to the assignment, which is when things started moving around, cooling systems started getting better and better. People were developing this stuff. And at the same time, railroads were growing and growing and expanding and expanding.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
And all of a sudden, people in the Midwest, farmers could, you know, they were like, hey, I want to be able to ship my stuff and sell it to the East Coast. So the whole food scene was changing because of this. In the 1850s, they started, and this to me is just like super ingenious, they started keeping railroad cars cool by using ice. So they would, they were called reefers, R-E-E-F-E-R.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
A reefer was a refrigerated, you know, rail car. And they had these big hatches in the roof. They would load just these huge, huge blocks of ice. And then fans that were driven... by, you know, powered by the turning of the axle on the train or on the train car, rather. And that just, you know, it just blew on them like a breeze past a cool towel in your window.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
And all of a sudden you had refrigerated train cars. They were lined in like flax and sawdust, like we mentioned, sometimes dirt, sometimes cow hair. And
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Even though people were a little bit at first like, I don't know about this, the meatpacking industry really got on board because they said, we've been shipping live cows across country for people to take care of when they get there, when we can butcher everything in one place and ship out this what they call dead meat. It's disgusting, but that's what they called it.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
I think I did. And Emily said, what the heck are you talking about? And of course they did. But I was kind of curious, like, I bet it's changed the game in more ways than I think. And that was sort of Libby's charge. And here we go with that, because I think it did change in more ways than I thought it would have.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yeah, it's a lot of dead cows. It completely changed Chicago as a city, and it completely changed the way we were eating as a nation all of a sudden. We had refrigerated cars also shipping produce. It wasn't just about the cows and the beef, even though it was a big part of it. Right. But all of a sudden you could be like, hey, I'm growing this fruit in Florida.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
And have you have you ever had not just an orange in your stocking for Christmas? You ever had a big bag of oranges sitting around your house? Well, we're happy to provide that for you. And U.S. Fruit, I think, was one of the first companies that. to get involved in, like, sending their good stuff all over the place. And, you know, as a result, obviously, the prices really, really dropped.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
There was an article in the New York Sun in 1894 that talked about the price of pears went from 40 cents to two for a nickel in just a couple of decades, thanks to refrigerated cars.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
I feel like I would remember that. Our stockings were a couple of little fun things, like a little top or some silly putty, but usually just like socks and stuff like that. Sure.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Uh, trains eventually, uh, shipping wise gave way to trucks and they said, Hey, now we got these trucks that, uh, we can, you know, refrigerate as well. And so we're not, um, you know, things were built around industries, entire industries, separate industries were built near rail yards because rail shipping was the only, only game, you know, for a long time. So, and I think it was in the net, uh,
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
What did we eat episode when we talked about Chicago, like the whole meatpacking area was around the rail yards because they could, you know, they wanted to have it super close. So now all of a sudden you could say, hey, stuff is, you know, it's really much cheaper to raise cattle or grow vegetables way out in the boonies. You get cheaper labor, cheaper land. So now we can do that.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Just throw it on a refrigerated truck to get it across country.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yeah, absolutely. There was an engineer early on who who did not realize his dream, but he was sort of the first visionary in the mid 19th century. His name was Charles Tellier. Oh, nailed it. He was the guy that kind of envisioned this and said, hey. The cold chain is a thing that we could make a reality and then we can sort of reorganize rationally on how we grow food and how we ship food.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
And it was his idea. He apparently died in extreme poverty. because he never realized the dream to its fullest, but he tried. He actually got a British steamer ship and outfitted it with a refrigerator, even named it Le Frigorifique.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Like magnifique, but refrigerator. The fantastic refrigerator concern. Right. And this was in 1877. And he was bringing beef across the ocean from Uruguay to Paris. And when they got there, he was like, everyone's going to love this. And the French were like, you think I'm eating meat that's been dead for a month? Yeah. You're crazy.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
And we're going to pass a bunch of laws that ban this kind of thing for the next 20 years. Until you're screeched. I'm not crazy.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yeah, so we're going to start early, way, way before mechanical refrigeration. There was still refrigeration, which just means keeping something cold. A refrigerator is a mechanical version of that. But in olden times, one might even say ancient times, people were still trying to keep things cold. Like since we figured out... That cold things lasted longer.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yeah. Yeah. Like a meatpacker storage facility, I think. By the way, second Rocky reference in here. That was another very subtle one. We'll see if the listeners can pick that out.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
It sounded like you were acting just then, and you kind of were, but I really did just tell Josh. But yes, let's leave that as an Easter egg. Anyway, yeah, cold warehouses started becoming a thing. Again, that sawdust insulation provided a lot of the, you know, insulation, I guess. These were in the 1860s.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
And, you know, it wasn't like your refrigerator cold, but they were storing like fruit and produce. So it basically is like, hey, you don't get too warm and spoil is what they were trying to accomplish there.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
No, no, no. But by 1904, this was a legitimate thing. There were more than 600 huge storage, you know, cold storage facilities. I think 102 million cubic feet and, you know, mainly based around cities. But they were holding everything from, you know, produce to namely eggs because people wanted their eggs year round.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
And back then, before they started breeding chickens to lay eggs year round, they were basically laying in the spring and people wanted those eggs in the winter.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
That's right. But, you know, we said the French were kind of grossed out by this. It wasn't just the French. A lot of people had a hard time kind of coming around to this idea of eating things that had been around for a while. And false rumors spread that, you know, that stuff could make you sick. It could cause cancer.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
So in 1911, as a PR rebuttal, I guess, the Poultry, Butter and Egg Association had a cold storage banquet at the Hotel Sherman in Chicago where they served an entire meal of foods that had been preserved through refrigeration to a lot of folks, including the mayor and the health commissioner, as sort of like, hey, here's where we are now. You don't need to be grossed out.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
And people said, OK, I may not be grossed out, but I'm also like I have to get used to the idea of not buying the eggs from the farmer down the street or getting my milk from down the street or the produce from the farmer down the street. And so it took a while for people to come around to just getting food away from a source they really sort of knew personally and trusted.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
People have been trying to keep things cold in various ways.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
That's right. We should take our second break here at minute 42. And we're going to come back finally with home refrigeration right after this.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
All right. So iceboxes had been a thing since, you know, at least the 19th century. They started to become more and more common. And this is, you know, a big wooden sort of cabinet in your kitchen, usually wood. And it was lined with something like a tin lining or zinc, maybe. And the ice man would come around, deliver a big block of ice to your house.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
And that's how things were kept cool in the icebox. And if you are a Gen Xer or older, you're Grandparents may have even said the word icebox. My grandmother certainly did because she lived to be 100 and was around when they were iceboxes.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yeah, yeah. Lemon icebox pie. But finally, in 1914, we get our first mechanical refrigerator in the house. The domestic electric refrigerator or the D-O-M-E-L-R-E fridge made its debut. And this was still not a fully integrated refrigerator. It was a device that you got to put in your icebox to keep things cool and to keep that ice from melting.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yeah, it's kind of cool looking. If you want to look up a photo, I mean, it looks as described. Leftovers, and this was something I was really curious about, that had been a thing. It was 1878, I think, when that term was coined. But leftovers back then meant like you got to eat this stuff the next day because people didn't want their food to go bad.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
People didn't waste stuff like they do now and just throw stuff away if they didn't eat it. So dinner went into the breakfast or the lunch or it went into a big pot the next day that was on the stove. And you just had these big sort of stews of leftover things. Now that you had the mechanical electric refrigerator, all of a sudden you could preserve stuff and you could serve.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
You didn't have to transform something. You could like warm up and serve the same meal that you ate a few days ago. And that was a pretty radical thing at the time.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
That's right. It's pretty great. You know, the cold chain is what really changed the game early on. But it also changed, like, not just availability, but, like, literally creating new kinds of foods, like inventing new foods. Iceberg lettuce is so named because it could hold up to being shipped on ice.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Hey, man, I'll go to bat for iceberg lettuce. Really? Really? Yeah, I think it's unfairly labeled as junk. And like iceberg in with some arugula and a little romaine and some leafy greens. That went a little iceberg because it's so crunchy.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
And you don't get that kind of texture from, I mean, maybe a little bit, but it's the crunchiest lettuce to me. So I think it gets a very snobby sort of people look down on it for bad reasons is my take. But I like a little iceberg.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
The polyester of lettuce. Yeah. But I was also raised a lower middle class kid who grew up eating iceberg lettuce. Okay. I was too. It has a fond place in my heart for that reason.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yeah, I find it interesting that and, you know, I've traveled my fair share around Europe and I was I was shocked early on in my 20s when a lot of the drinks came without ice. And they said, you know, that's sort of the European way, because in Italy and ancient Greece and ancient Rome.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
I would party on an old school 80s iceberg salad so hard.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yeah, I mean, that's the only kind of, you know, I mean, it's probably not even vegetable, but I considered it a vegetable. I didn't like a lot of vegetables, but I would eat a salad.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
The other thing I like to use iceberg for now is like if you're making something in a lettuce cup, iceberg works really well. Okay. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. Like chicken larb or, you know, something like that.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
So frozen foods obviously wasn't a thing for a long, long time. But finally, in the 1950s, they said, hey, you know what? We can cool things. We can freeze things. We can freeze meals and we can freeze orange juice. And I know we've already talked about TV dinners and concentrated frozen concentrate orange juice.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
But those were two really big game changers only made possible for advances in refrigeration and freezing and chipping.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
That's right. Betty Cronin, unsurprisingly, not forgotten, but doesn't get nearly the accolades she should have gotten.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yeah, way to correct the record, friend. Uh, so yeah, TV dinners. I mean, I would go listen to that episode. It was pretty great, but it definitely, uh, you know, came along as TV was coming along and it was a big deal.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
And even though, I mean, there are still TV dinners sort of like that, but, um, if you go in the frozen food, I mean, I don't get any of this stuff, but if you go to the frozen food section, I mean, you can get almost any kind of meal frozen these days.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
The people that had the dough, they were putting ice in those drinks, and that's because iced drinks are better. Yeah, across the board. To me, they are. I know everyone has their own thing. Some people have sensitivities, teeth-wise and things like that, so I get that. But I've always been a super icy drink guy. I love them cold, cold, cold.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Oh, no. I'm not going to let someone ruin. Hawking up a loogie for everybody. That's one of life's great pleasures. Sure.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
This is about the pink house. Hey, guys, I can't believe there is finally a subject I can share some information about. Every year I would visit my cousins who live about 20 minutes away from Plum Island, and heading to the beach was a yearly activity.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
As we all grew and we had our own families, the yearly gathering at Plum Island got bigger and better, and passing the pink house has always been the tell that you're just a few minutes away from the beach. I grew up hearing the same story you guys shared about it being a spite house and believed it to be true as it truly sits alone on the salt marsh. It's pretty weird looking.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Just last month, though, being a new homeowner on the island, I was sent a town newsletter in which a tribute to the Pink House gave a different history. I've attached the article for you to read. While it wasn't quite built with spite, there seems to have been some spite in the story. Our family loves the show and even flew to Boston...
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
to take our two adult girls who live in Boston to see you live. Thanks to you, we are walking local experts on the Biosphere 2. And that is from Amy Sandy, who is wonderful.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Hey, unless you just like a straight up warm room temperature neat whiskey, which is your prerogative. Sure, of course. You need to be cooling those drinks down really well. Like a cool drink isn't great. You got to have it cold.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yeah. And I know we're going to get people that say, like, I don't like things that cold. So even if they don't have teeth sensitivity. So, again, people like what they like. But I'm an ice since I was a kid. A tall glass of the iciest ice water is the most refreshing thing I can put in my mouth.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Well, actually, the studio is the only place where I don't drink iced water because it makes noise. So I have a, you know, out of the refrigerator cooled, so it's still pretty cold. Sure.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
I love that. But supposedly that's not the way. But I love that.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Oh, and we're getting so sidetracked over these drinks. We're not even through like the first paragraph here. But the martini, the ultimate martini is when they do that. And then they bring you the tiny, you know, little half pitcher sitting in a little tiny bowl of ice.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
All right, so people are cooling their drinks with ice in ancient times and places. Around the 7th century, of course, the Chinese are always discovering the biggest and best ways to do things way back in the day. You hedged yourself right then. And I was like, oh, be careful. Saltpeter, which is used in making gunpowder, was found to absorb heat when dissolved in water.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
So they would, maybe one of the first artificial cooling methods was to make a little saltpeter bath and you would just sit a jar of whatever you wanted to keep cool in that cooler water. Pretty cool. Get it?
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yeah, I've heard that before. This is something that has been done in India for centuries and centuries. And, you know, it's not refrigerator cold, but if you're looking to keep something cool and something a little bit fresher, it's not a bad way to do it, for sure.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yeah, I imagine knocking something down a few degrees makes a big difference in the pre-AC days.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Bearing things in the ground is also a good way to keep things cool. You know, like three to five feet down, you're going to find pretty consistent temperatures, depending on where you are. If you're in the north, it can be 45, 50 degrees down there. More like 70 in the south, and, you know, that's Fahrenheit.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
And, of course, anyone who's ever spent any time camping or hiking knows, as I did when I was a kid, my dad would build a little, like – cordoned off area with stacked rocks in a very cold mountain river to put like jugs of milk and stuff like that in when we were camping as a family.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yeah. So far, I'm keeping track now, you have name-checked eggheads, laypeople, and hayseeds. And mountain folk. Yeah, and mountain folk. That's what we do here. Yeah. So in the 17th century in Europe, they had official ice houses and they were, you know, you'd bring down ice from where you could get ice, like literal just ice from the wild, like in Scandinavia.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
And they were using it to preserve food, obviously. Also for like the medical community would use it for different things and also chilling those drinks still. But, you know, you would you could use ice to treat burns and things like that to bring down a fever. You know, making things cooler was a big benefit to a doctor.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yeah. Or, of course, any, you know, sprains and, you know, muscle pulls, things like that, heat and ice can be used in various ways. Sure. The rice method, you know?
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yeah. So it's either just out or coming out soon. It's getting its own short stuff because it was just kind of too much there. It was pretty cool.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
Yeah, totally. I think it's super cool. If you want to talk about like real ice and there's this really extensive in-depth long New Yorker thing, which, you know, most New Yorker things are about Frederick Tudor, the Ice King, who's around in the 19th century. And he was the guy that was like, hey, we got all this ice up in New England, like our lakes are literally frozen.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
And why don't we try and make some money by shipping this ice out? He had, you know, he tried to get investors and they were like, I don't know. It seems that stuff is going to melt. Right. If you put it on a ship and try and send it to Cuba. And he said, oh, watch me. And he put some on a ship and sent some toward Cuba and it melted. And he was like, oh, man, they were totally right.
Stuff You Should Know
The History of Refrigeration
But he kept at it and kept at it. And, you know, they used to keep use things like straw to help keep the ice a little more insulated. And he said sawdust actually works a whole lot better. And he and other people got in on the game. And that was like American ice being shipped all over the world in the 19th century, which is and making it there, which is kind of hard to believe.
Stuff You Should Know
Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
That's right. So when that finally happens, the female peahen will scratch out a little depression in the ground, basically, and line it with sticks. And that's their little nest. They're going to lay four eggs that are going to hatch after four weeks. And those little pea chicks are up and around pretty much right out of the gate. It'll take them a couple of weeks to fly.
Stuff You Should Know
Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
And those boys that are peacocks aren't going to get those train feathers until their second year. They're like, why don't you just chill for a couple of years and not think about that thing?
Stuff You Should Know
Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
That's the cutest little iridescent blue baby duckling thing I've ever seen.
Stuff You Should Know
Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
Uh, no, I've just seen the turkey version at the camp.
Stuff You Should Know
Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
Yeah. The following around is, is just very cute. Cause like mom's up front and there's like six little guys and girls just following along. Like I can keep up, I can keep up.
Stuff You Should Know
Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
So the dads, as far as blue and green peacocks go, are not around. They're complete absentee dads. But hey, if you're feeling bad for the family unit, just go to the Congo because those Congo peafowl are monogamous. They don't have those leks. They like one lady and they hang around and feed and raise pea chicks with mommy.
Stuff You Should Know
Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
Yeah, because Charles Darwin was bringing a little too much of his human baggage to some of this research, it seems pretty clear, don't you think?
Stuff You Should Know
Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
That's right. They're little babies called pea chicks. And if you want to talk, as we're going to, about the species as a whole, we're going to be saying pea fowl. And then we will, you know, when we say cock, we're going to mean male. When we say hen, we're going to mean lady. And when we say chick, we're going to mean beebee.
Stuff You Should Know
Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
That's right. And that choosing is based on that flashy display that we're going to talk a little bit more about as far as the colors and stuff go and that vibration. But if there's science behind that or is there science behind that? Yes.
Stuff You Should Know
Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
In 1994, it seems like it at least, there were some researchers in Britain that found that the bigger peacocks that had more eye spots, you know, they look like eyes. What are they called? Ocelli? Ocelli?
Stuff You Should Know
Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
But the more of those they have and the larger that they are and the more just big and beautiful they are, it looks like the larger offspring they're going to have, they're going to be more likely to survive. So it seems like they are more genetically fit.
Stuff You Should Know
Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
That's right. And thanks to our listener mail in the Ruby Ridge episode, it's called Convergent Evolution and Not Co-Evolution.
Stuff You Should Know
Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
There are three main species, speaking of laying this out, of the peafowl. And you have the most common, if you live in the United States and you've seen one, maybe in a zoo, maybe in a park, or maybe just strutting around your neighborhood.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
All right. We are back to finish up with Peacocks, and we're going to talk a little bit about something we did an entire episode on, and that is iridescence. This was many years ago that we did an ep on iridescence, and if you want to really deep dive on the science of it, you can go listen to that ep.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
But what we're looking at in the case of peacock feathers and why they look iridescent or just so shiny and majestic looking is because of the shape. It's a physical shape of something and not necessarily a color of something, right?
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
Oh, yeah. Is it, I mean, the same ones from many years ago? Because you told the story years ago about the sound of the peacock.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
That's right. Partial band gap, not to be confused with the partial gap band, which is the sad tour when two out of three of those guys went out on the road.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
It wasn't a very good joke, but I couldn't help myself. Yeah, I mean, that's iridescence in a nutshell. That's basically how it works across nature. It's just about, you know, the structure of the thing. And, like, you know, what did we talk about? We talked about fish and butterfly wings mainly, I think.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
That's right. We do need to talk about their Yelp because it's a, you know, I mean, you used to do a pretty good impression. You want to try it?
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
Yeah, it is, and I always laughed at that years ago until we got our own neighborhood peacocks, and then I would hear it occasionally, and I was like, yeah, Josh is right. Or is Josh in that backyard right now? I was like, it's one of those two things that's happening. Yeah, it's pretty shrill. It can get annoying if you live near one.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
I don't mind it so much because I didn't live next door to one, but... It's usually in the morning and evening. During mating season, it can pick up a bit. So I don't know if there were complaints or if these local peacocks just, you know, met their natural end, you know. I don't know if they were taken out or if they were moved to a farm.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
All right. So let's talk about the history of these things. Jumping back a little bit. A few thousand years ago, the ancient Phoenicians... were the first folks to say, hey, these things are great. Let's move them around to different places because these things strutting around a palace is really something to see. So they brought them from India to Syria.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
They were traded around the Mediterranean at that point. And they did become like a status symbol. If you were nobility or royalty or had a lot of money or lived in a palace, then you probably wanted some peacocks strolling around your property.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
Oh, okay. I thought you were going to send me a peacock tongue.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
So they would just stick the feathers back in it in an ornamental way.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
Yeah. Interesting. I think even a lot of meat eaters appreciate the animal not looking like its original form when it's on the plate. Sure.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
Like, you know, I love a Branzino, but I don't like that fish head looking up at me.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
No, I don't want to see it, but I'll still dine on a Branzino. I got a friend whose brother will take that eyeball out and eat it right at the table in front of everybody.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
I mean, supposedly that's the thing to do, you know, use all the animal, but I don't want to eat an eyeball.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
All right. Fair enough. I mean, I've talked before about my neighborhood peacocks. I have not seen them in a few years, so I don't know if they're still around. And the house is on my morning dog walk. So I haven't seen those peacocks around in a little while, those peafowl. So I'm not sure if they're around, but we used to see them occasionally and it was all great fun.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
That sounds too much like a McNuggan. You remember that? No. I think I sent it to you years ago. It was supposedly in a thing of chicken nuggets, but it was a deep-fried little chicken head that got through, and they called it the McNuggan.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
All right. This has been very instructive. For sure.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
Yeah. I said butthole earlier, too. This is going downhill.
Stuff You Should Know
Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
All right. So back to history and peacocks. Lord Krishna in the Hindu tradition wears peacock feathers as a headdress. And there have been many other examples over the years and Greek mythology and Roman mythology about the peacock. I believe Hera even had peacocks pulling her chariot.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
Yeah, the Peacock Throne is one of the most expensive things that's ever been made. If it drives at home, I think it was about twice the cost of the Taj Mahal to build this one throne, which had... Oh, 2,500 pounds of gold, 500 pounds, not 500 precious stones, 500 pounds of precious stones.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
Yeah. Which one? I don't know. I'm just amazed that you brought that around. Nice work.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
Endangered? Yes or no. Indian bluefowl are not endangered. In fact, they're doing really, really well. And you mentioned, you know, in places in Florida and even Southern California, they can get a little out of hand with their menace. They can tear up foliage and they can poop all over the place and they can destroy habitats that other birds have.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
So people sometimes now even are trapping them and giving them vasectomies.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
But where I started 10 minutes ago saying is if you see one of those in the United States, you're probably almost certainly looking at a blue peafowl or an Indian peafowl.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
That green pea fowl, they are under threat, though. Their list is endangered because they are from Southeast Asia, and a lot of their natural habitat has been done away with thanks to land development and agricultural mowing down of their environment. And also farmers who will poison them if they come into their fields.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
That's right. And as for the Congo peafowl, we don't want to forget about those fellas. They are vulnerable. Also, habitat loss and hunting, and there are about 10,000 of those in the wild.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
Yeah. That was another name for them. Something of something.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
I'm going to call this Maine and Billboards. Hey, guys. Longtime super fan of spreading the stuff you should know. Kool-Aid. Ooh. Far and wide. Flavor aid, I think. They make any miles I drive to reach anywhere in Maine fly by. So thanks for that. When you ask someone in Maine how far away a destination is, be prepared to often hear about an hour. But that can mean 45 minutes to nearly two hours.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
Fun fact here, though, about Maine. During a recent episode on Kudzu, you were talking about how it takes over billboards. And I know you get a lot of listener mail for Maine. I thought you might like to know an exciting factoid. Have you ever been to Maine and marveled at its natural beauty? Well, part of that is due to something that's missing. Billboards, guys.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
Maine law does not allow billboards... Of any kind, they have a very prescriptive law regarding signs not on business property, aka in Maine vernacular, official business directional signs. The rules are very strict and include a special provision that rolling signs, like ones attached to vehicles, cannot even be used to get around these requirements.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
And I think it is a $30 license fee to get a sign that can be $48 inches by 12 inches or 72 inches by 16 inches. And you can only use two fonts. They must be white with a single color background. And this is literally just to say like my pressure washing business is down there or whatever. They say the people at Maine consider billboards to be detrimental to the preservation of scenic resources.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
And that is a great law. And that's one reason we love Maine. And that is from, who's that from? That's from Katrina Peterson.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
Yes, exactly. They're the most common, a little less common, but still more common than the third group is the green peafowl or the Javanese peafowl. So native to Java, Southeast Asia and Myanmar. And then what's our little third grouping?
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
That's right. Live show listener request edition because Peacocks came to us. Did you get her name? Or can we just say the wonderful young girl at our Atlanta live show?
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
No matter which kind of peafowl you're talking about, they're all going to be omnivores. They eat lots of seeds and berries and, you know, plant life and stuff like that, as well as some insects. But they'll also munch down on a mouse or a little cute lizard or a snake if they want to, if they're feeling peckish, I guess.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
That's right. And as you'll see, that big, beautiful train is a big part of the mating ritual. So when you see that thing fully displayed, when that peacock wants to have a little good time with a peahen, that thing may go five to seven feet in every direction.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
I bet. So the blue adult male peacock is about a 13-pounder. If you don't count wild turkeys, which are usually put into a different family, although they can be in the pheasant family, they are the largest. The peacock, that is, is the largest in the pheasant family.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
I didn't say that about the turkeys, but yeah, they're big.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
Yeah, I got that turkey family living at my camp. There's six or eight of them now. They hang around together. I get them on the cam cam. It's just lovely.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
No, no. I mean, sadly, all the wonderful camp activity is when I'm not there. I have a feeling that they peer through the woods and they're like, oh, the guys are down there again. Right. They'll leave tomorrow.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
Yeah. So this is a great idea. We're talking about peacocks, which is, if you want to look at the word itself, it's English. And it is derived from the Latin word pavo. And in Old English, that was pronounced pawa, P-A-W-A. And that was shortened over the years to po, eventually peacock. Pocock, then Powcock, and I guess peacock.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
So the green peafowl, you know, we're going to talk a little bit about all of them, even though the blue are the most common. But the green... If it's not mating season, you may not be able to tell them apart. They both have that really nice green neck, that sort of light green here and there.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
And during mating season is when you're going to see the male's train grow a lot longer, but then they molt and they shed those. So more or less, they look about the same when it's not mating season.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
Yeah, it's fantastic. And if you have one in your neighborhood as a pet in captivity, if one of your neighbors does, you may just get used to that sound and get used to seeing them because they could live 40, 50 years when kept as pets. I'm not suggesting that they be kept as pets. I'm just saying that people do that. They live about 10 to 25 years in the wild.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
Okay. You got to get a good running start if you want to get off the ground, I guess.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
That's right. And when a male wants to impress a peahen, that peacock will prop up those feathers into a big, beautiful fan. Dave helped us with this, too, like an inverted umbrella. So it's sort of, you know, when you see it, it's sort of pointed back from their butthole area towards the hen. Yeah. And they will shake those feathers.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
And it's linked a little bit to this old expression, proud as a poe, which is, you know, how a peacock kind of struts around all prideful. And then eventually it became peacock.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
And the shaking isn't just like, hey, look how pretty and iridescent this gorgeous train is. Science has discovered semi-recently that those vibrations are in lockstep with the peafowl's head feathers that they used to think were just for show.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
But now they realize they vibrate at the same intensity and that they can actually sort of feel when those tail feathers are vibrating in their direction through their head feathers.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
And before we get emails, I'm sure Josh will admit that when you said it just happens to vibrate the same frequency, that is no accident at all. It's called natural selection, baby.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
I mean, you're just being cheeky, but I'm sure somebody would write in and say, no, Josh, it didn't just happen to vibrate that way. It's by design.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
See, people, when you don't know a word, it's okay to say, I don't know what that means.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
So, and you didn't talk down to me. You told me the definition. Now I'm a little bit smarter because of you.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
I wasn't like a dummy. Listen up. Teleological. All right. So we need to cover this part of the mating ritual because the fact of the matter is the peacock loves to get around the block, if you know what I mean. They have a social structure called a lek, L-E-K, which is basically a harem. And the male is going to mate with several females. But here's the part that's a little maybe not intuitive.
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Ba-Gawk! How Peacocks Work
Even though the male is mating with many females, the male isn't running the show as far as who he gets to do that with.
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Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Oh, man. Stink lines. Who's the first person to do the stink lines?
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Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Each week, we're going to rewatch and discuss an episode from the series.
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Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Right, right. I didn't even, like, who are these people?
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Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
Who's Michael Dukakis? Yeah. I remember. And Kitty. That's funny stuff.
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Editorial Cartoons: Art as Satire
It's so funny to kind of think about the greatest political hits of our childhood.
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GONG: The Chuck Barris Story
I don't know that song. It's got to be real. Sue, Sue, Sue, Sue, Sue. I got to have it, baby.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Yes, but there is a slight silver lining. It is possible that it is so deadly and so dangerous that it's actually created a decline in its use. At the very least, a decline in deaths from it has taken place. So it is on the decline, at least deaths. Yeah. And we'll talk about possibly why that is later on. But yeah, we'll talk about the origin of fentanyl.
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Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Yeah, and not only more potent, but the fact that it's more potent means that less of it can generate just as much cash, which also means it's easier to smuggle, too. And like you said, fentanyl tracks exactly the same way. It's really easy to make. I mean, apparently, you just basically, if you have the precursor chemicals, you're just making a stew in a pot that you're stirring.
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Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
You dry it out, and there you've got a bunch of fentanyl. So it's easy to make. Tons and tons of agricultural workers and tons and tons of acreage to grow poppies that you process into heroin. And because the potency is so much more, there is a huge cost benefit. Apparently, it just accrues to the dealers, though.
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Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
There was a study in the journal Addiction from 2020 that basically wanted to find out why was fentanyl introduced. Was it users who were like, hey, heroin's great, but we need something way deadlier? Was it dealers who were like, hey, heroin's great, but this stuff I can cut heroin with? And, um, like I'll make a lot more money. Uh, or was it a combination of the two?
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Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
They didn't say definitively, but they made a pretty good case that it does seem to have been the dealers looking to cut costs because those costs or those savings weren't passed on to users.
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Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Yeah, and one reason why is because these dealers were saying, if I sell you heroin mixed with fentanyl, I have to use less heroin because it's going to be just as potent or more potent, but I can charge you heroin prices even though I'm paying way less for the fentanyl that I'm using here. And yeah, people were caught by surprise. The fact that it was duplicitous
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Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
is just awful because it's like, hey, good luck getting acclimated to this. It's going to be a rough transition. But if you look at it from a business standpoint, the rollout of fentanyl into the American and European drug supplies, it had terrible marketing. Like it had zero marketing.
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Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
It was just all of a sudden there, people started dying and it took the authorities investigating what the heck was going on for people to figure out that it was fentanyl. That's how it was introduced. It was just so reckless and I mean, I'm talking about heroin dealers being even more reckless than they normally are. That's what happened with fentanyl being introduced. It just suddenly popped up.
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Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
No one said anything about it first.
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Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
For those of you who don't know, it's a synthetic opioid. First, there was morphine, which is, I think, basically 100% processed natural opium. Heroin is a kind of a combo hybrid between synthetic and natural. And then fentanyl is just straight up like just made up. It's an analog. And it's way more potent than anything anyone had ever seen before when it came on the scene.
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Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
I think that was worth mentioning, yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Yes. It's a great point. Um, yeah. And that has to do with that fat solubility again. I said it before and I'll say it again.
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Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Yes, because the onset is so quick, which makes it that's another reason that it's so deadly, too, is you don't have time to be like, oh, man, there's froth around my buddy's mouth. I better call 911 because there's good Samaritan laws in my state. It's like, oh, my buddy just injected fentanyl and now they're dead. I mean, it's it's not that fast necessarily, but compared to heroin, it is.
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Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
And yeah, I think it's measured in like seconds.
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Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Yeah, because that's a big barrier for a lot of people. who are like, I like drugs, but I'm not going to stick a needle in my arm. That just seems like such a horrible road to go down that it will give people second thoughts. But smoking something, geez, I like marijuana. I like smoking crack. I might as well try smoking fentanyl. It's just much less of a barrier to overcome.
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Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Yes. Yeah. I mean, it's crazy if you think about it, because most other drugs that you smoke, you could conceivably overdose on. But fentanyl, even though you're smoking it and not injecting it, there's still a really good chance that you could overdose and die from just smoking it. That's kind of mind boggling, but it's accurate.
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Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Yeah, and it's kind of hard to wrap your head around, like, why would somebody send you that? Like, how evil could you be? But apparently fentanyl pills are very frequently created to look like old OxyContin, what are called M30s. So it would be very easy for somebody to be like, oh, cool, here's an OxyContin.
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Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Fentanyl users know what they're doing, but if you weren't a fentanyl user and you just wanted an OxyContin, that's how you could die of an overdose fairly quickly. And like you said, those are the stories that you hear on the news. I don't think it's a very frequent thing, but when it does happen, it's just horrific.
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Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Yeah. Just a reminder, speedballs are what killed not just John Belushi, but Chris Farley as well. And apparently, this is that fourth wave that we were talking about of speedball and fentanyl with cocaine or with meth. And it's not just where dealers are cutting it and not telling their buyers. The buyers are seeking this out.
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Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
And apparently this fourth wave has kind of caught black Americans up into it more than the other previous waves have.
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Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Yeah. So the cartels are getting these precursors. They're turning around and distributing the precursors to cooks who I read like a Univision story on. So they just I guess we're interviewing some random fentanyl cook in Mexico. It was like three 20 year olds who were just standing out in the woods under a black tarp with a pot on top of a fire, just stirring it like it was really easy to make.
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Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
And then that stuff goes back to the cartels to smuggle across the border and sell.
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Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Yeah, most often American women, and I think the Cato Institute did a study where they found 86.3% of convicted fentanyl smugglers are American citizens. So that seems to be totally untrue. But apparently, I think this is a measure of how bad fentanyl is. Because, I mean, Chuck, we're pretty fentanyl naive. I've never done fentanyl.
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Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
I'm making a pretty good assumption that you've never done fentanyl and kept it a secret from me. So it's entirely possible that within this whole thing, we've passed along some myth or exaggeration without being aware of it. And for that, I'm sorry. The thing is, it seems that the overall... theme that fentanyl is incredibly deadly and on a level unlike any other drug that's ever hit the U.S.
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Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
market, so much so that it's like, just don't do drugs. It's too dangerous because of the presence of fentanyl. I think that holds. And I think this supports that thesis a In Sinaloa, the Sinaloa cartel has a ban on selling fentanyl in Sinaloa. Punishable by death.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
So if you're a drug dealer in Sinaloa and the Sinaloa cartel catches you selling fentanyl in their state, in Mexico, where they're supplying the rest of the world with fentanyl, they'll kill you. I think that says just about everything you need to know about fentanyl.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
So one of the things that's a little different about the fentanyl epidemic is that it doesn't it hasn't tracked closely or identically to past drug epidemics where like the crack epidemic or the cocaine epidemic, especially of like the 90s where or the 80s or 90s, where if you were caught with it, especially if you're black, you're going to prison for possibly the rest of your life.
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Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
This time around, it's been a little more, there's been a little more understanding that this is as much a public health crisis, probably more a public health crisis than a crisis to be addressed by law enforcement.
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Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
And one of the more cynical reasons why that's probable is because it's largely been viewed publicly as a white issue, that it's mostly white people who are overdosing and dying from fentanyl.
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Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
No, you were just morally reprehensible and your kid was probably screwed up.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Yeah. And I think that the test strips have helped a lot of people, if not saved their lives. The problem with them that I've seen is that all they do is show that there is fentanyl present. It doesn't say whether it's a fentanyl analog like car fentanyl that's 100 times stronger than fentanyl. It doesn't say how much fentanyl is in there.
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Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
So is it just a little bit or is it like a kill you size dose? But if you're like, I don't do fentanyl, those test strips are going to help quite a bit. Like I just want cocaine. Stop putting fentanyl in my cocaine. Those test strips are going to help you.
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Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
And they're going to tick you off because, I mean, I don't think you can take cocaine back to the dealer and get your money back because it had fentanyl in it. Although who knows with kids these days.
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Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Right. And one of the things I just want to say that they messed around with molecularly to make fentanyl, they increased its fat solubility, which sounds like who cares? But that has two really important effects that make fentanyl what it is. One, it allows the drug to cross the blood-brain barrier faster, which means fentanyl has a much faster onset than heroin or morphine, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
I wonder if like they draw straws to see what order everybody does drugs in. Like how do they determine who's going to go last?
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Wow. Yeah. I mean, it just reverses an overdose, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Yeah. I don't know the law in Georgia or anywhere, really. But, yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
So you would be protected, but that wouldn't matter. It's more like if you're shooting up with your friend and your friend overdoses and you have a bunch of heroin or fentanyl on you, you can't be prosecuted for having that. I mean, I'm sure to an extent, just because you called for help to help your friend and the cops ended up showing up to you.
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Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Yeah, it's getting much more widely available.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Yeah, but let's talk a little bit about overdoses because there's some – one of the telltale signs, I think it's not just with fentanyl but with heroin as well or opioids in general, is it can produce fluid in the lungs so that a telltale sign of an overdose is froth around the mouth or in the nose. Once that happens, you need to act pretty quickly.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
And one of the things that they say to do first is rub your knuckles on their chest area. Kind of hard because it's a very uncomfortable thing to have done to you, and it can snap you out of an opioid stupor, even that. But if they don't respond, then you need to call 911 and or administer naloxone.
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Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Yeah. And it's even worse than that, actually, because there's also opioid receptors in the parts of your brain that control voluntary breathing. So like when you're like, I need to catch my breath and you take a deep breath or if you're meditating when you purposefully breathe, that is repressed as well. So you have involuntary breathing and voluntary breathing repressed.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
And this thing that detects rises in CO2 in your body, that gets repressed as well, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
It just hits you much faster. Right. And then it crosses back through the blood-brain barrier more quickly. So the duration of the high that you get lasts a shorter time. So just that one little tweak, fat solubility, made this drug what it is. Because faster onset makes it addictive. Shorter duration means that you need to do more.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Yeah, so breathing, I think you said early on that that typically is where fatal overdoses derive from. You just stop breathing, stop being able to breathe. But there's other ways you could die. I think you mentioned heart attack earlier too. Another famous one with opioids is your gag reflex is suppressed.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
So if you're basically knotted off and you throw up, say you've been drinking as well, you're not going to choke that stuff out or spit it out or throw it up out of your mouth. It can just stay in your mouth and it can go down your lungs and you aspirate and or choke on your own vomit. That's another way you can die from an overdose as well.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Right. A lot of people don't have access to the kind of doctor that's going to prescribe that for them. Even among medical professionals still, believe it or not, there's still a lot of stigma associated with being an opioid addict. Yeah. Which is pretty rich, considering that American physicians, a significant chunk of them got America hooked on opioids in the first place.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
But that's neither here nor there right now. So I think there was a study from 2022 that the CDC conducted where they said that of the three point seven percent of all adults in the United States who need medication assisted treatment. Um, I think only about 25% of that 3.7% were able to get it. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
One of the other ways that you can get off of it is to go to prison where they are just like, good luck drying out.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
No, and the problem with it too is not just like that's – I can't imagine going through that. But if you get out of prison or say you're able to get heroin or something or fentanyl in prison after you've kicked it, your tolerance has dropped. And we talked about this in our heroin episode in 2020. Yeah. But your tolerance has dropped.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
And so your likelihood of an overdose is through the roof compared to what it was before you kicked heroin the hard way or fentanyl the hard way.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Right. But there's cases of like first responders and paramedics suffering from exposure to very small amounts of fentanyl. And people are like, what the heck's going on? The best explanation is that it's what's called a culture bound syndrome. This expectation that it can happen. it leads to a nocebo effect where the person essentially freaks themselves out into a panic attack.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
And it's, it's, they're like, I just had a, I just OD'd on fentanyl just from touching a little bit of it.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
That's the best explanation. It makes sense. The point is, is like you like interacting with somebody who's OD'd on fentanyl isn't going to give you a fentanyl higher overdose. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Yeah. It's crazy. Look at all the morality we associate with drugs. It's brought in by illegal immigrants. Drug users accidentally create overdoses in first responders and paramedics trying to help them. It's the reason for homelessness. Like it's all there's all moral judgments associated with all of those things. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
And you associate it with the drug and anybody who doesn't do that drug and loves first responders, doesn't like illegal immigrants and doesn't like homeless people is going to hate that drug from that point on.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Yeah. Well, let's just say again, fentanyl is perfectly safe in like a medical setting in the hands of a trained professional. It's just outside of that. When cartels become involved, then it becomes a huge problem. Yeah. But I said at the outset, there is a silver lining or at least some hope because the use is – well, first of all, opioid deaths are declining.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
I think they peaked in 2022 with 108,000 opioid overdose deaths in the United States. Jeez. And the numbers aren't in for 2024, but they think the estimate is that it's going to be anywhere between a 15 to a 20 percent drop in overdose deaths from fentanyl. And they say, OK, well, Chuck, why? Why? Why are these fentanyl deaths finally subsiding? What's the deal?
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Yeah, you were saying that younger generations might have been scared away from it.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
I thought you said that. So apparently Gen Z is unlikely or less likely to use drugs. I think like 67% of 12th graders said that they abstained from drugs, meaning that they hadn't taken any drugs in the last 30 days. And I was like, I wonder what that is compared to Gen X back when we were in high school.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
And I was like, this is going to be crazy. It is crazy, but it's the opposite way you would think. I can't remember what U.S. agency conducts this every year, but in 1993, high school seniors said that 81.7% said that they had abstained from drugs in the last 30 days. So Gen Z is on way more drugs than Gen X was, which is very surprising to me.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
That's entirely possible, too. Are you a narc, man?
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
I wonder if it really is. There is. It's just a lot more prevalence of drug use because it's so easy to get it on the Internet. And it used to be hard back when we were in high school for people who did drugs in high school.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Yeah, I mean, that's pretty significant. What else?
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Well, I guess we should probably say before we end the episode, Chuck, if you do fentanyl and you're addicted to fentanyl, please seek whatever help you can find to get off of it. And if you haven't tried it yet, probably you shouldn't start.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Well, since Chuck corrected me from probably to definitely, as was foretold in 2008, he has just triggered listener mail.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Yeah, I think still today it's the most common opioid used for anesthesia during surgery. And that just sounds like madness when you're familiar with fentanyl, the street version. But in the hands of a really well-trained anesthesiologist with hospital-grade equipment, it's actually very safe. It's the fact that the stuff that you buy on the street has very uneven dosages.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
to pull more strings in our favor keep up the good work and that is again uh kevin and then serena awesome thanks kevin and serena um that reminds me of a point i wanted to make that i didn't have a chance to in earthquake richard roundtree aka shaft he was in that he made it to the end and he was also one of the heroes helping save um genevieve bujold am i saying her name correctly
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Yeah. So, yeah, he was like a motorcycle stuntman. So he was sadly an exception, but he definitely did make it to the end, which was great. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Nice work, Richard Roundtree. And if you want to be like Kevin and Serena and want to share your thoughts with us, we love that kind of thing. You can send us an email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
It means that's why it's just so deadly because you're not a trained anesthesiologist. You're not using hospital grade equipment. You're shooting up something that some dude sold you. And it's just not it's just not trustworthy and it can kill you because it takes such a small amount to create a toxic dose.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Just a reminder, marijuana is Schedule I.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Yes. And there's different kinds, different analogs of fentanyl that everybody just kind of puts under the umbrella of fentanyl when you're talking about illicit fentanyl. But two of them that stand out that aren't actually illicit, but they're used in the drug market is carfentanil, which is used. There's no use for it in humans. They use it to sedate rhinoceroses and elephants.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
And I think it's something like 10,000 times more potent than morphine. You can get that on the street apparently, although I think it's fairly rare. And then sufentanil is 5 to 10 times stronger than fentanyl. So if you – like people aren't like, yeah, it's carfentanil or sufentanil. You're talking about fentanyl.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Well, speaking of umbrella terms and different names, I think we should talk about some of the names the DEA says that this is called. And the only one I could corroborate is the last one.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Yeah. So apparently that's fentanyl and cocaine mixed together and or fentanyl and methamphetamine, some sort of speed. That's a speedball. And as we'll see, that's actually proving to be a really big problem. It's created like a new wave of opioid deaths.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Yeah, and this is really well portrayed in the limited series Dope Sick. I can't remember if it was on HBO, I want to say. You saw it, right? No, I didn't see that. Oh, man, it is really good. But it's about the Sackler family in Purdue Pharma essentially purposely hooking America on OxyContin. And it's a really good series that just punches you in the gut, but it's really well done.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
And it covers all that period. The problem was – and this is covered a little bit too toward the end – when you take people's OxyContin away and they're hooked on OxyContin, an opioid – they're going to, a lot of them are at least, turn to whatever opioids are available.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
And that meant that a lot of people who otherwise would have never tried heroin took up heroin because they couldn't get OxyContin anymore.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
So, yeah. So that third wave, the fentanyl opioid death wave or fentanyl driven wave, that vastly outstrips the death rate from the first two waves. Yeah. So I think in 1999, so this is when people are starting to take opioid prescriptions, there were two opioid overdose deaths per 100,000 people in the United States. Yeah. That was 1999. Yeah. 2013, the second wave is going on.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
That was up to eight. By 2022, when the third wave is in full swing, it was 25 people per 100,000 people in the United States that were dying of overdose deaths from fentanyl.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
For sure. And apparently I was like, well, what else is anybody ODing on? And it seems that meth has created a new epidemic of overdose deaths that everybody's like, what the hell's going on?
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
That's just not how it has worked unless the United States is at war, essentially. And, you know, we're talking a lot about the U.S., but the U.K. and Europe – sorry, U.K. – tracks – Fairly closely, although the numbers are lower, it seems to be following like a similar pattern. Although I think in some countries, I think Estonia is one of them, like you can't even get heroin anymore.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Yeah, I think the first two waves were driven by larger numbers, increases in people using prescription opioids and then heroin. So that accounted for it.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
But when fentanyl came on the scene, yeah, people stopped using it as much, but their deaths just increased, which if you look at it from just an outside perspective, like it's just because it's so potent and it was rolled out or introduced to the drug supply and In a really horrific way, as we'll see.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too. And this is Stuff You Should Know, the Big Bummer Edition.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Yes. So social capital is basically the size of your local Kiwanis chapter.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
So, yeah, this is I mean, like this whole thing kind of rose in lockstep. Opioid overdose deaths rose in lockstep with these financial crises that the U.S. found itself in over and over again since 2008. Job loss, loss of manufacturing jobs, just all of the hardship that the United States has gone through since then.
Stuff You Should Know
Fentanyl: Actually As Dangerous As They Say
Opioid deaths kind of tracked with it, especially at first, especially with people, basically more people turning to that kind of thing as a disease of despair, which is just sad. It's just nuts that you can kind of connect those two things.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
That sounded like a really wordy children's book about ADHD. I'm not a kids book writer. Even though we have a kids book. Exactly. That still holds true. So, Chuck, it's clear, like you said, they found a genetic component to this whole thing. They've also found that there are definite differences in brain structure with people who have ADHD. The brains are just simply physically different.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
One of the things is that they're smaller in places like they have less volume. Maybe some parts are thinner, some parts maybe thicker. And it's really important to point out that brain size is not relative to intelligence. So if you're very small, it doesn't mean like you aren't intelligent. And maybe here's a really good place to point out that.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
One of the things I think is kind of overlooked about people with ADHD is they have the same thoughts and feelings and emotions that anybody else does. It's just that they have trouble regulating those emotions and regulating those behaviors that the same impulses that everybody else gets. can slip through with a person with ADHD.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
That damper that's like, well, I can't do that because it's socially unacceptable, that neurotypical people have, is kind of absent for the most part in people with ADHD unless they're really paying attention and trying to hold it back.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Yeah, and as we talked about in the dopamine episode, it's not like dopamine gives you that hit of feeling good. It's the thing that comes along with whatever makes you feel good and says, this is important. Learn this and remember this so that the next time you're faced with cleaning a room, you can remember, oh, there's some good feeling at the end of this.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
And if you don't have that, yeah, there's no reason whatsoever for you to get up and clean a room, especially... As we'll see, there's actual brain function that's missing or impaired in people with ADHD that allows them to self-arouse and be like, I should really do this, I'm going to get up and do this.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Ja, also eine Sache, die ich gesehen habe, ist, dass sie nicht denken, dass Menschen mit ADHD weniger Dopamin produzieren. Das aktuelle Verständnis ist, dass Menschen mit ADHD mehr Dopamintransporter haben, sodass Dopamin schneller aus dem Gehirn entfernt wird, sodass man weniger davon hat, an jedem bestimmten Zeitpunkt. Nicht, dass man weniger davon macht.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
The other one you mentioned is norepinephrine, and that's usually the thing that allows you to kind of rouse yourself. And it helps you also, very importantly, regulate emotion, regulate self-control, regulate attention. And so those are the neurotransmitters, the big ones, that definitely in some way, shape or form affect ADHD. We just don't fully understand it.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
But one of the other big things that has to do with the brain is the... Typically the frontal lobe or the frontal cortex contains like our higher thinking, our higher behaviors.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
And that's usually put together in something called executive function, which is a suite of behaviors and cognitive abilities that essentially let us just be, you know, functioning people in society as far as the terms of society require.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Richtig. Du denkst normalerweise an arbeitende Erinnerungen, als würdest du ein Telefonnummer erinnern, während du es schreiben würdest, weißt du. Aber es betrifft auch alles, von der Begegnung in eine Konversation, der Planung einer Verabredung, wie alles, wo du eine Menge Gedanken hinkriegst, wie in der Vorderseite deines Geistes, während du es alles erarbeitest.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Das ist arbeitende Erinnerung und es ist wirklich wichtig, Und es ist sehr oft in Menschen mit ADHD verletzt. Eine weitere klassische exekutive Funktion, die grundsätzlich universal ist, wenn es um ADHD-Symptome geht, ist Selbstvertrauen oder Inhibitionenkontrolle. Und nicht nur physisch, sondern auch emotional und bemerkenswert auch.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
No, Chuck. Instead, today we're talking about ADHD, which stands for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Kind of wordy, but it really does get the point across because with ADHD, I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with it, especially the people who requested it.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Wie in einer Konversation zu bleiben, nicht etwas Offensives über jemanden zu blöden, auch wenn du nicht meinst, ihre Gefühle zu verletzen. And another one too, being on a diet and then just being like, I'm just going to eat a bunch of cookies too, who cares? All of those things have to do with inhibition control and that's just a big part of it.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Or just think it. And that's another thing, too. I think that's why a lot of people who don't have ADHD recognize it, because they were thinking the same thing, but they know not to say it. This person says it. You know what I'm saying? That's the difference.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Yeah, you might go to great lengths to avoid that task. And also not just procrastinating, but like really genuinely having trouble focusing because you don't know what to do. You don't know where to start.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Right. Another one is decision making, which kind of ties into that, where, you know, you can't just say yes to everything. That's not how life works. So you have to take into account future consequences and you have to figure out, do I have time to do all of these things? And if not, which one's more important? Like all that goes into decision making. And that can be largely impaired, too.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Not just not like necessarily all the time, but you were just kind of mentioning something called ADHD paralysis. Where things can get so overwhelming, you cannot know where to start, your boss is coming down the hall to get this report you haven't even started on, and you just shut down. You can't decide anything, you can't really focus on anything.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
That's called ADHD paralysis, and that can come from having to make decisions.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
I'm not exactly sure exactly what kind of disorder it is, whether it's a mental disorder, a personality disorder, an externalizing disorder. There's actually a lot of debate about it. But essentially, it's where people have a lot of trouble paying attention, sitting still, focusing, and a bunch of other stuff that we'll talk about.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Yeah, totally. And we'll talk more about what parents and family members and spouses and all that can do later on down the road. But that's a great thing to hit multiple times, you know?
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Yeah, and it's not necessarily because they're like, I don't care about this deadline. They may have literally forgotten about it. I read a horror story, Chuck, about a guy with ADHD, an adult, whose boss came to him and said, hey, why don't you run Monday's meeting? I'm not going to be there.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
And the guy was like, I knew that this was like a step toward like getting me ready for like the next level for a promotion in the management. So he was really excited about it. And then over the weekend, he totally forgot about it. When the Monday meeting came around, he sat down with everybody else waiting for the boss, wondering where the boss was.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
And they all just left the meeting and went back to work. And his boss came and asked him how the meeting went. And he's like, what are you talking about? And it finally sunk into him like what had happened. Ja. Er sollte das für Halloween haben. That horror story?
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Richtig, genau. Und das ist auch ein großer Klassiker. Du fokussierst dich nur auf eine Sache oder du kannst auch noch eine andere anfangen. Und wenn du all das zusammenfasst, in der Leben, Menschen mit ADHD, die haben Probleme, sich zu erinnern, Geld zu zahlen. Sie vergessen, dass sie Arbeit haben. Sie sagen oder tun unabhängige Dinge, wie nicht warten, bis es ihre Zeit ist, zu sprechen.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
They have trouble self-motivating, staying on task. They misplace things. They have false memories, which is a really big one that we'll talk about. They can't remember important dates or that they're supposed to run a meeting. And another big one, too, is that they'll very frequently, ADHD causes you to walk into a room and you have no idea what you went in there for.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Und wenn man alles zusammenfügt, kann man das Leben ziemlich schwer ausüben. Und zu Beginn, wir werden darüber noch viel mehr sprechen, aber Kinder, es war früher so, dass kleine Jungs Fidgeting, das war eigentlich, was ADHD oder ADD an der Zeit betrachtet wurde. Aber über die Zeit hat es sich wirklich geändert. Wir haben gemerkt, dass viel mehr Mädchen es haben, als wir dachten.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Yes, that's another thing too. Especially as you age with ADHD, you can start to be like, okay, is this ADHD or am I developing early onset dementia? There's a lot of overlap and it can be very scary.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
But you also learn tricks like you just leave the room and go back out to where you just were and you're going to see a clue that will prompt you to remember and then you just think about it while you're going into the room and then you remember. It usually just amounts to an extra trip back out of the room and then back into it. But it is just frustrating for sure.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Oh, okay. Yeah, that's right. That's right. I remember Chad saying that. He would always pinch the bridge of his nose while he was singing.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Nein, und manchmal, es ist fast immer so, dass es nicht aufhört. Es gibt einen Psychiater namens Ned Hollowell, MD, der es als einen persistenten, magnetischen Pull weg von der Aufgabe in die Distraktion bringt. So, because your brain is like, no, no, no, we're over here, we're going to daydream because your default mode network is on. You can't focus for long periods on the task at hand.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Or if you can, it's a constant struggle to resist letting your mind wander. You have to actively keep it focused. on the thing you're doing because you're, like you said, the action network didn't take over and the default mode network go down, you know, proportionately to one another. Now they're just both on.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Und wir sind auch gekommen, dass Ältere es auch haben. Und das ist ein, ich meine, es ist ein wirklich großes, großes Verständnis. Und viele Leute benutzen es einfach als Kurzhand, wie, du weißt, ich habe meine Karten vergessen, es ist mein ADHD oder so etwas. Aber je mehr du darüber weißt, desto mehr merkst du, dass es ein wirklich debilitierendes Verständnis ist, das Menschen haben.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Yeah, for sure. Do you want to take a break and then come back and talk some more about, you know, ADHD?
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Yeah, it can be actual rejection, but it can also be something like constructive criticism, which is important to be able to take. A perceived slight, maybe a made-up slight, somebody's fleeting facial expression, an offhand comment, your own false beliefs. And then there's two ways generally that a person with RSD, or we should just say ADHD, will respond to that, to that perceived rejection.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
They can internalize where they'll just emotionally die sich in einen Ball befinden und dann einfach aufhören. Oder sie können auch auslösen. Und dann haben sie einen Ausbruch oder einen Ausbruch, oder sie werden wütend. Das nennt man Externalisierung.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Und um es wirklich in Perspektive zu stellen, stell dir vor, dass einer von ihnen die Antwort ist, die du bekommst, wenn du jemandem fragst, um ihre dörrigen Geräte in den Kühlschrank zu lassen. Ja, genau.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Yeah, it makes it really hard to have a connection with somebody who might just melt down at you at the slightest provocation, right? And you said something, the person can't help it. The person with RSD cannot help this. They're not being a jerk. Like, they can't not do this. And one of the problems with it is that it's really fleeting. It's like a tidal wave or getting punched in the stomach.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Aber das ist ziemlich fliehend. Und dann wird das von Regret und dann von Scham verwendet, jedes Mal, weil man sich so schämt, dass man sich nicht kontrollieren kann, richtig? Ja. Where they don't share their thoughts, their true emotions, their true opinions.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
They don't share themselves because what they're doing is cutting off as much risk as possible of being rejected and thus triggering a bout of RSD.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Es ist. Und also haben sie ursprünglich gedacht, dass es mit ADH, dass es eine separate Sache war. Und es ist noch nicht einmal in der DSM erkannt worden. Es ist so, dass es recently erkannt wurde. Aber es scheint, dass Studien gefunden haben, dass grundsätzlich 100 Prozent der Menschen mit ADH auch RSD haben.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Also kommen sie einfach nur zu der Abschätzung, dass es ein schreckliches Symptom von ADH ist.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
But essentially this one company found that a person, a neurodiverse person, who is locked into something that interests them in their work, will essentially do the job of two people. They produce between 90 and 140 percent more work than their peers in the same, say, department.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Und dass ihre Arbeit typisch konsistent und ohne Fehler ist, weil sie einfach total laserfokussiert auf diese Sache sind. Also, wenn du einen Job finden kannst, der deinen Interesse so hält, dann bist du sehr glücklich. Weil, leider, eine der Dinge, die eine große Herausforderung für Menschen mit ADHD sind, ist, einen Job zu finden, wenn du einen Job finden musst, der deinen Interesse nicht hält.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
It's very difficult to arouse yourself to do that, even though you know you have to do this and you should be doing it and you feel terrible for not doing it. It's really hard to do sometimes.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Yeah, for sure. Another kind of something related to this is you can become laser focused on just everyday tasks that end up catching your interest somehow, surprisingly. And so people with ADHD, if they're doing a task and they're in hyper focus, it'll take them way longer to do it frequently. But that's because they're doing a perfect job of it. So like, say, vacuuming the car.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
You just go to vacuum the car and you're like, huh, this caught my interest and now I'm totally focused on making this car immaculately clean in every way, shape or form. So, of course, it's going to go from taking 15 minutes to taking an hour and a half, you know. But when you're done, the car looks awesome.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Ja, ja. Eines der Dinge, die ich gesehen habe, ich habe einen Dell-Watt oder Dell-Watt gelesen. Wie nennst du das? Das Konsultierungsfirma? Ich weiß es nicht. Es ist egal. Ich habe einen der Berichte gelesen und sie sagten, dass, du weißt, traditionell denken die Leute, okay, es muss ein guter Job für eine neurodiverse Person sein, wie vielleicht Programmierung oder Coding oder so etwas.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Lass sie einfach weg und sei selbst von sich selbst. Und sie beginnen zu erkennen, dass man jemanden, der in jedem Job neurodivers ist, und wenn sie etwas Interessantes finden, dann werden sie es ausüben. Es ist nicht unbedingt ein spezifischer Bereich, der zu neurodiversen Menschen angeht.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Yeah, and there are a lot of positives, upsides to having ADHD that kind of give you talents that other people don't necessarily have. Like one of them is, I saw it described as you're getting so much noise at any given time, you're inevitably going to also get more data points than other people at any given time.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
And people with ADHD have typically an ability to connect dots that other people, make connections that other people can't see. That's a big one. Another one is like if you are multitasking and you actually get those projects done, that kind of boundless energy that's synonymous with the hyperactive part of ADHD, you're going to get a ton of stuff done in any given day.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Way more than like a neurotypical person who, you know, poops out halfway through the day.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Chuck, there was this one time where I tried to fight two guys who I thought were throwing rocks at a manatee. And I was seeing red. Yumi was even like, it's not a manatee, stop. And I didn't even hear. And those guys were like, it's a rock. We're not throwing rocks at manatees. I was like, oh, okay. All right. And luckily they were cool with it.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
But I was ready to fight two dudes for throwing rocks at a manatee. Like my sense of justice was just that stricken.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Yeah, no, not at all. And our understanding of it has progressed like over the centuries. But it is interesting that it started in the 18th century because, I mean, Crichton nailed it on the head. Like he's like, there's definitely something here. And I guess it just kind of stayed there for a little while until 1902, when a pediatrician from the UK named Sir George Frederick Still. Ironically.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Another one, Chuck, is if a person with ADHD gets excited, it's infectious typically. If they're in a place where they feel safe and comfortable, like just showing their excitement and just letting it hang out, you're probably going to get excited along with them. Because it just spills over. It can be really nice to be around.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Eine weitere Sache. Wenn du ADHD hast, katastrophierst du dich sehr normalerweise, wenn es um das Denken geht. Du erwartest immer das Schlimmste, weil es immer wieder in deinem Leben das Schlimmste ist, weil du etwas vergessen hast oder so etwas. Das katastrophale Denken kann ein Asset sein, in dem du etwas siehst, was alle tun, und sagst, wir werden alle sterben, wenn wir das tun.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Chuck, I say that we end part one here. Yeah, just getting cooking too. And then we're going to pick up part two. And we're going to talk some more about ADHD in part two. And then while we're talking about ADHD, we'll eventually finish part two. And then that will complete part one and two of ADHD. What do you think about that for a plan?
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Yeah, and finish on that dramatic pause like the very special episode of Different Strokes.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Yeah, I thought that too. He described children who had a defect of moral control. Which is essentially saying that these are kids who have trouble delaying gratification, not thinking about negative consequences when they carry out actions. And that's impulsivity. That's what we call it today is impulsivity. And that's what Still was essentially describing at the time.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Ja, ich meine, was für ein Weg, da zu verabschieden, weil auch heute sind wir nicht genau sicher, wie Stimulanten die Symptome von ADHD betreffen. Wir wissen nur, dass sie wirklich, wirklich funktionieren. Glücklicherweise hat dieser Arzt gesagt, stopp mit dem Verbrechen, nimm ein paar Benzedrine und schau auf, kleine Kinder.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
So that was actually kind of a diversion. In 1937, when Charles Bradley discovered this, that amphetamines treat ADHD, it didn't take off like wildfire, because there was an interim period between then and the 50s, where psychiatrists and psychologists were like, all this stuff needs to be talked out. Through psychoanalysis, that's how you treat mental disorders.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
And in the 50s, finally, people were like, no, let's start prescribing drugs. And one of the first companies was Seba Geige Pharmaceutical Company.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
I mean, you're definitely going to go out of business if that's the name of your pharmaceutical company. But they're the first ones who developed Ritalin. And it turns out that the guy who developed the drug, Leandro Panazzoni, Panazzone? His wife was named Rita and he named it after her. That's right.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
No, so in the late 60s, the DSM-II, the sequel, introduced a diagnosis called hyperkinetic reaction of childhood. And it's essentially ADHD that they were talking about. And this is the first time it showed up in psychiatry. It's like, this is actually a thing. We just aren't clear what to name it yet, clearly, because we're calling it hyperkinetic reaction of childhood. And within...
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
We finally had it nailed down to attention deficit disorder, ADD. People of our age, that was the name we were first exposed to. It was not ADHD, this newfangled version. It was ADD and that's the way it was and you liked it.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Hey everybody, in today's episode and in part two, we talk very frankly about ADHD and all that that means over the lifetime of a person who has it. So, if you're a parent with a kiddo who has ADHD, maybe consider listening by yourself first before you share it with them. Just a thought. Hope you enjoy these episodes.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Ja, eine der Gründe, warum sie dachten, dass es nur ein Kindheitsverletzungsgeruch war, das sie ausgewachsen haben, war, weil die ersten Komponenten von Kindern mit ADHD oder ADD nicht in die Erwachsenheit gefolgt wurden. Sie haben sie nicht mehr studiert, als sie Kinder waren, also haben sie es nicht gedacht. Und dann auch, und das ist wirklich traurig, wenn man sich darüber nachdenkt, die...
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
As an adult, as you grow up, you get so good at masking your symptoms in order to blend into society.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
That researchers were unaware that there was a whole group of people with a disorder that was just unrecognized because they were good at disguising it, which is a huge part of ADHD. And it turns out just being neurodiverse in general.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
So, I say we take a break and come back and talk about how this whole thing kind of works in the brain as far as we know.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and there's Jerry Jerome Rowland. You put the three of us together and you got yourself a podcast called Stuff You Should Know.
Stuff You Should Know
ADHD pt 1
Chuck, I can't remember if I said it already, but I have ADHD myself. What? Yeah, and then Jerry does too, it turns out. And this is the most amazing part of this. Jerry and I were diagnosed within like a week of each other. And we both told you on the same day. And you found out that you were the only third of stuff you should know that doesn't have ADHD. Nice.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Yeah. And so obviously the next thing to conquer would be the LD, long distance. At the time, if you wanted to pick up a phone, in New York City and call San Francisco, you couldn't do it.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Yeah. What's a chippy? That's right. We are going to be talking about telephone switchboards. Some overlap with a couple of other episodes we've done. But this is all about the, you know, the advancement of the telephone system in the United States and abroad and how the telephone switchboard was a crucial, crucial part of that.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
You were using the Miles Davis rebreathing technique.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
You're breathing through your nose so you don't have to stop talking.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Oh, okay. That's the Dizzy Gillespie method.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Yes. It's amazing. I guess we'll spoil it and say eventually New York was able to talk to San Francisco. And, in fact, I think that was – Well, no, the first long line was between New York and Philly in 1885. New York to San Francisco finally came around, finally, I say, in 1915, which is incredible.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Classic Watson. You know, it didn't just work with like magic. You can't send something that you're used to going like a mile or let's say 100 miles, all of a sudden sending it, you know, close to 3,000 miles. So they had boosters. They had loading coils, which are like electromagnets that would boost the transmission. They had these vacuum tubes.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
that would regenerate a weak signal those were called repeaters so it needed help along the way to finally get you know across country but the fact that they were able to do that by 1915 is is remarkable um while this is happening i mean i think you said that he was uh bell was an old fat rich guy by this point that is because
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Through even the late 1800s, Bell consistently swatted away rivals with lawsuits, with shutting people down, with saying like, no, you know, I have a patent here till 1894. So like there are people out there building in their own phones and even their own switchboards. But like I'm going to go after them as fast as they can build them.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Yeah, and AT&T, American Telephone and Telegraph, we should point out that they were approached before that patent expired. And the reason they were initially approached was, I mean, it was part of the plan just to, you know, snap up other companies. But part of it was, hey, I need AT&T to help me build these long distance lines because that's the future. If we control long distance.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
and no one else has it, then we can, even if new companies pop up after this patent expires, if we're the only ones doing long distance, then we can lease those to other companies or not lease them to other companies.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
I love old telephones. I would like to check that out.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Yeah. Can we talk about phone numbers real quick?
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Because I don't have a complete handle on – because how phone numbers expanded was, you know, it wasn't just one exact uniform way in every place. It kind of depended on how big the city was as far as how many digits they were using and stuff like that. So what I've gathered is that from the beginning, it was two to four numbers depending on how big your community was.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
So you could literally be living in a community and your phone number was – Seven. Yeah, it could be 07, I guess. Well, I don't know if zero counts, but let's just say 11. No, I want to say seven. Okay, your phone number's seven. Mine's 11. Okay. We should get together and make a convenience store. But as things started to expand and grow, obviously you needed more and more numbers.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
And I remember seeing in like... even like happy days and stuff and TV shows like into the sixties and seventies when they would say, you know, uh, um, a word followed by numbers. Give me Klondike five, 6,000. Exactly. And so from this, how I understand it is, and if you found something different, let me know. But Klondike would have been the, uh,
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
either the switchboard or the central, you know, hub for that town. And then whatever the numbers you said would be the actual number.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
As that got busier, cities started using what they called 2L and 4N format. So two letter, four number. Okay. So it would still be Klondike 5555 or whatever, but it would be KL and then you would use the four numbers. And then eventually it was, I think, Two L, five N. They just kept taking away letters and adding numbers the bigger and bigger your city got.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Yeah, which I was told recently in a script I wrote to take that out.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Well, I mean, any kind of script note is just there is no right answer. But this person said, yeah, it just I don't it bugs me because it always takes me out and makes me feel like I'm watching a movie. So I was like, oh, OK.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
No, I did not. I got a lot of good notes from this person. So I was on their side.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Yeah. Then you went seven digits and then eventually in most places you needed the area code as well. And we went to 10 digit.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
From the moment you could remember?
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
What if those two numbers called each other, like, and some weird portal opened?
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Oh, Adam Curry. Dressed as a gnome.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Okay. I knew you weren't going to be satisfied until I picked one of your two. Should we talk a little bit about who the switchboard operators were? All right. Or should we take our break?
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
All right, well, most of these switchboard operators were women. Initially, they tried teenage boys, but I love this little factoid Kyle dug up. Apparently, there was a quote that said, unfortunately, they matched insult for insult for Canadian boys that were operators. So if like...
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
And as we'll see, you know, people call up and be surly or in a bad mood or if it didn't work right, they'd be cussing. These teenage boys will give it right back to them. Yeah. And so customer service is suffering in the 1880s because all these, you know, wise mouth kids. So they started hiring mostly women in the early 20th century. I think 80 percent of all operators were women here and abroad.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
They were called Hello Girls. Ironic since apparently they weren't even allowed to say hello. We'll get to that in a second. And Emma Nutt was the first phone operator, switchboard operator hired by AGB in 1878 at a whopping wage of about a nickel an hour.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Actually, you know what? We had a landline for that reason for a while, but no longer.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Yeah, it took everything I had not to make a nut job.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
joke can we hear it but i guess i sort of just did well i don't know her name was emma nutt and everyone's like i want i want a nut job that was good sorry you got me uh so here's the deal though it was very specific criteria you couldn't just waltz in there and get this job because like you said there wasn't a lot of choice for women in the workplace
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
And eventually they would pay them, you know, OK, not as much as their male counterparts, of course, because that's just how things worked, very sadly. But it was a very it was it was known as a pretty good job to get in the U.S. You had to be well-spoken. You had to be a high school graduate. In Canada, they sought women with good eyesight, no cough.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
You had to be of sufficient height and were physically fit in order to tackle the exacting work at the switchboard. And also, this is in Canada, also a reference of moral character from their clergyman.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Yeah. What about in the UK? Because that's pretty fun, too.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
I guess nostalgia is not a good enough reason, huh?
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Yeah, we talked about this on one episode. It was a long time ago, but I used to have Ahoy Ahoy written on my first flip phone when you opened it up, the little home screen, because before they had pictures and graphics, just said Ahoy Ahoy.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
No, no, no. It was typed out instead of like Chuck's phone or something.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Yeah, well, these were early flip phones.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
No, no, no, no. It was typed letters.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Oh, yeah, man. I mean, lots of, it's dumb. It's just my, our Gen X selves, like looking back with joy about walking around your bedroom with a long phone cord and.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Yeah. I never did telemarketing in college, but that was a big – Dial America was a big job in Athens. I'm sure you remember. You probably worked for Dial America.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Yeah, it was a big, easy job to get in Athens and I'm sure many colleges. But the central benefit of any job like this is being able to put your hand over the receiver and roll your eyes to the person next to you and go, oh, my God, you got to get a load of this guy or you should hear this lady's voice. Like if you deny your worker that. then you're not going to have a happy workforce.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
That's the one perk you get when you're not right in front of someone is that you can say something quietly and have a quick laugh.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Or your mom literally being able to go to every point in the kitchen with like a 25 foot stretchy phone cord that you're ducking under and it's knocking things over and.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
They were. And they, in the face of, you know, like I said, some people would call in cursing. There were men who would use foul language. Sometimes they would get charged extra for their call. They would, sometimes people would call and say like, hey, do you know what time it is? Or do you know what goes in this recipe? Or do you know what time the train runs from the station?
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Yeah, exactly. And they're acting like... information, basically, rather than just connecting calls. Right. You know, I guess they weren't being as reined in everywhere because or maybe they were taught the customer is always right. I don't know.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Well, if they got asked something in a recipe and they can only say five things, it really hems them in.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Here's one fun little thing. In World War I, there were 223 American women who served in Europe as switchboard operators because France's phone system was wrecked. So the U.S. Army Signal Corps literally built its own phone system
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
And had bilingual American switchboard operators working there and sometimes giving like really important direct orders about, you know, bombings and raids and things like that.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
You thought that's what I was saying?
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Exactly. But this is the cool part. After 60 years, finally in 1979, these women were recognized as veterans.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
All right. Now we're going to take our break. We're running a bit long, so we're going to come back and finish up on how it all ended with automation right after this.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
That's right. I think you mean pulses, don't you?
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Hey, I'm not just sitting here as correct you guy. I think it's kind of funny. Somebody would have written in and was like, why are these phones having impulses?
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Here is where my mind exploded because I didn't learn this yesterday. Are you still liking that one? I didn't learn this yesterday, but I learned it, I think, the last time you explained this because we explained that in another episode about how you dial.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Oh, yeah. How you dial a rotary phone. I did not know that it was the retreat of that dial back to its original position was what was being quantified and and pulsed.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Yeah. I wonder if they're they're safer like for like government systems, you know, because you literally have to tap the wire physically. It's not just in the airwaves. True that. So I don't know.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Yeah, you put your finger in it and you dial the four over. You know, as a kid, you just think, well, like, yep, I'm hitting the four and I just take it out and it goes back to its place. It going back to its place is the key.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
It's pretty cool, though. I mean, that's just a fun little fact for anyone who still understands what those are.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Yeah. I mean, that's the one that led to the rotary switch that we're talking about, though, right? Yes.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Do you know how his worked specifically or what the difference was?
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Well, let's hear it. We got one minute.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Yeah. And, you know, we didn't even really mention, it seems obvious, but I guess we should say the reason they were looking to phase out and go into automation is kind of like every reason always is money, you know, less overhead. As more and more switchboards grew, you had, well, A, the switchboards cost a lot of money.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
I'm curious. Surely someone knows. But let's talk about Alexander Graham Bell because he is the OG. He's the guy that invented, well, patented the telephone at least. Right. And from Boston in 1876 where he was not trying to invent a telephone. He was trying to work out the problem with the electrical telegraph, which was it was just getting bunched up.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
They cost, you know, you had to have land in a building and you had to have people to operate them. And They just couldn't keep hiring more and more people. I think at one point they said, you know, we need a million switchboard operators. And that just wasn't even a possibility at the time. So automation was always on the horizon. Interestingly, along those lines, long distance automation,
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
switching took a lot longer. Like it was into the late 1960s and even some places in the 70s where you still had operators that had to connect long distance lines because it was, as Kyle said, that it was just no alternative to human intelligence. It was too complex at the time. But eventually, you know, they figured all that out.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
What happens when you dial zero today from a landline? Is there an operator?
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Yeah, there's a couple of competing last switchboard, last operators. One that you'll see a lot online is widely recognized from 1983, Bryant Pond, Maine. I think the specification here is it was the last hand-cranked telephone system and switchboard. Like, you know, like you see in the old movies, there's a box on the wall and you go, you crank a thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
And Susan Glines was the last operator there. London's, thank you, Kyle, was at Enfield. And this was 1960, I think, when it was retired. But the last caretaker telephone operator in the UK retired in 84. But then you found one in California that was 91. Yeah. And as best I could tell, that was a private company. a sort of very small customer-based private phone company.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Too many people are sending too many, you know, telegraphs. And it's a problem. So there's too much traffic. So all of a sudden, Bell, who was a sound guy anyway, realized that you could send tones. And once he realized you could send a tone along a wire, he was like, OK. forget the telegraph. I'm going to come up with the harmonic telegraph.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Yeah, not even the final one, all of their operators were bilingual.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
I think that was their specialty.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
No, I mean, I think that's honestly, they had most of their customer base were people with family in Mexico. And so they just had a niche, from my understanding.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Because you keep laughing at it, going, that's funny.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Here's our Joe Theismann follow-up. We got quite a few emails, in fact, a few from people whose parents went to school with Joe Theismann, the former quarterback of the former Washington Redskins football team, now the Commanders. Hey, guys, I used to freelance for a video company that did a lot of conferences, and one time Joe Theismann was the keynote speaker.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
The way he told the story about his last name is as follows. Growing up, his dad was very firm that their last name was pronounced Theismann. Apparently, his dad would get quite cross when folks would pronounce it wrong. People often said it wrong, so Joe would call his dad and have him correct them.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
According to Joe's story, when he was a candidate for the Heisman Trophy, his college coaches thought it would be better if it was pronounced Theismann to rhyme, obviously. So again, Joe called his dad to ask him, and his dad responded, I've told you, it's Theismann. So it sounds like Joe has made kind of a fun little apocryphal story about this, but it seems confirmed.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
It was these men heard it from the man's own mouth. And that's from Karen and Gil Pennington.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
And one day I'm going to speak to somebody on the other end of a wire.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
What if all of the calls went into a central location and there was a human being there that would connect those two wires? It's a very elegant, very simple sort of system. It's, you know, it's literally connecting two calls by, you know, by connecting them, by plugging them into the same system. What would you even call that? Switchboard? Jack? Yeah, the same Jack.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
The first switchboard commercially was in 1878. So only, geez, like a year after... The Bell Telephone Company was founded. This is in New Haven, Connecticut. And it connected 21 different subscribers in this case. And this is a very old-fashioned, primitive thing. Before long, they were like, why don't we wrap these cords in cloth? It's like insulated.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
And why don't we make the board look a little nicer? And we'll call them a cord board, but everyone's still going to call them a switchboard.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
You're not too far off. That is if my jack is on that board. If it was a big enough community, that switchboard operator might say, I don't have Chuck on this board, but he's on another board. So I'm going to contact that switchboard and, you know, patch it in that way.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Well, early on, they just knew, you know, in a 21 person situation, they just knew everybody. In fact, for a little while, they weren't even saying phone numbers. They were just like Chuck Bryant.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Yeah, because this is when making a call costs money. And up until, I mean, not that long ago in the grand scheme of things, making a long-distance call cost extra money. So you had to bill people, and it was pretty ingenious. Things started growing, growing, growing. You said the word exponentially, and that is the truth.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Because between 1880 and just 13 years later, we went from 60,000 phones to 260. And then just another 10 years later... There were 3 million phones in the United States only. Kyle points out that in the UK, they were a little bit behind us. In 1914, there were fewer than two telephones per 100 people compared to 10 in the U.S., but they eventually caught up to it. And everyone had phones.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Yeah. And, you know, something else we should point out, too, is this is a time where the phone company controlled the phones themselves. So you couldn't just go to a store and buy some cool looking Mickey Mouse phone or a Garfield phone. Man. Or what do I have?
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
I did get that for free, actually, but those are always garbage. It was the ones that look like push button, but when you hit it, it dialed. Oh, really? Do you remember those? You know, it had the keypad, but when you hit nine, it went...
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
It was a big bait and switch. But you rented your phone at the time. I guess if you had a – or maybe they didn't sell them at all at first. But I know for a long time they rented phones to people like – Into the 70s, right? Yeah. I mean, like you used to rent your – some people still probably rent their modem from their cable or whatever, their Wi-Fi provider. Am I saying all the wrong words?
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
But yeah, anyway, they were controlling the flow of money in more ways than just the bill. They wanted as many people to have phones as possible because they were renting those phones and eventually, I guess, selling those phones.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
That's right. But I got us a little off track. You were talking about some new techniques because these switchboards all of a sudden were getting just more and more ubiquitous. And they started to get a little clunky in like how long it would take to connect calls. So one of the things they did is came up with a concept of what's called the divided exchange.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
which is really just an organizational structural thing where people got more specialized. You might have operators just answering the phone. You might have people just connecting instead of the person going, oh, hey, Josh, let me see if Chuck's available.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Like all of that was really streamlined eventually until they came up with what was called the Express system that had a lot of letter B boards that converged on a letter A board. And there was an operator linking between those two.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
That's right. This is a Kyle joint. So a little British factor, too, in here. Because Kyle likes to throw those in because that's where he lives.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Yeah, they also just improved the signals, like signal strength. All of a sudden, operators weren't, like, yelling at each other, which can cause just chaos in a room with a bunch of switchboard operators.
Stuff You Should Know
Switchboards: Please Hold While We Connect You
Yeah, exactly. So just improving the signal really optimized how those things function such, you know, even just making the little signal lamps, the little lights brighter. Right. Responding to the current in the line, like everything just got a little better.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
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Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
You're going to go a long way, baby. Stick with me. Should we take a break or you got something else?
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Dear diary, today I went to the catacombs. I found my solace there.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
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The Catacombs of Paris
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Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Just post your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash S-Y-S-K. That's LinkedIn.com slash S-Y-S-K. And you can post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
That's right. Big thanks to Anna for the contribution here on the Paris Catacombs. Have you ever toured the Paris Catacombs? Yes, I have. Have you? I have not, and I think I remember you telling me that you had. I've been to Paris three times, have not yet done this. It was not on my radar. The first two, didn't have time the third trip. So if and when I ever get back to Paris, it's on the list.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yes, for sure. And I don't want to make you feel self-conscious. I was laughing at a dirty joke that I couldn't say out loud.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
I'll tell you later. Oh, I know. Yeah, yeah. So a lot of, I mean, monks used to make chartreuse down there. Was that the birthplace of chartreuse? Yeah. In the catacombs?
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah, for sure. So that's one thing that happened back then. Mushroom farming, there's been a great tradition of alcohol brewing actually over the years. Because, I mean, one of the great things about having an underground system like that is it's very stable temperature wise. It's about 60 degrees Fahrenheit always.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
That's right. And so that means you can do a lot of stuff from like storing wine to brewing beer. Storing beer.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Mushroom farming was another big deal because one thing you don't need a ton of for most mushrooms is light. Sometimes, you know, you want them to fruit. You may be able to manipulate light or something like that. But generally, mushroom growing can be done in very dark places.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
And so starting in the 19th century, actual mushroom farming and not just like I'm going to grow a few mushrooms like they were producing about a thousand tons of catacomb mushrooms a year.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah, I'm finally feeling well. I had some fruity mushrooms and everything's fine.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
It's also been a good hidey spot over the years, depending on what's going on with the government during the French Revolution. Revolutionaries hid out down there and were chased down there. Sure. There was an alt-right group in the 30s called... How would you pronounce that, Josh?
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
La Cagoule. They... not only hid down there, but would use it as a way to get around and potentially break into government buildings, I guess, from, you know, from the bottom.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
No, of course not. During World War II, obviously, there's going to be either Nazis down there or the French resistance might be down there.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
But what they're most famous for now is being able to go down there with your niece, the movie star. Yeah. It's been a tourist attraction since Napoleon said, you know what would be great? The year is 1809. I think it's high time we start letting people down there to tour this pretty cool thing. And it's sort of... Uh, vacillated over the years.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
It used to be like, you know, you could go down there once a month. If you were a citizen of Paris only, uh, sometimes it was like quarterly. Um, finally, uh, they said, you know what, let's just, let's just make money on this. And it's open what, uh, Tuesday to Sunday. I guess they close on Monday. Like a lot of museums do, uh, nine 45 to eight 30. It'll cost you 31 euros these days.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
which is about the same in dollars, I think, right, right now?
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Okay, so pretty close. Man, you really keep up with that. Not bad. Thanks. Let me see how my Euro stocks are doing.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Well, I just came back from Mexico City, so I basically just divide by 20.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Oh, I don't know. But I think you divide by 20-ish now. But my friends that we were with were like, I can't even think of it that way. I heard all you have to do is drop a zero and then divide that in half. So everyone has their own way of thinking about it. And shout, how much is this? Exactly.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Okay. That sounds about right. You go down a big spiral staircase. There's a lot of stair climbing, obviously, right?
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah, so you're walking down, down, down. Before you enter, you go through something called the Port Mahon Corridor, which has a replica of the Port Mahon Fortress. I imagine that looks kind of cool, right? Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Oh, so many skulls that it's just like, whatever, there's another skull?
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
You can just stay right there if you die. Like you mentioned, 72 is when electricity came along. There is something called Ariadne's Thread, a black line. to ensure that you don't get lost. And I thought, well, what a strange name that is.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Okay, no flying cars yet, but as soon as those things get invented, they'll be on AutoTrader. If you see a car you like, it's probably on AutoTrader. That's kind of their thing. AutoTrader.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
So Ariadne was the daughter of King Minus and was associated with mazes and labyrinths. And while it is a literal thing painted there, it's also, you know, ties back to Ariadne and the While she was a person, it's also like a logic, like applying logic to all possible routes of a maze to get out is Ariadne as well.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah, what does this look like, though? I couldn't find any pictures of this actually in the catacombs.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
You mentioned, well, let's talk about some of these chambers. A lot of them are like the coolest parts of the catacombs are not open to the public and technically, officially illegal and off limits.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Because they weren't the super cool ones were not on the tour.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Well, I looked at some pictures of some of these. The La Plage, which means the beach, is a really cool room because it's got a sandy floor and they painted like a beach scene on the wall. But it looks, I mean, all these places look like where the Lost Boys might hang out, you know?
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
That's totally what it was. Super cool. Yeah. What else? What other cool rooms are off limits?
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah, that is super cool. That was... a subset of a group called UX short for urban experiment. And there are these, it's an artist collective in Paris founded in 1981 and by a group of teenagers back then that like, they'll do this cool stuff. Like they snuck into the Pantheon for months in a row to restore a clock there, but like on the, on the down low.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah, just like the group that did the movie theater. They were a subgroup.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah, that is really something. But all of these people who sneak down there and do stuff are known as cataphiles. And those are the people, the urban adventurers, who illegally find their way into the catacombs to party, to hang out, to show movies, to have concerts and parties. And show movies. All kinds of things are going on down there over the decades. And it seems to have really kicked off.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
So the JSAT, the Josh SAT would be Moulin Rouge is to boobs as the Paris catacombs is to blank.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
I mean, they've been doing it since the 1800s. I think they had a Chopin, like 45-piece orchestra did a Chopin concert down there.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
In the 70s and 80s is when it seems like the the cataphiles really kind of, you know, took roost down there because it was a great place to go hide. Like the punk rock movement kind of moved downstairs underground, literally underground. Hey. And they tried to keep people out over the years. But like you said, people are going to find a way in if they want to.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Oh, man. I don't know. I haven't taken a test like that in so long. That'd be fun to take the SAT again. Would it? I think so.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
So, yeah, people do find their way in, like I said, and they've been doing that a lot since the beginning. And, you know, besides partying and doing drugs, like there are all kinds of like cool works of art. There's murals painted on some walls, obviously all kinds of graffiti. Sometimes they leave messages and leaflets and things for each other to find and try to avoid.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
The cataflicks, which is literally translated as catacops.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
The raspberry. The fine, the 60 euros you mentioned, I saw 65. I mean, that's just like double the cost of legal entry. So it's not the biggest fine.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
There's got to be one close one. Like grave site or something.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah, for sure. The IGC, that inspection group with the French name, still maintains it. They've been doing so since 1777. And there are still collapses here and there, but it is mainly shored up. Oh, this other thing I thought was fun, the ways that people have found their way in. When they close off an area, sometimes the cataphiles will go in there and reopen it and make a way to get in.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
And they're called... I don't know how you would say it in French, but it translates as cat flaps, like a cat door.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah. It's been in a bunch of movies and stuff too, right?
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Do you remember that from back in the day? Is that the human goop that seeps out?
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Do you know if the water, is it continually filling up?
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
You ruined the story, but... Gamers might recognize... The catacombs from Assassin's Creed Unity.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
No, I didn't play that one. Do you play any of them? Assassin's Creed? No. Do you have something against them? No, I just, you know, my gaming is limited.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
I'm playing a horror game right now called Alan Wake 2. It's the second Alan Wake. And I'd never played a horror game before. And it is pretty scary.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah, like when you're playing this game, they look so good now and they're so realistic. So you're creeping around with a flashlight in these rooms and you hear noises and see things and it's like, it's super creepy.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
All right. That's a great JSAT. We should have our own Stuff You Should Know SAT. That'd be a fun thing to design.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
That's masterful. Definitely ongoing dread. And then when the jump scare happens, when a bad person comes out, it's just, yeah, it scares big grown boy Chucky. Fantastic.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Here's one cool thing, and this guy might be worth a podcast on his own. But there was a photographer. He went by the name Nadar, I guess, N-A-D-A-R. And this is in the 1860s. His real name is Felix, I guess. How would you pronounce that last name?
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Tournachon. He was a very accomplished dude, sort of the pioneer of the medium. This is early photography and the guy in Paris photography wise at the time. But he invented a battery operated light, basically, and is one of the first people ever in the history of photography to use artificial light to take a picture.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
And over the course of three months, starting in 1861, he went down into the catacombs. with 18 minutes per exposure, took a lot of pictures of the catacombs, and they are super cool and creepy pictures from 1861. They are creepy.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah, and those head bones weren't moving, so they're fine.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah. Well, at the very least, it's going to up the creep factor because that just dead-eyed expression of a dummy is pretty great.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
I'm going to have to ask Emily. You know, she took a solo trip there a couple of years ago. I need to see if she went there.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Probably not because I feel like I would have remembered her telling me about that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah. She was like, were there paintings there? Then I didn't go.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Oh, that's true. What about crime? There's been a lot of crime there over the years because, like you said, that's a good place to pop underground and then pop up into somebody's expensive wine cellar or something.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah. Not cool. People have been stealing bones down there since there have been bones down there. Highly illegal.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah, I think that a lot of them back in the day were to sell to sort of like cadavers, sell to medical students like, hey, here's a headband for however many Franks.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah, of course there's going to be ghosts down there. There's a couple of more well-known than others. I think the most well-known is a guy named Philibert Aspert.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
No, and you didn't shout that one out, so I'm glad you are.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
I know I'm wrong, but when it comes to French, I just want to drop the last letter of everything.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Anyway, he worked at a military hospital in the late 18th century and apparently in 1793 got lost in the catacombs with his own lone candle and never found his way out and just like Like I said, the convenient thing about dying down there is you just stay there. And apparently if you bring a candle there, you hear his voice just before the candle goes out.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Were you creeped out down there or was it just like, oh, this is a cool thing?
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah, I got to go check it out next time. Did you look at that video, by the way, the one that's like highly likely faked?
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
No, there's this videotape that I think it was like 2017 that circulated that was like, you know, it's like a Blair Witch thing. Like, is it real? Is it not? It was a guy walking through the catacombs and apparently gets lost and starts to freak out and run and hear sounds. And then the last shot you see is like the camera falling to the ground and into like a puddle.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
And some people say it's real. Some people say it's not. I don't know. It feels like it's probably faked. But I wasn't like, oh, my God. It was kind of not that interesting.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Here's a correction to our gong show episode. Hey, guys, there was one big error in this.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
I thought we had, but apparently we didn't. But yeah, big shout out to Gene Gene, a legend of that show.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah, no disrespect intended. We both loved Gene Gene. How do you not? Exactly. So this was an error, though. Chuck Beres, guys, did not invent syndication. It has been around in television forever, with some notable 1950s shows such as Sea Hunt and Life with Elizabeth. Nor was The Parent Game the first syndicated game show or even Chuck's first syndicated show.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
First syndicated game shows came in 1965, Everything's Relative and PDQ, and Chuck Beres' first foray in 1969, The Game Game. Initially, that was to give local stations some color options since old sitcoms wouldn't be in color. But syndication exploded in 1972 because the FCC gave the 7.30 time slot back to the local stations.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
And for those stations, it was cheaper to buy a game show than to make local content. I know this, guys, because I'm a bit of a semi-pro TV historian. Oh, yeah? Yeah, with an emphasis on game shows in particular, so I feel a duty when something is broadly misstated. As that was, I have to try and correct the record.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
I had hoped you'd use Gong, this book, as one of your sources, as it was written by a real-life TV historian named Adam Nediff, who I've done some research for in the past. Okay. Hope you're enjoying the snow today. So this came a little while ago. But that is from Mike Berger in Livonia, Michigan.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
And Mike, I'm going to hang on to your email, and we might hit you up if we ever need any insight on TV history.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
I have to check it out. And I'm also going to forgive you for when I said Mary, Mary, for not saying.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
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Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah, so this is, I mean, let's go back in time, I guess. I mean, we know already what it is. It's a series of underground tunnels where more than 6 million Parisians are there, you know, forever. Unless they decide to move them again.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah, yeah. So if you go back in time, let's say 45 million years during the Lutetian period, there was an erosion event that caused a lot of what became to be known as Lutetian or Paris rock or Paris limestone or Parisian limestone deposited there.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
And that is, if you go to Paris and you see everything as that sort of creamy gray, that's what that is. And that's what gives Paris its distinct look because they had loads and loads and loads of it. And the reason we're starting with this is because the mining of that lutetian limestone is where these tunnels started.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
About 2,000 years ago, on the banks of the rivers there, they had these quarries where they would mine the heck out of this stuff. And before you know it, Paris is sitting on top of a vast network of tunnels.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
That's right. And that presents a couple of very big problems. First of all, if you've got a city growing and growing and getting built on and built on and getting heavier and heavier, and a lot of the underground has been dug out, that is a problem. And there were numerous incidents of...
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
sinkholes of buildings collapsing into themselves of all kinds of you know tragedies happening over the years throughout the history of Paris because it was built on you know hollow ground in a lot of places right that's why another very famous nickname for Paris is the Florida of Europe right I'm sure they love that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
The other big problem is that Parisians used to love burying themselves in Paris. Like you wanted to be laid to rest in the city where you grew up and lived your life.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Yeah, like very, very locally. And by the 18th century, late 18th century, this was a big, big problem. There were too many bodies. Disease was being spread. So this led to a couple of things. I think in the 1730s, there was an actual... A parliamentary commission study about how disease from these, you know, dead people everywhere in Paris was hurting the city. And then it took about 40 years.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Eventually, in 1777, King Louis, what is that, 16th, created the IGC. You want to pronounce that?
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Right. So basically, hey, we got this report 40 years ago that no one's acted on. So we need to really start looking into this stuff. And Chief Inspector, can you pronounce his name?
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
He came along as the chief inspector and said, all right, you know what? We're going to shore up these mines and make sure that they're not going to keep collapsing. And also, we're going to start moving bodies out of here. We got a body problem, not a three body problem. We have a millions body problem. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
And we're going to start moving bodies out of, let's start with the oldest one, the Holy Innocence Cemetery, which has been around since 1186. Let's start moving things out of here and from other cemeteries, close these things down and start moving them into these old mine shafts.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
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Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
That's right. To the tunnels. And people are like, you're doing what? Yeah. And they said, don't worry about it. Just go back to sleep. And from 1785 to 1787, over a couple of years, not only from Holy Innocence, but all the nearby cemeteries, they moved these bodies. In April of 1786, the catacombs were consecrated officially.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
It was called the Paris Ossuary at first, but catacombs sounds creepier, I guess. Hey, have I been saying ossuary before?
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Well, I wasn't sure how it was pronounced, to be honest.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
So catacombs took over as the sort of, you know, the go-to word. And they kind of just dumped them in there for a while until in 1810, there was a new quarry inspector who said, maybe we can have a little fun with this.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
That's right. And I think from now to the end of time, a skull should be known as a head bone.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
So like you mentioned, there are no headstones there. So you don't know who is who. We do know there are some famous is there like Robespierre. Very famous statesman is there. There's a painter named Simon Vouet. Probably.
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
Oh, okay. And then this guy, I think we should maybe do a show on at some point. Charles, I would say Peralt as an American, but what is that, Peral?
Stuff You Should Know
The Catacombs of Paris
I say ossuary, so I don't know why you're asking me. Well, you took French. I didn't. This guy was like the granddaddy of the modern fairy tale. So he wrote Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and Puss in Boots and didn't know about this guy.
Stuff You Should Know
Pagans, Neo-Pagans, Wiccans – Let’s Sort It Out!
Right. And so the tide turned on pagans basically right out of the gate, but Constantine himself didn't do anything to persecute. He didn't use his official position as emperor to persecute pagans.
Stuff You Should Know
Pagans, Neo-Pagans, Wiccans – Let’s Sort It Out!
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So actually, I think he was fully immersed in the baptismal font instead.
Stuff You Should Know
Pagans, Neo-Pagans, Wiccans – Let’s Sort It Out!
His son, though, went full bore after pagans and outlawed paganism. He passed the first laws, Constantinius, Constantius, not Constantinople. Constantius. Constantinius. Yes. He passed the first laws that made paganism and practices of paganism illegal. It was basically amounted to any public displays of paganism were outlawed.
Stuff You Should Know
Pagans, Neo-Pagans, Wiccans – Let’s Sort It Out!
But not too long after, a couple of decades, his successor Theodosius, he said Christianity is the state religion of the Roman Empire. And if you do anything pagan, including in your own home, Like, you're toast. Don't let us see you go anywhere near a chicken or you're in big trouble.
Stuff You Should Know
Pagans, Neo-Pagans, Wiccans – Let’s Sort It Out!
Yes. And they actually took some of the existing gods and just basically copy-pasted them into the conception of the devil, of Satan. And again, keep in mind here, these pagan religions, they don't have anything even approximating Satan. Right. Like gods can be good or evil, protective or dangerous, but there's no like one evil polar foil to God because there is no one God.
Stuff You Should Know
Pagans, Neo-Pagans, Wiccans – Let’s Sort It Out!
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, but it's so ingrained that even after you know about it, you know, it's hard not to just shake that stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
Pagans, Neo-Pagans, Wiccans – Let’s Sort It Out!
It's not dual, it's plural. That's part of pagan religion, right? So it's ironic that they're like, your God is Satan. And they're like, which one? They're like, the one with the horns, the one with the antlers. Yeah. And so that's basically how the modern conception of Satan came along. And so basically any god would just be equated with evil, with a demon, with Satan himself.
Stuff You Should Know
Pagans, Neo-Pagans, Wiccans – Let’s Sort It Out!
And if you were caught practicing this, now you started to risk being killed by the people in charge.
Stuff You Should Know
Pagans, Neo-Pagans, Wiccans – Let’s Sort It Out!
It's like a mashup of Michael Cera, John Cena, and John Sununu.
Stuff You Should Know
Pagans, Neo-Pagans, Wiccans – Let’s Sort It Out!
Right. But the Cernunnos is wearing antlers because they indicated protectiveness, not necessarily of humans, but of the forest and the countryside. And you could be in Cernunnos' good graces by taking care of those things, or you could run afoul of Cernunnos if you, say, just stepped on a bunch of ducks for no good reason.
Stuff You Should Know
Pagans, Neo-Pagans, Wiccans – Let’s Sort It Out!
Yeah. I ran across a couple of websites, Christian websites, that essentially still think all of the same things that the church originally said about pagans back, you know, 1,500 years ago.
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But he became Satan eventually, or he was one of the ones. I think they went basically local religion by local religion and identified who could be Satan and then demonized them and all the others.
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Exactly. So now, because your God, your ancient pagan God is Satan, if you are caught worshiping that God or any God or any kind of polytheistic pagan religion, you're now in league with the devil. And again, you can be put to death for that kind of thing.
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And that developed into witch trials, the Inquisition, all sorts of terrible stuff that was essentially the Christian church persecuting in an effort to stamp out any local rival religions. Yeah.
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Yeah, everybody likes Halloween, which started out as Samhain, as we'll see. I think we've talked about that probably 15 times. You know what I think actually triggered me thinking of this topic? What movie? No, it was Easter. I was thinking about, I happened to be up and out around sunrise on Easter, and it reminded me as a kid being raised Catholic of going to sunrise mass in Easter.
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And I was like, dude... You're standing there celebrating a religious service, watching the sun rise on a specific day in the spring. Like it is so pagan based and it's in like in every single way. I think even Easter is like a shift or an adaptation of like Ostair, which I believe was one of the polytheistic pagan gods.
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Like it was it's just there out in the open, basically. And that made me wonder about the whole thing.
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So it's still alive and well.
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Yeah. Pretty cool. Yeah. So they were basically stamping with one foot, giving back rubs with their hands. Stamp, stamp, rub, rub. That's what the Christians did to basically win the PR war of the religions and take over, essentially. Yeah.
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So, yeah, the Enlightenment was like in a couple of strange ways. It was really fertile ground for like an interest in paganism to come along. For one, the Enlightenment thinkers just essentially as a first step just rejected Christianity and monotheism in particular. And they also were like, I really like the philosophy of these ancient Greeks and ancient Romans. They were polytheistic.
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Maybe I could be too. So it kind of aroused like an intellectual interest in that. But it also it created an interest in paganism in a different way, too, because the Enlightenment created such rational thinking that some people were kind of repelled by it. And they're like, I'm going to go seek answers and purpose in nature instead.
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And that probably more than anything is how the Enlightenment led to an interest in paganism.
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Yeah. You've never wanted to take your clothes off in the woods? Read some Keats. Right.
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Yeah, no, I get that. There's mosquitoes and beetles and those worms that crawl up your pee hole.
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Right. Yeah. And in retrospect, looking at this now, it's like, gosh, talk about getting your wires crossed.
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Oh, man. It's so great. What else? Oh, there was another thing that kind of created. I might have grown out of this interest, essentially, like kind of scholarship on paganism.
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Some was good. Some was the kind of stuff that you would equate with finding on the History Channel today.
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I think it's pretty much all... Yeah, that.
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Yeah, pretty much. And I think it has been that way for a really long time. And I mean, not to bag on the History Channel, it's interesting, but I guess what I'm equating it to is... Really interesting unsupported theories that like if you're an actual scientist and you look into it, you're like, this is just made up.
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Yeah. So we're talking about paganism, everybody. And hats off to Dave, too, first of all, for helping us with this. This is a huge, big lump of a topic that almost every one of the things we're going to talk about could be broken out into its own episode. Right. So we're going to have to summarize in a lot of ways. We're going to get a lot of stuff wrong.
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Yes. But the problem is, is they present it factually and it gets taken factually by a lot of people. So they've caused a lot of problems. They essentially have ruined the world single handedly. The History Channel has.
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Yeah. And so modern historians have said that's a great theory, Fraser, but it's not correct. Fraser is not a History Channel type. He was a legitimate anthropologist. And one of the reasons the Golden Bough figures in is that he did an amazing amount of exhaustive research that in the book he describes a lot of ancient pagan traditions and beliefs and stuff.
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So the Golden Bough became kind of like a handbook for the modern pagan movements that followed.
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I don't know. Was this like a book on tape you heard once?
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Yeah, he really does, doesn't he? I never thought about it. He's great.
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Bow. I don't know if I believe that lady. Like when the bow breaks. Wouldn't you just sit up and tell your mom that she got it wrong if she's saying when the bow breaks?
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Yeah, she came up in the Bella and the Witch Elm episode because she was saying like Bella was murdered by a witch cult. And she's one of the people who argued that the modern European witches trace their lineage unbroken back to fertility feminist cult that's been in the British Isles ever since time immemorial. And that's one of the things that's been debunked is that it's just not true.
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Like the Christian church. and in their turn Judaism and Islam as well, did such a thorough job of interrupting the transmission from the ancient world to the modern world that it's just not really possible. Now, that's not to say that in certain super rural, local areas, there's not folk traditions that actually do date back really far. I mean, everybody's seen Wicker Man.
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But the thing is, like, Wicker Man would be actually a bad example because that, like, is an actual ritual. They knew exactly what they were doing. They were performing rites, that kind of stuff. This would be more like, hey, we're dancing around the maypole, but we don't necessarily know every single thing that's going on. We're not—
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So apologies already to all of our pagan listeners out there. And let us know, correct us about what we do get wrong, but we're going to try our best not to get stuff wrong. Because it's a really interesting set of religions. We should say that's what paganism is. It's not a religion.
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performing every single aspect of this ancient ritual, even though the ritual in some form or fashion still survived to today. It's not the full the full Monty. It's not the full Monty of the actual pagan folk religion that they're they're kind of venerating still.
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It's a set of typically nature-based religions that before the original ancient paganism predated any of what we call the Abrahamic religions, the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And that's my definition of paganism.
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By the way, Chuck, Yumi and I have a friend named Alex Mary who's an artist. And she does something called Morris dancing. And a lot of the Morris dances like resemble paganism. Like sometimes there's antlers and stuff like that. But it also more than anything reminds me of stuff they would have done in that A24 movie Midsommar. And it's basically like folk dancing that dates back to like the –
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15th century and probably before, but they can definitely trace it back that far. I was asking her about paganism. She's like, nope, not a pagan. I'm a Morris dancer.
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Oh, yeah. Are you talking about what? Modern paganism?
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Yeah. As far as Norse religions, Norse pagan religions that fall under the umbrella term heathenism, this is where they get all their stuff.
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I don't know if it's Eddas or Eddas. I think I agreed too soon. Okay. Maybe Eddas. That and then the Viking sagas. And so the Viking sagas aren't, like you said, it's not a handbook of how to worship Norse gods, but just mentions of it, like incidental references to stuff like that.
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Yeah. We haven't gotten anything wrong so far, so yeah.
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The neo-pagans who worship Norse gods have kind of taken that, gleaned from that what some of these rituals and thoughts and mythologies were.
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I think he did break off and try to become a leader at some point.
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I don't remember either. But their whole thing, the reason we mentioned them is they were probably the first what you could consider modern pagan religion. They practiced magic and they were into the Egyptian occult stuff.
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So that's why we bring them up. I don't think there's too many Golden Dawn people running around, but I guarantee there are some.
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No, that's one that would probably be pretty good to redo someday.
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Yeah. So it depends on who you talk to. Gardner might either be described as a huckster who made all this up or a very gentle man. I saw somebody describe him who knew him as utterly without malice, who may have made all this up.
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But he was known for writing what's called the Book of Shadows, which has become a big part of the Wiccan religion, which is essentially a personal recipe book of spells and rituals that has worked for a particular witch or coven. And sometimes it's shared and people can borrow from it and add to it and they create their own Book of Shadows.
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But having your own – basically, you know in those Bugs Bunny cartoons where that witch is like looking through her book?
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That would technically be a book of shadows that she's looking through to find like the ingredients for potions or whatever. That's a pretty literally cartoonish depiction of it. But that's, you know, essentially what she was doing.
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She was one of the most disturbing cartoon characters of all time, if you ask me.
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Like, she had that high-pitched voice. And didn't she have, like, kind of a red Cousin It type who wore, like, tennis shoes? He was a little off-putting as well.
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Yeah. So, yeah, the witch from Bugs Bunny.
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Yeah, and it wasn't until 2000, I think, 15 that Susanna Budapest indoctrinated her first male clergy member into Dianic Wicca and other Dianic Wicca temples split off. And so it's rare to find a man in this religion. Like, it's all women. And I read that they're anti-patriarchy. They actually try to use their magic against the patriarchy. But they're not anti-male.
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The reason that they exclude males is because their religion is created to celebrate and honor the – Life cycles, the biological cycles in a lot of cases of a woman as she's born and then ages and then dies. And that essentially there's not a lot of role for men in that religion. But, you know, you guys go form your own stuff. Go become druids, I think is their motto. Yeah.
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Yeah. Probably a liberal court.
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One other thing I got to say, I ran across the UK finally suspended their witchcraft laws, their bans against practicing witchcraft in 1951, which is why Gerald Gardner's books start popping up in the 50s, even though he'd been doing this since the late 30s.
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Isn't that interesting? Like he could have been arrested and thrown in prison for practicing witchcraft before 1951. Wow.
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Oh, yeah, it's definitely interesting. It's funny because that means that at some point in time, and we'll talk about when that happened, Christianity suddenly leapt forward as like a sophisticated thing. So the tables basically turned because originally some of the Greek and actually Roman Christians, Pagans were very suspicious of Christianity and said all sorts of libelous things against them.
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Marvel and Lord of the Rings. Like if you thought Led Zeppelin was into Lord of the Rings, man, introduce yourself to a heathen. Like they are into that stuff. A lot of Valhalla. Yeah. And I think the two biggest Germanic heathen religions, actually, I guess, I don't even think they're sects. But one is Esatru.
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They worship the Aesir gods, who would be the highest of the pantheon of Norse mythology, like Odin and Thor. And so people who are into Asatru are very much into honor and valor and getting into Valhalla. And then there's the Vanatru. which they're concerned with the Vanir gods, who are the rest of the gods, who are more earthy, more nature-based, they're into prosperity, that kind of stuff.
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And I think there's way more Asatru than Vanatru right now. And then one other thing about heathenism, there's a really interesting kind of side history that you can go look up about the black metal scene specifically the Norwegian black metal scene that essentially turned into turned their focus from Satanism, like traditional metal to heathenry.
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And so you've got like folk metal, Viking metal, like they essentially just became heathens, but metal. And it just got really out of hand in the early 90s. It was really interesting stuff.
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Yeah. And they didn't exactly like set paganism's general public image on fire. Well, actually, they kind of did. Yeah. Yeah. Arseth was a Satanist. Vickernese is in addition to being a murderer. He's a avowed neo-Nazi. And the whole scene in particular kind of gets caught up with nationalism a lot. So it's not a very representative scene.
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Picture of paganism as a whole or neo-paganism as a whole. But it's still I mean, it's just ridiculously interesting what happened there.
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It's worth mentioning, I guess.
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Yeah, I was checking a lot of it out. Some of it's really good. I'm not into folk metal, though, at all.
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You know that kind of like super proud Irish music that's like rock? From, like, Boston. Imagine that as, like, metal. But it's got, like, bagpipes. Almost. Almost.
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Or, no. So, yes, that Irish, like, rock does from Boston. This is, like, the Norwegian metal version of that.
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Okay. Just look up folk metal and you'll see. But some of the other stuff is really good. Like, Mayhem stuff was pretty interesting. Yeah.
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And then as Christianity rose to prominence, it used that same playbook against pagans. But yeah, it makes sense that it's like you were considered a hick or not up to date if you were still a pagan once Christianity became a thing in the Roman Empire. Yeah.
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Yeah, maybe. Get some antlers. Yeah, why not, man? Why not? Like, really, ask yourself, why not do that?
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Yeah. And I saw that Druids are, a big difference between them and others is that nature itself is the divine. It's not like a manifestation of God or the goddesses or anything, like it's nature. And I also saw that the practitioners don't really consider it a religion. They consider it more of philosophy or a way of life.
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Isn't that a little weird? Yeah, they sound like a couple of guys who might live in a van together. They might. Who knows? There's also ceremonial magic, which would trace itself to, I guess, the Golden Dawn.
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There's neo-paganism, which we should talk about because a lot of people use neo-paganism as a term incorrectly to describe modern paganism, which is what we've been talking about this whole time. Neo-paganism itself is a specific kind of pagan religion. So all neo-pagans are pagan, but all pagans aren't neo-pagans.
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And if you basically want to just come at this by saying, I like a little of this, I like a little of that. Oh, I would like to do a little bit of ritual magic. Yes, I want to go out in the woods and practice all this stuff. Then neo-paganism is for you. It is wide open. They believe that everybody's beliefs are equal. They're very much opposed to the idea of absolute good and evil.
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They're very into nature. It's pretty much, I think, what people think about when they think about modern pagan religions.
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And if you want to know more about that, there's a great site called neo-paganism.org. They seem to be pretty authoritative on it.
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Right. It's in Comic Sans. And just one other thing about neo-paganism. I think I said that a lot of people, that's what they think of, but they might be saying Wicca when they're talking about neo-paganism. There's big differences between those two. Wicca is very magical based.
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The intent is to harness the power of nature to get something done, like get a job successfully or make someone fall in love with you, whatever. And Wicca is very much esoteric, so that means that there's a set amount of knowledge out there.
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There's hidden mystery knowledge in the universe that if you are an initiate into Wicca, like you have to be initiated into a coven, and you apply yourself and work and study, you can have these mysteries of the universe revealed to you. Not at all what neo-pagans believe.
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I thought so, too. I like bumpkin because it's like it's an insult, but it's just so round and happy that it's hard to be angered by it if somebody calls you a bumpkin.
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Um, there's just a ton of differences, but I mean, if any of this has floated your boat and you're like, I really want to check this out. There's a lot of stuff on the internet, uh, that you can go read up on. I would just say, use your, your just general common sense to decide what site you're on is whether it's legitimate or authoritative, or if it's just some dude making stuff up.
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Exactly. It's a dead giveaway.
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That's a good one. I feel like that's more an album, though. Okay. And you better believe they're going to have some Lord of the Rings character as the illustration.
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Well, if you want to know more about that stuff, like I said, go out on the Internet. And since I said that and Chuck had just said true, that means that it's time for Listener Mail.
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You've got bacon grease in front of your face?
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Thanks a lot, Randy, with an eye. Did Randy sign the eye with a little heart instead of a dot? Because that'd be fantastic. Thanks a lot, Randy. That was a great tip. We appreciate it. I'm quite sure everybody who loves popcorn and bacon that's listening appreciated that.
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If you want to be like Randy and send us a tip that everybody can appreciate, you can send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
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Right. They don't care what you think of them.
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Yeah, and we'll talk about where it came from, but there's a lot of, well, just incorrect facts on the internet that basically says this tradition has continued uninterrupted in secret. It had to be driven into secret by the rise of Christianity, and that just does not seem to be true.
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Yeah, a good example of this is real quick is there's no absolute good and evil. That's one of those Abrahamic religious ideas. And paganism does not believe in that. So, for example, if you are crossing a raging river, that river might kill you and drown you. But it's not like the river is evil and wants to do that. It just can't happen. So there's a risk, but it can also be a neutral thing.
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You can increase your chances of successfully crossing that river by maybe praying to it, the spirit or the god of that river, or maybe offering a sacrifice. But it's not – there's no evil rivers in any of the pagan religions.
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Yeah, I guess maybe, but I think even then it's not necessarily absolutely evil.
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Yeah, I think the singing and dancing is subsequent to taking the drugs.
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So there's a couple of things just from the ancient pagan religions that are still carried on today. Ancestor worship is another big one. especially as we'll see in the neo-pagan Norse traditions.
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But it's essentially, you can see evidence of this in the fact that we buried people in the way that we started burying people, as if they're venerated, as if we understand that they need grave goods because there's an afterlife. And so it's not like a hard leap to the idea that those ancestors can help us out now that they're in the spirit world. And so you can worship them.
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That's a big part of it too. Yeah.
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Yeah, and then you can pretty clearly demonstrate that the Earth Mother eventually evolved into Gaia from the Greek pantheon. Gaia is the mom of all the other gods, which brings up another point, polytheism. It's not monotheistic. There is not one single god. Even if there's a head of the gods, like, say, Zeus or Odin or something like that, there's still plenty of other gods who are gods.
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They're not saints. They're not angels. They're not assistants, deities. They are gods in and of themselves. And so polytheism is a huge, huge part of any pagan religion, ancient or modern, too.
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I would think so, too. Yeah, for sure.
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You got to be right, you know? I mean, it's not like that was just coincidental. Somebody came up with that in the 60s or something.
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What about sacrifice, the stuff that pagans don't like to talk about?
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Yeah. I mean, we know for a fact that Germanic and Celtic tribes sacrificed humans just from the presence of bog bodies in the state that they were, the way that they died. They're pretty much proof positive that there was sacrifice. And even outside of Europe, I mean, you know, the Inca maiden, the Lulea, Lulealo. I think you mean Leilani.
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the maiden, you remember the Inca maiden that has like your knees pulled up to her chest and she looks like she's sleeping, but she was sacrificed 500 years ago. I mean, like it did happen, but the idea that it was widespread or that they like drank baby's blood or that kind of stuff, that was the exaggeration that really kind of were smears.
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I finally watched it. How was it? Did you see it? No, but I've seen the scene that made you think of that.
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Pagans, Neo-Pagans, Wiccans – Let’s Sort It Out!
Yeah, Mel Gibson is basically into snuff porn. Like, he loves that stuff. Have you ever seen We Were Soldiers?
Stuff You Should Know
Pagans, Neo-Pagans, Wiccans – Let’s Sort It Out!
It's one of the most violent, yeah, goriest war movies I've ever seen in my life.
Stuff You Should Know
Pagans, Neo-Pagans, Wiccans – Let’s Sort It Out!
And I've seen The Guns of Navarone.
Stuff You Should Know
Pagans, Neo-Pagans, Wiccans – Let’s Sort It Out!
Oh, was that Telly Savalas? No. He was in The Dirty Dozen. That's what you're thinking.
Stuff You Should Know
Pagans, Neo-Pagans, Wiccans – Let’s Sort It Out!
I don't know if he was in that one. He was definitely in The Dirty Dozen. That was a great one.
Stuff You Should Know
Pagans, Neo-Pagans, Wiccans – Let’s Sort It Out!
Yeah, they love them for sure. So, yeah, those are some high points or basics, I guess is a better way to put it, of ancient pagan religions. And because, as we said before, there's not really a lot that survived from the ancients to today. A lot of that stuff has been gleaned by archaeologists, anthropologists.
Stuff You Should Know
Pagans, Neo-Pagans, Wiccans – Let’s Sort It Out!
And it's from that base of knowledge that modern pagans draw from to create the newer versions of the pagan religions.
Stuff You Should Know
Pagans, Neo-Pagans, Wiccans – Let’s Sort It Out!
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and we both have antlers on our head, and this is Stuff You Should Know. Just a couple of wooded bagels. Yeah, I'm excited about this one, man.
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
But even then, it's not like some sort of foolproof solipsistic argument because even if you were sending signals from one brain to another, it's still going to be a subjective experience and you wouldn't have any idea Even though you're getting the signals from their brain, like the subjective nature of it, like you can't gauge subjectivity scientifically.
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
Yeah. And if that was a test subject, they'd say, why is Chuck walking into traffic? What's going on?
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
Yeah, and if you, you know, as AI comes on more and more, and I know you tackled some of this in The End of the World, your special podcast series. Thanks for the point. But the idea of, like, AI becoming sentient or conscious or whatever Like, how are we going to know if that's even happening? Because it's not just if it knows so much stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
It can, you know, AI can learn facts and things, but like it's that subjectivity of a human or I guess just an experience because it wouldn't be human. And like, how do we know if that's happening to an AI?
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
That's right. Diving into philosophy again. This one, solipsism, perhaps the most navel-gazy philosophy. Sort of unintelligible aspect of all of them, which is that sort of old classic stoner college dorm room thing. How do we know if anything is real? What if it is all in this part of it? What if it's all just a simulation?
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
Well, let's talk about some of the, I guess, varieties of solipsism that they've come up with over the years. There's one called metaphysical solipsism. That's basically that an individual is like yourself, is all that there is, nothing else, has any independent reality at all. Then there is epistemological solipsism. And that is, it is not even possible
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
to know where anything outside our individual consciousness exists or is real.
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
Right. Not the famous statue, but, you know, a real thinker. There's methodological methodological solipsism. I got that extra O in there. And that means it's not possible to even start to analyze the world except through your own individual consciousness and lens, which that makes sense.
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
Yeah, I think there's a professor from MIT named, a philosopher rather, maybe teaches philosophy, named Caspar Hare. And he had a book in 2009 called On Myself and Other Less Important Subjects, where he was arguing a lesser version of ethical solipsism, which is the idea that other things and people might exist, but we have no obligation to any of those people or ideas except for our own.
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
Yeah. Piece of what? Piece of S. There are also lots of little sort of side ideas that come along if you're going to gaze at your navel. about solipsism. And one is the famous brain in a vat or the Futurama or the matrix idea, which is all you are maybe is a brain floating in a jar with some life-sustaining liquid and it's hooked up to a computer and everything you see is a simulation.
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
Yeah. There's also, and this is sort of along those lines, the experience machine idea. There's a philosopher named Robert Nozick in a 1974 book that said, how about this for a thought experiment? I don't think that people are just basically hedonistic in life. And what would people choose if they could be attached to a machine
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
They can simulate any experience as if it were identical and real, and you thought it was real. Would it be hedonistic? Would you choose falling in love? Would you choose to create a great piece of art or something like that? And then there are different versions of that, like what if it's for two years at a time? What if it's your whole lives? And the counter to that usually is somebody saying,
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
yeah, but people, it's not reality and people aren't engaged in reality and humans inherently want to engage with reality.
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
Yeah, I think in The Matrix, wasn't Joey Pants fully on board with the simulation?
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
I think he was because I think he was like eating the steak and they were like, yeah, but the steak's not real. And he's like, yeah, but, you know, it tastes real, tastes good to me, something along those lines. But, yeah, that's pretty interesting.
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
All right, so when it comes to criticisms of solipsism, not from us, there are some famous stories, one of which, very famous story in philosophy circles, that is, at least. If you're not a philosopher, you're probably going to be like, what's that guy kicking the rock for? But it was an 18th century story about writer Samuel Johnson.
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
who was in a, I guess, debate with a philosopher named George Berkeley, and Berkeley said, hey, Descartes' mind-body dualism is faulty, and everything that appears to have existence is just made up in your mind. Well, first Berkeley said it's impossible to refute this, and that's when cheeky old Samuel Johnson came in and kicked a very large rock
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
and said i refute this in other words hey this rock is here and this is just an absurd idea because i can kick that rock and it hurt my toe
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
Yeah, I think, unfortunately, Wittgenstein Well, I didn't see it, but I think the second letter in the E-I in German is the one that's favored.
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
I'm pretty sure the second letter in German is the one that's pronounced. No, I believe you. I'm not positive, but I do know that Frankenstein was the doctor. You mean Frankenstein? And not the monster. Yeah, that's true. So let's talk about Stephen P. Thornton. He's a philosopher at the University of Limerick, the most sing-songy university in all of Ireland.
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
He has an argument that, hey, guys, it's a big mistake to view these mental states as just something we experience subjectively and then you know, relate to others like, hey, I know how it feels to get my toe stubbed because I've done it. So I see that's happened to you. So I know how that feels. He says, no, we learn what these mental states are and what he called an intersubjective world.
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
like a kid when it's it's born uh understands what being sad is by looking around at someone crying or something like that and that's how they know what sad is because of a behavior they witness in a context they witness it in um so if you you know olivia used a great example if you're grinding your teeth and if you're you know snapping at people in your life and you can't sleep then you probably know you're experiencing stress
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
What would it be of like, give me an example. Do you have any?
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
I gotcha. So, you know, the navel gazing and talking about solipsism and debating it or whatever is one thing, but. If you have a mental illness, especially if you have something like schizophrenia, this idea is terrifying. It's called derealization, and it's something that can happen if you suffer from paranoid schizophrenia. There are people that...
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
suffer from that, that talk about sort of exactly this, like the people around them are extras or empty shells, and that you and you alone are real and responsible for the world moving on as it is and being alienated from your own body and not having a sense of self. That's all real stuff and terrifying stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
Yeah, I think Livia found something online that said, like, no modern, like, legitimate philosopher even takes part in these arguments because it's just such like, hey, get off the couch with your bong and maybe talk about something, some real philosophy.
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
Well, there are other disorders, too, that touch on other parts of solipsism. Certainly you're talking about the POS kind, the ethical solipsism. That very closely could tie into something like narcissistic personality disorder or antisocial personality disorder, that sort of lack of empathy and only making choices based on their own needs. That definitely is like rings of ethical solipsism.
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
This is from Yun, spelled J-A-N, but Yun is German. Hey guys, listen to the episode on Ludwig II, which I enjoyed like all your episodes. I work in research and development for wastewater technology, so I know how much work it is to research a new topic and become familiar enough to talk about it like you guys do. And I mostly research stuff in my own field, so well done.
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
I want to say thank you for being a steady presence throughout my PhD on waterless toilets. Fatherhood, the pandemic, and my new job, which often takes me on long road trips. Love learning, and your podcast allows me to broaden my horizon way beyond my normal work. Today, however, guys, I have to write to assure you that filling a hall of 500 people in Germany would be ein Kinderspiel.
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Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
Most people below the age of 40 here speak English to a decent degree, and I know plenty of people that listen to your show. So please, please come to Germany. If you do, I'll make it my mission to get the event sold out.
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Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
And let me know if you want any recommendations for decent beers while you're here. And that is from Jan.
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
We've had enough people saying come to Germany. I think we have to go to like Berlin and Munich just to see what the heck is going on. Two, huh? Yeah, we could do the big city style and then Bavarian city style.
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
Well, this is what, I mean, J-A-N in this letter said it's pronounced Y-U-N-N.
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
Yeah, for sure. We should mention the skeptics a little bit because that sort of lays the groundwork for solipsism a little bit. The skeptics started around the third century BCE. The word itself came from the Greek term meaning inquiry or examination.
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
And they were basically like, hey, it's not possible to have like some knowledge to make definitive judgments arguing against the Stoics who said, no, you should be able to test claims using, you know, stuff that we can see and hear using our senses. And the skeptics in this sort of lay the ground of what was to come for solipsism basically said like, hey, we can all be deceived, though.
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
What about the case of identical twins? You could... You could be deceived there, or you could have a sensory experience, if you're talking about trusting your senses, that aren't connected to reality, like that's what a dream is. And dreams sort of play into the whole thing, at least at the beginning.
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
Uh, speaking of the dreams though, there was a Taoist philosopher named, uh, Zhuangzi that, uh, and this also sort of laid the groundwork was, um, Hey, if I wake up from a dream and I was, uh, you know, and, uh, a wildebeest in that dream, uh, how do I know that I'm not really a wildebeest and that this is the dream?
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
Yeah. And that's, you know, basically saying like, hey, I know that I am real. I'm doing the thinking. I have a brain. And but that's about all I know. Right. They you know, Descartes was the first one that came in and said, hey, maybe we should get a system called methodic doubt. Great band name to determine if like, hey, you're saying something is truth.
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
Like one of the truths we can we should be able to test this. But yeah. Things are fallible, like math you can make mistakes in. You can't look at tradition of a culture because people might disagree with that kind of thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
And then the idea of an evil demon coming in and basically kind of taking hold of your consciousness and saying that you're having all these illusions and that's inhabited inside of you.
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
Well, the word itself, if you want to break it down, it first appeared in 1869 from Kant. And I think it's Latin for solace from alone and ipsy, meaning self. And this isn't the kind of thing where like at the beginning, people are like, wow, this is really holds a lot of water. From the beginning, it was pretty ridiculous, and philosophers thought it was pretty ridiculous. Oh, here's a quote.
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
No great philosopher has espoused solipsism. Right. It's the quote that Livia found. Because, you know, if you believe that there's nothing, then you can't have an argument about anything because, like you said at the beginning, a solipsist would just come in and go like, well, how do you know? Prove it. You can't prove that because even your proof isn't proof because it's not real proof.
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
What do you think? Yeah, we'll be right back.
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Stuff You Should Know
Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?
Yeah, and in terms of neuroscience, you know, you're talking about maybe a technology where you could brain splice and you could literally maybe get someone inside someone else's head.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
All right, so I kind of teased out the importance of, or I'm sorry, importance. I soften T's here in the South, everybody, if you haven't noticed by now, and you're 17. Receiving communities are very important.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
How safe these people are going to be when they move to this place is, again, A, they're still going to be vulnerable to the impacts of climate where they go, most likely, or almost, you know, with 100 percent certainty.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
But just how safe they're going to be, period, because we talked about sometimes when they set up on the outskirts of towns and there's violence and they're more susceptible by being in a shanty or a tent or something to just even a hard rain. So it's almost like this. It's a vicious cycle that's happening where people are being displaced to places that also aren't safe.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Yeah. Here's the thing, though. And this isn't like a bright side sort of thing. It puts a strain on resources when a lot of new people come to a place. But they can also be an asset because most of those migrants are going to end up performing a lot of very important jobs in that area. A lot of them work in agriculture. Some work in construction. Some work in child care.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
But those same people are also not necessarily – it depends on the receiving community – even down to that community level and how they're going to take care of those people. And what I mean by take care in this case is just see that they get a fair shot at like earning a wage by performing a job. If you face a lot of potential workplace abuse,
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
If you're one of those migrants in the United Arab Emirates is a striking example. Eighty eight percent of the population there is made up of migrants, mainly from Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh. And it's very hot there as well. And so they're not taking care of their migrant population of workers.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
And they can just sometimes some companies might be like, you know, we're not going to pay you for that. What are you going to do about it?
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Yeah, potentially. So under the United Nations, they have a refugee convention from 1951 that specifically defines the good thing it does. It defines that refugees are entitled to legal rights, entitled to travel, some kinds of support, housing, that kind of thing. But the.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
I guess kind of the downside of what it did is it very narrowly defined what a refugee was in the wake of World War II, which was you have to be fleeing persecution on the basis of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or group membership. And only if you're fleeing from one border to the next.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
We already mentioned that a lot of this is happening within their home country, so they don't have any of those UN guaranteed rights. But a lot of people, legal scholars, are saying, hey, we need to expand that definition to include maybe not necessarily only cross-border and people who are climate refugees.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Well, yeah, and that's just, you know, that's the UN definition. There are other places in the world, the Organization of African Unity Convention in the Latin America, Cartagena. Is that Cartagena? Yeah, I know that from romancing the stone. We just watched that with Ruby last weekend.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
It holds up. And if you have a kid that's around that age that's into sort of like action-adventure kind of movies, which she is, it's a great one, man. She had a really good time. And it's not like super inappropriate for an 80s movie.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Not yet, but yeah, that'll be coming. It's just Danny DeVito, man. What a national treasure that guy is.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Ira! I forgot how much I love Remains in the Stone. All right. So back to Cartagena Declaration, they have an expanded definition of refugee that is more broad than the U.N., where they say events that are seriously disturbing public order, which obviously could include climate events.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Like there's an animal climate migration we're not even going to talk about.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Yeah, the writing is on the wall there, very sadly.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Yeah. And Fiji kind of stepped up and were like, hey, we have some underdeveloped land. I guess it was undeveloped land that we can sell you. This is in 2014. And the president at the time of Kiribati was Enote Tonga.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
All right. And Tongs, you know, was all over this. Like, let's buy this land. Let's move people like not just, you know, a few families. Like, let's start moving en masse over there because, you know, the writing is on the wall here. And these islands just aren't going to be around at some point. Right. He was calling it migration with dignity.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
And then in 2016, Tong lost the president to Teneti Mamao. And this it was just, you know, sometimes when a new administration comes in, Josh, things can shift in radical directions. I don't know if you knew that or not.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Yeah, well, in that case, it was billions of dollars to physically re-engineer these islands and build those walls, and they didn't have that kind of dough. So China stepped up and said, You've got that marine protected zone where you don't allow fishing. Give us those fishing rights. So this is just sort of another good example of the domino effect that can happen.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
All of a sudden, you're wrecking that part of the sea because it was a protected zone that's no longer protected because China said, hey, we'll help you re-engineer those islands if you let us fish there. But they only ended up giving a fraction of the cost of what's needed. I think New Zealand is also stepping up, right? Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Yeah, I mean, I think people are of two minds here, and it seems like there are way more people that are so attached to their home they don't want to leave it.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
But I've heard just anecdotally stories of people that are like, I'm getting the heck out of California, or I'm getting the heck out of a hurricane-prone area, like if you live around the Gulf of Mexico or something like that, and those panhandle-y areas. or in Houston or Miami, we're getting out of Dodge.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
So some people are doing that, but it definitely doesn't seem like people are taking it seriously enough yet.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Yeah, for sure. And, you know, we'll get to some studies and stats and things. But the stats you got to keep in mind are kind of a guess because, as Libya points out, or maybe we'll just talk about that when we get to the stats part.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Oh, did I see that all the way? I think I might have seen that all the way through back when it came out, but that was it.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
No, I'm the same way. There's something about Zodiac that is just endlessly watchable to me.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
I should check it out again. Oh, and I think I have a good reason to coming up, hinted.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
I know, you know. I have a couple of stats as far as the United States goes. This is at this point already here in 2025, two or three million Americans leave their homes every year, every single year, two to three million due to natural disasters that happen, floods, earthquakes, fires. hurricanes, all the stuff that happens here. We don't have volcanoes.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Oh, yeah, yeah. True. But generally in the lower 48, we don't have volcanoes.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
No, no, no. Most of those people do return. But over the past couple of decades, about 3 million people have moved just to avoid flooding, which is a long period of time. But those are people that are just like, yeah, this place floods. I remember after Katrina, I feel like Atlanta got a pretty decent amount of displaced New Orleans residents that stayed here.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Yeah, we being specifically the United States, because there are other parts of the world that are already sort of proactive rather than kind of, like you said, being reactive and waiting when potential refugees are just sort of at the border saying, like, we have no place to go because our place almost said habitat. I guess humans have a habitat, right? Yeah, sure. Is that true?
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Yeah, every animal has a habitat. Okay, I didn't know if I was being callous by considering us all just animals.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Maybe so. But speaking of the U.S., you know, you do hear a lot of talk about that kind of thing, like, oh, people are going to be coming into our country. You know, depending on who you talk to in this country, some people might welcome them, some people might not.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Oh, that makes sense. 20 degrees higher than the temperature of the egg interior. Washing an egg at too high will potentially cook it. Washing at a temperature lower than the shell contents and the permeable nature of the shell will actually absorb the exterior contents so you're eating whatever soap that you are using.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
This knowledge is gained from keeping my own backyard flock for over a decade. And that is from the wonderful Meg.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
But as Livia is very astute to point out, generally what we're talking about nowadays, the more common thing that you're seeing is people – people don't want to leave their home, you know?
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
They'll move as kind of close as they can to where they're from rather than say, hey, let's just pick up and go to a completely different country where I know nothing about it and I don't speak the language.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Like, what's generally happening is if there's a climate issue, like, let's say, which could look like a lot of things, and we're going to talk about a lot of them, it could mean I just can't farm here anymore because it's so drought-prone or... There was a my coastline is disappearing or there was a natural disaster here. So I have to leave. People want to move close to where they are.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
So they're generally saying, like, all right, I can't be out here in the farm area anymore. So let's move toward the urban centers. And that's why a lot of these urban centers in the global south are popping at the seams.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Right. And but the idea is that I guess if you're moving away from where wildfires are more rampant, you're going to move to a place probably as close as you can. Unless, you know, in America, if you have like family on the other side of the country or something where those wildfires generally don't happen, maybe you'll do that. But we're talking about countries.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
You're probably moving within your country. And within your country, it's not like, oh, well, I'm at a place where the climate problem isn't a problem. So it's not solving a bigger problem. You know what I'm saying?
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Yeah. And also you're you're living like perhaps in like a shanty town on the outskirts of town and you're going to see increased poverty. That's going to be an unstable situation. And then violence comes along oftentimes in these places. She found one study from 2022 of Central African migrants. Five percent reported that they moved specifically for environmental reasons.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
But 50 percent said, yeah, but that played a part in the decision to leave. Like whether or not they're saying like, no, the drought's too bad here, I'm leaving. Or some places are just the extreme heat is becoming so bad as people just can't live there anymore.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
They're not saying I'm moving just because of that, but half of them were saying like, yeah, that was a factor that led to this whole mess.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Yeah, I mean, over an eight-year period from 2002 to 2010, the urban population in Syria went from just under 9 million people to almost 14 million. That's nuts. That is a lot of people to add. But, and this isn't like, I'm in full agreement, so this isn't a counterpoint, but Syria mishandled that.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
And there are other countries in the region that suffered through the same drought, specifically Jordan and Lebanon, that had a government that was more proactive and responsive. And they had policies that were put in place that they didn't have the same kind of, you know, destructive outcomes that Syria had. So it's, you know, it all depends on how you're handling the situation.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
We're going to talk a lot about countries, you know, people leaving countries and then especially the receiving countries, because that's really where the rubber meets the road.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
That's right. And if the road is still intact and not cracked to pieces.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Yeah, true. Well, this is probably a good place since I promised to talk about something stat related. One of the reasons it's hard or one of the reasons you get something like anywhere from 50 to 250 million people, this pretty big swing is because we don't know how effective our efforts are going to be to curb emissions and to get things, you know, sort of on the right track again.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
How successful we're going to be at, you know, some wealthier countries doing things like seawalls and, you redistributing water resources and things like that, because as you'll see, a lot of and we talked about before that, you know, the most precious resource in the future is love is it's it is love. Oh, man, I needed that. Water, unfortunately.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
So, you know, there have been people that talk about, you know, the wars of the future will be fought over water. And as we'll see, a lot of climate migration happens either because of a lack of water or lack of water that's, you know, useful for humans or too much water and other parts like rising seawaters and such.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Yeah, that's right. Well, you know what we can do? We can just migrate to another part of the iHeart offices here. Yeah, nice. A nice, cool studio.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Yeah, I think you meant North Africa, not North America.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
I think people who listen to the show know us enough now to where we're like old pals and they're like, oh, Josh, Chuck, you don't even need to point that out. We know what he meant.
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
All right. Well, how about this? Why don't we take a break? You said Latin America was 17 million, right?
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Five million. So, you know, not nearly as many as the others, but there are, again, water scarcity. Yeah. In places like Mongolia and Kazakhstan. So now can we take a break?
Stuff You Should Know
How Climate Migration Works
Yeah, and that's the last fun we're going to have on this episode because this is not so fun.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Well, I think the Beatles one has the least amount of meat on the bone.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
It's a very, very famous story. But the one that's really interesting to me is Ford vs. Ferrari because that is a terrific movie that I highly recommend.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
I doubt it, but I'm sure you can stream it somewhere. The great James Mangold directed it, and I'm always a fan of his work. He did the new Bob Dylan movie. What else? He did the last Indiana Jones movie, which was better than the one before. What else? I don't know. James Mangold's good. He sort of has a very varied resume, which I always appreciate in a director.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
I am, and I do recommend it. He also did the Wolverine movie and the Logan movie. So yeah, he's all over the place.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
That's right. And their very famous founder, Enzo Ferrari, pitched a deal for 18 million bucks for 90 percent interest in the company. And as the movie portrays it, this isn't in this article, but as the movie portrays it, if I'm not mistaken, and I'm not sure if it's true or not, but at least it was in the movie.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
I don't see why they would make this part up, is that he was using that deal to get a better deal from Fiat. Right. So playing one against the other, which will really make someone mad in business. Sure.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Oh, it's fine. It's a top ten. We haven't done those in forever.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Apparently, when Ford showed up to sign the paperwork, Ferrari said that, you know what, you're this Ford assembly line, this bureaucracy that you've got in this company is this is not how we do it over here. So no deal.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
It's always kind of a fun throwback, and it seems like we never do ten. With our three-act structure, nine is probably a great number, but I guess we'll see what happens, right?
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
So they won first, second, and third. So they really bested Ferrari. They also won in subsequent years. So they swept, or not swept, but they won in 66, 67, 68, and 69. That's a sweep. Well, I meant not sweep first, second and third place necessarily. Or they may have. I don't know.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
But I think we should do one on the 24 hours of Le Mans because that's that's I'm not a car race guy, but that to me is the most interesting one.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
And it's not just like a circular NASCAR thing. They're driving through streets.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah. Apparently the founder of Lamborghini, John Smith... His name was Ferruccio Lamborghini. He was a tractor maker in the 60s, and he had a Ferrari. And he was like, this clutch is kind of janky.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
And as the story goes, he got in touch with Enzo Ferrari and was like, hey, you know, I think I can help make your clutch better because you got this problem here with this spawn divot, and I can help make that thing better. And apparently, as the story goes, Ferrari did not receive that phone call well and was basically like, get lost.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Exactly. What a weird name for a car.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
You and I are not car guys, but like if I see a Lamborghini on the street or something or like the old Magnum Ferrari, I'd love that stuff.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
A little bit. I mean, you know, I'm not a sports car guy, but I just can't help but see those and think, like, what an amazing machine that is.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yes. And I feel like we did this on an Internet roundup or something. Maybe it sounded really familiar. This story did. It did. OK. Not to you.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah, I mean, considering how much they were, that is a song, you know.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah, I mean, I think every guy, I mean, Thomas Magna fitted him.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Really? Well, when it showed him in the car, his knees were up toward his chin a bit.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah, because he was a tall guy. But that Ferrari, I feel like for guys of our generation, that Ferrari and the Porsche from Risky Business are like two of the top five probably dream cars.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah, it had the lights that popped up. It was one of the not as lauded versions, I think. But man, it's something about that movie. It just sort of locked it in. I mean, it's like a little hatchback. It's not even that special. When you look at it now.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Oh, yeah. We got to get going.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
That's right. And I feel like I've seen this in more than one place in the world where. Oh, really? Yeah, not even necessarily a road, but like where like, well, you don't want to give up your house. So we're just going to build these skyscrapers all around it.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Oh, yeah. This is the extreme because this happened in China to this couple in 2012. The man's name was Luo Bogan. Bogan? Bogan. He and his wife refused to – they tried to come in and take their house to make a highway. And they were like, no, we're not going to do it. You didn't offer us enough money. And so we're not going anywhere. And so they built –
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah, but you would remember this one because it involves self-mutilation.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
I mean, if you're visualizing a house literally sort of in the middle of a road and the road just goes around it, that's what they did.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
I mean, this is the most extreme case of something like this that I've heard. You know, it didn't take long for them to give in, obviously, because it was, well, dangerous and awful. Yeah. And so they got they did eventually give in and got a larger offer than they originally asked for. But I don't get the feeling that they thought they won.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah. I mean, it's really egregious when you look at this picture.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah. Through it practically.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
That was a spiteful road, and now we're going to talk about a spiteful statue.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Because in Germany, between the towns of Bonn and Buehl, there's the old Rhine River and the Rhine River Bridge that connects the two.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
And so the Little Bridge Man or the Brückenmanken, it's kind of a mouthful, is the Little Bridge Man. And that is a sculpture of a guy sort of bent over, sticking his butt out. And that became the subject of a lot of contention, eventually backfiring. Is that right?
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
But like I said, it backfired because that statue became a bit of a local icon. So it was on banknotes. It was on people took pictures of it. It was on local postcards. It was a little tourist attraction. But what they did was they put attacks on the bridge, but only attacks going one way and not back into your own place. Right.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
So what happened was from the Buell side, they could see the statue because it was pointing, you know, their butt was pointing at them. So they got all the benefits of seeing this thing without having to pay to cross the bridge to see it. If you're on the other side and you wanted to go like actually see this statue, you had to pay to get across.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
And that's what Bonnebule.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yes, there is a book, and this is, as the story goes, the book in 1904 called A Dictionary of Saintly Women. Mm-hmm. The story is that Viking, you know, berserker raider types came pillaging southward to the British Isles at one point. Well, not at one point, in 867 CE specifically.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
All right. And I think that's break number two. And we'll be back to finish up with three more right after this.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
And while they were doing their berserkering and ravaging of the villages and things, there was obviously the kind of thing that would happen would be assaults on people physically, sexually, and otherwise. And so when they went to a monastery in Scotland, the Coldingham Monastery, the lead nun, St. A.B. the Younger, said, hey, here's what we'll do.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
All right, we're going to talk about, and I've seen stories sort of like this, but this one seems to take the cake. When a Christmas display goes too far and all of a sudden people or neighbors are like, hey, this is getting out of hand. It's too bright or it's, you know, people are driving in to see these things now and I can't even get down my own street. Right.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
And this happened in the mid-2000s in Ross Township, Pennsylvania, when a dude named Bill, an electrician, key, named Bill Ansell did a pretty, you know, audacious Christmas display in his front yard there in Ross Township such that people were driving in and neighbors started to get annoyed.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
That's right. And apparently left it up year round. Santa urinating in the front yard. A choir that was beheaded. Frosty the Snowman getting run over by a car. Also up in lights, F. Ross Township. Yeah. Yeah. Just just right there in string lights. A sign that said this display is dedicated to Ross Township.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Shame on you for destroying my display that brought so much joy and happiness to so many people.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah. And then he built a kill desert.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah. Be a good neighbor, everyone. Be a good neighbor to your neighbor. That's all you got to do. You don't have to. You can go above and beyond if you want, but just be like base level good.
Stuff You Should Know
10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
We want to keep our chastity and our covenant to God. It's a big deal for us nuns. We should cut off our noses to keep that from happening because they won't assault us then.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah. And let's not tank everyone's property values. We're all in this together.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
That's right. This is super spite.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
That's right. We'll move on to Prince Rogers Nelson, a.k.a. Prince, a.k.a. for a little while, the artist formerly known as Prince. Mm-hmm. Because very famously, Prince changed his name in 1993 to an unrecognizable symbol. It was sort of the symbol for man and woman. And it had some other flourishes and had kind of been tweaked and redesigned over the years. It was on different pieces.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
You know, he had a guitar shaped like that previously. I think it was on his motorcycle in Purple Rain, maybe. Oh, yeah. But it was a symbol that had been around his world for a while. And Prince said, yep, that's my name now. Don't wear it out. Don't wear it out because you can't say it. So that's impossible.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
But I think at the time, I remember everyone just thought it was Prince being Prince and being strange and being eccentric. But it is now pretty widely accepted that he did that to spite Warner Brothers records. Because he was in a record contract he didn't like for numerous reasons.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
He had re-signed it too, by the way.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
No, no, no. He re-signed before this one. This was the second version. He re-signed a third time later.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah. Not even to spite, I think. I think it's to protect themselves from sexual assault. Sure. I mean, this is all horrific.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
That's right. He also wrote the word slave on his cheek in a lot of performances at the time. And it didn't work. He had to see the contract through, which just another few years, I think in 2000, it expired. And then he was Prince again. And like you said, you know, bygones were bygones, I guess, because he re-signed yet again 20 years later with Warner Brothers.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
it right work around yeah exactly so rip prince man he was pretty great yes uh my friend and your friend scotty got to go to his final performance the solo atlanta performance at the fox theater just days before he died yeah and it always makes me so mad because scotty didn't even really love prince yeah I'm glad he got to go.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
No, no, no. I didn't think you were.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
So that's one of those. We almost went and pulled the trigger to scalp tickets. And it was just like, I don't know why we didn't, because it was special enough to be a piano solo concert by Prince. I was like, man, we got to go. And we didn't. And then he died.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
I saw Prince when I lived in L.A. in the late 90s or I'm sorry. Yeah, I guess it was early 2000s. And that was amazing just being able to see him once with a full band. It was something else.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
He was. I also saw Tom Petty on that last tour. I saw him quite a few times, but I was really glad to be at that last one.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
One of the best. He's one of my faves.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
That's right. This is another image search quality or image search worthy kind of thing to look up. If you're in a place where you can do that, just type in Plum Island pink house and you will see a quite large pink house sitting in the middle of nothing.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Made out of spite. A lot of times these spite houses happen when a couple gets divorced. It should come as no surprise. Or I should say probably couples with a lot of money get divorced. Because what I've learned is in order to have a spite house, you have to be rich. Well, I'm just going to build that huge house to get back at someone. It's a very privileged position to be in. For sure.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
So, you know, I am judging. But in 2015, there was a New York Times article that talked about this thing that was built, like you said, in the middle of nowhere. It said it was overlooking a vast landscape of pristine salt marsh. And it apparently happened in 1925 when a couple got divorced and the wife said, all right, we can get a divorce.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
But you have to rebuild an exact duplicate of the house we live in if you're kicking me out of it because I love it so much. And he went, no problem. And so he built it and he said, you didn't say where. And he said it just like that, I bet.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Just clapping the dust off your hands.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah, I mean, I guess if you're a loner and you like nature, it's not the worst place to be. I just saw a sunset picture. It looked pretty nice.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah, and I'm sure upkeep on that thing is you're probably repainting that thing every couple of years, right?
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah, you would have to. Apparently, it was lived in until 2011 and then eventually was sold to the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge in 2012. And you can't get to it now. It's off limits to the public. But they're trying to make it an official protected house so it will stand forever. Yeah.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
I don't know. Well, some people say that that was just an urban legend and it was just a family who lived out there.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
So another recent one from Automatt. I love this real-time stuff. This, you know, I mentioned some sort of episode on currency and how it affects things. And this is from Tree. Tree, okay, awesome. Not a tree, but Tree. Tree. Hey guys, Chuck. Specifically, you mentioned in the Automat episode you were trying to formulate something around how change affects things, or currency rather.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Look into the situation in Zimbabwe, that might help, where it was too expensive to import metal coins. They had adopted the US dollar. It was too expensive to import the metal because of weight. So there was a huge change shortage because store owners couldn't give shoppers change.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Shoppers would have to purchase additional items to try and get their total purchase as close to the whole dollar amount. And he sent a New York Times article. And that, my friend, Tree, is exactly what I was talking about as something that could be a part of that episode. So I appreciate that direction. And that is specifically Tree Marchink. Great name, Tree.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
That was crazy. I remember that.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah, there's got to be more to it.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah, it gets even worse because what the Vikings did was burn the place down with them inside and killed them all.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah. And they just burned them down. They didn't spite anybody.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah. Oh, wait, but doesn't it mean to spite your own face? Right. So you're harming yourself. Yeah, I got you.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah, I just got confused.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Wow, that's really good. I like that.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
All right. Let's talk about Henry Clay Frick because he was a Gilded Age character. I don't know about Robert Barron, but he was very least a mogul. And along with Andrew Carnegie, they made quite a lot of money together as partners in the steel industry. That relationship went south and Carnegie got him out of the picture, got Frick out of the picture.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
That's right. Just go to squarespace.com slash stuff for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code stuff to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
And, you know, to the point where he was, Carnegie was sued and Frick actually won a lawsuit and won compensation and everything. But it wasn't like he was like, all right, we're all even now. He hated Andrew Carnegie for the rest of his life.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah, for sure. Anything you can do, I can do bigger and better. And so you would think at the end of their lives, they could just let bygones be bygones. And that's what Andrew Carnegie tried to do when he was in failing health.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
He said, can you get in touch with my old partner, Frick, Mr. Henry Clay Frick, and tell him he's got a great name and tell him that I'd like to meet up with him and patch this thing up before we're gone off of this earth. And so they brought the letter. He dispatched his personal secretary, James Bridge, to send this to Frick personally.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
And Frick apparently balled up the letter and threw it back at him and said, tell him I'll see him in hell where we were both going.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Oh, man, if you I know you're getting into some old TV and you always have been. But if you do you have Criterion, the Criterion channel streamer?
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Highly recommended, by the way. Sure. Like it's really the only great one out there as far as quality stuff. But they have old Mary Tyler Moore or maybe that was on Max. I can't remember, but anyway, Emily and I started watching old Mary Tyler Moore episodes.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah. And it is, I watched a little bit when I was a kid, but man, it is so good and it's so funny and charming and witty and like still great.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
So good. Ted Knight and who's the woman who played Rhoda?
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Oh, it's killing me. Valerie Harper. There you go. Valerie Harper. Ed Asner. It's really a great, great show. And Mary Tyler Moore is just a gem of a human. I hope she's still good as a person.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
I watched the documentary about her. It's worthwhile.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Yeah, it's excellent, in fact.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Hey, sure. I feel like we've killed some time. Should we do a third and then take a break? I think that's a great idea, Chuck. All right, we're going to talk about Saddam Hussein. And Saddam Hussein didn't like one George H.W. Bush, who was the guy who said his name that way because of the first Gulf War.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Right. And if you walked around it, you were given a bad room.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
Did you look at a picture of this?
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
You totally tell who it is. It's big old George Bush senior right there on the floor of the hotel of the lobby. It's a very strange thing to see in a nice hotel. Yeah. But W came along later on, went back to Iraq for the, you know, the war there on the basis of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. Right. And he had them smash that up.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
He's like, Daddy, I'm not going to let him do that to you. here's some sledgehammers. And so they went in there and they smashed that thing up and chiseled it up and supposedly laid a portrait of Saddam. They didn't do that in mosaic tile, did they?
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
He's like, here's some sledgehammers and I need a good tile guy in Baghdad.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
I think so. To ruin your hotel lobby, your nicest hotel lobby. Yeah.
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10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite
All right. We'll be right back with three more.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Yeah. Also, a 60-year-old man named Fred Goble was stricken about an hour after that, and this is also key because this was the second spotting of an individual, another tall, thin prowler fleeing the scene.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
All right. So by Thursday night in Mattoon, Illinois, it is on like Donkey Kong, even though that wasn't a thing. And the town were pretty scared. People were, you know, rightfully so. They were locking their doors. They were locking their windows, which is not something you really did back then.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
That's right. If you're curious, the other headline, bagels, colon, like an unsweetened donut? So another thing started happening on Thursday, which is these gentlemen and their sons in the town, the Anti-Theft Association, got their guns, got some makeshift weapons. These are those 3%. I think I need to point that out. They start roaming the town, like, you know, the vigilantes.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Like, they were quasi-deputized. I think they were supposed to, you know, like, the cops would get help from them for cattle rustling and, like, chicken thieving and stuff like that. But they knew this was a big deal, so they grabbed their guns and got in their trucks and did their thing.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Yeah. You know, as we do, we did our financial conversion, because we love those. You knew it would feature a financial money conversion. So we went to our trusty West Egg calculator, and that would be $176,306 a day. So he's not helping matters. I would walk through any backyard for that kind of dough. For sure.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Yeah, no good. So this was sort of a busy time for the cops, obviously, right? Because they didn't usually get calls like this, right?
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Yeah, and that was about half of what they should have had. They were understaffed. They should have had around 20 cops. Only had 10. And as a result of this, over the previous months, there was sort of a spike in crime that didn't have anything to do with this, like robberies and stuff like that. There were army checks rolling in. A lot of the young men were off fighting, like we said.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Everyone knew that. So there was a spike in crime for Mattoon. I don't think it's anything to worry about like today's big cities. Sure. But for Mattoon, it was a spike in crime.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
That's right. The cops are hard at work. They're freaking out a little bit. They started working double shifts because they were down half of what they should have been. Like we said, they also didn't have two-way radios in the car yet. They did exist, but they couldn't afford that kind of thing in such a small department. So...
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
When calls came in, they came into City Hall, and there had to be a cop there with a car that said, well, where are we supposed to go? And that's how they got police out.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
So things are getting a little crazy, just like a movie would happen. Or I guess what would happen to a movie? What a weird way to say that. The state sent two investigators, one Richard Piper and Francis with an I, Barry, from the Illinois Bureau of Crime Identification and Investigation.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
It's a little weird. It doesn't even spell anything. It spells Ibti? So, yeah, good point. So they arrived on Thursday, and that was when these vigilantes had kind of hit the streets. Things are getting a little crazy.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
They take possession of that paint cloth from Beulah Cordes, again, managing, I think it probably was harmless by this point, but they didn't press it into their face, thankfully, because they're real pros. And then the FBI also showed up, supposedly just to observe, but there were a couple of feds there.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Can you imagine what that was like? Yeah.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Okay, we're back, everybody. So, I'm not sure if you remember where we were when we left off and had 15 minutes of ads. Things are a little out of hand in Mattoon. So again, like a movie, a profile of the gasser emerges from one of these state investigators from the, from what? MTE? MTE.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
That suggested that he, of course it wasn't a woman doing this, he was mentally imbalanced, intelligent, possibly brilliant, and then said, the man is a nut. Got decidedly less forensic, I guess, at that point.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
That's correct. So in general, though, like despite all this going on, the cops didn't seem like super, super concerned about the crimes. I think they were worried about the perception of them. But Chief Cole said it was basically a case of nerves. So he's the first one to kind of plant that seed that it might just be a bunch of hysterical women in town who miss their husbands. Right.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Two stars? Three stars? I give it seven. How many stars? Oh, wow. Okay, never mind. I don't want to know what you think. Seven stars. Seven stars. I'll take it. The police chief also, Chief Cole, tried to pin it on carbon tetrachloride fumes from the local Imperial, I'm sorry, the Atlas Imperial Diesel Engine Company. They were not too fond of this theory, obviously, as a company.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
And so they had a press conference. Well, not a press conference. They talked to the one person that ran the newspaper. And said, you know what? The cops didn't even bother to come by here and check on anything. And you look around, all these kids working here are just fine. Nobody is... bleeding from the mouth today and everything's good.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
And not only that, but we hired a PhD health department inspector to come by and they said that it was impossible for any carbon tetrachloride vapors to escape the plant in any amount of concentration that would even closely approximate a toxic condition. And everybody in the town went defensive much?
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
If this gets released as a live episode, we don't release the opening bit. That's only for y'all. Is everyone going to wonder what the hell I'm talking about with these stars? I never think about that stuff. And I don't care. No.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
We're back, everyone. So the cops weren't completely blowing this off, obviously. They had an obligation. They did look into about 30 people by the end of the case total. And what they did was they examined records of the state mental hospital to see if anyone had escaped that might fit the profile and terrorize a town with a paralytic noxious gas.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
New York has no problem with this. Montreal has no problem with this.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
So at one point, one of the Chicago papers printed an off-record statement by Chief, I'm sorry, not Chief Cole, but Commissioner Wright, that said that they had zeroed in on a suspect, a mad scientist, and they quickly denied this and said, no, no, no, we're looking for four people, actually, two home chemists and two crackpots. That's a quote. It is a quote.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
You know, we follow the two maxims of live performance, say moist and vomit. Projectile vomit, no less. Like a 30-minute period.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
All right, so... Almost immediately, the calls started dropping off because people were like, that doesn't sound very fun. The last recorded attack came on September 11th, which was a Monday night at the home of one Bertha Bentz. Not Beulah, but a Bertha. And this one is very key as well. This was the third time a prowler was spotted. But Minneapolis St.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Every high heel needs a steel toe.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
That was it. And more bagel follow-ups, of course.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
So after September 15th, only a few other mentions of the whole thing appeared in the paper at all. The most notable was an editorial on September 20th where nearby Decatur, Illinois, the only way to describe this is a bit of a newspaper flame war between these two small towns, a real Springfield, Shelbyville type of situation. Sure. Yeah. I mean, me or you? You. Okay.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Oh wait, it does say Chuck, colon, speak now. That's how we do this, right? That's how tight we are. So they got into a bit of a flame war, started writing editorials, kind of making fun of one another. Decatur was making fun of Mattoon. Mattoon would get very defensive, obviously.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
and say, you know what, this article overlooks the indisputable fact that there was a mad gasser at large at first and that a failure by the police here to take care of the case seriously at the outset allowed the mass hysteria that followed to overrun any investigation and also the odor probably came from Decatur.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
What? Wouldn't it be funny if their reaction, they're like, oh, my God, amazing. If you're like, so this is about Lenders Bagels and sponsored by Lenders Bagels.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
I think there were 24 different attacks that affected between 36 to over 100, if you count when 70 of those three percenters in their pickup trucks said, I smell something. So I don't like to count that. So I think about 28 people-ish were affected.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Yeah, so there were a lot of skeptics in town, obviously, including, still, Chief Cole. The attacks dropped off pretty sharply, and he was quoted as summing it up by saying, it was a mistake from beginning to end. I don't even know what that means. Like, a mistake? Yeah. That it happened, or that they took part and investigated? I don't even know what that means.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
So when Johnson showed up to study the victims, he was able to get hard information from them firsthand about the actual gassing. But he's doing a psychological research paper, so he needs data about who they are, their level of schooling, and their socioeconomic level. And he's got to have all the personal data. And no one would give that up. So he devised his own system, right? Yeah.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
You should Google that other super interesting story, though.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
And that person was my father-in-law. Let's cut that part out, Jerry. All right. Just in case. So, that's a great joke. What are you talking about? He sounds just like that, by the way. So for occupation, he looked at the census records. He looked at the 1940 census, which was the closest one, kind of gleaned what he could. But back then, they had really broad labels for censuses. I like that.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
All right. I just made that up. I can say that now because I'm a whole human being without a big hole in the front of my mouth. I did this show earlier. Yeah, you're clapping because I have all my teeth. Early in the year, it was like anesthetist, synthesis. It was not good. Your dental work just got a round of applause. I know. That's pretty neat. I'll have to tell Dr. Presley.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
No. I've never heard that. I thought that meant you were farty. No, I don't do that. Full of beans? No. The musical fruit? I'm full of beans. Okay. I can tell. No, of course not. Well, never mind. Yeah, keep moving on. So we're going to take you back in time and hop in the Wayback Machine and go back to 1944 when it took place. Wayback Machine. This is the Wayback Machine, by the way.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
No, no, no. That wasn't my Dennis. That was a listener that wrote in. Oh, gotcha. Yeah, it was a great Dennis. The Dennis that drops F-bombs while you're in the chair. My kind of guy.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
You've heard that word. If you haven't, I'm going to call child services and report your parents.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
So cute. Oh, man, that threw me. My daughter's nine. She knows that word. Where are we? Okay, so for income, he based... Oh, no, no, no, we were talking about the sensei. It was a little vague back in those days, right? That's where I was.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Yeah, totally. Anything that was a great distraction for them.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Like, sure. Favor? Great. For income, he based it on, and this was actually the only part of the ABC scale that I thought was pretty smart.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
He would go to their house, and he would look around, because it was 1944, for household conveniences or luxuries at the time, which could really tell you a lot about your income as a household, which at the time was electricity in the house, a mechanical refrigerator, a telephone, and a radio.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
That's right. It's not us talking, everybody. Right. 1944 people.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
So, in the end, Johnson concluded that it was entirely psychogenic, that's a quote, that was birthed from a case of nerves experienced by Aileen Kearney to begin with, which resulted in that first call to the police that ended up in that night's blotter, spotted by the reporter from the Journal Gazette the next day, who concocted out of thin air this idea that there was an anesthetic prowler on the loose.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Sure. Which, you know, 97% of the town is reading this thing. So the germ of fear spreads. I forgot where I was with my fingers. It set off other case of nerves, which were attributed to that same prowler, further supporting the existence of the prowler, which may or may not have been a thing, which produced even more cases. So it was like, what you call that thing?
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Thanks. Should we, I mean, I feel like this is going pretty good still, right?
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
It's in the mind. So we're all there together. I suddenly just sound like a cult leader. So Mattoon in 1944 was a pretty small town of about 16,000. I think it's still a pretty small town, if I'm not mistaken. And it's populated back then with people with some great names. So you're going to hear some 1944 names tonight, like Bertha and Elmer. and Heber. Heber's my favorite.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
I think it's still going pretty good, you guys. We have to take another ad break in case this gets released. So we'll be right back, Minneapolis.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Yeah, for sure. And as a cherry on top of all that, on August 29th, like right before this happened, newspaper headlines nearby told the story of a Nazi POW, like a real Nazi POW, not those fake ones that they, you know... I don't know why I said that. A Nazi POW had escaped from prison from an army base where he was being held about 150 miles from Mattoon.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
And Beulah and Urban, like great 1940s names that you just don't hear anymore unless you are like a super hipster and you name your kid Beulah. Oh, yeah. It was my great-grandmother, I promise. It was surrounded by fields, corn and soybeans, so a lot of farming went on there.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
No one tried to pin it on this, but it just sort of lent itself to the air of paranoia.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Yeah, for sure. This is also a time when people worried about, you know, like sarin gas and mustard gas. It was just a period of our history where gassing was in the air.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
I love you, but that was terrible. I don't like puns. No, no, no. Don't compliment sandwich me.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
I love you. Terrible joke. And you also look good tonight. That's how you do it. Oh, hello, miss. You like tubby old guys? Emily would think that's hysterical, by the way. I know. Just to be clear. Oh, man, I got thrown because she hit on me. Oh, here's the other thing. No motive ever emerged. And no one was ever, like, thank goodness, no one was ever robbed or assaulted or anything like that.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
It was just these random, sporadic gassings.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Not a lot of physical evidence is happening at this point. It was also pretty peculiar. Jeez, that word. It's getting late, everybody. It was also peculiar. It was strange. Porky Pig. That was good. Pequila, pequila, pequila. Strange. The whole thing ended when the police announced they were gonna start sticking the tube down the throat, right?
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
They did have a couple of railroad junctions that still went through the town, which was good because that also provided work. And then there were a few factories. We looked up to see what was interesting, and there was a shoe company, the Brown Shoe Company there, which seemed pretty cool.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Nobody was there, because no one wanted to be around him.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Man, what a setup. You're a real pro.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
So, though there was not a lot of physical evidence, there was a little bit. You can't discount that. You had that moist pink cloth that... Everyone could not help but put in their face. People did bleed from their lips and mouth. Children vomited. All that stuff really did happen. There was that slashed window screen. There was that high-heeled steel-toed boot footprint in the dirt.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
So even though there wasn't a lot of stuff, and I don't think we said, they did test the rag, obviously, but by the time they got it, I think it was a few days later, back in those days, there was nothing that they could isolate from the rag.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Yeah, the cops also had a motive for just wanting this to go away. Like we said, they had a penchant for covering up crimes. Did you like that? I did. Penchant. Covering up crimes or, you know, kind of burying crimes. This let them off the hook because they had nothing, basically. So it totally let them off the hook.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
And we know that they were comfortable in covering up crimes from the Journal Gazette, so it wasn't too far-fetched.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Yeah. There is one little – and to me this is sort of the biggest one if you're making this case, which is despite all of these cases that happened, I think there was over 30 of them or 20-something – none of them overlapped geographically or time-wise.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
When I was 1944, I bet it was both. Yeah, a little bit from column A, a little bit from column B. But a long way of saying if you lived in Mattoon, you probably were a farmer. You may have worked on the railroad all the live long day or you might have worked at one of those factories. It's what they call the pre-bagel era.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
If this town had been in the grips of mass hysteria, there would have been a call saying, I've been gassed, and five minutes later on the other side of town, at some point during this 10 days, somebody would have made it geographically and physically impossible because they're all freaking out and calling the cops. But every single incident could be explained geographically speaking.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Someone could have gone from one place to another in the amount of time that it occurred.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
No. In fact, Maruna names an individual. Oh, man. You guys are the best. This is probably going to be the one, you guys. Oh, okay.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
That just pushed it right over the line. He names an individual, a local man named Farley Llewellyn, a trained chemist and a college dropout from the University of Illinois who built a professional chemistry lab on his parents' property that blew up about a week before this all happened. And he was tall and had a slim athletic build.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Yeah, for sure. And everyone tolerated this in the town because he came from a prominent family.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
His family owned, back when individuals owned grocery stores and it wasn't just some monolith corporation, his dad was a grocer and a very beloved grocer who would do really genuinely great things like take food by at Christmas if people didn't have a lot of money and gifts to children and stuff like that. So he was a beloved individual. He was a real Chuck type. Oh, come on. Are you kidding me?
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Those are my gifts. That didn't go over well. Cut that part, Jerry. I had them in the palm of my hand. I know. It was ruined. Yeah, I know. I saw it. I was here. So we're back, everybody. They were a beloved family. Everybody loved these people, so they overlooked their weird son.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Here's the thing, though, with nitromethane is it's known more as an exploding thing than a, like, paralyzing thing. So the leap that Maruna took was that, hey, I think that this guy was trying to blow people up. I think he didn't fit in because he was a gay, smart chemistry loner in this town in 1944 where you couldn't be that.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
And so he took revenge on the town by trying to blow them up one bedroom at a time.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
The second problem, in Maruna's book, he got a lot of his information, basically all of it, by talking with townspeople, and this is many, many years later, right?
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
And they were not able to verify a lot of the claims. There was a lot of speculation going on. This whole idea that he was gay, so he was an outcast. And so he wanted revenge on the town and wanted to kill people by blowing them up.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
And then they stopped happening because his grosser families, that sounds so strange, his family had the kind of money to send him away to the state hospital where he was never heard from again. And that's why the gassing stopped. And this is problematic for a bunch of reasons, obviously through today's lens, because locals saying he was weird and strange.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
It could have been that he was just a regular gay guy who was into chemistry and maybe sort of a brainiac and was doing his thing like doing chemistry in the basement. It's kind of coded in a big way. It's also possible that he could have been the Mad Gasser. We don't know, but there was so much speculation going on. We tried to find records from the state hospital.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Did his parents have them sent away? We couldn't even find that, unfortunately, because they just don't keep records like that. It's also a time in history where a prominent family with some money could have your child sent away just because they were gay.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
I'm trying to go to bat a little bit for Farley Llewellyn, but it seems like he might have been the guy.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
You want to describe it, Chuck? Sure. For those people that can't see this tiny, tiny thing that I'm holding. I went on eBay. It is green. It does not look anything like Farley Llewellyn, I should point out. It's a monster and has like lobster pincers and a gas tank with an orange gas mask and also these strange tentacles coming off of his back. Uh, it's pretty cool.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
I love having this little fella. Sure. But again, I don't see Farley Llewellyn when I look at this.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
And we love sharing what we've learned.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
basically we're both nerds each tuesday and thursday we take an hour-long dive into some science topic learn all about our amazing and beautiful universe on daniel and kelly's extraordinary universe every tuesday and thursday on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts you're listening to an iheart podcast
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Yeah, couldn't find it. I've spent a lot of time on Ancestry.com and Findagrave.com. Because sometimes, literally, the only way you could find out a woman's name is by standing over her grave and looking at her gravestone, which is very sad. But we got almost everyone. So what was her name?
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Very generous. So about 11 p.m. in this house, Aileen retired to bed with her toddler daughter Dorothy at 11 p.m. I can only imagine it's because Dorothy had just gotten home from working at the factory that day. And Aileen noticed a strange smell in the house, like a really sickeningly sweet gardenia kind of smell.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
It got stronger and stronger, and as the smell grew stronger, she noticed that she was losing, I'm laughing, it's not funny, losing power over her legs and arms, like it was paralyzing her. Her mouth and throat got really dry and were burning. Little Dorothy became ill. Don't worry, she would be okay. Mm-hmm. And she called out for her sister because she was rightfully scared.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Yeah, so Aileen's husband, the aforementioned Bert, is a cab driver, was a cab driver, and he was driving around in 1944. When you're a cab driver, there's no way to get in touch with anyone unless you stand on the corner and pretend like you need a ride. No radios in the car or anything like that. And they finally got in touch with Bert about an hour and a half later. He rushes home at 12.30 a.m.,
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
And this is very key. When he pulls in, an hour and a half later, after the cops have gone, he sees a tall, shadowy figure, tall, thin, athletic build in the backyard wearing what was described as a watch cap. I didn't know what that was, but it's just like a toboggan, like a beanie. I don't know which regionally you call it here. What do you call it here? Beanie? Okay. We'll go with beanie.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
I didn't know if you were close enough to Canada to call it a toque. Are you close to Canada? Where are we? I'm sorry. I woke up from a nap and came straight here, so.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Oh, yeah. Okay. I woke up and I was here 13 minutes later. Wow. With a shower.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
You just gotta select Uber Shower. You don't share those though, right? No. Yeah, that'd be fun. So he saw this figure, he chased this prowler, the prowler runs away, gets away, they call the cops back out, the cops come back out, of course there's nothing there still. And that was about it. About 90 minutes after onset, Aileen was able to move her arms and legs.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Little Dorothy was feeling fine the next morning, went off to the factory to work, and everything was okay.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Yeah. The other two headlines, we like to do our research. We went on the microfiche. Big headline there, bagels, breakfast of the future. They were trying to build up some buzz. Sure. 40 years earlier.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Yeah, and I think he even speculated about what it might be. There was a lot of speculation early on, right? Yeah, a lot. Yeah. All right, so you have to keep in mind the Mattoon Journal-Gazette was received by 97% of the town, which I thought was hysterical because even in 1944, there were the three percenters who was like, mainstream media, no... Better not throw that paper on my front porch.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
But it was a little paper. It was almost like a church bulletin. It was very sweet. It was about six or eight pages long, typically. It did not publish on Sundays. Well, I guess it's not like a church bulletin. Or holidays, and this was Labor Day weekend. So the story runs on Saturday, Sunday followed, and then Labor Day Monday followed.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
So this story is lobbed out there about this mad gasser, first victims, and people are just sitting around waiting for news to roll in for two days.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Yeah. This guy's name was Urban Rafe. What a 1944 name that is. He and his wife, Pauline, we got her name, said that they had experienced the same thing just one night before Aileen and little Dorothy. And I guess Urban thought it might be a gas leak. So even though he was literally paralyzed, he somehow asked his wife, woke her up and asked her if she had left the gas on.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
I'm not sure how that happened. She had not. Right. So they noticed this smell after about 90 minutes it wore off, and they chalked it up to eating bad hot dogs.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
You go to a Twins game, have a hot dog, from like the fifth inning on, you can't move. You're like, I can't do the seventh inning stretch.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Tuesday was also the day we got our first physical evidence. There was one Beulah Cordes who came home on that night and found a piece of pink cloth that was not hers on her front porch. And she picked it up, she noticed it was moist, and she did what you do. She put it in her face and inhaled deeply.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
For sure. The same night, about an hour later, there was a woman named Marjorie Burrell. She was stricken, but, and this is also key, in the same house, her 18-month-old son, fresh home from the factory, completely unaffected.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
Right, a factory manager, by the way.
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LIVE: Minneapolis - The Madd Gasser of Mattoon
I don't think we mentioned, too, that the cops obviously took the evidence into hand, that pink cloth, and I guess managed to avoid the urge. to breathe deeply into it. They're like, it's moist. It's moist, yeah. That's what you do. Let me see what that is. I mean, at the worst, it's cat urine. That would be pretty bad.
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The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
That's probably the right route to take. So Ray took it. It was a two-hour affair in court. No one got the satisfaction of hearing any of the evidence. It also meant he wouldn't be eligible for parole for 30 years, whereas if he had gotten a life sentence and not the 99, he could have gotten out in 12 and a half.
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The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
But just three days after he pleaded guilty, he recanted and tried for the rest of his life to get a new trial, tried to escape. He did escape. In fact, if you listen to our Barkley Marathon episode, he escaped successfully for three days in 1977 and was picked up in Brushy Mountain where that race takes place.
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The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
But he would eventually die in prison in 1998 at the age of 70, which would also been the year he was first eligible for parole.
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The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
And it was all just a bit awkward because, as we all know, or maybe some people don't know this, but the FBI. had been tracking Martin Luther King Jr. since 1956. So for 12 years under a program called Racial Matters.
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The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Yeah, he joined the Army. Yeah, he dropped out of high school at 16. King was in college at 15. So just contrast the two situations. In 46, he joined the Army after being laid off from his civilian job in the Army. He was charged with drunkenness, with breaking arrest. He served three months in the Army clink, hard labor for that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
He was discharged less than honorably for, quote, ineptness and lack of adaptability to military service in 1948. So just a couple of years in the Army. And then was a drifter and a petty criminal who was in and out of jail over and over.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Yeah. And, you know, it was it was really a 20 year prison sentence for everything because it was a pretty small like robbery at Kroger that wouldn't have gotten a 20 year. But he had other armed robbery convictions. He had mail fraud convictions and escape attempts. So it was like, hey, we're just going to try and put you away for a while. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
And if you're curious how he escaped, he hid in a bread delivery truck that was leaving the prison.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
With your little portable radio, prison radio.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Yeah, who are apparently surprised. I imagine they were like, oh, wait a minute. Is that him coming back?
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Another time he came back to re-rob a place he had already robbed, re-entered the window to get more stuff. That is a no-no.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Yeah. Like, get out of there. I'm not a criminal, but I would get out of there.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
No, I think they meant the other way, like the matters of race. And then in 1963, they started tapping his phones under the Communist Infiltration Program. And J. Edgar Hoover was still around at the time because it seems like he was there for 300 years. And he didn't like Martin Luther King Jr.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
And these are the Londoners. They're not used to knocking guns out of hands. And this guy still managed to do it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Yeah. And, you know, we don't lend our show and ourselves to conspiracy. We're not conspiracy minded generally. But you don't have to be to to look at this and say he probably didn't act alone. It just doesn't add up, like you said. So there have been congressional committees over the years that have been. family members of Martin Luther King Jr. that said, yeah, this was part of a conspiracy.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
There's never been any solid agreement on what kind of conspiracy and who else was behind it. And we're not going to get into the nitty-gritty of all the – there's a lot of discounted stuff and stuff that rabbit holes you shouldn't even go down. So we're not going to get into those, but we are going to talk about – The legit idea of a conspiracy and who could have been involved, like, for real.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
He called him the most notorious liar in the country publicly at a press conference because King had been criticizing the FBI because they, you know, weren't protecting the civil rights of black Americans. And so Hoover didn't like the guy, yet he was the guy kind of at the top of this huge investigation.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Yeah. So after he retracted that confession, just days after his conviction, he started saying, I was set up and I was set up by a guy named Raul. So supposedly he had a lot of interactions with this Raul guy, but he went from describing him as a Latino with blonde hair to a French Canadian with red hair. Nobody ever witnessed him with anyone that looked like either one of those people.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
A lot of people think there is no Raul at all, but he still could have had help from someone else.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Yeah. As far as Martin Luther King Jr. 's widow, Coretta Scott King, she was She always thought the FBI might have had something to do with it. She knew that they had been surveilled and their phones had been tapped. She thought they, you know, were a possible suspect. you know, bad actors. They even, you know, this is sort of startling. And in fact, it startled the country in the late 90s.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
But they came around to believing James Earl Ray, Dexter Scott King, one of his sons, visited James Earl Ray in prison. They pushed for him to get an appeal. He apparently asked him point blank, like, did you kill my father? And James Earl Ray said, no, I didn't know. And then apparently he also said, but like I say, sometimes these questions are difficult to answer.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Sometimes you have to make your own evaluation and maybe come to the conclusion. I think that could be done today, but not 30 years ago. None of that makes any sense.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Yeah, but as shocking as this meeting was, They they got on board and said, I don't think you did this. I think you were patsy. I think you were set up. And a lot of Americans were confused and a lot were offended. Pulitzer Prize winning biographer of Martin Luther King Jr. David Garrow said that Dexter King's support was of Ray was egregious and embarrassing.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Jeez, let's talk about the high road, man.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
So there's an attorney named William Pepper who is a very conspiracy theory-minded attorney. He became James Earl Ray's attorney eventually. And he's not someone that a lot of people thought a lot of in his career. He had been described as disgraceful by some, the most gullible person I've ever met by someone else. He was –
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
All right, so the FBI gets a hold of that .30-06 rifle that was— determined to be the murder weapon. They couldn't actually conclusively link that bullet to the gun because the shell had been fragmented, but it was the same caliber, and everybody was like, come on, it's the gun. Can we all just agree to that?
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
readily and willing to just malign innocent people to get his theories out there. And I remember this happening. I didn't watch it. But on the 25th anniversary of King's murder, so I guess somewhere in the mid 90s, he sold HBO on producing and broadcasting a mock trial TV special of James Earl Ray in which Ray was acquitted by the mock jury.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Yeah, I feel like if you're floating a conspiracy about an assassination, if you just throw out like local cops and mafia, then you're probably halfway there.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
So Martin Luther King Jr. 's family sued him for wrongful death in civil court. Again, this is not a criminal trial or anything. They didn't want money. They wanted 100 bucks. They basically wanted to get all these claims heard in court and have it, you know, published, you know, out in public. And they this is sort of shocking as well.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
The family was represented by that attorney, William Pepper, who had represented James Earl Ray. The jury did decide that Jowers and others, including government agencies, had been responsible for King's death. So they actually won that civil trial.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Yeah, dumped minutes after by a guy who sped away in a Mustang.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Yeah, along with a scope and a gentleman who said that he was going hunting on a hunting trip with his brother.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Yeah, and under an alias under the name Harvey Lohmeyer.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Yeah. So he was like, that's the guy. There were witnesses we mentioned earlier in part one at the Bessie Brewer boarding house. They also looked at pictures and they were like, yeah, that's the guy we saw running away. And they went to the hotel clerk and or the boarding house clerk and they said, yeah, this guy signed in. That's him for sure. Under the name John Willard.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
So he had multiple aliases. Oh, yeah. And. that portable radio that they found in the bundle had a scratched out ID number, and they eventually figured out that that was his prison radio. It had his inmate number on it. So he escaped prison and was like, I'm taking my radio.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
So the FBI started tracking his movements. He's got all these aliases. In that year that he was on the lam after the shooting, He was into politics for a little while, supporting Alabama Governor George Wallace, his presidential campaign. He was in L.A. for a little while. He took dance lessons. He went to bartending school.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
He lived in Mexico for like a month or so, trying to become a pornography director. under the name Eric Salvo Galt. That didn't work out. So he left Mexico, came back to the States, and apparently in like the month or so before the assassination, he had been stalking King and had followed him from Atlanta to Memphis.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
I think you mean Toronto.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Yeah, and this time his alias was, because, you know, it was a real dude. In fact, the guy was a cop. Pretty ironic. But his name was Raymond George, I guess, Sneed, S-N-E-Y-D.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Okay, well, it's good that we spelled it out because that will come into play in a minute here. But from Toronto, he went to London. He was actually in London a couple of times. He passed through London on his way to Lisbon after that first flight from Canada. And he was going to Lisbon because he was hoping to go to Africa before the murder.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
And then afterward, his long-term plan was to go to Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, because in 1965, a 5% white minority there had assumed independence from the UK. And he was like, I'm going to go to Rhodesia and I'm going to integrate into this small white minority and become a paid mercenary.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Yeah, we'll get to who Ray was a little bit, but. The one takeaway from everything that I've read is he was not a very smart person.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
No. Also because he did not throw that first passport away, and that would be his undoing. Like we said, he could not secure that passage to Africa, so he went back to London to figure out what his next move was. This is sort of a weird part of the story. He called... a reporter named Ian Colvin at the Daily Mail's Foreign Desk.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
And I don't know if this guy had written articles about it, mercenaries or something. I don't know either. That's the only thing I can figure out because he called this random reporter and said, hey, you got any contacts for these mercenaries?
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
It's a very strange little side part of this story, for sure.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Yeah, two different names.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
That's right. Where we left off with part one was the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr., and we're going to pick up now with the investigation and the manhunt. And while we're talking about that, we might as well go ahead and say it's still perhaps the largest manhunt in FBI history, depending on who you ask. Cost a couple of million bucks in those dollars. 3,500 investigators.
Stuff You Should Know
The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Part II
Yeah, his attorney at the time, Percy Foreman, said, well, you know, if you go to a jury trial, you're probably going to get a death sentence because of, you know, because of the murder and its impact on the country, basically. Like, you're not going to avoid the electric chair. So if you plead guilty, you can get the maximum life sentence, which is 99 years in prison in Tennessee. And he said...
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
That's right. And we are going to take a couple of minutes here at the head of the show to pay tribute to HowStuffWorks.com founder Marshall Brain, who passed away last November at the age of 63.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
All right, so if you want to geolocate something or somebody, you're going to need, and you're on Earth, you know, you can just use longitude and latitude, and that'll do a pretty good job. Sure. GPS is like, hey, what if you want to find out where you are relative to sea level? We can do that. And you can't, longitude and latitude. Yeah. And GPS does that with microwaves.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
They decided not to use radio waves for reasons we'll talk about, but they use microwaves. sent down to Earth.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
That's right. And that is in the form of a pseudo-random code. And one of the cool parts about that is it's going to tell you like, yeah, it's coming from this satellite. Here's my pseudo-random code. But it also uses a slightly differently altered frequency. So the frequencies don't jam one another.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
So all these satellites, because the frequencies are just slightly varied, can all talk to each other because you don't want satellites up there jamming each other.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Right. And this is one final bit of key, key information here. All these satellites, great. They're beaming microwaves down, fine. If we didn't know how fast those microwaves traveled, then none of that would do us any good. We have to know exactly how fast that stuff travels in order to measure a distance.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
And in this case, we know that electromagnetic waves, microwaves, travel at speed of light, 186,282 miles per,
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah, 100%. Just about Marshall. He was an electrical engineer, had a Bachelor of Science. He was a longtime professor at NC State. And in 1998, he founded, as a hobby, HowStuffWorks.com because he wanted to... He had a very pure goal, which was to make complex things understandable and relatable to everyday people. And that is, you know, that's what we still do. We were hired as writers there.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
That's right. And you might be thinking like, yeah, but what about stuff getting in the way? Like if this stuff is supposed to be exact, then, you know, what about a tall building or what about, you know, weather and space like that can throw all this off, right, guys? And that's true, but they have a very pretty brilliant workaround for that.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
One method is called differential GPS, and they have these antennae on Earth that are locked in. They're stationary. They're not going anywhere. We know exactly where they are. They're called known points for that reason. And since we know exactly where those are, they're receiving these transmissions from GPS. And so they can calculate whether or not the location is off.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
If this thing is locked in place, but the calculation coming from the GPS is off by a little bit, hey, it must have gone through some thick shrubbery or bounced off a building or something. But either way, we're locked in place so we know exactly what that should be. And thus, we'll know what that discrepancy is and we can account for that.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah. And hey, listen, I won't tell everybody. I'll just adjust it on my end and they'll never know that you screwed up.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Too much kale, like a salad with only kale or like, God forbid, you eat a bag of kale chips. You would die.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
It's too much at once. Yes. Oh, boy. All right. So now we get to trilateration. Take it away, friend.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Well, first of all. Let me explain that trilateration is not the same as triangulation because we're not talking about ankles. We're talking about distance. And somewhere in there is the key of where I was screwing up because you had sent me this in a very elegant, sort of simple to explain way.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
It was explained about, you know, like a Venn diagram, three circles overlapping and then the point where they overlap is where you are. We'll explain that more thoroughly. But I was just drawing three random circles. And I'm like, three random circles don't always intersect at a point. Right. Like they might overlap in an area. And so the center of that area maybe is what we're talking about.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
But then I realized you can't just draw three random circles and expect them to have a tangent point because they don't always. In the case of GPS, I guess it's just a very exact measurement from one place to another. And in that case, they will intersect.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
No, I'm sure there's a name for it. Some science person is going to say, oh, Chuck, that's just blank.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
I got a freaking compass at one point because you were like, it's because the circles are willy nilly.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
I never met Marshall personally. I think I saw him come through the office a couple of times early on, but I never had the pleasure of actually sitting down with the guy.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah. Hey, well, I'm not going to tell you that. But how about this? You're 690 miles from Minneapolis.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Right. So you're like, is there one more Wiseacre in this town? Yeah. Who will tell me by not telling me where I am, where I am.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
And so you go into this final, the only other gas station in town. And you say, guys, someone told me I was 625 from Boise. Didn't help much. Someone else said 690 from Minneapolis. Please just tell me where I am. They said, oh, you're 650 miles from Tucson, pal.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
All right. So now you got three circles, though. And this is where I got super tripped up because I was like, oh, cool. Let me draw this out. And I drew it out. And I was like, these don't intersect at a common point.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
But if you're using exact GPS calculations, distance from a satellite, or in this case, points on a map, then you know exactly where you are because it's going to intersect at only one place at three points.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah, but you knew you were in Denver because you can't catch your breath and it smells like weed everywhere.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah. And liberals and conservatives are smashed together and everyone's like, what kind of state is this? It is. It's crazy like that, isn't it? Yeah. I love Colorado. I think it's interesting that way.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
And one guy goes, hey, you ever try to shoot a hacky sack in midair? Watch this. It's kind of fun. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
My friend, I hate to break it to you, but you did the old Josh Clark insert and extra consonant thing.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Right. And I think you mentioned the spheres while I was obsessing about the extra L, right? Yes, I did. Okay, great.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah, for both of us. He was also an author. One of his books is called The Doomsday Book, colon, The Science Behind Humanity's Greatest Threats, something that Josh has particular interest in.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
I say this out loud at the risk of losing listeners that might be new listeners are like, I can't listen to this guy. Oh, this is really dumb. Up until yesterday, whenever my phone or my car or something said, you know, turn on your Wi-Fi to improve accuracy of your location. It's like, I'm not near my house. What is this thing asking me to do? I'm not near my Wi-Fi.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
You weren't like, you're not the boss of me. No, I was just, that's pretty dumb.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah. So Marshall was also a TV host. He eventually was the director of NC State's Engineering Opportunities Program, which helped mentor aspiring inventors. And Marshall was survived by his wife, Leanne, his four kids, David, Irina, Johnny.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
It's like, they don't know. I'm not near my house. Why is it asking me to turn on my Wi-Fi? This phone is so stupid. Oh boy. All right. So speaking of, The opposite of stupid, your smartphone. How accurate are those things?
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
When GPS first started, they said, and this was, again, like 95-ish, they said, it's going to be accurate to within 100 meters 95% of the time, which at the time was like, hey, that's not bad at all. Like that gets me in the neighborhood of where I want to be. They've gotten much, much better. Now they say within two meters of 6.6 feet, but it's really closer than that.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
They did some measuring in 2021, and the global average across all users was about just a little more than two feet. And, you know, again, that depends on a lot of things. If it's got tall buildings in the way, space weather, atmospheric conditions, apparently like a really dense like jungle canopy or thick shrubbery can – actually degrade the accuracy of that signal.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah. And I get I mean, it's amazing we're here because if you're like GPS to just say this is good. If you're if you're five feet away from the restaurant or your friend and you don't see them, that's on you.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah, no, it's getting – I mean, I imagine they're going to have it, I think, March 24th. If you're an ideal, if it's clear skies, you're out in the middle of the desert or something, they can be as accurate as 30 centimeters.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
and ian and their dog summer and it was just really sad to hear the news because like like you said marshall if it wasn't for him we wouldn't be here now and we'd like to think we're still carrying on his tradition of making complex things accessible i like to think that too
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah, that's right. And your parents and grandparents might be using their Garmin still. So just have patience with them.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah. And it's still being used in certain cars in certain people's families. Are those things even supported any longer? I don't know, man. It's pretty funny, though. It's like looking at a MySpace web page or something when you look at it.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
But, yes, I took us off task. You were talking about other things that this is used for. A lot. We talked about landing airplanes. That's pretty important. Accuracy is pretty important. Maybe not down to the centimeter, but if you want to track soil moisture, you can do that via GPS.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
If you want to measure the size of a glacier and whether it's shrinking or moving, you can do that very, very accurately and not just sort of ballpark things anymore. Migration patterns. If you want to see where that school of whales is headed and how they know when they get there and how far they are from where they started, you can do that with great accuracy.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah, I thought the thing on tunneling was kind of cool. I never really thought about that. But if you're tunneling through two sides of a mountain to ideally meet in the middle and have a one long tunnel, that's not one tunnel with a little zigzag in the middle because they were off by a little bit. You can do that down to the centimeter, you know, or 30 centimeters rather.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah, that was a little disconcerting to learn. I thought like, oh, well, surely this thing has just some weird, robust government shield that cannot be hacked, right? And that's not true.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
In fact, the military, I mean, it's part of military, just regular operations to jam GPS for another country, their planes and drones, or to spoof it is when you send it, you know, jam it and make it non-operable, but you... You're like, ooh, here's some fake coordinates that you're going to think are real.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Like they do that all the time. Countries do that to us all the time. But like you said, any schmo that's got 300 bucks can get a software-defined radio and figure out how to use it and jam somebody's GPS. And so your neighbor's walking around wondering where that restaurant is.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah, that is a little odd. I'm sure somebody knows. Or maybe it was a flex.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
I mean, Ruby says things I don't understand and I just don't even ask.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah. Hey, you know, all we did in the 80s was shorten awesome to awesome and un-awesome.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
That was as sophisticated as we got. I don't know about the skippity stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah, it's, you know, kids and teens come up with their own language, so adults don't know what the heck we're talking about, and they can laugh behind our backs.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
We said, that's very un-oss, and our parents were like, what are they saying?
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Uh, airlines can get jammed. Uh, there was a study that found intentional jamming of airlines was a problem, uh, in three regions, only three, uh, more than 70,000 flights were jammed between February and August of 2022. And, um, that, you know, once you jam it up, you can't reset it. Like that plane lands and then the unjamming happens.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah, classic Marshall, classic How Stuff Works. And even though our show has kind of grown and morphed, it's fun to go back and do these every now and then.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah. And you have no idea how much I put my hand over my mouth when you said bad actors, and I almost shouted out a few names of actors. Who are you going to name? No, I can't because, you know, you never know. People might listen to this. I'm sensitive to hurting people's feelings now here in my 50s.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Or a skibbity toilet. I hope that doesn't mean something dirty, right?
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Well, I'm just glad that you have someone in your life that's down with that kind of stuff because it's pretty vital these days.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Maybe not that, but Skibbity Toilet has its own Wikipedia entry.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah, it actually sounds intimidating, but it's really not at all. It's a pretty simple process, believe it or not.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Uh, that would be 27 years old? Is that right? Yeah. Yes. That thing has sarcopenia.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah, this was more fun than I thought. And you know what? I'm glad we had some fun and had some laughs because that feels like a lighter tribute for Marshall than something else.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
I'm going to call this Forget Rice. How about some peace and love? Hey, guys, big fan of the show. I love listening when training for marathons and love the recent marathon episodes. While listening to the history of refrigeration, the rice method for managing a musculoskeletal injury was mentioned.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Did you know, guys, that in 2020, the medical world threw out the rice method and transitioned it to peace and love?
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
I think I probably did. So for peace and love, we have protection. Avoid activities that cause pain for two to three days. Elevation. The A is avoid anti-inflammatories because apparently that reduces healing and you should avoid ice too.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
But what it is overall, GPS, is a, as Marshall wrote, a space-based radio navigation system that technically GPS is the one that the U.S. government owns. If you live in another country, it's not called GPS. It's called a GNSS.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
I just, I never take those anyway because I don't really need to, but yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
I know, I'm sure. Where was I? A, so down to C, compression, E, education, which is avoid unnecessary passive treatments. Your body will heal, so I guess educate yourself.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah, basically. And then we, and is not spelled out, but love is load, let your pain be your guide, optimism, condition your brain, vascularization, pain-free cardio, And exercise, restore mobility through active approach. And Sarah says, this is a lot. I hope people can learn to avoid ice and anti-inflammatories for optimal recovery, but it's having a hard time catching on.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
That is from Sarah, PT bird nerd Hollingsworth, and she's a bird nerd and loves our bird episodes.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah, exactly. But, you know, that's what the system is that tells you where you are. When you take out your little smartphone and say, where in the world am I or how in the world do I get somewhere? If you want to get somewhere, they got to know where you are at that moment. And that's why you can do that 24-7. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah. Well, we'll see what happens with that. You never know. But right now, that's the current situation. They do this with satellites, at least 24. Usually there's more than 30. And wherever you are on Earth, if you had super, super long vision, you could look up and see four of these bad boys with your eyeballs because you've got to have those four to tell you where you are.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah, that's the important part because I've tried. I've gone out there without a phone and just shouted up, where am I?
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
One of the cool things about GPS is this was kind of roughly figured out a long time before we even had satellites. There was a doctor, Dr. Ivan Getting, who was a physicist and American, who basically said, hey, you know what?
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
You could find out someone's 3D coordinates if you use radio signals and just calculated the time it takes for those signals from different sources to reach a single point on Earth. And that's GPS, basically.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah, literally off the ground and into space. Sputnik was October of 57. And a couple of years later, we said, oh yeah, we'll see your Sputnik and we'll raise it five satellites. or I guess raise it for, for a total of five satellites. Sure, all ACES. That's right. And this was 1960, I'm sorry, in 1967, they had really precise clocks on board these satellites.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
And then just five years, six years after that, in 73, NAVSTAR was formed. And that is the system, the program that, you know, that is GPS, basically. And then we said, all right, now it's just going to take us about 20 years to figure all this out.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah, that was a flight intended to go from New York to Seoul to get there. They were flying over Alaska. And still today, we don't really know why, but it veered off course about 200 miles into Soviet airspace. This is not a great area of Soviet airspace to be near because it was near some secret military installations. And so they scrambled a couple of fighter jets, Soviets did, MiGs, I reckon.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
And they tried to contact the plane, could not get in touch, and then downed the plane with a missile and killed everybody, 269 people. I remember this. I was 12. Oh, yeah? Yeah. I mean, you know, of course I didn't understand something like that fully at 12, but I remember it being, you know, all across the news. Mm-hmm.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Oh, man. Oh, man. There was probably a song on FM radio that, you know, encapsulated this. Oh, I'm sure. Like that a DJ made, you know, not a real song.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah, probably what I don't fully get now. What I do get is that, you know, airplanes and airlines have GPS on their airplanes, so they don't do this now. But why did that like broaden it to the public at large? Like, couldn't they have just said, all right, it's for the military and for the FAA?
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
So we have one GPS system, which is kind of a problem. We don't have a backup yet, which, you know, we'll talk a little bit about that more later. But there is more than one GPS because it's not like China and Russia are like, hey, we'll just, you know, use your GPS when we want to bomb something.
Stuff You Should Know
How GPS Works
Yeah, exactly. So China and Russia and the EU all have their own GPS. And I think they all have backups even, and we don't.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
They weren't quite chiclet white, but they were enough to where they looked a little different than the others, and the others are just going to, as teeth do, continue to stain a bit. So it's like, yeah, why don't we go ahead and knock it down a notch?
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
That's right. I love my Bombas socks. They are super cozy and the secret is in their fabrics. We're talking about the really good stuff like Merino wool, which feels as cozy as a ski lodge. But if you want to brave the cold on the slopes or on a snowy run, Bombas has athletic socks built for that, too.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
That's right. And if you get cold feet, then you got to try those slippers that they have. They're warm because they have that fluffy, sharp aligning and the marshmallow-like cushioning. Really good stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah, and with something this old, if DNA isn't readily available, mDNA, mitochondrial DNA, can also be very useful.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
All right. So now this is where things get a little hinky because we're going to talk about the other aspect of forensic dentistry, which is the very controversial, very complex bite mark analysis, which and we'll get to the admissibility of it now in a bit. But they still do collect the evidence, which, you know, you should do.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
I don't think these implants will – that's the problem is they don't stain while the others are.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
I don't think anyone's saying like, hey, stop even doing this as far as evidence collection goes. Right. But here's how they do that. If you see a bite mark or anything you think is a bite mark in a like a murder case, let's say you call in that forensic dentist who's just sitting around like so happy they don't have their hands in a live human being's mouth at the time. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
And they got to do it quick because time is of the essence because bite marks can change a lot pretty quickly, especially if a body has been deteriorating for a few days. Like the location of that bite may be entirely different because the skin is slipping and shrinking.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah. They're going to take pictures with a ruler next to it. You've probably seen that in some movies.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Oh, yeah, that's right. Bite photography is very specific and very precise, or at least it should be. And then you can magnify those photos and stuff. But while they're doing this, the first thing that they're going to identify is, like, was it a human bite or not? And it seems like a no-brainer. Like, I could even tell. Sure. But you found a study from 2015 that – doesn't quite hold up.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah. I'm like, why have I just smoked 80 cigarettes? So today, another and I thought we were done with forensics, but who knew that lurking out there was the topic of forensic dentistry.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
The easiest thing in the world. Was this a dog or an adult human biting this person?
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah, I would think human and animal would be pretty easy to tell the difference of, but, you know, apparently not.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Well, this is a pretty disturbing but I guess helpful thing that I never knew. After they inspect the body for the bite marks and all that stuff, they will actually cut out the bite mark and preserve it.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah. So they will cut the bite mark from the skin, preserve it in formaldehyde, and then make a silicone cast of the bite mark, which makes total sense. I just never thought about how gross that would seem.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
uh which we will learn very quickly as in right now um kind of can be divided up into two things which is um identification of uh deceased people or peoples from dental records like when you hear like you know they perished in the fire but they were able to identify the body uh and the much more controversial uh bite mark analysis
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah, I was about to say Mike Tyson bite. He's got a fight on Friday. Oh, is he fighting that guy Friday? Yeah, on Netflix. Shoot, I'm not even going to be here. I wanted to see that.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
We also have avulsions. That is when just some of the skin is removed, and I guess not an entire piece of the body. You have contusions, which is, of course, a bruise. If it's profusely bleeding, it's a hemorrhage. If it's a nice, clean, neat wound, then you have a very precise biter, and they call that an incision. And then a puncture wound is a laceration.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah, it should be obvious. Oh, my God. And... holy crap, for the love of God, what was this person doing?
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Well, I think forensic dentistry is a creepy enough title. Or maybe I'll title it forensic dentistry colon enter at your own risk or something like that.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah, for sure. I mean, if I would have bitten somebody in a violent episode when I had my front tooth or my two front teeth missing, it would be pretty obvious when you saw that bite mark. Ted Bundy, like you said, had crooked teeth, and so that will leave a crooked impression. Obviously, any chips on your teeth are going to make a more sort of jagged impression.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
that had been widely used in court and is now generally thought of by most dentists and people in this line of work as junk science.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah. Here's an earlobe and some Dorito, so let's put that in an evidence baggie.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
And then braces, you know, braces or implants or something or a bridge that can leave a pretty distinctive impression. For sure. Once and this is sort of how it used to work. But once they identify a subject, they're going to get a warrant to take a mold of a suspect's teeth so they can compare it. They'll take a lot of pictures of their mouth and stuff. opening, closing, biting, stuff like that.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
And then in the old days, they would go to court and compare those and a forensic dentist would take the stand and say, hey, that bite mark looks like that person's mouth to me, jury. That can be a major reason why you convict.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah, I mean, there are some professional dentists and forensic dentists that still believe that. I mean, that thing I sent you is from last year and is on the National Institutes of Health U.S. government website, and those four accredited dental experts flat out say like a person's bite mark is unique, like DNA or fingerprints.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
And I guess we should probably take a break and get into the studies and stuff like that. But it seems like study after study is kind of confirmed that it's just not the case.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
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Forensic Dentistry
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Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
All right. So you did some extra digging and, you know, it's pretty clear from doing the research that this is basically known as junk science now to most most people, despite those four people who wrote the article on the National Institutes of Health. But there was a review in 2022 and a report from the NIST.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah, okay, so they released this report that said, and there were previous reports that we'll talk about too, I guess, but this is the most recent, that said bite mark analysis is not real science, and it's based on these three sort of faulty premises. One, which you already mentioned, which is that a person's dental pattern is unique to that person.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
And, you know, there haven't been any studies that really confirm this. There was a 2013 study from the United Arab Emirates that found, and I think there's, is that a sort of a dental capital of the world? Because I saw a lot of dentists from like Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
I have a hunch that that's the case. So maybe someone will confirm or deny that. But that study found that 51% Of the 2,000 dental charts that they examined were unique, one more than half, and the rest were identical to at least one other.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
The only thing I'll say in defense is that it may not be truly unique, but if 49% are unique, then that's unique enough to talk about, maybe not to be used in court, but enough to talk about.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Seems like about half of them are if you go by the data here.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah. And, you know, that's the kind of situation, too, where you also have to really educate a jury over like the data on what that really means. You know what I'm saying? And say like, hey, half the time these aren't unique. So you have to understand that going in. So, you know, that that was the first thing. And, you know, that there was that one case that you sent.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Where and this kind of factors into number two. Number one was that they're unique. Number two is that the patterns can be accurately transferred to the human skin. Because we've already talked about the fact that there can be a lot of distortion by skin's elasticity. And if the person like sort of does a sawing motion, it completely distort the bite mark.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
But you said that one case of the guy who was convicted, who was. missing a tooth entirely, which should show a pretty clear like, hey, we can exclude this one because the bite mark didn't have a gap. But they were like, yeah, but if he grinded his teeth and kind of did a sawing motion, it could look like this. And he was found guilty, you know, and he was not guilty.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah. And and the both forensic dentists that worked on that case recanted their testimony. Right. Like completely.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah, at least 26 that DNA evidence is now cleared where bite mark analysis was, if not the smoking gun, like a pretty key part of the jury's, you know, findings.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah, for sure. And, you know, the big change that you were talking about with just excluding that came about in 2016. We've mentioned some other studies. There was one we didn't mention in 2009 when the National Academy of Sciences released a report about a lot of problems with a lot of forensic science. But one of those was bite mark analysis.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
And they basically said, and this was in 2009, and it still took until 2016 to make that change official, was they said there's no scientific studies that support the assertion that bite marks provide sufficient detail for positive identification. And then a few years after that,
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Doctors from the American Board of Forensic Odontology, like we said, that's sort of the main body or is the main body. Participants in a study there of certified dentists, overwhelming number of them couldn't even agree whether they were looking at a bite mark at all.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah, and even if the teeth themselves are struggling to hang in there, tooth pulp or dental tissue on the inside of that tooth is very resistant to environmental attacks like incineration, immersion. Like you can be underwater for, I was about to say a million years, but that's probably not true.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
They throw tomatoes at them. For sure. There was another case you found, a pretty striking one, a guy named John Kunco. He was convicted of rape and assault in 1991, and the main evidence that got him convicted was identification of his voice by the victim, a comment he supposedly made at a party, and then bite marks on the victim's shoulder.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
all the evidence was was a problem the um the comment that the party that he supposedly made was not corroborated by i always have trouble with that word it's a hard word corroborated by any other people at the party. The voice ID was made from a police officer's imitation of Kunco and his lisp to the victim. So I have no idea how that got through.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
And then I believe the bite mark was infrared light analysis of a bite mark that had already healed.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
But immersion, trauma, decomposition, so extracting DNA from the inside of a tooth is a pretty viable thing. But before 1974, all you really had going was identifying victims of a disaster, usually a natural disaster or a human-caused disaster. They did not really get into crime scene stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
It was a picture of him with his looking at his hand and the bones.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, this is everything changed in 2016. One of the big things that happened, I think there was a case in Texas. A guy named Stephen Cheney was released by the Texas Court of Appeals. And this is the Texas Court of Appeals. They're not big on releasing. Right. You know, convicted criminals.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
But the Texas Forensic Science Commission in 2016, because of this, you know, kind of fraudulent bite mark evidence in Stephen Cheney's case, they were like, we need to stop this. And I think that was kind of a big case that kind of, you know, really jumpstarted the whole. We maybe not scrapped the whole thing, but where they ended up, which is it can exclude, but it can't positively identify.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
No, but hey, it's a good little historical cherry on top, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah, and man, that may be it for our long, long-running forensic suite. I can't believe that there could be anything else, but I also said that last time.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Maybe. I mean, someone will write in and be like, guys, you've covered crime scene cleanup, blood spatter analysis, fingerprinting, DNA. I mean, the list goes on and on.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
What I didn't know about. That's it. It was the dog. I smell Fritos.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah, one of the rare articles that we didn't cover that is still good for us.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
All right, I'm going to call this another ADHD follow-up. This is a good one. Hey, guys, I had to write in after the ADHD episode during the first episode. I had to pull over into a parking lot because, honestly, guys, I started crying.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah. I have ADHD, and I have never had my life explained on a podcast before. Everyone's experiences are different for sure, and I think you did an incredible job explaining the base challenges. I also appreciated Chuck's hesitancy to call it a disorder. It is defined as a disorder, so there's nothing wrong medically with calling it one, but...
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
It does hurt just a little even as an adult when people call it a disorder without thinking about the person who has it. I appreciated the optimism with which you both spoke about the challenges and how they can be managed, especially Josh. The only thing I would add to that is the subtopic would be to find people who accept you before they try and change you.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
When I feel that people love and accept me as me, I am far more willing to accept their help with managing my ADHD Don't approach someone like you're going to fix them. Approach them because you love them. And they will receive your honest offer to assist.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
And just good life advice. Your podcast reminded me that there are a lot of people out there like me. And I hope that a lot of people out there who are trying to take this particular challenge do amazingly positive things with it. And that is from Steve.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Because in 1975 is when that first became permissible in court where a murder victim had a bite on her nose and three forensic dentists came along and said, hey, it's pretty clear this bite came from this person. It should be maybe the exception to the rule, but we should allow it in court this time.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah, appreciate it, Steve. Those episodes were a big deal for us for a lot of reasons, and it seems like people responded, so we're proud of them. For sure.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
That's right. I love my Bombas socks. They are super cozy and the secret is in their fabrics. We're talking about the really good stuff like Merino wool, which feels as cozy as a ski lodge. But if you want to brave the cold on the slopes or on a snowy run, Bombas has athletic socks built for that, too.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
That's right. And if you get cold feet, then you got to try those slippers that they have. They're warm because they have that fluffy, sharp aligning and the marshmallow-like cushioning. Really good stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah, dozens of people, according to the Innocence Project. And we should point out, from 1975 until just recently, 2016 is when they finally made a firm decision, which, we'll hold onto that one, but that's really when things changed. But I think the case that you were talking about is Ted Bundy.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
In 1978, notorious serial killer Ted Bundy would sort of wind up his serial killing career by wandering into the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University and bludgeoning and killing four students, sorority sisters there, including one victim where he bit her and left very clear bite marks And those bite marks were instrumental in Ted Bundy's conviction.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah, that's right. So that's a good setup. We should just mention sort of as far as the identification, the non-controversial part. Adults usually have 32 teeth, four incisors, four canines, eight premolars, 12 molars and four wisdom, depending on if you still have those. And when you go to the dentist, they, you know, we've been to the dentist and they do a lot of notating.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
They notate your teeth, variations in your teeth, changes in your teeth. If you chip a tooth, any dental work you've gotten like crowns or fillings or bridges or in my case for implants. periodontal disease, receding gums. There are x-rays and there are just the tooth charts.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
And these are the dental records that we speak of when they say, you know, a body was identified, you know, via dental records. It's because of all this work that you get over the years at the dentist. I guess if you, well, this doesn't have so much to do with bite mark analysis. I guess it could, but the records it seemed like are mainly about identification.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah, for sure. So, you know, we mentioned all the ways teeth can hang in there and stay, you know, a part of your skull when other parts of your body have deteriorated. Teeth can shrink. They can become fragile. But if you handle them gently and with care, you can preserve them in lacquer. And what will happen if you need to identify a corpse usually is a dentist will go to the morgue.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
They will surgically expose the jaw and examine things. That's if you have a pretty recent dead body that hasn't decomposed too much. If all you've got is a handful of teeth, That still may be enough due to those X-rays and charts. But if it's mass casualties, a dentist is going to and these are forensic dentists, by the way, it's a specialty. Right. They get a list of possible victims.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
And then, you know, you start comparing different records of the different people to try and sort out who is who.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah, yeah, for sure. There's a lot of things you can sort of glean from looking at a person's teeth about that person. It's not the most exact science, but we know generally how fast teeth grow, about four micrometers per day. So you can estimate someone's age based on their teeth.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah, exactly. They can get it in a wheelhouse. Sometimes you can learn a little bit about someone's ethnicity because, you know, some ethnicities have teeth that are a little different. Apparently some Native Americans and some Asian people have incisors that have scooped out backs.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
You can determine sometimes some socioeconomic background if there's, you know, a lot of really expensive restoration work. That'll tell you that they probably had a lot of money or, you know, at least money to afford that. Also, the methods that are used are used in some parts of the world and not in others, like some geographic areas.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
That's right. Or in my case, the front four are my pearly off-whites because when they made me my new set of four teeth to go up front to replace my four teeth, they were too white and they looked weird. Oh, really? And they said, we can send them back and have them stained just a bit more. And I went, yeah, we're going to have to do that.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
A person's lifestyle, like if they were a smoker, this is kind of fun. If you're a pipe smoker or if you play the bagpipes, you have a very distinctive wear pattern on your teeth.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
Yeah. And then just sort of the obvious stuff, like a family member saying like, no, they were definitely missing that tooth or that that, you know, that distinctive crown with the diamond CWB for Charles W. Chuck Bryant.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
That was definitely their mouth or that tooth was broken. So beyond just dental records like family members can sometimes help out.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
All right. We'll take a break and we'll talk about the Black Death and then dive into the more controversial bite mark analysis.
Stuff You Should Know
Forensic Dentistry
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Forensic Dentistry
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Forensic Dentistry
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Forensic Dentistry
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How Automats Worked
Okay, we're back. I did not throw up. I think I'm good. It's been subsiding every day in the afternoon and I feel fine.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
And then in the morning again, I'm nauseous. So that's why I think it's a diverticulitis.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
We'll see. All right. No, I'll be okay. I'll be fine. Good. I'm going to do a lot of studying after this.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
All right, so we were talking about the busyness of New York and why it worked out there. And one of the other reasons it was really popular, because like I mentioned, it was a very clean place. They prided themselves, at least in the heyday decades, they did go downhill and kind of fall into a little bit of shabbiness.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
I last threw up about an hour ago. Man. And the main problem is it's just, I've been in like a fugue state, man. I have nothing in my body for three days now.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
But in the heyday, they were known as being really, really, really clean, safe places. And believe it or not, at the time, there were a lot of cafeterias that like, if you were an unaccompanied woman, They would not serve you. You had to be in there with your husband or they just serve men like businessmen. So a woman could go in by herself. Children could go in and it wasn't like a seedy thing.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Families could feel safe and like they were in a clean place with good food. And also a lot of these are really, really beautiful restaurants on the inside.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
It's a beautiful, like I would love to find one of those on eBay.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Well, I think in the, I mean, it's been a while since I've seen the doc, but I think there was someone that is getting like the automat machines too and collecting and restoring them.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
So I'm just like spacey and can, I told you on email, you guys will love this, that like I'll go 30 minutes where I just like, I'm just so zoned out. I can't have a, I don't even have a coherent thought for a half hour. I know. Josh said, well, that part sounds kind of nice.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
That's right. Burger King will come back again in this episode, believe it or not.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Yeah, I think it was as fresh as food could be for that format.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Let's say that. The coffee... was super fresh. Like, after 20 minutes, they would throw the coffee out and put new coffee in. The food, they did not sell the next day. And if you're thinking, God, what a lot of food waste, because they're pre-making this stuff, and, you know, we'll get to that in a sec, but a little bit of genius here is they had three different day-old shops
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
In lower income neighborhoods in New York. So the next day they would sell the food there at a discount. So even if you didn't have the nickel for the piece of pie or whatever, you might be able to get it for like two or three cents the next day.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
That's right. They sold so much coffee that they ended up losing money on it because they kept it locked into that nickel price for 38 years? Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Yeah, for sure. So they were losing money. They eventually had to raise the price. The only thing they could do was double it to 10 cents because their slots took nickels and their sales dropped a lot from 70 million cups a year to 45 million. They still came out on top revenue-wise, if you do the math. But I remember watching the documentary and they were talking about this.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
I've wondered, and I haven't found a way to wrap my head around how to actually do this topic, but something about change Like coins and how they established so much commerce, like a coin slot only taking a nickel. The only thing you can do is double it. So what does that mean to the economy? Like there's something there, but I'm just not quite sure how to frame it.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Yeah. But, you know, I love that city. I'm going to keep going back. I'm going to maybe next time drink only bottled things and not even cocktails with ice. I'm trying to figure out what what's triggering me. It may just be my biome and some of the food. I don't know.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Yeah, because, I mean, the idea of, like, doubling the cost of something is crazy, even if it's a nickel to a dime at the time. Like doubling your price is just insanity for a business, but there was nothing else it could do.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
They also sold a lot of pie. And I do remember this from the doc. Pie was a very big deal at H&H in 1964. Here's a pretty fun stat. They sold an average of 822 pieces of pie in New York City. between 8 and 11 a.m. And there are some people who said, some historians that have said that, I don't know about this, but maybe, that there was a desire for people to do things like eat pie for breakfast.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
But if you had to order it from a server, you might be like, oh, you know, I can't order apple pie for breakfast.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Yeah, exactly. But at the automat, you could just do it on, you know, on the down low and be quiet about it. I just, I didn't know people would be judgy like that back then, but maybe.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Yeah, because it's a dessert. It's a little weird. I mean, I like the idea, but it is a dessert.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
So after your steak dinner, you get a bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit?
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
All right. Still getting to know each other after all these years. All right. So let's talk a little bit about the nickel throwers, because if you're going to require a bunch of nickels, you're going to have to have a bunch of nickels and you don't often come in with a bunch of nickels as a consumer. So they had changed people. They were women. Basically, they called them nickel throwers.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
And they just sat there all day long shoving nickels across the counter, just like when I would go to the 99 cent movie when I was a kid. They had a big stack of tickets and a big stack of pennies, and they would just shove it back to you in the window. And it was always a lot of fun, I thought.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Maybe. And I'm curious how much they would lose in a year on those pennies.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
It's not a bad idea, but I'm still going to go back. I'm going to try it again. This may have also triggered my diverticulitis. So that may be why it's extending here into day three. I don't know, but I'm here. And this gives us, dude, a rare opportunity to do anything newsy or like current, if you want to mention anything.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, like you said, it conveyed a sense of the future. Like kids loved it for that reason, because they were it was like being in the Jetsons or something. But kids also loved it because that gave them a sense of autonomy to to go in there and get a couple of nickels from their parents and to be able to walk up and pick something out.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Neil Simon. I take issue with this quote, or the end of it.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Neil Simon, the great Neil Simon, said this when he was a child about going there, or as an adult about going there as a child.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
To have your own stack of nickels placed in your tiny hands, to be able to choose your own food richly on display like museum pieces, to make quick and final decisions at the age of eight, that was a lesson in financial dealings that not even two years at the Wharton School could buy today. Yeah. Maybe a little hyperbole there.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
I bet it was pretty good if for no other reason than in the 1920s and 30s and 40s and 50s. They use real food. Right. And real ingredients. And it wasn't like it is today. So I just think by virtue of that, it was probably not bad.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Yeah. And that was one of the selling points that, you know, another piece of pie on a tiny plate would pop into that window when one went out. It's not like it just stayed empty. I guess if they ran out of pie, it would or they probably put, you know, something else in there. But they had a huge actually a few different central commissaries in the city where they would make all this stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
They would ship it over there. And they had tons and tons and tons of worker bees behind the scenes doing all that stuff. They had these rotating drums that would do the work of filling the actual slots, but there had to be someone filling those drums. So it wasn't a bunch of robots back there. It was not George Jetson.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
It was just a bunch of people plating stuff up and putting it in the drum to put in the window.
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How Automats Worked
I don't remember if it was a lever, but that sounds about right.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Well, I didn't like you did, but sure, I saw the bad kids doing that.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
That's right. Automats. And we need to give a big shout out to a documentary called The Automat by from director Lisa Hurwitz. Because it's great. And I saw it a couple of years ago. And that's what inspired this episode. But I wanted to, I don't want to like right on the heels of this great doc, you know, kind of swoop in and do a podcast episode about it. But great documentary.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
I'm struggling. I'm sorry. I know you're doing it on purpose. It's all fun.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
For a while there, they didn't have hot windows. They just had the cold windows. So the hot food was served from a steam table. But it was not too long until they had the hot windows and the cold windows or the hot cases, probably.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
How they treated their workers is a matter of debate. They they struck a couple of times. In 1937, they struck. They had 3000 employees at the time that failed. That organizing effort did not hold. Then again, in 1952, they struck again and eventual New York State Supreme Court Justice Melvin Barash.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
uh was one of the people trying to organize at the time in 1952 and in 1991 he said the conditions were straight out of the 19th century um that effort failed other people if you watch the documentary the the son of the president of the company said no it was great we had company picnics and christmas parties and like every it was really really really great
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. This reminds me of a childhood trauma that I suffered because growing up, my sister had a best friend whose father worked for Kraft Foods. And they had a big Kraft, like... They rented Six Flags or something. It was some big thing every year. My brother's best friend worked for Coca-Cola. And every year they had the big Coca-Cola picnic thing.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
I had nobody and I never got to go. And every single year I had to watch Scott and Michelle go to the craft event and the Coke event.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Should we take another break? Yeah. All right, we'll take another break and talk about the inclusivity of the automat right after this.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
It's streaming on Max. Highly recommend it. She did a great job. I can't wait to see what she does next. And it was a big help here.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
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Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
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Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
So, yeah, welcome aboard, Laura. Laura came to us through Livia, which is all the recommendation we needed, right?
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How Automats Worked
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How Automats Worked
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Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Yeah, for sure. They had a motto, which was serve everybody and serve everybody in the same way, which is a great quote. And Colin Powell, former secretary of state, is in the documentary. And it's a great, really sweet interview. And he said the one we would usually go to is the automat on 42nd Street. I never even thought about the fact that I'm a black kid. Should I go into horn and hard art?
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Is it OK? To go to the automat, all the automats had that beautiful diversity that didn't exist in most of the rest of the country of economic standing, of color, of ethnicity, of language. You never knew what you'd run into in an automat.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
They were also known for their celebrity fans. They had those one very famous Esquire spread. Of course, this is for Esquire. So it was all set up. But in 1951, Audrey Hepburn was photographed for Esquire. So cute. Shopping at an automat. Very cute. But in the documentary, Reiner and Brooks, you know, Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks love the automat.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
And they talk with great adoration about their childhood of going to those restaurants.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
So I guess we're at the sad point, like so many of these episodes that we do on a cool thing from the past where the decline begins. Right. The 1960s is when that started, although they were still like a huge deal culturally. You know, everyone knew about the automat.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
And I don't think we mentioned, you know, at a certain point in New York City, they were so famous that it was like when you go to visit New York, you would go to an automat just for that experience.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Oh, yeah. My band did one gig at the Hard Rock Cafe here in Atlanta one time.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
But the 60s is where things really started to struggle, even though they were, again, still popular culturally. Stockholders were involved by that point, obviously. Just revenues started dropping, obviously. The suburbs was a big cause of it.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
You know, when people started moving out to the suburbs, offices and office complexes started getting built in the suburbs and people started shopping at malls in the suburbs. And there were fewer and fewer people just, you know, walking around New York doing things like shopping and going to their office.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
So it just it started to sort of slowly drop and slowly drop until they got a little weird with some of their ideas. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Not a wild restroom. That's every restroom in New York City.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Right. They also tried a beer garden. They tried the roller skate waiters thing. They tried, you know, live bands and dancing and stuff like that. But eventually Horn and Hardart looked at each other and they said, well, this has clearly seen its best days. The silver lining is, is we are sitting on a bunch of really valuable real estate.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
I was just about to improvise one of those terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible Burger King commercial songs.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Well, it's this whole new campaign with a guy that's singing.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Yeah. Yeah. All right. So Burger Kings went in. Automats were going downhill. Another thing that happened was as they started going downhill, a different kind of shopper started coming in there. People that were itinerant to people that were.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
were unhoused, people that were vagrants and just sort of coming through town who knew that they could hang out there for that nickel cup of coffee for hours and hours and hours. And when that starts happening, families stop coming in and it just creates this sort of vicious cycle where your clientele is different and it's not seen as that safe middle class space any longer.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Yeah, another big part of that is like these huge central commissary kitchens where they were cooking all this stuff is an excellent, excellent, efficient way to do it when you are booming with business. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Once business drops and you're not cooking, you're not needing to cook as much, all of a sudden the economy of scale isn't there any longer and you have these huge places with fewer employees and less food being pumped out.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Yeah, basically. That last one that closed in 91, it was the last one starting in 1977 at 200 East 42nd Street. So right there, you know, sort of near Times Square. Sure. And it lasted 14 years on its own as a nostalgia piece, basically, before becoming a Gap.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Where, is this in your off-grid panic room? Like, where are you watching antenna TV?
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
That's right. The Flintstones, they even had a Flintstone automat in a 1962 episode.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Oh, that's fun. And I did not know he totally. Yeah. Let's call an homage. You're kinder than I am.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
That's right. That's right. Pat Boone tried his version of the automat called the Dynomat in 1962, which was frozen food that was then microwaved. That did not work out too well. That's surprising. But there were a few other things over the years that were tried like this that did not take off like the automat did.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Oh, that's funny. But that never happened at all, right? Just an idea.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Yeah. I mean, there are things like this. I mean, Japan has stuff like this, right? They have what's called katin sushi. Okay. What's that?
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
No, but I've seen little windows as well of things. It may not be hot food. Maybe it's other things.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Yeah, there's a place in Brooklyn called the Brooklyn Dumpling Shop. I think there are like 12 of them in here in Canada. And they I just looked up a picture of them and they they had these little automat kind of like cubbies that you order through an app like a locker system.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
And I've also seen I think it was a shark tank product that I ended up seeing in a hotel where it's like a machine that gives you like a cheeseburger or a pizza like but made to order and. So, like, you can say what kind of pizza you want, and it's just got this machine inside that'll, you know, load it up with whatever and then bake it, and then it spits it out in 15 minutes or whatever.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
And then they have a hidden camera on you. Right. And spit out a picture of you going, ah!
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
I have nothing else. I don't think I have to puke. I think this is the best I've felt in a few days. So hopefully that holds.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Just a little Josh, a little side cup of oyster stew. I'm back on my feet again.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
That's right. This is short and sweet. This is kind of fun because this is coming out tomorrow and it's a correction on an episode that was just out. Awesome. So maybe for a change we won't get like 400 emails from crafters.
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How Automats Worked
Oh, yeah. Hey, guys. RE, the High Times episode and Martha Stewart. Hodgepodge is a big jumble of things that don't go together. Modgepodge is the craft supply. Just don't want you to embarrass yourselves at the craft store. That is from Kelly.
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How Automats Worked
Heck yeah, man. I've had free TV for many, many, many, many years. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
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How Automats Worked
All right. I'll check it out. Should we talk automats or did you have another announcement?
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
That's right. And if you get cold feet, then you got to try those slippers that they have. They're warm because they have that fluffy, sharp aligning and the marshmallow-like cushioning. Really good stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
By the way, this is going to be a tough one for me to get through for obvious reasons. Yeah, yeah. Because in the first paragraph, I saw the words oyster stew earlier, and I almost vomited in my mouth.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
I have not eaten food in three days, but I used to eat food.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
That's right, and we've been at it for six minutes. We might as well go ahead and say that the automat was a grouping of chain restaurants, self-serve restaurants, sort of like a cafeteria, but instead of being served in a line where people would dump food on a tray, they had these walls filled with glass-fronted compartments, and you would put in some money.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
And a slot, and you would open the door and get your piece of pie or your chicken pot pie or your pot roast or whatever have you.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
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Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Yeah. I mean, the last one, this is remarkable. The very last one in New York closed in 91.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Which is hard to believe. They saw a couple of sad decades, a few sad decades before that. But we'll get to all that. But should we go to the beginning?
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
And where else are we going to go but our old friend, Germany? Because the first automat popped up in Berlin in 1895, and the word automat was just more of a general term for a vending machine in Germany. But it won a gold medal a couple of years later at the Brussels World Fair.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Europe kind of got into them a little bit, and they spread around Europe over the next five or so years before making the leap to the United States.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Yeah, their first one in Philly, which was the first one overall, was 1902. But the equipment, you know, because it started in Europe, was in Europe. And they tried to get some of the stuff shipped over there. You know, these big, beautiful cases with the coin slots and the little windows and everything. And the ship sunk in the Atlantic. So they lost all that gear. They tried again.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
And these were victim to a warehouse fire, but salvageable. They repaired that stuff. They got them up and working, and they beat out their closest competitor. There was one card, Harcombe, in New York that went out of business. I think it was a little fancier. And H&H definitely leaned toward, as we'll see, serving just sort of solid, affordable comfort food to the masses. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Yeah, and this is like – that's funny, by the way. This is like during the Great Depression, like people were going out of business right and left. And they actually – H&H thrived during the Depression because, again, everything was really cheap. It was comforting stuff. As you'll see, the coffee was great. The food was fresh.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
And, well, maybe not more than anything, but additionally, it was a great place to go. They were beautiful places, generally. They were clean and they were safe. And we'll get to a bunch of other ways that they were inclusive as we go on.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Yeah. I mean, that's kind of hard to believe in a way because they were so successful there. You would think in the other places, like, of course, the obvious ones, they went to Chicago, Boston, D.C. and Detroit and some other places. But, you know, those are big cities and it's just odd that they didn't take off there.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
No. Well, that's good. Here's the story, everybody. I went to Mexico City again and got sick again, thankfully at the end, and... I couldn't record yesterday, but we were in danger of missing a publish date for the first time. Yes. In 17 years?
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
But we do have a quote here from New York history from a guy or an idea rather from this guy named Nicholas Brommel, who basically was like, you know what, in New York, it's so dense. And they they really concentrated the restaurants around offices like in the garment district, in the financial district, in Midtown, where people were either shopping or like going to work far less.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
And like, you know, the the quieter neighborhood streets and stuff like that. So it was just so densely packed and everyone knows how how busy New York foot traffic is around those places. And that was at least Nicholas Brommel's take on why they took off in New York and Philly.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
Oh, yeah. I mean, I kind of like the off-brand stuff, but yeah, that's definitely weirdly vague.
Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
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How Automats Worked
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Stuff You Should Know
How Automats Worked
And don't get me started about the prescriptions. That's a whole other story.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
That seems to have been a 19th century invention, which is actually about the time that popcorn became a favored American snack in the United States.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Oh, that's a great New Year's resolution, Chuck.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
He'll say that Mike stands for money and the D is for diamond. That's right. Was that exactly what you were going to say?
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
kind of slowly but surely started to gain traction. Thoreau was a fan. He called popcorn a perfect winter flower, which seems like a miss to me. And in 1848, popcorn showed up in the debut edition of the Dictionary of Americanisms. And I was looking through that, Chuck, and keep a stiff upper lip was in there too, which I associate 100% with the UK, but apparently that's American.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Okay. So, yeah, we're talking popcorn today. And, Chuck, there's a lot, a lot to talk about with popcorn. Who helped us with this? Was it Anna? This was Anna Green. Very nice. So if you don't know what popcorn is, we'll wait a second. You go ahead and Google popcorn and then come back. I'm pretty sure most people know what popcorn is because it's a global sensation.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
I always thought it was the UK, but I was wrong.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Oh, so you cover the oysters with the towel and it keeps the steam inside? Yeah, yeah, with a wet towel. Okay, gotcha, gotcha.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Yeah. So it wasn't quite as popular. You know? Yeah. Although you can imagine there were some country women who had like a much bigger, stronger right arm from popping popcorn in an iron skillet. Yeah. Dead giveaway that they were a popcorn fan. Yeah. Finally, in 1866, the first patent was issued for a popcorn popper. And it was essentially just like, you know, those old timey toast makers.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
There's like a it's like an iron rod and ends in like a mesh basket that you'd put the bread in and toast it.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Something like that, but the mesh was thin enough that the popcorn bran wouldn't fall out. When you're popping it, and it would just go pop, pop, pop, pop. My feet can't stop.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Okay, that makes sense. Well, that is the first patented popcorn popper that came on the market. And it was, I mean, still hard to do, but it was much lighter than holding an iron skillet over the fire until your popcorn popped.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Right. So people were like, OK, I can kind of get into this. And that's when it just started to take off.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Yeah, I looked at a picture that says glorious. It's got like the big old penny farthing wheels on it. It's just, I would love to buy popcorn from it.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Oh, wow. That's neat. Is that kind of like that thing where like if earth was the size of a pinhead, the sun would be the size of a basketball?
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
So this is the 19th century. I think we made it through, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Okay. So by the 20th century, oh, no, we haven't quite made it out of there because I think we would be remiss to not mention Cracker Jacks.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
But I have to say I'm quite proud that popcorn is through and through American. And not just the United States version of American. Mexico, Central America, South America, Canada. We'll include Canada, sure. They love it. American in that sense. That is popcorn through and through. Even still today, most of the popcorn in the world comes from the Americas.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
So it was a dirty lie when you said that we made it out of the 19th century.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Yes. So another thing that people put popcorn to use for, again, people are starting to get pretty crazy with this. Remember our live episode on the Kellogg brothers at the Battle Creek Sanitarium? And before they started serving cereal there, John Harvey Kellogg's wife, Ella Kellogg, introduced popcorn as a cereal, a breakfast cereal with milk and a sweetener.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
And it was essentially the predecessor to the Corn Flakes and the Bran Flakes and everything that came after that. And in my opinion, it was the direct, indirect predecessor of Corn Pops. which are still around today, but they came out in 1950 and were one of my all-time favorite cereals.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Oh, yeah, it's gluten-free, right? Yeah. And it is good. You're not just saying that. Yeah, it's pretty good. Because you spent some money on it. By God, you're going to like it.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
I saw a recipe for popcorn bread, and I was like, wow, that sounds interesting. And if you look closely, there's like five other types of flour in it. Popcorn is just part of it. Yeah. I'd still eat it if somebody else made it, you know? Yeah. So we finally made it to the 20th century.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
And the reason the 20th century became such a big deal as far as popcorn goes is because that is when movies started to come out. At first, they were silent movies and then talkies and movie theaters started to open throughout the United States. And very quickly, people were like popcorn and movies go together really well. But it turns out the theater owners were the last ones to figure this out.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Yes. I mean, like a lot of money off of popcorn. There's a well-trod story about a theater owner from during the Depression named R.J. McKenna, who found that popcorn was basically keeping his theater afloat during the Depression. People didn't really have much money for a movie theater ticket, but if they did, they still had money enough for popcorn because it was a cheap snack. So R.J.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
McKenna made the very wise business decision of lowering his ticket prices below what he would have made a profit on because he made so much money off of popcorn in the concession stands. And I think the number that's bandied about is $200,000 from popcorn alone, which is more than $4.5 million today if that's in 1936 dollars. Wow. From popcorn.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Yeah, for sure. And he said a bit of a tradition, as we'll find out, that popcorn's still big profits.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Yeah, and there's another really great – I want to say it's an urban legend, but it actually happened. A guy named James Vicari, who we've talked about before because he was basically the inventor of subliminal advertising – even though subliminal advertising isn't really a thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
But the reason he ties into this is because he supposedly experimented on people showing frames interlaced within movies that popped up so quickly that you couldn't perceive them. You only perceived them subliminally. And they said things like, go eat more popcorn. And popcorn sales tripled, supposedly, even though the whole thing was a total fraud. And the guy made it up.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Let me ask you, do you get buttered popcorn at the movies?
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Yeah, I never was into it, even as a kid. I tried to be, and I just couldn't get into it for some reason. I think because it just wets the popcorn, and I don't like popcorn wet.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Yeah. Well, you know what stuck out to me from that anecdote, Chuck, is like that's an example of early disruption, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Where people are like, oh, there's a change. There's a huge sea change in the way people do things. So this thing is going to totally go away forever. Yeah. Right. And just since the Internet age, we found that just doesn't really happen. Like everything from bookstores to paper to, I don't know, seeing people in person. We're all just destined to just go away because they've been replaced.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
And it's just not how it goes, which I think is kind of neat to understand because it makes you a little less fearful of change or technology or progress in some ways. I agree. Although anyone who's listened to the end of the world knows there's plenty of technology to be scared of. It's got to be selective.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Yeah, newspapers, though, that one did take a pretty hard hit, but it wasn't necessarily because of the internet. It was because of captains of industry essentially realizing that they could capture journalism if they defunded local news. And that's exactly what happened. And I don't remember what episode it was on. There's a YouTube podcast that I love. You may introduce it to me or me to it.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
One of the two. called Doomscroll. It's hosted by a guy named Joshua Cittarella. And he has the most interesting guests on who are just, they just think and talk about their thoughts. And I mean, like it's all rooted in, you know, like academia or research or something. There's not just riffing or anything like that. But one of them was talking about that capture and what happened to it. And
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
It's just so strange to think like, yeah, local newspapers went away. But the effect that that had on democracy and on people being informed and just generally caring about stuff, that was a huge, huge deal, allegedly.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
No, I don't think he did. No, he drinks like LaCroix instead.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
The Lizzie Borden murders and the cannibal runs.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
It's Chuck and Josh. It's Stuff You Should Know. Word up, Jerry.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
It is. It's awesome. It's a little tiny bit of water. Yeah. Apparently anything less than 13% water inside the popcorn kernel is not good enough. I think you mean the hull. Yes, you're right. Sorry. Or the bran, as you like to say. The bran, yeah. Bran to me is like mast. It's like one of those homey words. I love it. The sweet spot is between 13% and 20% water content inside the bran.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Although the hamster that runs our popcorn popper did come with a little fire chief's hat that he wears. It's so cute. So yeah, that's another interesting thing about popcorn. If you kind of track its trajectory, it just keeps evolving with new stuff. Like anytime something new comes along that you can apply to popcorn, whether it's movies or TVs or electricity, people apply it to popcorn.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Like it's just this little thing lurking in the background that's been woven into our culture so thoroughly and for so long. You just look right past it and then it trips you as you walk by and you suddenly recognize how important popcorn is.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Yeah. And we've talked about this guy plenty of times. He was kind of like the Hayflick limit for a while and early stuff you should know. He came up a lot. But a guy named Percy Spencer worked for the Raytheon company and he was in charge of creating magnetrons. I can't remember what he was doing with them. I think they were for like radar or something.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
And he was standing next to one at some point, and he had a chocolate bar. I'm guessing Mr. Goodbar. That's what I've always envisioned. In his front pocket, like a total nerd, because obviously his shirt was also a short-sleeve button-down shirt. And the Mr. Goodbar melted in his pocket, and he thought, hmm, that's curious. He's like, I was saving this for after lunch. Exactly.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Now, it's just oozy. And then he decided almost immediately to see what happens with popcorn, if you could do the same thing with popcorn. And he did it.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Wow. Yeah. And Red Bow Variety, you said? I wonder if they named it after his penchant for red bow ties or he started wearing red bow ties because of the variety.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
There you go. He also just said one more thing about Orville Ridenbacher. His Eames lounge chair, you know, the one with the ottoman?
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
He had one in his office in, I think, Nebraska, Omaha or something. And it's still out there. Orville Redenbacher's Eames lounge chair from his office is out there somewhere in the world.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Yes. I've coveted it ever since I first heard about that.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
And I still, I don't know why I've never really stepped back and asked myself, but it's just got me for some reason.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Oh, yeah, they were great. They were wonderful dudes. They were the predecessor of Penn and Teller, I think. Yeah, I think you're right. So, yeah, we talked about microwaves and how microwaves started coming to the home and microwave popcorn came along quickly after that. I think 1981 was when you could start buying microwave popcorn. And like I said, it's like a global phenomenon.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
And when you heat that, because the bran is non-porous, that steam that gets generated gets trapped inside. Well, as we all know, when steam expands, it really expands. And it expands so much that it blows the popcorn inside out. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
I think I said it at the outset. Everybody knows popcorn, whether you love it or not. You know about popcorn. You know where to buy it. And there's different tastes around the world, as you might imagine. Apparently in the United States, the favorite flavors of popcorn are salted, buttered, White cheddar, regular cheddar. So white cheddar is finally overtaken regular cheddar. This is a big deal.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
That's all right. I've never been crazy for it. But, you know, if somebody put it in my mouth, I wouldn't just spit it out.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Do you remember when we were filming a – we were filming some commercial, I think, and we were eating popcorn at the movies for this part of the commercial. And we did like one take, and then Chad, our friend, the director, who directed the stuff used in a TV show, he came over and he's like, just one note, don't mash a handful of popcorn into your mouth all at once. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
And he goes, that's a note for a regular life too. Oh, no. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
I don't know. Like, I guess you hold it in one hand and then like daintily pluck a few out with your other hand. That's what I've seen people do in the movies. But like that, yeah, I just put my hand in a bag of popcorn or a bowl of popcorn and just shove it into my face as best I can. That's how you're supposed to eat popcorn. Okay. I'm on your side.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
It's not just me, but yeah, Chad made it seem like it was just me.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Yeah, I think also that we've kind of mellowed out in our quest or our willingness to do stuff like that.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Yeah, we're kind of like, hey, we're happy podcasting. We tried so many different things and it's always just come back to podcasting that I think we're just like, yeah, we're happy living this way.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Yeah, and I know for a fact it's not pronounced Mike, but I failed to ask you me how to pronounce it. What is it, Mike? We'll go with Mike, but it's not Mike.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
No, I'm with you. I just wish I knew how to say it, but you probably were right with Mike. What else could it be? Nike? Yeah, Mikey. What else, Chuck? Is there anything else to say about popcorn? Oh, I know one. Apparently people have used popcorn as like a packaging stuffer. Like packing peanuts. Yeah, packing peanuts, but popcorn instead. Since like the 1950s.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
But the problem is, is if you use popcorn, it can get kind of gross, especially if you didn't think and you popped it in oil and covered it with butter before you put it in. as a packaging material, it'll just get gross. It can attract pests and stuff like that. So no one's quite figured it out.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
But I guess a few years back, 2021, there's some German researchers who were like hot on the trail of this using scraps of corn that you get off the floor of like a cornflake factory that they figured out how to pop And it's essentially styrofoam, but it's made of popcorn. And I'm like, hurry up with this because styrofoam is one of the worst things humans produce on this entire planet.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Very nice. I think that's it for popcorn, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Yeah. And check out that book by Andrew Smith, Pop Culture, because it's the definitive tome on popcorn. That's right. Well, since we talked about Andrew Smith, it's time, obviously, for listener mail.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Yeah, Jerry deserves way more credit for that, too, because sometimes it's just like, man, you just knocked it out of the park with that pick, Jerry.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Yeah, and also a huge, huge heartfelt thanks. I think I just said thanks, but I really meant thanks to every single person who's ever sent in a music bumper because that's just such a cool, just little subtle part of the show. Having all those different great little pieces of music. Thank you to everybody who's ever done that. Thank you to everybody who's going to do it in the future even too.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
I think we say 16. I thought it was 12. Somewhere in that neighborhood, between 12 and 16 seconds. How about that?
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Well, if you want to get in touch with us, like Cecilia, you can send us an email too. Send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Yeah. Something's wrong with it. It ain't right. Yeah. And so you're like, okay, well, why doesn't rice pop, suckers? Why doesn't wheat pop, smart guys? Well, it turns out it's because they have porous holes. So steam will come out of them. It won't build up pressure inside like it does popcorn. So popcorn is a very unique, darling, peculiar little thing that everybody loves.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Don't even come at us like you don't love popcorn. Everyone loves popcorn. Sorry.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Yeah, it was all popcorn. It was just a generic term for popcorn. It was all called popcorn. But I think in the mid-19th century or later 19th century, companies started to come along and basically branded their own version. And there was even a mascot in the 1870s called Colonel Pop. I love that one. I couldn't find a picture of him. Could you?
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Same here. And there's actually a popcorn company from not too far after Colonel Pop was developed, 1914, called the American Popcorn Company. And they're the people who make Jolly Time popcorn. And if you've never made Jolly Time popcorn, you should just do it. Just go buy one of those little foil things. Mm-hmm. That has all the stuff you need to pop the corn in it.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
And as it pops, like the foil expands. It's just such a great little thing. Word of advice, though, I learned this the hard way. Don't do it on a ceramic cooktop. It's really, really bad for the ceramic cooktop. Oh, wait, I'm talking about Jiffy Pop. Jolly time comes in the bags.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
You know, I don't very much. We have like a stir crazy. I don't remember who makes it, but it's like the, the, the big like black heavy bottom with like a thing that spins around slowly on it so that it stirs your, your popcorn apparently in a crazy way. And then it pop, pop, pops. But it's mechanical? A transparent, well, there's a hamster that runs the whole thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
I guess technically it's mechanical energy. But there's like a transparent yellow bowl that keeps it from popping out. And then you just turn it upside down. Okay, yeah. And then you have your bowl of popcorn right there.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Yeah, but weirdly, we got it in the last few years. We tried air popping for a while, and that's just like punishment.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
I did not know that. Well, at any rate, it's meant to get in every crevice and nook and cranny of a popped flake. And yeah, I would guess it doesn't take very much of that stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Wait, wait, I'm not quite done. I should say like more often than not, it's microwave popcorn that we. Sorry, I'm judging you. It's all right. I can take it. I just don't like it. What about smart food? I like that stuff too.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Remember it used to be on our, what do they call it?
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Yeah, like you had to give us SmartPop popcorn backstage at our shows. Yeah, it's a good snack.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Yes, which explains why Chicago is a caramel corn town. And despite the fact that people in Chicago won't admit it, Chicago is a caramel corn town.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Yeah. Apparently also Brazil and Argentina grow a lot of it too.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Okay. So Chuck, a big question is whether popcorn's healthy. And the answer is a resounding yes, if you just air pop popcorn and only eat popcorn undressed in anything and not cooked in oil.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
So I was like, there's got to be something wrong with popcorn. I searched dark side of popcorn. And the best I could come up with is that there's enough fiber in it that if you have irritable bowel syndrome, you need to be careful of your popcorn intake. That's the worst thing anyone has to say about popcorn.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff You Should Know. That's right.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Yeah, for sure. It just makes it less healthy. You know, you've got all the problems that you have for eating butter and not just eating butter, but liquid butter. Wow. You want to talk about where popcorn came from? Because I do.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
So like I said, popcorn is indigenous to the Americas, and that's because corn is indigenous to the Americas. As far as we can tell, especially if you read 1492, corn was domesticated from the wild teosinte plant as far back as 9,000 years ago. And the whole thing began in Mexico, and it was such a good idea that it spread throughout Central and South America, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Popcorn itself is not that much younger, maybe about 2,500 years or so. Yeah. I mean, 6,700 years ago, there was popcorn.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Right. But we do have archaeological evidence. I think people have found popcorn buried with people in South America. And I think there was one burial in Peru, maybe, where the burial was 1,000 years old, but the popcorn was still viable, like you could have popped it. Imagine eating 1,000-year-old funeral burial popcorn. That would really be something. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
Yeah, one of those underground restaurants for richies where they eat people.
Stuff You Should Know
Popcorn: Who doesn't love it?
That's all I got. Good stuff. Yeah. So, yes, they were they were these guys were witnessing popcorn and you would think like, OK, well, it would immediately become a big deal everywhere. That's not necessarily the case, despite there being a legend that popcorn was introduced to the pilgrims at the first Thanksgiving.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
What movie? The Saturday Night Live movie about the first episode of Saturday Night Live.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Yeah, because, you know, New York grew from the south upward, and this was way up at 66th, 67th Street. So, yeah, it might have taken a while for that to become legitimized. But, yeah, 43 is when it really kind of started the – I was about to say nonstop operation as restaurant, but as we'll see, that would be interrupted later on as well.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
But it's at this point that it became year-round open, dancing, dining, cocktailing, drinking three shots of gin for 85 cents, I guess. And it was doing pretty good, you know. It was one of the most popular restaurants in the 1950s. They expanded it from 10,000 square feet to more than double to 21,000.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
including the very famous Elm Tree Room, which they built around one of the famous live elm trees. And including the indoor and outdoor space, they could seat up to 1,200 guests.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Yeah, and I'm sure you ran into what I did, which is tons of articles about that other elm right next to the outdoor dining that was recently cut down.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Yeah, it was a 160-year-old elm. And I think that it was like this summer that had some kind of blight. And, you know, unfortunately, they had to take it down. But that was not, I don't think, the elm from the elm tree room.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Yeah, it's Jason Reitman's new movie. It's called Saturday Night.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Yeah, totally. This is where they first started wrapping the trees with those white lights, which is one of the sort of signature Tavern on the Green things.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Yeah, I mean, I will say this, spoiler alert for my ultimate review. It is a very beautiful place to dine.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Yeah, if you're a fan of SNL, the movie is good enough, I think.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Still. In 56, a very interesting thing happened in its history when Robert Moses found himself up against some Manhattan mommies when he said, hey, I need a bigger parking lot, so I'm going to use this half acre over here. Sure, there are a lot of kids that like playing over there, but we need some parking. And the moms took it very seriously.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
And they got their kids, informed a human barricade to block bulldozers, got in a real fight with Moses. He built a fence to try and keep them out. The moms got an injunction. And uncharacteristically, Moses backed down and abandoned that and set aside $50,000 for a new playground that's still there today.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Yeah, and for good reason. He ran not only Tavern on the Green, but the Windows of the World atop the World Trade Center eventually, the Rainbow Room, the world-famous Rainbow Room, and the Four Seasons, which at the time when this dude, when Joe Baum was running these, they were the four highest-grossing restaurants in Manhattan, and they were all his.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Yeah. And he came along at a good time because the through the 60s and 70s, it was doing OK, but it started to feel a little bit dated.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Jr. It's like when Ice Cube got his son to play him. Yeah. Because he looks just like him. It was pretty perfect.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
And then by the time the 70s rolled around, Central Park had become I don't know, like how legitimately dangerous it was, but it became dangerous enough to where it was sort of part of the national punch line as far as like, yeah, go to Central Park if you want to get mugged. Right. That kind of thing. And so, you know, the restaurant fell on harder times.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
And Joe Baum was calling it the Tavern in the Red. And in 1974, like you said, Warner Leroy took over. He's a former theater director. And this guy had a, to say he had a flair is sort of understating things. He ran a bar for a while called Maxwell's Plum. Oh, my God.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
God, just gorgeous restaurant. It's just heaven. Yeah. Maybe over the top. I don't know about gaudy or not. I mean, I think it looks like an amazing place to have a have a martini, but it did get some like bad reviews for just how sort of kaleidoscopic and gaudy it was.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Yeah, there's a place in Atlanta... What is the name of it? I haven't been there. But the theme of the restaurant is that it's got like five or six different distinct cuisines. And that's like what it's known for. And it's even in the name of the restaurant. I can't remember what it's called.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
I can't remember. Anyway, I'll look it up and let you know.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
But you're right. So Maxwell's Plum was kind of a wacky place. He took over Tavern on the Green and he brought that same kind of flashiness there. He had a quote where he said, a restaurant is a fantasy, kind of living theater in which diners are the most important members of the cast. It's one of the few creations that appeal to all of the senses and one with which I can create my own world
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
So he spent $10 million on a restaurant he doesn't own renovating this thing to, you know, in his own sort of flashy style.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Well, I don't have it in front of me. Can you take it?
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Yeah. I mean, how do you think you would do in an EZE death scene, huh, Mr. Big Shot? Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Or what's the witch in Wicked? I don't know. We went and saw Wicked. Euphaba? Euphala?
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
That's what Emily went as for Halloween. Anyway, the green witch from Wicked, that would have been a good name too.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Yeah, but she had a name. Chandeliers were brought in. He brought in 15 chefs from France. He brought the chandeliers in straight from India and then built the very famous, some may say infamous, crystal room. which was a very sort of over-the-top room full of crystals. It was made of glass.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
That was the building, if you've seen the very first Ghostbusters, when Rick Moranis runs up and bangs on the window before getting attacked. That is the crystal room. And that's the part that I couldn't figure out. Like the room I ate in was all glass as well. And I think it was just a re sort of a different version of what that was.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Well, now they would because, yeah, that kind of campy, kitschy thing is appreciated. But at the time, not everyone appreciated it. Semi-recently, I guess when it reopened, they kind of looked back. And a guy named Pete Wells, a former restaurant critic for The New York Times, described that original Crystal Room as a wedding cake palace as imagined by a six-year-old princess with a high fever.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Yeah, they had revenues annually of more than 40 million bucks, seating more than 600,000 diners a year, which is a staggering number of people. He got a pretty good deal. It was one of these things where when he came in, the Central Park was kind of dangerous. And like I said, the restaurant was on hard times.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
So he was really in the driver's seat as far as sort of saying like, hey, give me a pretty good deal, Mayor Ed Koch. And he was pretty desperate. The mayor was and the city was. So they let him build that crystal crystal room without, you know, getting the necessary permit, which was apparently pretty expensive.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
And they said you only have to pay one point two million for the license fee, which apparently is a lot cheaper than the arrangement he had with Baum.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Should we take another break? Yeah. All right. We'll take another break and we'll come back and continue through the 80s and 90s right after this.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Okay. How about this? I'll save my review of the experience till the end.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
So another fact of Tavern on the Green at the time was that Leroy had a staff that was not unionized. So he paid pretty low wages for a long, long time. It took a walkout in 1989 over that low pay period. for the workers to finally get with the union, the New York Hotel and Motel's Trade Council. But they were rolling in dough at the time, so they could afford those wages.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
And they were doing pretty well until 2001. First of all, Warner Leroy died, very sadly, in February of that year. Then 9-11 happened, which put a dent on New York City as a whole. And that's when Jennifer Oz Leroy, Oz Dorothy, died. Green Witch Leroy had taken over. But it just wasn't happening. They just could not recapture that magic.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
The restaurant was never very well reviewed for the food, and it was starting to kind of matter because people weren't going just for the experience, and food was just a much bigger deal, and there were plenty of great restaurants by then. So the restaurant just kind of fell off by the mid-2000s.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
I do think it had a bit of a bullseye on it. I'm not saying like the food was ever like great and it was just really unfairly reviewed. But I do think it was definitely a restaurant that critics wanted to kind of poke a hole in.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Yeah, from 2010 to 2014, it was not a restaurant. And like you said, it was a big risk because it was a big, expensive undertaking. It had never had a great reputation. I think it was always the target of critics. And so no one would go in. I think they tried a couple of times. There was a guy named Dean Pohl. who ran the Central Park Boathouse restaurant.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
He tried to negotiate a good deal with the trade union, couldn't do it for six months. So he backed out. Other bidders were scared away. And so while it was vacant, Mayor Bloomberg said, well, let's make it a gift shop. So it was an information center and tourist shop. And, you know, there are a lot of people that are like, just this once, you know, sort of at least great idea
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
I don't know if a great restaurant, but great New York City landmark has now been turned into a tchotchke shop with some of the complaints. So finally, in 2012, the city said, all right, Philly, step in. We love you down there. New York City light. What have you got for us?
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
And Jim Keola and David Salama from Philly got the bid to reopen the tavern by investing $10 million to sort of get rid of Leroy's flashy thing and say, let's take it back to the old school 19th century tavern look.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
No, I know. That is pithy. Because that room, it is a glass room that looks out onto the courtyard with those lights. It's a wonderful room to dine in. Gotcha.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
That bar area is gorgeous, though. The two guys from Philly, Keola and Salama, were some say cronies. The city sweetened the deal a bit. Bloomberg put a lot of pressure on the trade unions to give them a two-year break from having to sign a labor contract and to defer that licensing fee for five years, which is a lot of money.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
And it turns out that Keola's sister was married to, and I think still is, to a guy named Kevin Sheeky, who was Bloomberg's former deputy mayor and an executive at Bloomberg Software Company. But he was like, that's all just coincidence.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Yeah, you know, I think that the fact that it's owned by the Parks Department is the fact of the episode. I had no idea until yesterday.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Like, just panned it. Yeah. Here they go again. Some quotes. Comatose potato salad. Roasted quail that's as dry as a week-old English muffin. They're all just so pithy.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Well, here's my review. It was fine. It wasn't like the food was bad. It was like, oh, this is gross. But it's, you know, it's just, I mean, I'm looking at the menu here. We can read through some of these things. Appetizers. There's a crab cake. There's a calamari salad. There's a country salad, honey roasted figs. That sounds pretty good.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Yeah, but Sheep Fold is a sheep enclosure. And for the first 60 years or so, that's what Tavern on the Green was. Like you said, just as a sort of a quick recap, if you want to listen to our Central Park episode about the history of Central Park, it's well worth a listen. But when Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux-Clayson Designed Central Park.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Oh, man. Burrata with hearth roasted grape tomatoes. It's all pretty standard stuff. Yeah. And then if you move on to the mains, you've got some diver sea scallops, Scottish salmon for $38, grilled whole fish for $46, rack of lamb. You know, fairly pedestrian. I think I, if I'm not mistaken, I had the lemon thyme chicken under a brick. Did you get to keep the brick? Didn't get to keep the brick.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
It was a real tavern on the green brick from the old sheep's fold. Or sheep's hold. That came with blistered green beans, mashed potatoes, and a jus for $35. And it was like, it was pretty good chicken. Yeah. OK, but, you know, truffle fries, shrimp cocktail. It's the menu is not not a third rate country club. Right. But I didn't go in there expecting like New York's finest meal.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
I went there for the experience. We were in Central Park and that, you know, you can walk right over there. I'd always wanted to go as a bucket list thing. And now I can say I've been. And I would very much recommend to have that experience if it's something that like piques your interest. If it's like, I've always wanted to try Tavern on the Green, like go try it for sure.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Yeah, my martini was good. Nice. Was it 85 cents? It's definitely touristy. Like I didn't expect the ghost of John Lennon and Warren Beatty to come wandering in. So it feels a little touristy, but it was good. It was fine. I recommend if you've never been to New York and you think you're into the touristy thing, go for sure.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
If you go to New York a ton and you've never been, like give it a shot for one of your meals. You can always go eat somewhere better the next night.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
OK, but it's cool. It's worth going to. It's kind of like a Russian tea room. I've never been there, but I want to try it. Just haven't you been there?
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
OK, I thought you had been there for some reason, but like I want to try that out just to sort of say that I've been there and know what that experience is like.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
You know, in lieu of listener mail, we're going to do another shout out to our friends at Coed because they have a very special thing going. You've heard us talk about Coed before. They're our friends that run the nonprofit down in Guatemala to help break the cycle of poverty through education. And they do really, really great stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
And they're doing a special stuff you should know sort of co-branded.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Yeah. So let's talk about our call to action, huh?
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
They won a contest in 1858, a design contest for their Greensward plan. Part of the plan called for a parade ground and a very big playground right at 66th Street on the west side of the park.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Amazing. Yeah. And here's the incentive, too. If you set up your gift by Giving Tuesday, which is December 3rd, you can get a chance to have a virtual hangout with us on Zoom. We do that every year. It's a lot of fun. We hang out with a handful of folks on Zoom and, you know, we can attest to Coed. They're a great organization. We know them personally.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
We went to Guatemala and saw the work firsthand. And they are walking the walk down there.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Yeah. Well, not take them into the house. Visually. Yeah. We talked a lot about Boss Tweed. Obviously, anytime we're talking about this period, this era of New York, Boss Tweed ran the city. And his cronies got involved with the Central Park Planning Board and said, all right, we're going to do some upgrades, $6 million worth, in fact, which is a ton of money back then and today.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
But one of the new additions was a really fancy sheepfold at 67th and Central Park West. That was really beautiful.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
It was designed by Jacob Ray Mould, one of the guys who designed a lot of the actual buildings there in Central Park, of which there are not a ton of, but they all have a distinct sort of, they're all sort of like made of stone and they all are really kind of classy and old school looking. Neogothic. Yeah, neo-Gothic. He was really into that Gothic revival stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
So Mould designed this beautiful sheepfold, and people would, like you said, they would come. It was almost like an interactive little museum. They could come and look at the sheep. They could come and touch different animals. varieties of wool. They would shear those sheep and sell that wool in a big event every year. And it was like, like you said, it was like, hey, you tired of the city?
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Go watch those beautiful Dorset sheep and touch their, they're almost said fur, their wool.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Yeah, that probably wasn't a good move. They did enjoy their home, because this thing in 1871 cost $70,000 to build. And like I said, it was a beautiful building. They had these pavilions built for people to sit in, to watch. And these pavilions had these bucolic pastoral murals. And it was just a lovely little scene there. They even had, of course, a shepherd.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
The last one to work there worked there for the final two decades until 1934. His name was Frank Hoey. And he watched over the herd and lived there. And in 1934, that's like you said, when everything changed, when Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, very famous New York figure, said, you know what? This sheepfold should be a restaurant. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Yeah, I think his big slogan was, by the way.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Yeah. And then they also said the remodeled building will be known in the future as Tavern on the Green. And, you know, within the average, within reach of the average purse was sort of the working, not slogan, but just, you know, they wanted to make it affordable. It wouldn't turn out, you know, it would end up being, I guess, for the time, a pretty expensive restaurant.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
I think once it hit the 60s and 70s, but we'll get there. Now it's, you know, it's a New York restaurant. So it's not cheap, but it's not like some super, super expensive place.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
You're going to find that in any city. Yeah, exactly.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Yeah, exactly. It's just get the change purse out and live your life. Yes. So one part of the announcement then said this. The park department will not undertake the management of the restaurant, but will let it, as in lease it, to an outside concessionaire by public bidding. And that started sort of a very unusual arrangement where in New York City we'd be the landlord of Tavern on the Green.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
No, I mean, it's super New York. By the way, I sent you pictures, but I went by Studio 54. I know. I saw that. It was kind of cool. They still have the doors that say Studio 54. They left a few iconic bits. I was on that sidewalk in front of it trying to imagine people having sex on the sidewalk, and I got really grossed out.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
And people would bid for the contracts and not only bid for the contracts, but pay a pretty hefty licensing fee to do so.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Yeah. And they called it Tavern on the Green because New York had a rich tradition of taverns in their past. In the 1700s, they had more taverns per capita than any city in the world. And something else called pleasure gardens were popular in the 18th century where you could, you know, have a drink and do some dancing in a very pastoral park like setting.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
And so Tavern on the Green was kind of a throwback to like, hey, you know, a throwback to the to the days of the 18th century.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Well, their paved space was covered in horse crap. So I mentioned green space was a nice respite.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Oh, man. Can you imagine? You want to take a break? Yeah, that's a great setup. And then we'll pick back up in the 1930s right after this.
Stuff You Should Know
The Story of Tavern on the Green
Oh, yeah. I should have picked out a hotter couple maybe in my mind, but I didn't do it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Yeah. And, you know, if you look into these cases and people, you know, the volunteers that are working with some of these, you know, a lot of them are run by families of victims. They will say that it's probably more like, you know, 50 people. Advocates say that, you know, the total is way higher than they're saying it is, you know, kind of for all the reasons that we've mentioned so far.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
And that seems like a good time to take our first break. And we'll be right back.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Yeah, it's, you know, as you'll see, it's and, you know, there are many reasons for this, but it's a heavily hitchhiked road and that can be very dangerous. And so a lot of times these are hitchhikers, people just trying to get from one place to another. And like you said, they are, you know, either sexually assaulted or murdered or both.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
All right. So when we left off, we were saying that the total number could be as high as 50 if you look at all these cases. And not a lot of them have been solved. There are a few exceptions here and there that definitely show that there were serial killers, killer or killers operating there. There was one big one in 2012 with Colleen McMillan. She was murdered hitchhiking. She was 16 years old.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
This is 1974. But they had, you know, in some of the evidence boxes had her blouse still. And with the improvement in DNA matching and databases and stuff like that, they were able to find a match on Interpol. It was an American named Bobby Jack Fowler who had died in prison in 2006 where he was serving time for attempted kidnapping and attempted murder on another woman in 1995.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
And these are the people that, you know, like they found bodies. There are, you know, dozens and dozens more than these dozens who have survived attacks and rapes along that stretch of highway. So, you know, it's no secret why it's called the Highway of Tears. Big thanks to Livia for enduring this topic and helping us out with it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
And they found that he had been working as a roofer in Canada when this murder and others took place. And, you know, basically we're like, it was probably two other women as well on the list, Pamela Darlington and Gail Weiss. And they were both murdered in 1973, but he died in prison before they could officially pin that on him.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Yeah, there's another guy. In fact, he's the only living person convicted of one of these murders from someone on the e-panelist. His name is Gary Taylor Handlin. He, you know, going back to the 1960s, had committed multiple rapes, been in jail multiple times for these rapes. One was a hitchhiker in 1978, and he became a suspect.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
And the youngest victim, 12-year-old Monica Jack that you had mentioned earlier. Mm-hmm. Uh, and also, uh, Catherine Mary Herbert, uh, 11 years old.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Uh, she just was not one of the E Panna cases, but they caught him, uh, by setting up a sting operation in which they kind of created this, this fake, uh, crime enterprise where he was answering to a undercover, um, cop playing a crime boss who got him to confess that he abducted and strangled Monica Jack. Uh, and this is when he also confessed to killing, uh, Catherine Mary Herbert.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
But that confession was ruled inadmissible. But he was convicted of Jack's murder in 2019.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Yeah. So, you know, we mentioned 2006 is when they stopped officially tagging names onto the official e-panelist. There have still been plenty of murders and sexual assaults along that stretch of highway since then. Cody Lejebukov, I believe is how you pronounce that. It sounds right.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
And big thanks to Al Jazeera, where she got a lot of information from a six-part series they did in 2021.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
uh killed three women and a 15 year old girl between 2009 and 2010 so that was after the official list two of those victims were indigenous and the cops caught him when they just pulled him over for a speeding violation and found blood on him and they found the body of a 15 year old lauren don leslie uh and then you know realized that they could link him to and i believe he was convicted too of killings of three other women jill stacy
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Yeah, so you mentioned Florence Nazeel earlier having organized her own walk. This was in 2006. They call it the Highway of Tears Awareness Walk. And they walked two weeks. They walked through snowstorms. They walked through some terrible weather and conditions. And eventually ended at the Highway of Tears Symposium in Prince George.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
And again, this wasn't something organized by the cops or anything. It was organized by indigenous groups and victims' families themselves. But they did have 500 delegates from the Mounties there, as well as some representative from the Canadian government there.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
And it was basically a symposium where they had recommendations on what they could do, you know, not only to help solve these crimes, but to prevent more of this from happening. And we'll get to, you know, what's happened since then, because they have done some things that seem like they should probably help.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
But also, you know, how to support these families, how to support these communities a little better, because it was, you know, not well funded and any kind of work was very sparse up until that point.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Yeah, and, you know, there's a lot of distrust for the Mounties there and for good reasons in a lot of cases. We'll see. There's a woman named Gladys Raddick who was an aunt of Tamara Chipman, one of the victims, and she leads a cause called Tears for Justice, the number four. She has a lot of distrust of the police because as a teenager she ran away and was hitchhiking
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
and was picked up two different times by RCMP officers who raped her. So... I mean, as far as the RCMP is concerned, they're like, we're going to investigate this stuff and we're going to treat anyone within our ranks who does something like this just like we would any common criminal.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
But the fact that that stuff happens, period, and that there's a human rights watch report that came out in 2012 that documented police abuse against indigenous women and girls. And that's like literal abuse and sexual assault that cops are taking part in. At the worst, then all the way down to just being hostile or uninterested in what happened to these crime victims and families.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Yeah. And not only that, but they've been shown to get rid of information. So in 2015, Elizabeth Denham, she is the commissioner for the information and privacy for British Columbia. She put out a report that said officials removed like 150 emails about the Highway of Tears from their database, which was a violation of the Freedom and Information and Protection of Privacy Act.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Yeah. So what this represents, though, is a larger population seen not only in Canada, but the United States and all over the world where minority communities are. Although they represent, you know, sometimes a small part of the population, they make up a much larger part of people in prison, of people who were killed by police. And that's certainly the case in Canada.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
I think, you know, part of the reason that EPANA has gotten mixed, not only results, but mixed reviews over the year for their work is because they've just been, you know, they came out with a bang and then they've sort of been slowly waning over the years. I think they went from 60 assigned officers down to six by 2022. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Yeah, and, you know, along the lines of what I was talking about before, this is not just a Canada problem. There's an official name for something like this, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, MMIWG. And that has happened, you know, all over North America and other places in the world. There's some estimates that, say, indigenous women and girls are 12 times more likely murdered.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
than the general population to go missing or to be murdered. In Canada, and 10 times more likely in the U.S., and there have been people trying to bring attention to this as well. There's an artist named Jamie Black who made these really powerful installations that is sometimes the most powerful ones are very simple. And that's the case here where it would hang empty red dresses in public places.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Yeah, the Zero Laughs edition, because we're talking about the Highway of Tears. And there's no other way around it. This is just a devastating topic.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
And it really caught on. And since 2010, Canada has recognized May 5th as Red Dress Day.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Yeah. And I mean, this is horrific to look at, but one of the problems is they found that whenever they have a very large group of only men around in a desolate area for one reason or another. Sexual assaults and murders happen. And that is the case in these isolated parts of Canada where the fossil fuel industry is.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
So what will happen is they'll go to work on a pipeline or something, and they have what's called a man camp. With like a thousand dudes on site working out in the middle of nowhere together. And historically speaking, not just here, but kind of everywhere this has happened, dating back to the 1800s.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
When this happens, there are going to be sexual assaults and murdered and disappeared women and girls nearby.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Yeah, I mean, this happens everywhere all over the world that that is the case. It's not just North America. They've taken some steps. I mentioned earlier some of the things that they're doing that seem like they would help out. One is... We've got to stop people from hitchhiking or at least reduce the rate of hitchhikers. They don't have any other way to get around sometimes, like you mentioned.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
So in 2017, British Columbia Transit moved forward on something that came out of that 2006 summit. So 11 years later, that launched three new bus routes along Highway 16. But that didn't work for very long because that worked in conjunction with Greyhound.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
And just two years after that, and like 5,000 people were now using the service, Greyhound cut back on the routes there because they weren't turning a profit. And so all of a sudden, hitchhiking was back on the map again.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Yeah, I mean, just not being able to call 911 very simply is a problem. So in 2021, I mean, just four years ago, it's astounding that it took this long.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
And the provincial and federal governments said, all right, we'll chip in four and a half million bucks out of what will eventually cost 11 and a half million total to get Rogers Communications to get coverage all along this highway with cell phone towers. And I think by the end of last year, the good news is nine of those 11 towers were up.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
And hopefully soon the entire 450-ish mile stretch, you'll at least be able to call the cops.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Yes, absolutely. While this was going on, you know, when the cops were sort of slowly coming around to the idea that there was a specific problem along the stretch, the families were getting involved, the families of the missing, the families of those who were found dead. And, you know, they organized their own efforts.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Yeah, they say we are hope, we are strength, keep Highway 16 safe. And, you know, they're obviously critics of that messaging because they're saying we don't want to say that there's hope because right now with the way things are going with the Mounties and the investigations, like there is no hope. So why say that if it's not hopeful? Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
I'm going to call this mushroom fruit, and this is from Mike. Hey, guys, I'm a mushroom farmer from St. Louis and thought I needed to write in and give Josh some bad news. Listening to the Catacombs episode, the mushroom, guys, is the fruit of its organism.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
The plant that it is grown from is called mycelium. Furthermore, not all fungi produce fruit, a.k.a. mushrooms. If you or your family use mushrooms in supplement form, like mushroom berries, powder or something like that. Be sure to look for made with fruiting bodies only on the packaging or something of that nature.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
A lot of manufacturers are using myceliated grain without any mushrooms to make these products. That's like going to the grocery store for apples and leaving with most of an apple tree. There's a lot more to that discussion, but at the moment and with the current data, I say that if it advertises mushrooms, then it needs to have mushrooms. I've included some pics of the farm and my fur babies.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
One case that really kind of brought everything to even more of a head was the case of Ramona Wilson. This was in June of 1994. She was 16 years old, and she went to go meet up with a friend to go to some, you know, end-of-the-year school graduation parties. She never got there, and her mom, Matilda, was like, the cops— Don't really seem to care much that this happened.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
If you come to St. Louis, please come to the farm for a tour. And there are some great pictures of these beautiful fruiting mushrooms. One terribly lazy, looks like golden, long-haired golden retriever type laying with a candy cane lovey. and an awful, terrible tabby cat laying on a box, as cats do.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
And so the locals got together and they started organizing. They started doing, you know, going on search parties and and looking out for her. They ultimately, you know, very sadly discovered her body about 10 months later at an airport. Her clothes were found near her with some rope and some cabling.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
And so her mom and her older sister, Brenda, and, you know, other members of her family in the community got together and said, all right, the least we can do is try and raise some awareness since no one seems to be paying attention. So they got a memorial walk together in June of 95, which became an annual thing.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Yeah, absolutely. She had already been working, you know, to raise awareness when very tragically it hit home for her in a more personal way when one of her family members, a woman named Tamara Chipman, went missing in 2005. And, you know, all this is going on through the, you know, I think it was 1981 when the cops finally started sort of getting together and comparing notes.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
And that was after at least 12 years since the first known murder. And it took all the way into the 2000s. um, for things to really take a turn. And that was, uh, when, uh, very tragically a woman named Nicole, uh, Hoer, um, was killed. She was 25 years old and she was white. Uh, she disappeared in 2002, uh, And this is what really brought the national attention.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
You've heard a journalist named Gwen Ifill in the United States coined the term missing white woman syndrome, which is the idea that it takes a white person to be, you know, the victim of a crime for anyone to kind of sit up and take notice. And members of indigenous communities or marginalized communities are often
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
overlooked and underfunded and under-resourced, and the cases are kind of swept under the rug. And that's exactly what was going on in Canada for many, many years, and still is to a certain degree.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Yeah. So in 2005, this is just a few years after Nicole Hower brought more attention to the issue. The RCMP, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, we'll probably call them that. RCMP, maybe Mounties. Do they still go by that?
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Yeah. They launched what was called the Unsolved Homicide Unit, launched something called Project E-PANA. The letter E, that was just the division of the RCMP. And PANA is named after an Inuit goddess who cares for souls in the afterworld. And they – their official designation was, hey, we think we have a serial killer, maybe more than one, out there on this highway of tears.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
It's a pretty – like you said, a pretty great place to get away with a crime like that because it's so desolate. Up until recently, there were – Long, long, long, long, long stretches where you had no cell phone service even. So you couldn't call anyone if you were in trouble. Not very many people around and plenty of animals around to take care of bodies and the remains.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
So they found some commonalities in three teenage girls, Ramona Wilson, who I mentioned earlier. a woman named Roxanne Thiera, 15 years old, from Prince George. This is a very sad case. She was in the foster system and the juvenile incarceration system, and she eventually had to turn to survival sex, which is a term for women who are forced to resort to sex work to feed and clothe themselves.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
And it usually means, like, instead of getting money, they get food and clothing and, you know, items to live and survive. In 1994, she told a friend she was going to meet one of her clients. She disappeared, and her body was discovered off Highway 16. And then finally, Alicia Germain disappeared. was 15 years old, last seen in 1994 at a Christmas dinner.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
And she was discovered close to Highway 16. So that's when they came up with their criteria to see if they could sort of narrow this down, right?
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Yeah, so once they narrowed down this criteria, they found more cases that sort of fit that and were lumped into the Highway of Tears murders. Alberta Williams was 24, and she was celebrating at a pub at the end of summer after working there seasonally with her sister. This was 1989. Her body was found about a month after her disappearance.
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Delphine Nicol was 16 years old, disappeared in 1990 while hitchhiking. Lana Derrick, a 19-year-old college student, disappeared in October of 95. We mentioned Tamara Chipman. That was the relative of Florence and Azil. She was 22. And the mother of a two-year-old boy disappeared while hitchhiking in 2005. And then 14-year-old
Stuff You Should Know
The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)
Alia Sarek Auger went missing from Prince George in 2006, and she was found deceased in a ditch right beside the highway, Highway 16.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
I know. What about the others emotionally ticking?
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
All right. Well, we'll take a break and see if we can rein this puppy in right after this.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Yeah, for sure. There was one person, a researcher, who actually endeavored to find out how fast that can get. This is in 1990, and they found that some participants in the study could think more than 4,000 words a minute. And, you know, just for context, the world record for fastest out loud talker as a Canadian guy who went to 655 words per minute.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
So this is basically, you can think up to six times faster than the fastest talker on the planet.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Yeah, I actually did the math. It's roughly six.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
No, it's unfortunately just some, I mean, hey, I love this guy.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
His name is Sean Shannon. He's a Canadian guy who did the To Be or Not To Be soliloquy in 23.8 seconds. Wow.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
You can't understand anything he's saying, but I think you have judges, you know, that are like, yeah, he's still saying those words.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Yeah, or inner voice. And it turns out this is kind of a tough one in some ways because it's like, I imagine Anna was up against it because there are many, many, many, many facets to this. And it can serve a lot of different purposes. It's very common, but also some people don't have it. Yeah. We can look at brain scans and say like, hey, this is lighting up.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Yeah, I thought this was super interesting. Child development is just fascinating to me, like going through it now, like more than ever, obviously. But for most kids, and by the way, this Lev Vitgotsky, who you said we would meet. You know what? Let's just bring him in. Come on in, Lev. Hey, I'm dead. Yeah, exactly. This is in the 1930s, so he has left us earthwise.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
But a lot of this has been borne out in modern research. But in the 30s, he was looking at like basically it starts out as private speech, like kids saying things out loud to themselves. And, you know, first they start talking just to communicate like I'm hungry. I need to whatever, go to sleep. Actually, kids never say that. I want to stay up. And, you know, that's just social communication.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
But then as they get older, they start. sort of privately talking to themselves as an internal motivator. And then eventually that I think around that's between like three and four and then around six or seven is when kids take that private voice inside their head. And that's when the inner monologue kicks off more or less.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Right. He's the one that coined the term inner voice, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
I think it's a property of the Soviet Union. I don't know why I said that as a German.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
You know, we mentioned that not everyone has inner speech or develops that. It exists like a lot of things do on a spectrum. Some people, Emily is a very, very, she's like, I'm constantly talking to people in my head.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
I know. I see it happening. Uh, you know, the other interesting thing she does, I don't think I've ever mentioned on the show. And she was like, you can say all this. I don't really care. Um, she spells out when she's stressed, she'll spell out things with her thumb in cursive.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Like on a table, like just sitting there, like we'll be watching a TV show and I'll know she's stressed and her, her thumb will be going. And now I'll not only know what she's doing for years now, I'll be like, what are you writing? And if it's a scene about like, uh, a tense standoff in an office or something, she might spell typewriter or office or something just that she sees.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
It's not always like I'm nervous, never like I'm stressed or anything like that.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
When you couple up with people and you really dig in, you don't have any of those barriers up. It turns out that we're all just a little strange.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
She's great. I can read it all. I can look at her, you know, thumb and just I can spell it right out in my head.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Wow. It looks like thumb's gone wild.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Anyway, but that's kind of her inner voice, too, you know, in a way, just manifesting itself physically. But it's still, you know, not out loud. But some people constantly are doing this kind of thing, talking to themselves. Others sometimes, some never. These two researchers, Johan Nedergaard and Gary Lupien, if you have zero inner speech, they have termed that anendophagia.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
But it's like it's also really hard to study and get a consensus on because a lot of it is self-reported as far as. when people do it and why people do it and what function it could serve or doesn't serve. And if you don't have one, what does that mean? So there's just a lot of different avenues, and it's tough to kind of make this a real tidy package.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
And they say, and this is another kind of frustration, like between 5 to 10 percent of people don't have inner speech, whereas Russell Hurlburt, who we've met, said, no, it's more like 50 to 70 percent have inner speech.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Right. Well, that got me thinking, like, if you have no inner dialogue, does that mean, like, do sociopaths have that? But I found no correlation there. It seems like sociopaths quite often have an inner dialogue saying, like, do this awful thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Yeah, and they've also found, this is Nettergaard and Lepien in a study just last year in 2024, where they tested, they wanted to know how it related to memory, and apparently verbal memory of groups with very, they tested people with very high and very low rates of inner speech and found that if you have a very low rate of inner speech, you're not going to be as good at just remembering stuff, like your lines in a play or a grocery list or anything.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Huh. All right. That that study from last year where they were talking about verbal memory made me wonder about dyslexia because, you know, my daughter has dyslexia. And I was like, I bet you there's a tie there. And I was actually right on the money with this one. Supposedly, if you have dyslexia, you have very little to no inner voice.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
So that was fascinating. Yeah, because a lot of times they think in images and they think in they call it kind of like 3D thinking. Gotcha. So it's less word based.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
You know how it gets so complicated.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Wow. That is fascinating. And I would imagine hard to do kind of like Ghostbusters, you know, don't clear your mind. Right. And then you get the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man like that. Yeah. If anything is suggested, I will immediately see the word. If it says, like, don't think of the word, I'll think of that word.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
No, she's at school, so it didn't come to me, but I'll ask her later and let you know.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Yeah, it says Ruby says that her inner voice just says, find Josh, kill Josh.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
I love her too, I think. That's what I thought you were saying.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Yeah, Josh, it was very sweet. Got a text and he said, hey, I got this new artist that I've been listening to. I think Ruby might like it.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Oh, I could have sworn I texted you. But yeah, we listened to it together and she dug it.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
So, hey, big plug for Magdalena Bay. Also a nice place to visit from what I hear.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Back to Russell Hurlburt. That's just so hard. It doesn't roll off the tongue. Sorry.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Yeah. Oh, yeah. In my inner voice, it's hard to say, too.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
He developed a tool called the Descriptive Experience Sampling. I would call it the sampler, but DES. That is when he sits you down and puts, I guess, a device in the room and just like, hey, just sit there and chill out and do whatever and think about whatever. And anytime you hear a beep, though, you got to write down whatever is in your brain at that exact moment.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
I guess in the idea of just sorting to try and hit on the randomness of like what you might be thinking at any given time and just log those thoughts right then. And then they would talk about those. And he said, maybe this could give me a good framework. And when he got the results back, he was like, wow, this is fascinating how just all over the place it was. It's so multilayered.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
It's so varied. People can be thinking of a watering can and be saying the words flower pot at the same time with no explanation at all. Right. Sometimes you have multiple voices all talking over each other. And he was just like, this is he just put the device away and walk slowly out of the room, I think.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Oh, I got one, too. Okay. Youth is wasted on the young.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Yeah, this is just a tough one because there are so many little nuggets to uncover. Like after I had done all the research and I was kind of like, all right, let's go do this. I was like, wait, wait a minute though.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Like when my grandfather had a stroke when I was a kid, he had aphasia, which is some stroke patients, you know, can't, you know, they're talking, but they're not saying the words that you understand. Right. I was like, I wonder what's going on in their head and what that has to do with your inner voice. And I saw some things that said like,
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Nope, you're it or it completely disturbs your inner voice as well. And then in other studies, it said, no, your inner speech can be preserved relative to the spoken language if you have aphasia. So it's just it can be frustrating. But it's also I shouldn't look at it that way and just think of it as like just super fascinating. And maybe, you know, we don't always have all the answers.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
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Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Sure. And we've kind of touched on them here and there. You know, when kids are developing it, they believe that it's a way to sort of grow and mature into being responsible. Like you start out hearing your parents say to go do something, go clean up your room. And eventually, the more you hear that, you'll start thinking.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
I should really go clean up my room or I'm not sure when that's supposed to start. But yeah, at some point, eventually that will lead to you saying those things to yourself like you would as a responsible adult, like I got to clean this mess up.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Yeah. And, you know, I already mentioned sort of the performance aspect. Like if you're if you're about to play a game or run a race or something like talking to yourself, you got this. You're the best. You can do this. You're going to run fast. You might have a routine that you run over in your head. That's all your voice. Yeah, exactly. And that can be that can really pay off.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
obviously much more than negative self-talk and motivation.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Yeah. Mine comes and goes, too. And I haven't thought too much about when or why. So I think that's interesting.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
I don't know. I think it's more used as like a verb, like when I game. Gaming.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Yeah. But I think if you said, hey, do you play video games? It'd be a very Gen X way to say that.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Um, if you're wondering about, you know, cause we've talked about whether you dream in other languages, if you learn a second language, uh, is that a mark of fluency, uh, kind of ties into inner voice. Um, generally speaking, you, you think in your, or you talk to yourself in your first language. Um, but if you are fluent in, you know, let's say I was fluent in German.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Oh, if only, and I moved to Germany, um, at times there, or eventually I could have an inner voice, uh, is that is talking in a different way. Yeah. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Well, yeah. And just in the case of the stroke thing with my grandfather, I remember very specifically being a kid and seeing the frustration and thinking as a 10 year old, like he in his head, he's saying what he's trying to say.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Yeah. Yeah. I think that's totally fascinating.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Oh, we don't know his name?
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Well, interestingly, I know that I'm drifting towards sleep when my inner voice gets really weird.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Like I can tell because he's getting really frustrated that it's coming out as something that is unintelligible to us. But, you know, all these years later, I got two answers.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Like I'll be thinking of things and when I start thinking about things and I can tell that are just absolute weird nonsense. It's almost like pre-dreaming. But the problem is now I know that sleep is coming and I know that's what that signals. So in my brain, I will start inner talking going, all right, baby, I'm about to fall asleep. And that takes me out of it.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
I'll be drifting. And all of a sudden, like, I mean, I'm just making this up because I can't I don't get up and write it down. What I should do is write it down. But then I've ruined my nap or whatever.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Uh, but it's, you know, all of a sudden, if I'm just hear words or I'm saying, hear my voice saying words like, you know, uh, you know, the chicken put on a cape and, uh, and played a little basketball and jumped in a pot of chili, like complete nonsense. And I will recognize it's happening and go, all right, that means I'm, I'm about there. And then that takes me out of it.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Or note it and then just not let it rouse me too much and it'll lead to sleep. Gotcha.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Oh, boy. But every time I've said something weird about myself like that on the air, like stepping on cracks with the same place of my foot every time with OCD, I've had people write in and say, I do the same thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
I mean, there's a bazillion other things, but we'll just park it right here.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
That's right. I'm going to call this Toledo. And this is from Alexander Nozar or Alex. Alex says, you know, every time Josh talks about having come from Toledo, I was thinking about Tony Paco's, which he mentioned in the fan theory episode. What wasn't mentioned, however, was and Tony Paco's is what it was a restaurant, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
That's right. What wasn't mentioned, however, was what makes Tony Paco's awesome. First and foremost, it was founded by a Hungarian immigrant, making it a significant place for Hungarian-Americans, especially here in Ohio, which has a pretty large Hungarian population in Dayton, Columbus, Toledo, and I believe Cleveland.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
My family is Hungarian on both sides, with great-grandfathers coming over here in the 1900s, early 1900s. Tony Paco serves not just Hungarian food like spätzl, but they're well-known for their homemade pickles, and most importantly, their hot dogs. But what makes it truly unique as a fun place to visit is that any time a celebrity visits, they're asked to sign a hot dog bun,
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
which is then encased in plastic and hung on the wall. It's been a while since I've been there, but I remember Leslie Odom Jr. 's name and, of course, Jamie Farr. So I think you two should go up there on some sort of tour, and you can experience our awesome food, but also sign a hot dog bun.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Yeah, I think that was good, Chuck.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
No, I'm just joking. There have been plenty of people that have studied this, though, and, you know, we're going to talk about some of these people here and there. There was a pair of researchers in 2011, Simon McCarthy-Jones and Charles Ferneyhough, maybe?
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Right. Right. uh they developed a survey and where they kind of categorize different varieties of inner speech and their survey was called the visc the varieties of inner speech questionnaire visq and they also along with others have other categories and we're kind of just gonna go through these now but um one can be dialogic which means you're like you're having a back and forth with yourself um
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Or others. I asked Emily if I could talk about this because she talks out loud, which I guess isn't quite the same thing. But I'll see her talking to herself sometimes, having a conversation with someone. Much more common when she was having frustrations with her business, talking like out loud to people. But it would be in her head, but then I would also see her talking out loud.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
And I'll walk into her room and say, who are you talking to? And she'd tell me. But that's dialogic because there's someone else involved, even if that someone else is another you.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Yeah, Anna's example for that is, you know, you're leaving the house and, you know, phone, keys, wallet in your head, that kind of thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Yeah. I see your point. Other people is another one. That's when your voice, not when you're speaking to someone else, but when it takes on the voice of someone else. It could be Abraham Lincoln. It could be Josh Clark. And that's when you're imagining a conversation with someone else where your own inner voice sounds like someone else.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
It's different than like Emily having a conversation with another person.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Yeah, it's very fascinating. One can be motivational or evaluative, either, you know, am I doing a good job here or do a good job? They found that, you know, with like sports performance and any kind of like public speaking or any kind of performative thing, you know, that inner voice pumping you up can lead to real results, usually good.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
When I play basketball, all I hear in my head is what I hear on the court, which is swish.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Ruby expressed interest in playing basketball the other day and I had a hard time containing myself. I was like, you know, that's the only sport I was actually pretty good at. Like, I can actually teach you something here.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
But I didn't want to say it too positively because then she'd be like, eh, maybe not.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
I'm working on it. Another is prompted. No, no, no, I'm sorry, expanded speech, which is like if you have to have a tough conversation with someone and you're literally kind of just rehearsing that in your head as one or both, that is like when you're speaking not in any kind of abbreviated way.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Right. Which that got me on a sidetrack of like, oh, that's like, why do people, when you hear your voice played on a recording, why does that sound different? Does this have anything to do with that? And I just had to park that because that gets into a whole other thing, which should probably be a shorty.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
No, no, no. Like when I listen to a podcast of us, like why does your voice never match when you hear it out loud as it does in your own brain?
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
No, it has to do with like the way your skull reverberates.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Actual physical stuff. But I think that could be a shorty.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
It is. And we'll get to Efferent's copy later on.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Yeah, but it's a prompt from an outside source. Right. Whereas the next one, which logically follows, thankfully, pristine or spontaneous. That was Russell Hurlburt, kind of a mouthful, a researcher that coined this one. That is that's just unprompted, spontaneous. And it's a part of like what makes us us. Yes.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
That's right. And well, except when he gets excited about something, then he yells out, Bernie Ho!
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Maybe before we break, we should talk about these other four. Yeah. Because that VISC is still, they've been revising it over the years and it's still in use for some researchers. But in 2015, there was another researcher named, what a great name, Mal Gorzada, Polchaska Wasil? Wasil? Wasil, maybe?
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
They were like, all right, let's categorize it by emotional types. And these are the faithful friend, which has a nice ring to it. That's like your personal strength, positive feelings about yourself.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Sure. Saying it out loud, which means it's not inner monologue or dialogue.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
Yeah. The ambivalent parent, which is awful, otherwise known as Gen X parent, associated with strength and love and caring criticism. So wait a minute.
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
I would say the parent. I mean, weren't most of our parents fairly ambivalent about us?
Stuff You Should Know
Inner Dialogues, Monologues and Stone Cold Silence
It's like, oh, this is weird because it associated with strength, love and care and criticism.
Stuff You Should Know
What Makes Disaster Films Great
Yeah, for sure. And it also sort of, as we'll see, and usually they're the schlockier ones, but you get a lot of these one-word title disaster movies.
Stuff You Should Know
What Makes Disaster Films Great
Especially in the 70s, but then again, as we'll see in the 90s resurgent, things like tornado, flood, stuff like that.
Stuff You Should Know
What Makes Disaster Films Great
So I didn't know, I didn't know any of these early, early ones, but one from 1936, it was called the San Francisco, right? Yep. And it was made 30 years after the 1906 earthquake and about that earthquake.
Stuff You Should Know
What Makes Disaster Films Great
Yeah, kind of like the ones as we know it. In the early 60s, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was one in 61, when a nuke-powered sub that was radiation fire coming from space, they were going to bomb that radiation fire from below. Anytime you're using a nuclear bomb to launch it into a disaster, I feel like that's happened a couple of times at least.
Stuff You Should Know
What Makes Disaster Films Great
Yeah, for sure. Also in the 60s, we had Crack in the World. And for me, one of the great movie titles of all time, Panic in Year Zero. Such a great title.
Stuff You Should Know
What Makes Disaster Films Great
Yeah, I take issue with that. The Night of the Living Dead is listed. That is not a disaster movie.
Stuff You Should Know
What Makes Disaster Films Great
Yeah, I consider those sub genres. I think as soon as you add any zombie, it becomes something else, something else entirely. That's again, these are all just my dumb opinions. Did you see Godzilla Minus One? No, but I've heard a lot about it. Is it garbage or great?
Stuff You Should Know
What Makes Disaster Films Great
Well, you know, I did host a movie show for a couple of years.
Stuff You Should Know
What Makes Disaster Films Great
That makes me an expert. The 70s is when really things start get cooking with all manner of disaster movies from things like The Andromeda Strain in 1971, you know, a Michael Crichton novel. So one of his early novels, it was adapted.
Stuff You Should Know
What Makes Disaster Films Great
That's when they just didn't care about depicting that stuff with any kind of tenderness at all, you know?
Stuff You Should Know
What Makes Disaster Films Great
Yeah. I don't blame you. I never saw it, but I remember that kind of as a holdover, you know, came out the year I was born. So, but I remember it just being a thing.
Stuff You Should Know
What Makes Disaster Films Great
Yeah. I mean, airport was in 1970 and that's the one that, you know, kicked off a huge, I mean, it had sequels. It led to airport 75, airport 77, and then Concorde colon airport 79. Yeah. Which all eventually led to airplane as, I mean, that had to be the first spoof, right? Like disaster spoof?
Stuff You Should Know
What Makes Disaster Films Great
Yeah, I like a lot of these. It's not my favorite genre overall, but like I found myself saying like, oh, yeah, that was pretty good. I like that. All right. But generally, if we're in this, this is a subgenre of action movies. And I think I prefer action movies overall more than disaster movies.
Stuff You Should Know
What Makes Disaster Films Great
I think it was before. But Airport was a very lauded film. It got 10 Oscar nods. It actually won. Helen Hayes won for supporting actress. And this is something that we'll see over and over again. Most of these movies, they make a huge, huge return on, even if they cost a lot to make. Like that cost $10 million in 1970, which was a lot. But it brought in $100 million in 1970. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
What Makes Disaster Films Great
All right. I'll check that out. And Airport 77, of course, brings in the Bermuda Triangle because I think 1977 was peak Bermuda Triangle paranoia.
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What Makes Disaster Films Great
Yeah. And, you know, they movie posters back then reflected that, too, because I remember stuff like Towering Inferno. They would be the more artistic, like the Inferno, you know, the building on fire. But then like at the top or the bottom, they would literally just have like frames of people's faces of the cast, like just just tagged on there. Like, look at all these all the star power.
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Yeah. You know, they're trying to appeal to a broad demographic. So they would definitely bring back like some of the stars from like the golden age of Hollywood when they were in their later years would be in these like Fred Astaire was in one of them. Right.
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Yeah, so they're clearly trying to appeal to all age groups. Another thing a lot of these had in common, at least in the 1970s, was a man named Irwin Allen, the master of disaster. He came up in the 1950s, but he really hit his stride in the 70s with things like Poseidon Adventure, aforementioned Towering Inferno. Each of those was the top box office hit of their respective years. Yeah.
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Poseidon Adventure, very famously, was about an ocean liner that flips upside down and sinks, basically. That's such a good movie, too. So everybody is upside down on this boat, on this ship, trying to get out while they're underwater. Pretty great.
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Such a brutal, tragic, very upsetting end for such a wonderful person.
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Yeah, God. Can't stop thinking about it sometimes.
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I know. Towering Inferno, of course, you know, we mentioned there was a fire. If you don't know this movie, you should check it out for sure. It's one of the good ones. But Faulty Wiring, of course, makes it catch fire. People are trapped at the top. But you've also got, you know, sometimes it can work in other mini disasters within it.
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And that's the case here where there's a flood scene because they're trying to douse the fire. And then all of a sudden you've got a flood to reckon with.
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Man, McQueen and Paul Newman, does it get any better than that?
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Yeah, agreed. If you want to see one that's kind of super schlocky, if you want to go down that avenue, you could start with Earthquake from 1974. Yeah. Old Charlton Heston was in that one. People are, in this case again, trapped in a skyscraper once again. But this time it's an earthquake. A lot of, you know, when you see these earthquake movies, they're always shaking the camera.
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But what's funny is if you ever see them being shot, obviously nothing is moving except the camera. So the people are all just going, whoa, on just, you know, solid ground. It's always fun.
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Yeah, it looks it looks really, really bad and is so abrupt and jarring and weird. But it's like I said, that part is on YouTube. If you just, you know, type in earthquake movie elevator scene.
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It's so good. You know, it's a good scene if someone has taken the time to clip it out and put it on YouTube.
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Uh, yeah, let's maybe push on and then we'll stop at the nineties.
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And you know, one, one person's great disaster movie is another person's schlock. It all kind of depends because some of the ones listed here is sort of, um, being the lazier versions, Avalanche and Meteor. That's not one movie that would be pretty great, though, actually. Sure. It'd be Meteor, then Avalanche, probably. But those are two different movies.
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The Hindenburg, I thought that was okay from being a kid and watching it. I didn't see that one. I haven't revisited. But then Roller Coaster, I, as a child, loved, loved that movie about a terrorist. Oh, I've not seen it. It's, you know, again, I don't know if it holds up, but it's about a terrorist that's going to blow up a roller coaster. You know, he's targeting amusement parks.
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I don't think so. But like there's the bombers in the park and I just, you know, I'm having these fleeting memories. It's probably terrible. But, you know, as a, you know, 10 or 11 year old, it was great.
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Yeah, roller coaster isn't the best name. I'll admit that. Okay.
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Yeah, that was pretty much it. The swarm kind of – I don't know if Nicolas Cage, if they were referencing or paying homage to that with the bees thing later in The Wicker Man. It became a very popular meme, the bees. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, from Nicolas Cage. But in this movie, in the swarm, there's a pilot that yells, bees, bees, millions of bees.
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Hey, I think that's a pretty decent disaster movie solution.
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No, it's not. So Alan had a black mark on his record with that, with the swarm. And then beyond the Poseidon Adventure, they tried to recapture that magic in 1979 movie released seven years later, even though it took place the very next day of the original movie.
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Yeah, it's interesting because I'm sure you did the same thing when reading off some of these. It's sort of like just a gut feeling sometimes. Yeah. And you can't say exactly what it is that you feel personally like doesn't count. But someone, you know, someone else might think it counts. It's not like this is something you can say is very cut and dry, you know.
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He did produce perhaps one of the worst entries Irwin Allen did of the genre. I don't think it was his swan song, but it was definitely the end. In 1980, a movie called When Time Ran Out that did have Paul Newman. It was about a volcano at an island resort, but he was very much forced into this movie because of his contract. I don't think he at all wanted to make it. They cut the budget.
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Warner Brothers did. So they didn't even have the money to make it look okay. And it was just, it was really bad. There's a pretty good quote in here too, right?
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Yeah. And that movie holds up pretty well, I have to say. It's still a fun watch.
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All right. We're back and we're going to talk about the resurgence of disaster movies in the 1990s. And I may have mentioned it on this show before. I'm not sure. But this is one of my legendary predictions, my friend. I can't remember it, but it was one of the very, very, very early 90s disaster flicks came out. I wish I could have pinpointed which one it was.
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But I remember very distinctly at the time in college telling my friends, I was like,
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you watch i was like they're going to start making all of these movies again just like they did in the 70s and there's going to be a ton of disaster movies and it literally happened like starting that year man did you hear that from the ghost standing in the middle of the street no no no no she whispered it to you it's probably pretty ghost but yes uh sharknado jared from subway yeah hugh jackman and disaster movies but the only four things i've ever predicted
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Yeah, it's there was a movie called Avalanche in 1994. So they were dabbling in that world, but it was not a big movie at all. As far as like capturing attention, I think Twister for sure. And that may have been the one actually where I was like, oh, man, you because that is what I think of is like typical disaster.
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I don't I know this is controversial, but I'm not sure I put Independence Day in disaster movies. There's something about when you add like zombies or aliens and stuff. It just tweaks it slightly for me from classic disaster. But again, just my opinion.
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Well, maybe this can be that. And maybe you can like, I don't know, start a website, joshdefinesdisaster.com.
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I famously said, Emily's favorite movies of all time are every independent film ever made and Twister.
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Yeah, for sure. It was like those were really great special effects at the time. Twister looked really, really good. We should also mention, too, I know we didn't go over this, but it's just now occurring to me, Philip Seymour Hoffman in Twister is also kind of a classic disaster movie trope character, which is sort of a side character to the guy in the chair. You ever heard that?
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Like the computer expert that just literally sits in a chair the entire movie and figures stuff out?
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All right. Should we go through some of these? Because you did a bang up job. Thank you. The first thing you needed in a disaster movie is a disaster.
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Always. This is sort of an adjacent thing, though, Philip Seymour Hoffman's character, which is sort of he's not in a chair, but it's the wisecracking, irreverent kind of, you know, he's wearing the Hawaiian shirt when everyone else has on like tactical gear. Right. That's, you know, but super smart and figuring stuff out.
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I'm not sure what they call that in disaster movies, but it's their version of guy in the chair.
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We got to talk about Titanic. It's a disaster movie, but it's got so much story and romance. It's definitely a subgenre within it, I think. Bill Paxton was in that, too. Yeah. R.I.P., man. What a great guy.
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But this can be a lot of different things. A lot of time it's a human made thing. Then that varies from climate change movies, which we've seen a lot more of lately to like pandemics. And sometimes like it like I guess a disaster. Some things like Towering Inferno are a bit of a mashup because you can have like the threat of a structural collapse.
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Yeah, that was a thing for a little while. I think I was still getting Premiere magazine at the time. And I remember they started writing about, you know, these productions being kind of out trying to outrace one another to get to the box office first, maybe to their disadvantage as a production. But very famously, the two biggest examples, I guess, for production.
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are Armageddon and Deep Impact about a meteor striking the earth, you know, to basically wipe out humanity.
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And then Dante's Peak and Volcano. Neither of those were that great.
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Yeah, agreed. What a waste of Linda Hamilton. What a shame. I got to shout out a few more that weren't listed here from the 90s. Hard Rain. Remember that one, Christian Slater and Minnie Driver? No.
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It was a flood movie. You know what it was about? It was about a very hard rain. Okay. Just won't stop raining. Shout out, a friend of the show, Minnie Driver. Listen to her wonderful podcast on her own network, Many Questions. Very nice. I don't know if you remember this one, Firestorm with NFL legend Howie Long.
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Yeah, that was one of the bad ones. I think he was like a forest fire, like a fire jumper kind of guy.
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They probably are. And then also some of the one word titles. There was a movie called Tornado. There was a TV movie called Tornado Warning that starred Gerald McCraney from Simon and Simon.
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There was another movie called Flood, a second movie called Flood. And then there was one from 1999, which is sort of when things started to peter out, called Storm with Luke Perry and Martin Sheen.
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So that is a human made thing, but it might be brought upon by like a fire or flood or something.
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Right. And once again, you were saying he because all of these movies failed the Bechdel test.
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And there's also a thing that popped up in the 90s, which was the – Like the rival scientist, if there was a hero scientist, a lot of times there was an – well, not anti-hero because that's still a hero. Just the anti-scientist who is still a scientist. I'm clumsily working my way through this. But they thwart the hero.
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It's like usually a government scientist or something or maybe an official, and they dismiss everything like the hero scientist is saying.
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Yeah. What do you call, like, Die Hard? That's not a disaster movie, is it?
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Yeah, for sure. But, you know, as the 90s wore on with things like Luke Perry's movie, R.I.P., once again, in 99, things really kind of stopped in the wake of 9-11. It just wasn't something that people wanted to see for a little while. So there was a lull. You knew it would come back. Early 2000s had a few of them here and there. There was one called The Core in 2003. Yeah.
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where the inner core of the Earth ceases to rotate and scientists, once again, have to bomb it to get that thing kick-started, just like using the paddles in the ER.
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2009, it was a pretty big year. This is when they really started to come back, you know, pre-2010s with the movie, the Mayan calendar anxiety movie. 2012 came out. Do you remember that? Yeah, that was Roland Emmerich, right?
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That's right. And we're all here right now. So thankfully that came true. 2012 was not a great movie, but it did because of the scope of like just the world ending. They could be like, hey, let's just do any disaster we want anywhere all across the world.
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Okay. My favorite disaster film is not listed here, but it is from the 2010s. As far as being an actual great, great film is Steven Soderbergh's 2011 film Contagion.
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It is. I mean, it's a disaster movie, but it doesn't play like one because it is so realistically scary and doesn't have that sort of summer movie kind of schlocky appeal. But it's a disaster movie for sure.
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Yeah, he went through a string of playing real-life characters here and there. That's right. Some of those weren't great, but I did like the one about the Somali pirates, Captain whatever his name was.
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Yeah, it's all a formula. The Rock started being in a lot of these. There was... One of the few movies I've ever walked out on was San Andreas in 2015 with Dwayne the Rock Johnson. I did not think it was very good at all. He followed that a few years later. You liked it?
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Yeah. And then he was in Skyscraper, not to be outdone by San Andreas, another not so great movie a few years later in 2018. But again, some people love all the rocks stuff. Sure. Which is my dumb opinion.
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Right. Yeah, just spacing them out as, you know, like just something you can return to that's a pretty dependable release, but not like, hey, let's release nine of these in the next two years.
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Yeah. Which is that's an interesting take for sure. Yeah.
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No. I feel like I need to watch more. I didn't actually watch any full disaster films again in preparation like you did. So this has inspired me to go back and watch some of those from the 70s that I never saw.
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I'm going to call this follow-up to Morgana the Kissing Bandit. Hey, Chuck and Josh and all that help make your show awesome. My wife and I are longtime listeners, but first-time writers. My wife Jennifer and I love having you entertain and educate us, especially on long-distance trips with the family.
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You help keep us awake and focused with a pleasant side effect of putting our five-year-old Ben and seven-year-old Eleanor asleep. That's great. I love it when we can lull children to sleep. We live to give. What? You ended your podcast with a mention that you didn't know she was still alive and what happened to her.
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Maybe best listener mail ever. So big hello to John Ritter and your wife, Jennifer, and Ben and Eleanor.
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Yeah, and hats off to Morgana. I'm glad you're doing great. Hopefully this message gets to you.
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Yeah, exactly. But what am I looking for in process, in progress? Sure. Oh, good Lord. It's usually a pretty large disaster. And for me, this is like... can be a real big differentiator in my personal opinion. But again, it's a gut check. Like sometimes if it's just a local thing, to me I'm like, well, that's not really a disaster movie because it has to be more big and sweeping to truly qualify.
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But then sometimes it is sort of a smaller thing, and I feel like it does qualify. So like in the case of – you know, like a bridge collapse or a collapse tunnel or like daylight Stallone's movie about the one that one of the the New York tunnels was collapsing or collapse like I considered that a disaster movie. So I'm like contradicting myself. And that's what makes this all fun.
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Yeah. Obviously, surviving the disaster is a big part of the plot point. We know some people won't make it out alive, but usually like most of the A-list cast will make it out alive unless they're really trying to like pull one over on you in a scream sort of way.
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Yeah. I mean, I guess more recently they may throw you a bone with like a woman as president. But then she's like commissioning the team of men to usually solve the problem. Good point.
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Yeah, for sure. And I think we would be remiss if we didn't bring up a little bit of a prickly topic for our African-American listeners. It has long been a movie trope in horror movies, disaster movies or whatever, where the black characters will die almost certainly and usually first. And that has become such a trope.
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It's become a joke and lampooned in like, you know, the parody movies and stuff.
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But we have to mention that. And what I'm curious about, and hopefully we'll hear from some of our listeners, if that has now become so ridiculous and crossed over to where it's now just sort of funny and expected and a movie thing and not like truly upsetting. Right. So I'm curious how our African-American listeners feel about this at this point in 2025. Yeah.
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I was going to try and bust out of Morgan Freeman, but I think I would embarrass myself. I've never tried, so it's never good to launch into your first attempt live on the air.
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Well, we have to talk about the hero. The hero most times is not like a typical hero. It's usually an everyman kind of character who just like Armageddon, for instance, you know, they put together a rough and tumble team, you know, Dirty Dozen style. It wasn't a bunch of like elite problem solvers. They were like oil rig guys, right? Like drillers.
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Yeah, they had to train him. I only saw Armageddon once, so I'm pulling a lot of this from distant memory.
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Yeah, you know, it was okay. It was fairly, you know, schlocky, big budget sort of stuff.
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Yeah, it's it's summer movie popcorn fair. I still love these kind of movies. I think there's a place for all kinds of movies. And I still love going to the theater and seeing these sort of big budget like it probably isn't a great film, but it might be a fun movie. Right.
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Yeah. I mean, I remember I think I remember when it came out, we might have even talked about that on the air at some point when we did the tsunami episode with how they recreated that was just harrowing.
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That's right. Just go to squarespace.com slash stuff for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code stuff to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain. Hey guys, it's Chuck and Josh from Stuff You Should Know. If you're anything like us, you've got a lot on your plate this new year.
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You've got summer beach trips to plan, a work-life balance to balance, and pickleball opponents to beat.
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But he'd need a ride back. Are you kidding? He said, it might take a while, but I could probably run a hundred miles. And I'm just like floored by this idea of, That people can do this. And he said, man, you should do a – I guess you should do an episode on the Barkley Marathons, which I had heard of before.
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Yeah. And they showed up there. There was a park ranger that was like, you guys should leave. Like, you shouldn't be out there. It's like it's not like you think you're going to get lost. You're going to get hurt. You're going to need rescue. They ignored him. They did make it through. They did an eight mile.
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uh they made this eight mile hike uh this loop but it took him a full day which is you know you should be able to hike much more than eight miles in a day and it required a lot of orienteering like you said and paying attention to that kind of thing and he said all right i think i have an idea here for a race uh let's make a nearly impossible to finish race um i think it's kind of hard to tell
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Because there's not a website for this. You can't get, like, historical. I mean, people have written about it since then. But you can't get, like, the official website documentation on this race in history because it doesn't exist. They keep it very much under wraps.
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So the way he tells it on the documentary, it was always supposed to be 100 miles, but no one ever did more than the first three loops out of the five. Yeah. I think, though, that maybe this first version was shorter. It was about a 50 to 55 mile course. It was held over April Fool's Day weekend, 1986. And the initial cutoff was 24 hours with 13 participants and zero people finishing.
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Yeah, I mean, he changes the route every year a little bit. That's why it varies. But the year they did the documentary, it was documented at 130. And everybody is like, it's not 100. Just stop saying that.
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Which is this – yeah, which is this ultra marathon plus a trail run plus in the mountains of northeastern Tennessee that is known for just being a crazy – race, a crazy hard race, and having a really unusual origin story, an unusual founder, and just how it's all done. It's just this remarkable story, and I agree.
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Yeah, and I guess we can go ahead and tell everybody the current iteration, like we said, is supposedly 100, but it's really more like 130 miles. It's got a 60-hour time limit. And the elevation is the total elevation climb over that race, if you finish it, is 60,000 feet, which is equivalent to walking up and back down Mount Everest twice. Yes.
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Yeah, I mean, their legs are all just... Because these briars, they have to go through one part, which is a really heavy briar area.
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Oh, yeah, like disgusting, bleeding. Their feet are disgusting and blistered and just riddled with... I think the one guy that... We'll get to the stops, but the one guy, they were like, it would take you eight hours to fully dry your feet out. So, you know, you can't... You're not going to get dry feet. Right. Which is a big problem. And... They're basically not sleeping. Right.
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When you complete a loop, you have what's called an interlooper period where you can do whatever you want. You can take however much time you want. You can get first aid. You can eat. You can drink. You can rest. You can change your clothes and socks. You can take a nap if you want. But that clock is still running. So how long you wait is up to you. Mm-hmm.
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I think the winner that year said he slept about an hour total. So just try staying up and awake for 60 hours in a chair.
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Yeah, exactly. People are doing this. And, you know, we say it's a run like a lot of this is hiking and bouldering and walking and crawling. So it's not like they're running the whole time, but it's just brutal.
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Yeah, I think so. So finishing the three loops, if you finish three loops, that is considered a fun run, and that is a designation, and that is a huge accomplishment just to finish the fun run. We should add he also has a baby Barkley in the fall, the Barkley Fall Classic, which is a 50K, so 31 miles, and that has about 400 runners.
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But only about 35 to 40 participants are allowed per year to compete in this thing because of, you know, it's out in nature. So the state won't let them have like hundreds of people, like not a ton of people can go watch. It's just like family. And I think some, you know, former winners can be there.
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And, you know, it's a pretty small operation because they just can't, you know, run roughshod over the area. But they had the 60 hours to complete. Now, 12 hours per loop. The first loop is run clockwise. The second loop, which is at night, will go counterclockwise. And then again, day, night, clockwise, counterclockwise. And then this is pretty devious.
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The final fifth loop, if you get there, the first person to finish the fourth gets a choice which way they want to run. And then they start splitting people up because almost everybody runs with a buddy or two. It really, really helps to have someone out there and they're really helping each other. But at the end, he's like, you're going to lose your buddy. Which way do you want to run?
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And the first person will say, I'll go clockwise. The next person has to go counterclockwise. And then they alternate. So at some point, if they finish that fifth loop, they're going to pass their former buddy going in the opposite direction. Yeah.
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Yeah, I think it's probably it makes it a lot tougher. But I get the idea that if you make it, if you're one of the maybe two, maybe three, maximum four people that are even on the fifth loop, then that's when things get serious. That's when it turns into an actual race.
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Yeah, and it definitely doesn't seem like it gets easier because they were finishing, when they were fresh-legged at loop one, they were finishing in about eight or nine hours for the fastest times, and then those fastest people were doing like 12 and 13 hours on the next loop. Through the darkness.
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And we should mention the weather, you know. With these huge elevation changes, you're going to go from temperatures sometimes in April in the 80s where it's low to like 10 degrees at night. They have about 100 gallons of water they put out randomly on the course. Like there are no technical water stations, but you'll just happen upon a jug of water.
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And Laz said that, you know, one year they were 140. eight pound blocks of ice because it was 10 degrees at elevation.
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Hey guys, it's Chuck and Josh from Stuff You Should Know. If you're anything like us, you've got a lot on your plate this new year. You've got summer beach trips to plan, a work-life balance to balance, and pickleball opponents to beat.
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That's right. The nerds have done the work for you, everybody, researching and reviewing over 1,100 financial products to bring you only the best of the best. Looking for a lower rate on your auto insurance? They've got a winner for that. Or a balance transfer credit card with 0% APR? They've got a winner for that, too.
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That's right. And if you get cold feet, then you got to try those slippers that they have. They're warm because they have that fluffy, sharp aligning and the marshmallow-like cushioning. Really good stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
All right, so we're back. The race is about to begin. We should point out, too, the other thing to keep in mind is if you quit, quit near the start-finish line. Right. Because, like, a lot of people finish, like, a loop and are like, I'm out. Or maybe the two or a lot of people get to that third fun run and they say, that's good enough for me.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
The one guy in the documentary quit and it took him 10 hours to navigate back. Cause it's not like they send somebody out, you don't tap out on radio and they come and get you. Yeah. You just decide I can't do this anymore. And then you very slowly walk back to the finish line.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yeah, no, totally. Or if there, I mean, it depends on where you are. If you're below the halfway point, a lot of people come back the way they came.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yeah, it was really well done. It's on YouTube. And I recommend watching it because it really there's a lot of drama that takes place the year that they did the documentary. I think they did it on 2012 or 2013, maybe.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yeah, that's a non-refundable application fee. I think most people send in two single dollar bills because he says they don't give change. And he every year chooses, you know, he chooses a range of people. Some of them are very experienced. Some of them are random. Every year he chooses one human sacrifice. that he said the runners even appreciate, even at the expense of not getting in themselves.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
He chooses one person that has no business being there. In the year of the documentary, that poor guy made it six hours. Yeah. And I knew as soon as that guy headed out in his camouflage cargo pants. Right. I was like, this guy, what is he doing? What's he wearing? So he didn't make it very far.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
No, I don't think so. No, it was pretty funny and sad. He took it on the chin like a big boy, though.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
A little bit more about the application process. Everyone knows it takes place generally around April Fool's Day. They send in an essay to get in with weird prompts. Like one year it was what's the most important vegetable group. And one of the women, I think she was in the documentary that year, Beverly Abs, who, by the way, that year completed the fun run. So quite an achievement.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
She said she was told to send the application in exactly at midnight on Christmas Day in the time zone where Lazarus Lake was. So she had to figure out where he was at the time. And then she wrote a poem as her essay and she got in.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
And then once you get in, you get a letter that says, I'm sorry to inform you that you have been accepted. Basically, misery awaits you.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
I think it was 2012 or 2013, and there's a lot of good drama, so we don't want to spoil some of the stories that happen. But I recommend watching, and here we go with Barkley Marathons.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yeah, he's one of the great eccentrics of the world, and sometimes those people are hard to pin down, you know, because they don't fit into a box.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Right. Some other fun things. If you're a first-time runner, you bring a license plate from your home state or home country, and he makes these cool signs out of them and hangs them up. You have to bring a gift as well if you were part of the race. If you are... A first-time runner, you have to bring an article of clothing. In the documentary, it was very funny.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
He said it kind of depends on what he needs. One year it was a bunch of white Oxford shirts. Another year it was socks. Another year it was flannel shirts. And then if you have finished the race and you come back to race again, you have to bring him a pack of Camel cigarettes.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yeah, when you get accepted, you know what day it's going to be on. You go, you camp out in the campground, and you're just sort of waiting for him to blow the conch. He blows a conch sometime between midnight and noon on the Saturday of that weekend. You don't know when it's coming. So if he blows it at, you know, 7 a.m. or sometime in the morning, you're up all night.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
You're not getting sleep because you're so amped up and ready for this.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
And apprehensive because you don't know when it starts. Again, he's just sort of messing with people. Yeah. And so when he decides to blow the conch, he blows the conch. That means you have one hour. And everybody, you know, starts getting ready to go at that point. There is no prize, we should also mention. The prize is just finishing this thing.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yeah, totally. I like that one dude, the long-haired guy from Arizona, in the documentary, that was his first one. He just had a cool vibe. Like, everyone had a pretty cool vibe. Like, it's a really... It has a great spirit of helping one another out, and during the interloper periods where they're, which is, by the way, the only time they're allowed to have their sort of aid crew with them.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Like, they don't, you know, they can't get help along the way.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
So this is when they see other people, and there's other former winners there, and when people drop out, they stick around, and they're really helping people get their feet together, and they're giving them dry socks, and... feeding them. And it's just a real great spirit of sort of camaraderie and helping one another out, it feels like.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
They can wear a little cheap or they're given a little cheap watch. And I think they banned altimeters in 2014 or 12 or something.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
To me, this is kind of one of the coolest things because the whole time until we had gotten to this part, I was like, well, how do they know that people are running that route? Because they're not staked out along the way.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
In the documentary, they had some people staked out a little bit just to get some footage, but it's not like they have people at checkpoints that are making sure they're on the route and all that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
He did something pretty lo-fi and genius, which was he puts 10 books out, 10 to 12, depending on the year, at different points along the way, and you have to rip the page out corresponding to your bib number, and that is the proof that you ran the real route.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
You have to show up with, depending on how many books, 10 or 11 pages when you touch that start-finish line, and you have to turn them over to Cantrell, and he has to look them over and verify it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yeah. I mean, the one guy, the year of the documentary that won and set the record, I think he said he spent a couple of hours looking for the book at one stop.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yeah, and I think there was a story just last year, in fact, there was a French runner who got to the final loop to find that a book was gone. There was a day hiker that thought the race was over and took the book as a memento. So he's like, what do I do? He completed the race, and when he got back to the gate, they had turned the book in, so they counted that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
You know, I bet that he feels a great sense of accomplishment, though.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Like he finished that thing, six seconds be damned, you know?
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
I think there was one more piece of housekeeping here. Housekeeping? Oh, that's right. When a runner gives up, a guy named Dave Henn, who is a race volunteer, plays taps on a bugle.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yeah. It's really fun to watch. It was. Someone just like on their last leg, literally like you bleeding at the legs. And he's like, hit the button. Right. Because that was easy.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Oh, man. The one guy that couldn't in the documentary that that tapped out and was just like crying.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Oh boy, that was tough. He had kind of dark curly hair and he was pretty pumped up going into it about his chances. And yeah, I mean, what can you say about a race where like, whatever, probably 98% of the people never finish it. Right. Maybe more, maybe 99.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Let me see. Last – I'm sorry. This year there were a record five people completed it, and that is – I think the maximum before that may have been three, maybe four, but usually it's one, maybe two or zero. Last, I'm sorry, this year, a woman was a finisher for the first time. Yasmin Paris or Perry, I don't know how she pronounces it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
She came in two minutes short of the deadline to finish that race.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yeah, I got that. And I don't know if I'm being an apologist, but I got the idea that a lot of that was sort of goading someone to finish.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yeah, like deep down, he's like, there's going to be a woman that's going to do this, and maybe I need to stoke the fire a little bit.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Who else? In 2024, a mechanical engineer named Jared Campbell became the first four-time finisher. He's in the documentary. And an interesting just sort of side note in this, and Livia pointed it out, but then when you watch the documentary, it really hits home, is that it seems like this race and ultra-marathoning and this sort of endurance thing attracts people of very, very high intelligence.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
We're still getting emails on that one. So yes, I do. Okay. All right. Cool. What LA marathon are you talking about?
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
I felt like every person they interviewed were like, I'm an engineer, I'm a scientist. And they talked to, I almost called him Barkley, to Lazarus about this, to Cantrell in the documentary. And he said, yeah, he said, those are the achievers in life. Those are the people that go to graduate school and go to get their doctoral thesis and people who set hard goals and accomplish them.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
It just sort of fits, and I never really thought about that tie, but I don't think there's a lot of dum-dums that do stuff like this.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
I do want to shout out the record, though. Brett Mahn, who has won it a few times now, I think he's a physicist. The current record right now lies with Brett at 52 hours, 3 minutes, and 8 seconds. Very nice. Just incredible.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
That's right. Sorry, John. Go back to sleep. Here's your chubby hubby.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
I can't find it anymore. I can't either. People say it exists. I get pictures, occasionally emails, but it doesn't exist in Atlanta.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
I don't know. I don't eat ice cream anymore anyway, which is the saddest part of this story. All right. I'm going to call this Lake versus Pond. We got quite a few emails. By the way, I want to mention one differentiator we saw said that the difference they heard between Lake versus Pond is if sunlight can reach the bottom. If it can, then it's a pond. If it can't, then it's a lake.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
But this comes from Mark. Hey, guys. The answer, I think, depends on who you ask. But as an ambassador from the land of 10,000 lakes, Minnesota, which is technically 11,842 lakes, perhaps I have a bit of clout. Most folks would assume the difference has something to do with size and depth. It's not quite that simple though.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
According to a 2012 CBS News article, a retired DNR water supervisor, Glenn Yackel, suggests that a lake needs to be large enough and deep enough to allow for wave action to be considered a lake that can clear vegetation from its shoreline. A pond, on the other hand, lacks this wave action, meaning its shoreline is typically surrounded by vegetation without clear boundaries.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
I don't remember what it was. Yeah. Oh, boy. People are just screaming at their – pod player right now.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
But guys, it gets even more complicated. Government agencies often have regulatory thresholds that lead to discrepancies per state. For example, here in Minnesota, with our 11,842 lakes, has fewer lakes than Wisconsin, And any Wisconsinite will gleefully point out that they have 15,000. But here's where the differences come into play.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
While they do have 15,000 lakes, their definition includes a body of water with an area of at least 2.5 acres. In Minnesota, our standards are higher. And to qualify as a lake here, we must cover at least 10 acres. If we lowered our threshold to match Wisconsin's, we wouldn't dare dream of it, though. We'd have over 20,000 lakes.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
For real. That is from Mark. Mark said, always a pleasure to listen to you guys with my boys who are six and seven and big fans. And Mark had replied with their names. And I'm very frustrated because I cannot find that reply. So let me just say, Mark and sons of Mark, thank you for the support.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Sorry, guys. But there's six and seven. So maybe that's for the best.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Anyway, let's not even do that. Marathon's been along a long time. Ultramarathon started in the 1970s, and that's what we're really talking about. And this guy, Gary Kintrell, a.k.a. Lazarus Lake, or Laz, he's in his 70s now. He is our... He is the creator, along with his friend of the Barkley Marathon, whom he named after his friend, a farmer named Barry Barkley.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
In the documentary, very sweetly over the end credits, they ask him with Barry why he named it after Barry. And he said, well, he used to help me with a lot of races. And I don't know. It just fit.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yeah, so there's no real reason, but they're called the Barkley Marathons. And Cantrell has an interesting story in that he is a former athlete. He's run supposedly over about 150,000 miles in his life, but he smokes Camel cigarettes. He just floods his body with Dr. Pepper. He's an older gentleman now and has kind of wrecked his legs from all that running.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
So he hasn't run for a while, but he got interested in this as a Boy Scout in Tennessee as a teenager, or preteen, I guess, when he started doing backpacking trips that he hated until he found out there is a great joy in overcoming a hardship and doing something tough, physically and completing a goal and got kind of hooked on that feeling.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yeah, exactly. They first took the form of what he called journey runs, which is this all sounds fun. If I was into running, I would do something like this. But he and his friends would get together and be like, all right, let's run from Knoxville to Nashville or let's run. I love the through run.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Their idea of a through run was either from Alabama or Kentucky running to the other just straight through Tennessee. Let's run through the state of Tennessee.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Pretty fun idea. They were doing these. They led to some other kind of legit races. I think one of the two is still around. He called it, and he's always had a sense of humor. You can tell by the way he names these things. The last annual Vol State, obviously Volunteer State, road race, which is a 311-mile run from Missouri to Georgia in 10 days.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Exactly. A 10-day cutoff time, no comfort stations along the way. You have to source all your own food and water and shelter along the way. And then another one called the Idiot's Run, which I don't think is around, 123-mile gravel, all gravel road run. Oh, my God. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Yeah. I mean, many, many years, the Barkley marathon has no finisher at all. Uh, many years, no one makes it to the fifth loop. Uh, there are four loops that we'll get into all this in a second. Um, it's happening more and more now. I think just.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
There are more veterans that come back that once you kind of know the deal, I say it gets a little easier, but you know, a little easier in that it's possible to finish. It's never easy, but I think the veterans have an advantage for sure.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
No, totally. And if you look at, you know, they do these aerial shots in the documentary of this prison that we're about to talk about. And it's just, you know, it's in the middle of nowhere, like at the bottom of, you know, sort of a ravine and very inhospitable. I mean, you'd like to think about places like Alaska being like, you know, some of the most inhospitable places in the United States.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
But I mean, the mountains of northeastern Tennessee are no joke.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
That's right. Our friend Chad, we want to shout out our friend Chad Crowley, who we've talked about before, who was the producer and director and showrunner of our TV show back in the day. Right. I got this idea from Chad because we had coffee over the holidays and he is running ultra marathons now.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
Exactly. And they needed somewhere to put those prisoners. So our workers, I guess, slash prisoners. So they built a new prison. It is called Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary. And in the 1930s, a lot of that land eventually became that great conservation area that we were talking about, those 24000 acres. And the New Deal era Civilian Conservation Corps built a lot of trails.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
it became a natural area you know officially in the 1970s but there are these trails there now um not like again like you said not like a lot of state park trails that you go to a lot of these trails are still pretty rough um the prison uh stayed open but what why we're telling you all this is for a couple of reasons uh one is at one point in the race they navigate through a
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
tunnel like a little water channel that goes under the prison and that's part of the race route where you're definitely gonna get your feet wet I don't think we mentioned you're running through rivers and things so like wet feet and it's just a part of the the challenge of this race yeah But the prison remained open.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
And James Earl Ray, the assassin of Martin Luther King Jr., was sent there with six other men. He escaped in 1977 from Brushy Mountain and spent 54 hours in that rugged terrain, eventually being recaptured about eight miles from the prison. And. And Lazarus Lake, old Laz Cantrell, heard this story, heard they made it only eight miles in that 54 hours.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
And he said, man, I could travel 100 miles through that terrain in 54 hours. So he invents this race.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
sort of inspired by this uh he said that he still gets hate mail every year and angry letters for people that think it's some sort of tribute to james earl ray and he's like no it's the opposite like it it was started because i'm making fun of the fact that this guy only made it eight miles and we're doing a hundred right right 130 really uh you want to take a break Yeah, let's take a break.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
We know the name of the marathon. We know where it takes place. We know who started it and where it came from. And we'll be back with more of the Barclay Marathons right after this.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
which is a very Chad thing to do. Like he starts running a handful of years ago and then now he's running ultras. And I was like, Chad, how long is that? And he said, 60 miles generally. And I said, could you run to Athens? He said, how far is Athens? And I said, I don't know, I can't remember how far I said, like 80 miles. He said, I could run a hundred miles.
Stuff You Should Know
The Barkley Marathons
That's right. They make it really easy to sell access to content on your websites like online courses, blogs, videos, and memberships. You can earn recurring revenue by gating your content behind a paywall even. Simply set the price and choose whether to charge a one-time fee or subscription for access.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Yeah, he was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, pump your brakes. I'm trying to sell these to lazy kids.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Like, broad overview, please. He ended up with grad students mainly saying that they did the best work, which makes sense.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
But we mentioned the iconic yellow and black design. That was something Cliff thought of himself. I remember the mountain cliffs even being on the editions I had when I was a student in the 80s. I don't think they have that anymore, but they have these yellow and black stripes that just...
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Yeah. I mean, the first thing we should probably say, because Jerry in the pre-show banter even got it wrong, even though I said, Jerry, we're doing an episode on Cliff's Notes. She said, I used to get Cliff Notes. It's not Cliff Notes. I used to say Cliff Notes too in high school, but it is Cliff's Notes, as in the person's name was Cliff, as we'll soon find out. It used to have an apostrophe.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
It looks, I mean, it's a genius branding move just to do that simple little thing because CliffsNotes were so identifiable from across a bookstore the night before a test or something. You could zoom over to that spinning rack of yellow and black pamphlets.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
That's right. And you would open up the scarlet letter, Cliff's notes, and it would say the letter is A, the end.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Yeah, probably. Because it is literally A. A for awesome. No, not quite. One thing Cliff had in his corner was all his work for the Nebraska Book Company and being a traveling salesperson and all these relationships he had with bookstores because he owned the market for this. 80% of the market for guides to literature belonged to Cliff because that was just it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
I mean, I think for a long time, I mean, competitors would come along and we'll talk about that. But I think he had a number of years, maybe even decades, where everyone was just like, well, no, there's already Cliff's notes. Like, why even bother? He owns it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Yeah, for sure. You know, we mentioned the 60s. You just mentioned 68 for crying out loud. Yeah. Being kind of a big decade for the business, it was toward the end of that decade that things got a little rocky. It was around 1969 that a couple of things happened to sort of dampen the business, I guess, a little bit.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
And this is something I didn't know, but apparently starting in 1969 and through the first bit of the 70s, the classics, people are like, hey, all these new teachers came along. They're like, hey, we don't need to read The Scarlet Letter anymore. We're going to read another unnamed book that's a little more current. And so the classics kind of fell off a little bit.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Then it just became Cliff's, two words, notes without an apostrophe.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
And apparently a lot of high schools and colleges started the pass fail thing. So a kid wasn't as incentivized to ace a test. They were just incentivized to pass a test. So they're like, I don't even need the cliff notes. I can just kind of fake my way through and pass this thing.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
As a result, they dropped about a million bucks a year in sales up until like the mid 70s when they were like, oh, my God, what were we thinking? We got to put the Scarlet Letter back on the reading list. And we have to grade these kids according to their grade. This pass fail thing is not doing anyone any favor. It's chaos. It's chaos.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Then it became Cliff's Notes, all one word, but with that N capitalized. So stylish. But it has never been Cliff Notes.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Oh, I was pretty sure that was dollars. And I'm sure. If you're positive that it's units, we'll move on.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Oh, okay. Well, that tracks because I was 22% positive. Okay, good.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
If you don't want to read The Scarlet Letter and you don't want to read the 47-page summary, how about you just pop in that cassette and lay on your bed and smoke some grass?
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Oh, boy. Was that planned or did you just come up with that?
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Oh, that's so great. This is only about a six month thing. It did not go over well, despite being a pretty good idea. That got me thinking about just audio books or books on tape and when that was a thing. Apparently that started in 1932. Oh, yeah. Yeah. The American Foundation for the Blind opened up a recording studio.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
So it was a thing, but I feel like it didn't really take off until much, much, much later.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
I don't think I ever had a Discman. I didn't either. I think I went straight from Walkman to, jeez, I guess iPod as far as walking around.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Right. And we should tell everyone what this is. If you don't know, I do know that they went around the world a little bit, but it feels like a very American thing. It is a study aid. It's basically sort of about to say a Cliff Notes version of the book because it's so in the lexicon now. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
So, yeah, I had the first, you know, not Steve Jobs' iPod, but, you know, the first edition. I still have it. It still works. Oh, do you really?
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Yeah, I put pictures of it on my Instagram not too long ago, actually, because I found it, charged it, and I just put up the opening screen because, you know, the first Walkman had everything in alphabetical order just on the screen when you opened it. And boy, it was eight or nine bands locked in time from, I guess, like 2000 or something, whatever that was.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Yeah, I mentioned Hilligrass was a true corn husker. He kept that company in Nebraska. He felt very strongly about that and donated 10% of its profits to Nebraska organizations. Was a big curator of the arts, so the Museum of Nebraska Art was a big one that benefited from his stealing that idea from Kohl's.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
And they have, if you've ever looked up, like, hey, what does this guy look like anyway, you might see a bronze statue of him, and that is from that Museum of Nebraska Art.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Yeah. And instead of calling him Mr. Hillegas, they said, you can call me Cliff.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Yeah. A couple of years later, in 1985, there was a Chicago Tribune article. So this is mid-'80s. They had a staff of about 25 people, and they had published 225 guidebooks or book guides, rather. 60 million copies in circulation. And yes, I nailed it. 39 countries in circulation. And apparently there were some countries that used them to help teach American English in different countries. Sure.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
By the end of the 80s, they were taking in about 11 million bucks a year, which is pretty good scratch. It's about 28 today. 28 million? Yeah, that's even better scratch. And by the end of the millennium in 1999, at the age of 81, he sold it off. He was like, all right, I'm 81. I want to live out my remaining years as a super rich guy and not just a medium rich guy.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
It's like if you went to read a book in high school in the 80s, like The Scarlet Letter, and you're like, oh, God, do I really have to read The Scarlet Letter? You would go to a store and you would buy this yellow and black, very thin pamphlet. I don't remember how much they were then. They're only about $8.99 now. And it would contextualize the work.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
So he sold to IDG Books, who was the publisher of the Four Dummies guides that everyone knows. And he sold for only 14 million, which kind of surprises me. fully retired and sadly died a couple of years later at 83 from complications of stroke.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Are you saying this personally to me so I can consider this as I weigh my future?
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
It was bought and sold a few more times, though. In 2001, John Wiley and Sons bought the brand. They changed the name this time. This is when they squashed it together as CliffsNotes with a capital N. Then Houghton Mifflin Harcourt bought it in 2012, and then Course Hero bought it in 21. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
And one final thing before we take the break is it is I think the New York Times and the early aughts did a report and they found that it's not just lazy high school kids that are buying these books. They found out it's lazy adults in book clubs that just want to they want to participate in a book club, but they maybe don't have the time to read the Scarlet Letter.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
So they'll get the CliffsNotes so they can go and have some wine and talk about the abridged version.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
That's right. And it's also the yellow and black is sticking out from their fanny pack.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Right. All right. Shall we take our second break? Yes. All right. We'll be back and pick up on where we are today with Cliff and his notes.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
It would summarize the work, give you character descriptions, basically everything you needed to know the night before to pass the test or write the paper. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
All right, as promised, we're going to talk about Cliff's Notes today. You can still buy these pamphlets. Like I said, I looked up online. If you want to buy the Scarlet Letter and hold it in your hand, I think it was $8.99, somewhere a little less, but they're kind of in that ballpark.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
I don't know. I mean, they sell them on Amazon. That still could be used, I guess.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Maybe. I do know that their main source of income now is the website that offers most of this stuff for free, which is weird that they also have a fee model attached.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Yeah, and we're not going to go through this list, but Livia was kind enough, I think, because she needed to fill a word count, to list out what you get in the actual free version of, let's say, the Scarlet Letter.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
And my take is that you get a pretty good summary and chapter-by-chapter thing and character analysis and all that stuff, but it's just even a lesser version than the more robust paid monthly.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Yeah, exactly. And a biography of George Orwell, the writer of the Scarlet Letter. That's right.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
I mean, I think it's ended up going to 39 countries, but it just feels like a very lazy American thing, especially for Gen Xers to be like, I'll just get that and that's fine.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Do you want to be a better student for nine bucks a month? Yeah. So we should talk a little bit more about the elephant in the room, which is that this is just a way for kids to cheat. I mean, the other elephant is we haven't discussed our own CliffsNotes use. I will volunteer my own. You don't have to answer.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
OK, well, go ahead and just make me look bad right before I say that I leaned on them.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Okay, I do remember that now, but you were setting me up to look like a chump.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
I did use Cliff's notes, not exclusively. I was always a believer, and this is not right, kids. of i love to read i was an english major for for heaven's sake i know so i love to read but um i wanted to read what i wanted to read uh emily still um sort of uh challenges me not on just reading but like chuck only does what he wants to do that kind of thing That's not the best trade, everybody.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
You should not be like Chuck. But I wanted to read what I wanted to read. I didn't want to read The Scarlet Letter. So I got the CliffsNotes and, you know, probably perused The Scarlet Letter. The books that I was like, I totally want to read that. I can't think of another book title. Like The Scarlet Letter. Yeah, I would read that scarlet letter. I wouldn't read the one they assigned to me.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
So I did use CliffsNotes. That was in high school. Did not use them in college as an English major because I felt like it was time to get a little more serious, and I chose that major willingly, so I should probably do the work. Right. And that was the only work in college I really, really enjoyed was reading and writing. So I didn't use them in college.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
But all that to say the elephant in the room is like, is this just for lazy kids? And you mentioned that Hillegas was like, no, but how would he enforce that or encourage that rather?
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
I doubt it, but I'm sure there were students like I did at times where a book was a little over their head and they used the CliffsNotes as intended to help with the book.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Well, teachers also were on record as using it for lesson planning sometimes because they didn't want to read the Scarlet Letter either.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Yeah. This is coming from two Gen Xers, and we wrote the book on how to get away with lazy.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
certain universities took charge in 1997. Villanova pulled CliffsNotes from their college bookstore. Other bookstores maybe didn't sell them, but they're the only one that Livvy could find, at least, that actually pulled them off the shelves.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
And yelled, hut, hut, hut. Mm-hmm. Cliff did not like this, and they took out a full-page ad. I guess he was passed away by this point, but the company didn't like this. And they took an ad in the Villanova student newspaper, called it censorship, and the college was like, they can still buy these things anywhere. This is sort of a symbolic gesture.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Yeah, for sure. And if you have a set of Cliff's notes that you have read recently from later in the company's story, you're like, hey, man, I didn't see any note from Cliff saying these aren't shortcuts. P.S. Enjoy the shortcut. This didn't have anything in it. I think the minute he sold that company, they were like, let's get rid of that note. It's a real drag. Yeah, it's a real drag.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
And not only that, like our advertising should actively encourage the fact that this is a shortcut.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Yeah, for sure. Here's the big question, though, and I'm glad Livia posed this question. Like, is it bad to use Cliff's notes? And the very idea of like, Do kids need to read the Scarlet Letter, or is the only reason they're reading the Scarlet Letter to just not look like a dipstick when someone brings up the Scarlet Letter?
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Like, do you just need to be acquainted with this stuff as a cultural touchpoint in life, or to get a Jeopardy answer correct, or I'm sorry, a Jeopardy clue correct?
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Man, we almost got our membership revoked. And, you know, this is me speaking. I think, yeah, like you should read these books. And a lot of people are on record saying, yeah, I mean, not necessarily Justice Scarlet Letter, but I believe there's a literature scholar from the University of Kentucky named Alan Nadell that calls it the labor of witnessing, like to actually read the thing
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
is the thing it's not reading the wikipedia uh i think that was she found a redditor um east tx josh that said it's like reading the wikipedia on beethoven's ninth but not listening to it there's something about experiencing the thing that is different and valuable yeah
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
That's right. And of course, we're talking about Keith Hilligas. Oh, I'm kidding. Clifton Heath Killigas. His name was Cliff. Gentleman was a true corn husker, as we'll see. He was born in 1918 out in the rural sticks of Nebraska. His father was a mail carrier and he was a very smart kid. And I would assume a smart adult because he studied physics and math at Midland Lutheran College.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Well, you know, it would be fun as our mutual friend, Joey Ciara of the Henry Clay people, who are friends who wrote and performed the theme song to our television show and still a good friend. I'm going to see he's going to Glengarry with me this weekend. Very nice. He is a Moby Dick aficionado and collects copies and versions of that. And he said that is the best book of all time.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
He said it's not my favorite book. He said it's the best book.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Well, let's put it this way. Joey gave me a copy probably two years ago, and it sits untouched on my shelf.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
I got to put down this Mike Campbell book of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and the R.E.M. one before that and the Mudhoney one before that. All I read is these rock books. I need to put them all away. And by the way, those are all called The Scarlet Letter. Right. My story in Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Should we mention one more point that teachers make? Or I'm sorry, that problem with study guides. Some people are like, hey, these study guides just give you one lens to look through to view this thing. And what you need to do is read the book and go to a class and hear it from a teacher. But some people say, yeah, but that teacher is just looking at it through their lens. Right. I disagree.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
As an English major in my classes, the teacher would present perhaps their analysis and then say, this is what other people think. And what do you think?
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Yeah, I mean, we can just mention kind of quickly, Spark Notes became the biggest competitor in like 1999. There's one called Shmoop founded in 2008 that became a pretty good competitor.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Interesting. I do want to mention this one spoof at least, Thug Notes.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Oh, right, right, right. It's a YouTube series from comedian Greg Edwards. He plays a character, a PhD named Sparky Sweets, who summarizes commentary on 100 different books. They're generally about five minutes long, and it's a comedy thing. You know, it's Thug Notes. He does African-American vernacular and breaks down these books in a fun way
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
In a very quick way, but he's got 3.14 million subs, and if you watch one of these like you did, you will soon learn, like, it's a joke, but he's laying down some real truth on some of these as well.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Yeah, I watched a few of them, but the one on the Scarlet Letter by George Orwell, at the end, in the analysis, he explains, he talks about censorship and book burning and Stalinism and double talk and all that stuff in a very fun way.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
And I can only think that, like, there might be young students that identify with Greg Edwards and what he's doing, that it might provide a little real insight and inspiration. I hope so. Even though it's just a joke.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
And then was going to grad school for physics and geology at the University of Nebraska. Go Cornhuskers. But dropped out in 1939 to marry a classmate named Catherine Galbraith, at which time he got a job at Long's College Books as a clerk. And that company would later become the Nebraska Book Company.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Hey, guys, this is about Broadway. My name's Reagan. I've been a listener for 10 years. My husband, Paul, and I love to listen to you guys while we cook dinner. And we listen to reruns on long car trips. I'm writing in because Broadway, the Broadway episode, because I am a theatrical costume designer. And I wanted to offer some more insight about previews that you guys were discussing.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Previews have a cool function where they are actually used by the production team to keep changing, like Josh said, and fine tuning a show based on audience feedback, especially on a brand new show, new lines and music may even be written and added during the process. Changes can also include restaging and cutting or adding technical elements like costumes or props.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
However, Chuck was right and that toward the end of previews, the show will be frozen by the director, which means no further changes are allowed to be made. And it's after that time that critics will be invited to attend during previews, after they're frozen, before opening night.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
So that totally clears it up. Thanks for doing such a great job covering Broadway. It really touched me to hear about the theater world on my favorite podcast because I listen to you guys almost daily in the costume shop. And that is from Reagan McKay, interim costume shop manager at the Roundhouse Theater. Wow, that's awesome.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
That's right. But he worked at the NBC, Nebraska book company up until World War II when he went to the Army. He was a meteorologist for the Army Air Corps. So, again, pretty smart dude. Ended up a captain. And his wife, Catherine, worked as a clerk for the Manhattan Project. So she was sharp as a tack as well.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Heck yeah, man. We're old people. We can say whatever we want.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
She did it. I think she broke into the estate of the Hillegas estate and stole a diary.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Yeah, for sure. All right. So back to Cliff Hillegas. He was in the army. Then after the war, he went back to his old job at the Nebraska Book Company.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Yeah. And he helped transform them into a wholesale textbook distributor company. And he ended up sort of traveling all over the country, buying and selling used textbooks when a little trip to Toronto, Canada ended up being quite a good thing for the course of his life, right?
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Well, first thing we should say is he took great risk. And I'm not like, you know, weighing in one way or the other of the ethics of any of this. But Hillegas did take upon great financial risk. He got a loan for $4,000 to make this happen, close to 50 grand today. and printed up 33,000 copies of these Kohl's notes himself.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
And he and his wife, Catherine, and their three young kids, like, packed and shipped these things in their house out of their home for a little while and were selling pretty good. And then what happened, Josh?
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Yeah, I would argue that maybe the name is intellectual property. But I think in a court of law, a judge would say, like, you can't claim like doing a condensed version of a book as like an original idea that no one else can do. Because there were summaries before this. They didn't invent the idea of a literary summary. You know what I'm saying?
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
No, that's true. And I do. I'm not, like, going to bat for Cliff. I'm just saying that I don't think that's one of those ideas you can say, like, I hold the idea for condensing a long novel into a shorter version.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Well, people, I feel like everyone is called out online for doing something like this. But old Cliff gets a pass, I guess, because everyone got through school because of him.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Yeah. He sold a lot of these pretty quickly, though. I do like how Livia put he gradually phased out the original material. It seemed like that happened within that first year. But he was it also I also can find when he stopped paying the royalties. Was that during the first year or two? I'm guessing when it became Cliff's notes, he stopped paying royalties. Probably right.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
But nevertheless, between the start of when he started doing that in August of 1958 and just yet six months later at the end of that year, he had sold 58,000 copies of these book summaries and pamphlets. And by 1964, but six years later, he was doing all this on the side from the Nebraska Book Company. He was able to quit that job by 64. And just the 60s were a big decade period.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
He quit that job in 64. He changed the name in the 60s. from Cliff's Notes without the apostrophe to Cliff's Notes. Big, big deal. And then he got divorced in 1966 and got remarried.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
That's true, but did those kids' biological father get royalties on those children?
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
Oh, man. And everyone just glosses right over that. Should we take a break? Sure. All right. We'll take an early break here because this one's probably a little bit shorter. And we'll talk about the early days of that company right after this.
Stuff You Should Know
The Cliffs Notes on Cliffs Notes
We're not going to do the exhaustive encyclopedic documentary length CliffsNotes episode?
Stuff You Should Know
The Fascinating History of Dandelions
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
All right, so we promised to start off with SSRIs, and we're starting off with that. We're kind of going to jump around, starting with the most frequently prescribed sort of modern version of antidepressants, and then we'll jump back in time and talk about drugs that, you know, maybe your parents took. Who knows? But these came around in the mid-1980s.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
I think the very first one to become available was fluoxetine in 1988. And we're going to, I guess we'll say both their regular name and their trade name or trademark name, just so everyone knows kind of what we're talking about.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah, exactly. Fluoxetine is Prozac. Peroxetine is Paxil. Sertraline is Zoloft. Fluvoxamine is Lubox. These are a challenge for me.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
I appreciate it. Citalopram is Celexa. And why don't you take that Lexapro for me? What is that?
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Escatalopram. Oh, okay. I just had a little yes at the beginning of that.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah, so these are the SSRIs that are going to block. They're called reuptake inhibitors, and what that means is they're going to block that bus trip that serotonin takes back to that original cell, the presynaptic cell, the one who sent that transmission, and it leaves it floating around in that space in between. I believe that's probably you that said that's where all the action happens.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
But that's in what's called the synaptic cleft. So it sends that serotonin out. And when it comes back, instead of uptaking it or re-uptaking it, it blocks that from happening. So that just means there's more of it where you need it.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
You're trying to wedge in jokes in an unfunny episode.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
That's what we try and do. Wedge in jokes where they're not appropriate.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah, I don't think I even read out what it stands for, Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor, or I may have, but there it is again.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah, I think you're right. And I think that... When it comes to getting that, if you're on more than one, either that cocktail right or that single SSRI correct, that is where your doctor comes into play.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
But even though I've never been through this, I know plenty of people who have, I believe it's safe to say that's also where you come into play, though, as advocating for yourself in concert with your doctor.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
yeah i uh if you suffer from depression and you feel a little lost um and you are a fan of comedy um i can highly highly recommend the great comedian gary gullman um he's a comedian who has he's been around a long long time and it's not like that's his act but he did have one tour and one sort of set where he really really dug into this and one special
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Uh, and then lately, uh, he wrote about it in his book, which is great. I read the book. Uh, this is all about his childhood growing up, but lately on Instagram, he has been, um, posting just daily things. He's kind of written down on a paper that helped him when he was at his darkest and, you know, take a walk, things like that, but, but drill down and got more specific and, um, uh,
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Advice on if you're a friend of someone, like what you can do, like it's really, really, really helpful. So Gary Goldman's awesome. And I encourage you to check out that Instagram. As silly as that sounds, it can really help. It doesn't sound silly at all. Well, anytime you're like, oh, go to a social media thing and look at what this comedian said. But you know what I mean?
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
That's right. And the listener will never hear where we edit out when Jerry bursts into the room in two minutes. We'll just cut that out. Nice and clean.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah, for sure. All right. So that's a quick overview of the SSRIs and how they work. Now we're going to move on to, we're going to jump back in time. Oh, we can get in the Wayback Machine. That's fun.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
To the 1950s and 60s when tricyclic antidepressants made their debut.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
All right, that's one way to put it. All right, we're going to name these. And these, again, might be things you saw if you're a Gen Xer. You might have seen them in your grandparents' house. medicine cabinet even.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Let me see here. Here's the first one. Nortriptyline. Nortriptyline.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
I even practice these. Nortriptyline. Why am I getting all these? That's Pamelaure. How about you take the next one?
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah, I mean, yeah, we could go through them, but it sounds like one of those commercials. But you're way more likely to experience those with those than the SSRIs. It's also, they were, the tricyclic were easier to overdose on.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
And you're just not going to see them a lot for depression these days. They're still around. I think neuropathic pain is something they found use for. Yeah. And if you don't tolerate SSRIs, they might say, you know, they might pitch you a drug from the 1950s.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah, for sure. I mean, that was a long time ago. So this was early sort of medicine at work. We have SNRIs, serotonin, not just serotonin, but serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors. They came around in the mid-90s, so after the SSRIs, a little bit after. And they do exactly what you would think. They block the reuptake of both of those in the same way.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah, and those are, there's only a couple of those, Effexor and Cymbalta. And in Cymbalta's case, that's Duloxetine. And Effexor is Venlafaxine.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
The next thing we're going to talk about are MAOIs, or monoamine. Is that right? Monoamines? Monoamine, oxidase inhibitors.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
And yeah, I don't think we've mentioned yet that that's what that group is called. Serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine are all monoamines because of the molecular structure of those things.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Do you think anyone ever goes in and they're like, can I just do the SSRIs because everyone kind of knows those?
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Oh, yeah, that's right. This is one where... I think it was in the early 1950s, they were testing drugs for TB, for tuberculosis. And it was one of those deals where they said, hey, these people over here taking this thing, they're sleeping pretty good. They have a good appetite. They're bouncing around the room. They seem pretty happy. And so that's how it was born.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
They found that I think that when they gave it to patients with depression, that 70% of them showed an improvement. So they said, I guess we've got a new thing here.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
I guess now we can jump over to, or should we take a break or should we cover nutraceuticals?
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
All right. We'll take a break and then we'll come back and talk about something that you can just get over the counter. It's called a nutraceutical right after this.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah. I mean, that's so like us to hit stuff like bipolar first. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
I think it makes sense maybe to cover this first. So how about that?
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah. Put that in your palm and wash it down with some water. How's that for a segue?
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah, for sure. And, you know, this is a real shame because a lot of these studies on these have come back with some results that look pretty good. Some of them show, you know, can kind of be all over the place again, maybe because it's not regulated is the reason, because some studies show that results can treat MDD pretty effectively. Others show it's not any better than a placebo.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
They can also have side effects. So it's not like, oh, it's just a supplement. So I don't, you know. I don't hear the commercial listing, you know, a laundry list of things that could go wrong. And I can buy it just over the counter, then there can't be any side effects, right? But that's not true at all. There are side effects to supplements as well.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
And it can, you know, there have been plenty of situations where there's a supplement that becomes kind of the, The all the rage. Yeah. And people just start like St. John's where it used to be when people were just like, hey, St. John's works the best. We just should take tons of it. And that can result in its own set of issues.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah, I remember my parents even at one point signed up for one of the supplement, you know, pyramid schemes, I guess it was.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Sort of like the Avon Laney, but it's supplements. I remember a short time. I mean, they were always trying to hustle some side gig because they were teachers. But I specifically remember when I was a kid that we just had like a house full of this stuff for a while. And I can't remember which system or brand this was. But if someone wrote in and told me, I would be like, oh, yep, that's the one.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah, for sure. So, I mean, that leads very nicely into psychedelics. We promised talk of those earlier with ketamine and psilocybin, and here we are. They At least for ketamine, that is one that is way out in front of psilocybin as far as like official studies and the government kind of getting behind some of this stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah, they love K. Yeah, they love that K. They're being tested, ketamine that is, as a breakthrough treatment and breakthrough is a label. or a designation rather that the FDA says, hey, we can fast track this through the approval process because we think it has so much potential.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
And these still though, even though like ketamine has shown a lot of promise, it's still looked at and studied as a last resort if you're resistant to other more traditional treatments.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah, exactly. They started to develop ketamine in the 1960s in Belgium. And, you know, they've been, like you said, I think starting in 2000. It's when they really started kind of looking into stuff. So it had a big jump on psilocybin. That's one that's just now starting to kind of people are starting to say, hey, you know, you know, magic mushrooms.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
I know has a has a bad connotation for a lot of people. So let's call it psilocybin, you know, the medical or, you know, I guess, biological name. And let's let's study this stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah. Do you know what the dose was before I give this number?
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Two handfuls. I'm very curious, but this is, I think it was a depression rating scale they were using where 24 was severe and seven or below was no depression. And before they had the psilocybin, they scored 22, an average of 22.8 out of 24, as far as being severely depressed. And then afterward, it went all the way down to 7.7, which is just a skosh above no depression.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah. And I think they did try to follow up with those people, but they got no self-service out there in Joshua Tree.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
That's right. And that's after remission has begun. And that is when they're trying to, you know, knock down or outright eliminate the symptoms that are still sticking around and get you back to where you were before your MDD episode. So after six months of that, if there's no relapse, then they may wean you down or completely off of something. You know, it just sort of depends.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Like, again, like talk, talk a lot to your doctor through all this stuff. So you really have a good handle on what what's going on.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah. I mean, that's a good overview, you know, without getting into the weeds as far as numbers go. Symptoms, as you might imagine, are they're sad. Disrupted sleep. feeling like you're worthless. Sometimes it affects your concentration. Sometimes it affects your ability to even experience pleasure at all. Even when you're doing something that might ordinarily be fun for you, it's not fun.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah, for sure. Which kind of all leads to the question, are these being prescribed too much? That's, you know, you can't hardly bring this up without hearing somebody say, yeah, they're just doctors are just willy nilly prescribing this stuff to everybody, like young children all the way to senior citizens, like they'll just throw anyone on that.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
And that's just a very sort of dumbed down way to look at this. There are critics who, you know, have valid points about stuff. But you have to look at real numbers as far as like an increase in prescriptions. If you look at the numbers, part of it is that they are staying on something for longer.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
So if they're keeping you on something for six months rather than just switching something out at six weeks, then the numbers for that prescription are going to be higher over a six-month period. So there's just a lot more nuance in those numbers. numbers as far as there's been a big increase, like a sweeping statement, like there's been a big increase in the number of prescriptions.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah, I mean, 2016 to 2022 is also a period of a lot of upheaval in the United States and starting in 2020 with COVID around the world. So all of that stuff comes into play for sure.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Kids pulled out of school and their entire social structure sometimes.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah, I was curious, too, about kids. I wondered if there was just a minimum age. And from what I found, each drug is FDA approved starting at a certain age.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah. I mean, it may be simple misdiagnosis. It could be bipolar disorder. It could be BPD, which we've talked about, borderline personality disorder. But those are not the same things. So you just might be misdiagnosed.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah. Your metabolism might affect it if some people just don't clear drugs out of their system as quickly. Yeah. So if it's taking longer than usual, then it usually a dose adjustment can help with that. But that could imbalance things even more.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah, polypharmacy. Pretty good band name, but not a great thing to live with because, you know, things interacting with other drugs is a real thing. And if you're on a lot of them, then it sometimes can be hard to even tell what might be affecting what at a certain point.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
It's not being sad in a moment or being blue for a little while. It is a persistent thing where it disrupts your life. It interferes with your life. It can interfere with your relationships and interfere with your relationship with yourself in a big, big way.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
This is one of a couple I'm going to read in the next few episodes about the inner monologue episode. We heard a lot from people about that. Yeah. And specifically in this case, my inner monologue when I'm falling asleep getting really weird. Hey, guys, Chuck mentioned before falling asleep, his thoughts start to get weird, and that's how he knows he's falling asleep.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Right away, I knew what he was talking about. And the reason I read this one, because I had dozens and dozens of people that had the same thing, is because it's very common. But this person names it. There's a term called hypnagogic imagery, which I think we've talked about that in something. It might have been lucid dreaming.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
which I learned about from Jeff Warren's awesome book, The Head Trip. It's basically the stage before falling asleep when our brains start to produce hallucination-like images. This happens to me, though I'm not consciously aware of it on nights when I fall asleep quickly.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Often I'll drift into the hypnagogic stage and then catch myself and think, that was weird, which is what happens to me, and then drift back in. Chuck described his experience as a series of nonsensical thoughts, so I wonder if his is truly verbal versus visual. I would love to hear more. I think mine are a little bit of both, Jill, and that is Jill in Connecticut.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
yeah for sure and those things very much help and i'm glad you said that what you said just a second ago because when i said i sounded very very down when i said that the symptoms are and i paused and just said sad um there is a lot of hope but you know i have everybody you know has if they don't suffer from the depression you have people in your life and your family and your friends that do and it and it makes me very sad because these are you know great people who
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
have a hill they need to consistently hike up. And I imagine it is something that drains your life force. And we're here to talk about some of the ways that you can change that.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
That was a one-timer for me. Yeah. It's not the kind of movie you watch over and over, but Lars von Trier can make a great, great flick. And I love Kirsten Dunst. She's great.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah, and it's accepted, and it's not like it's accepted through gritted teeth. I think most people agree that's – what most people agree on is they don't really understand what might be the underlying issue or the mechanism behind that is. We do know, like, a lot of the things that may lead to depression, if you're a woman, you're more likely to get – what did you call it, MDD?
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah. Major depressive disorder. If you have suffered a loss or unresolved grief. And these are things that can compound. It's not like, again, that's different than being sad about, you know, losing a loved one or something like that. But it can help contribute to MDD. Same as if you suffer through a stress early in your life, that can all contribute.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
So we know some of those things, but we don't know that underlying mechanism. that actually causes it. And because that we don't exactly know how antidepressants work. We know that they do work and we know what they do.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
But if you really don't know the underlying cause, you can't just say like, yeah, we have antidepressants completely figured out because we know they work and we know how they function.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Well, thankfully, we know that's not 100 percent true because they are still studying and trying to figure this out. There was a study that I guess you dug this one up from last year.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
from the University of Colorado, go Buffaloes, that hypothesized that increasing, well, increasing serotonin, we know that alleviates symptoms, but it's not like it's just rebalancing your brain and picking up a level that you had that was low. They are saying from the study that maybe it's helping to repair the neuroplasticity in the brain and just sort of like
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
their brain circuits that become just sort of stuck and lodged in that depressed state, and it helps to unstick those.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Yeah, for sure. And we also know, you know, you mentioned serotonin and norepinephrine and, you know, messing or balancing out the brain chemistry. What's literally going on and what they're designed to do, antidepressants that is, and we're going to talk about, I guess, all of them probably, right?
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
They interfere with what's called the synaptic transmission of these things, of serotonin, norepinephrine, dopamine. And that transmission is the movement of neurotransmitters from one neuron to another. They're leaping from one to another. They're talking to each other. They're getting to know one another. And it's that transmission that we know is what antidepressants affect.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
That's right, with the ultimate goal for all of these to increase levels of those things. Usually, I mean, some norepinephrine, as you'll see as we talk about, but more along the lines of serotonin.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
That feels like a good break point. That's a big old table setting.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
I don't know which is which, pal. Can you help me out?
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Well, no, I mean when I reach for the wrong one, just give my hand a little smack.
Stuff You Should Know
How Antidepressants Work
Perfect. All right, well, we'll be right back and start off with the star of the show, the SSRI.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
If you're a criminal and you ever think something might be shady and it might be a sting operation, just look at any name that they've given you and, like, read it backwards or see if it spells an acronym that says, like, we nabbed you, buddy, or something like that. Like, that's how cutesy they got. And you'll see. I'll just throw that out there, and we'll talk about them as they pop up.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
This was thought up. It was a brainchild of a guy named Howard Safir. He was head of enforcement operations at the time. FIS 7 was a big, big success. And he's like, what at the Christmas party? He's a little toasty and said, what does everybody got? He had too much of grandma's Christmas breath. And he said, what's everyone got? I need some fun ideas.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
And Robert Leshorn, the guy, the Brooklyn Bridge Delivery Service guy, still basking in the glow of those tailor made packages to the criminals. He apparently came up with this idea and it was football tickets. One of the hottest tickets in football at the time in 1985 was there at RFK Stadium. for what was then the Washington Redskins, now the Washington Commanders since the name changed.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
But they were the Redskins then. They had won the Super Bowl, beat the Dolphins in 83, lost to the Raiders in the Super Bowl in 84. In 85, expectations were high. Season tickets, 25-year waiting list for season tickets. Every game is sold out at RFK. And so offering up free tickets to criminals in the D.C. area seemed like a no-brainer.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
I feel like, I don't know, you should get a little gold star for your football knowledge right there.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah. The story goes it was Joe Theismann. And in college, he changed it to Theismann to rhyme with Heisman. Oh, really? That's what they say. Huh. I'm not sure. Did he win the Heisman? I mean, the Heisman? Oh, you know, I'm actually not sure if he did or not, but his leg got snapped on national TV. I was watching that game. It was horrific.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
I don't think it was his thigh. I think it was a lower leg. But I just I remember it was that was the first horrific injury that I saw on TV that even though I didn't know it at the time, activated my mirror neurons in a way that was quite striking.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah, they did that for up until not too, too long ago. And then they stopped anytime there's a serious injury like that. They're like, we're not, you know, we don't show the replays of these things anymore.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
All right. So we're back to Robert Leshorn. He's the one that came up with this idea to give away these tickets. He said, here's what we'll do. We'll create a fake TV station, like a rock music TV station, like a local MTV, basically. W-R-O-C video. Yeah. And that's going to head up this whole thing. And this is where they get cute again.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
The prize letters that they sent out were signed by station manager. I am Detnaw. If you'd spell that backwards, it is I am wanted. Get it? Yeah. And then the guy who they said you had to call in or whatever, the business manager that took the phone call, his name was Marcus Cran, C-R-A-N spelled backwards as Narc.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah. Was that what I was doing? I certainly was. All right. Moving on.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yes. And supposedly, and I did not verify this, but there was one source that said the whole music when you called was I Fought the Law and the Law Won by Bobby Fuller.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Oh, yeah. I mean, it's in the NFL Films documentary. You see the guy typing that name in a computer.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah, yeah. They mailed out 3,000 of these letters to fugitives for a total of 5,117 outstanding warrants between those 3,000. Said, you won this thing, plus a grand prize drawing for Super Bowl tickets that year. The flagship international sports television was the fake station, FIST. So they did it again. About half the letters came back returned to sender.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
The others, again, were told to call Marcus Cran. to confirm their attendance. And a few of the people that called in were like, wait a minute, this is the cops. But out of the 3,000, it's not very many, apparently about 160 people RSVP'd, which would still be a pretty good take, I guess. And they said, all right, come on down to the Washington Convention Center at 9 a.m. on game day.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
We're going to have a big brunch and a big party and then shuttle you over to the game.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
They were all cops. Everyone there was a cop. Like the busboy was a cop. The person serving your drink was a cop.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah. You know what? I'm not sure. Now that I think of it, this may have been a listener request. And I'm going to look that up real quick because I hate not shouting people out. Yeah, I'm with you when that happens.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah, they had to shave a lot of about half of their mustaches. If you watch, I mean, you can see this whole thing. It's only like 12 minutes long, an NFL Films documentary on this on YouTube or wherever. And you can watch the whole thing play out. It's incredible. But it looks like a room staffed with 166 cops dressed up as different things.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah. Even the cheerleaders who were not dressed as cheerleaders, they were dressed in tuxedos. Like everyone there was wearing a tux, which was hysterical. Right. Because, you know, it was 1985. That's the epitome of class. But they were all cops. And one of the women... that was interviewed, she was like, I didn't want to do a cheerleader. She was like, I was in this. I was a U.S. marshal.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
I want to I was rough and tumble and I wanted to, you know, throw some guys on the ground and put the cuffs on them. But they were like, no, we need you to be a cheerleader. And you're actually the first line of defense, because what they did was they hugged these guys upon greeting like, hey, we're cheerleaders. Hug, hug, hug.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
And they're sort of patting them down and feeling for weapons, which is amazing.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah, because the chicken was for the Padres, not the Chargers even at the time. The only explanation I saw in the video was they said something about Santa Claus was going to be there. And I don't know why. This is the part that has no explanation. He said, oh, we were like, we can't have Santa Claus, so let's get the San Diego chicken.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
I was like, he said that as if that was the most reasonable statement he could make.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Oh, sure. I bet there are. And I bet that's their whole act.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah, I bet it's not Alfie. All right, so I'm a Bobby, right?
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Leshorn, as for his part, he's in the video. He's saying, like, nobody can act like a cop here. We got to smile. And he says in the NFL film scene, he goes, I know we're not used to smiling at bandits, but today we need to. I was like, bandits? What is happening in 1985? That's right.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
All righty. We are back. It is not Christmas, but it certainly feels like it in 1985. It's December 15th. The Washington Convention Center is decked out. There's a big TV playing highlights of the Redskins season thus far. There's music playing. Everyone's in those tuxes. They got red and gold balloons they're handing out. It's really fun to watch this thing play out.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
You've got these cheerleaders hugging and patting these guys down. One guy is, like, leaning in trying to kiss one of the women, and she's just, like, pulling her face away. Oh, yeah. And still has her armor on. In fact, she actually, Stacia Hilton, she was a U.S. Marshal, the cheerleader that they interviewed, or fake cheerleader.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
And later on, she had gotten out and was brought back into the service as an appointment as director of U.S. Marshal service by President Obama.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
He said, you're dangerously close to winning the Super Bowl tickets, too. That was great. That's how they do it in the movie, at least. So one person came that was not expected. It was an attorney from a local TV station that had the local broadcast rights to the games. Yeah. He heard about this flagship international sports television, a.k.a.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Thist, and he was like, wait a minute, they can't do this. I'm going to go give them a piece of my mind. Exactly. He shows up with a cease and desist letter, and the cops got him out of there. They were like, here, why don't you go have a talk with these two cheerleaders? They're like, buddy, you're going to blow our cover here.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah, this is Louis McKinney. He's on a stage. And then again, this is just like, hey, this is the party room where you're going to get your actual tickets. And he's the emcee. He's the master of ceremonies. He's wearing a top hat, a literal black top hat. And he doesn't just go up there and say you're all under arrest. He settles everyone down.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
He said he wanted everyone to kind of get settled in and calm. So he's just doing a bit. He's doing stage work about how excited everyone is and getting everyone, like, pumped up. And then... And you can literally watch this happen. He says, on behalf of Flagship International, we have a big surprise for you this morning. Everybody's under arrest.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
And you see behind the doors, you see all these like SWAT cops is their version of the SWAT, their SOG, Special Operations Group. That doesn't spell anything clever.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
They have literal shotguns, and they're just like, right behind the door. Yeah, exactly. They rappel in through the windows, break through the windows. No, they literally just kick in the door and go running in with shotguns. And you see these guys that like... About a third of them like immediately sort of put their hands on their heads as they were being directed to and get on the ground.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
And about a third of them are like, what's happening here?
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah, they didn't know what was going on. But, you know, soon enough, they had them, you know, face down on the floor.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Fifteen people at a time. Then escort them out a different door and just, you know, keep doing that over and over until they got everybody.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah. So they did a lot of things. They found a lot of busy work for them to do over the years. These days, did you mention witness protection? Not yet. Yeah. I mean, basically these days they take care of witness, the witness, they run the witness security program, AKA witness protection. Uh, if you see prisoners being transported, um, like to court or something, those are marshals doing that.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
I mean, I imagine it was. I've got some bad news and some more bad news. Like there is no good news. It's like your friend has been arrested and you're also not going to this football game. And you also have to find your way home somehow. Exactly. Surely they gave him a ride home at least.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
I mean, I was laughing about they're their victims, but they really are. I mean, what a bummer.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah, I mean, that's the... That's why you do it like this, for the safety and for the money savings, or the efficiency, rather, I guess, financially. But the PR aspect of this should not be overlooked. They wanted them to film this. They wanted them to know all the cutesy stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
So one day NFL Films would release a mini doc and future podcasters would talk about it and sort of make fun of it, but also bring them some attention. So the PR part of it was a very purposeful big deal. The guy I've seen lots of different numbers bandied about by how many people they actually got. I think one hundred and forty four arrests.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
is what Dave saw, but in the documentary, the guy whose brainchild it was said it was 101. Really? But if you do the math on 101 arrests, it cost them $22,100 to pull this off. That breaks down to just $218 if they got 101 arrests. And the average cost of just a per fugitive cost of nabbing a single fugitive is about almost $1,300.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
So that's a, you know, that's a big, efficient haul if you really look at it that way.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Um, and they're since 79, they've been in charge of, uh, fugitive investigations, which is to say basically anybody with an outstanding warrant is a fugitive. Um, you don't have to have like escaped prison. Um, if you're charged with a crime or, have been summoned to testify or something like that, and you jump bail, you don't appear in court, if you escape from custody, then you're a fugitive.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah. I mean, he's probably right as far as Charles Watkins goes in – And Dave got some of this, by the way. He wanted to shout out the podcast Criminal. Huge shout out. Yeah, because they covered this, and I think Dave listened to that and got a couple of these things in the end here from there.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So go check that out for criminals point of view. I'm sure it's pretty great because it's a great podcast. But apparently there was a producer from CBS News named Alan Goldberg. who went back at the footage and was like, I think he just thought some of this stuff was a little fishier than it was made out to be as some big, huge success.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
And he saw footage on there of Charles Watkins, a 50-year-old man, saying like, you got the wrong guy, you got the wrong guy. And it turns out they got the wrong guy. They got Charles Watkins Sr. Charles Watkins, the murderer that was the felon, or rather fugitive and felon, was his son. He was 20 years old. They got the wrong person.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah. I mean, it was mainly misdemeanor offenders, a lot of parole violations. There were six traffic offenses in there.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah, exactly. There was one guy and you can see him in the NFL film stock as they're bringing him out. He was like, man, he's like, you know where I live. You could have come to my house. Basically, like, why did you drag me down here? Right. And make me go through all this. Just come knock on my door and arrest me.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
This turned out to be sort of the beginning of the end, though. It is, again, still praised as a success if you look at any U.S. marshal stuff. But they I think like this nine was just regular police work over a period of eight weeks. They got a bunch of more fugitives, which is great.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
And the U.S. Marshals are going to try and find you and either put you back in jail or put you in jail for your very first time.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah, no scams. But they don't do this stuff anymore. I guess this was sort of the golden age of that kind of thing. They're still out getting fugitives. I think last year they captured more than 3,000 violent fugitives in Operation North Star, but that did not involve culture club tickets or sweepstakes prizes or anything like that.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah. Have you seen it? No. Okay. I just want to talk for one quick minute about this because I heard this movie on two different movie podcasts I listened to. Scott hasn't seen. He covered this with Mike Castle, husband to Lauren Lapkus as the guest. And then it was also on The Flophouse, one of my favorite shows that I've listened to forever on the Max Fund Network where they cover bad movies.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah, yeah. It's wonderfully bad, though. Like, I heard both of these before I saw it, and I was like, I've got to watch this movie now because it's so funny bad. Wow. And it is. I highly recommend it. The M. Night Shyamalan, Josh Hartnett movie trap, because it is so ridiculous and awful. And the choices that are made as a movie are just bonkers and hysterical.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah, I like the Unbreakable movie and the Split, whatever. There was like a trilogy in that world.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah, I thought all those were pretty good. But yeah, a lot of his movies are really bad, but still well-made enough to the... be worthwhile, even if it's just sort of like a cringe fun watch. And Trap is one of them. And, you know, whenever he pops up in his own movies, it's always so bad and dumb and obvious. And he does so in the funniest, worst way in Trap. Okay, good. I got to see this.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
It's really a fun, bad movie watch. I highly recommend it.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah, we cannot finish, though, even though I did mention Homer Simpson earlier, one of the great, great Simpsons episodes. They had a sting operation where they were giving away a boat, right?
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Hello. Why are the pretty ones always insane? Favorites. Also, a little nugget on the end. If you're ever in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and why else would you be there? But going to the U.S. Marshall Museum, you can see Louis McKinney's M.C. Black Top Hat on display. Very nice.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Hey, guys. Love the show. I just started listening around 2018. I'm now realizing that was seven years ago. My commute to work is about 15 minutes in each direction, so your release schedule is perfect to listen to a fresh SYSK episode all the time. So fresh.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
I was listening to Automats and hearing Chuck weirded out about pie for breakfast is so funny to me because I'm a chef and I will never understand why pie, sweetened, thickened fruit in a pastry, is dessert. But a Danish or jelly donut, sweetened, thickened fruit in a pastry, are breakfast.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
And by the way, this totally vindicates you because when you were like pie for breakfast and I was like, that sounds so crazy. And you said most breakfast foods are dessert. And I was like, what are you talking about? You're completely right. I wasn't thinking about all this stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
I was thinking about eggs and bacon, but I forgot about the sweet side of breakfast, and all that stuff is dessert. Same goes for cake and pancakes. Flour, sugar, eggs, baking powder with a sweet condiment. French toast is plain white bread dipped in a sweet cinnamon custard, griddled, and then you drizzle sugar syrup on top of it.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
So, guys, Josh is right. Lots of breakfast foods are pretty much dessert, and I say if it makes you happy, there's no reason to keep it. away from dessert foods at breakfast. Your stomach doesn't know what time of day it is. Thanks for all the amazing information. I've learned so much from you guys and always have a great time listening. That is from Aaron Brittingham.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
And Aaron, thanks for proving me wrong. I forgot about all this sweet breakfast stuff. Thanks for proving me right. Yeah, and not to even mention cereal. I mean, what is Captain Crunch besides a bowl of dessert?
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
I, breakfast is my favorite meal that I never eat. But when I do, by God, I love it.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah, I don't eat that stuff anymore. But if I'm on vacation and there's a good breakfast place, I'm going to party down and then I'll skip lunch.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah. They said, hey, guys, let's have a little fun with this.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah, for sure. We'll start with our first QT acronym. In 1981, they launched a program called the Fugitive Investigative Strike Team, a.k.a. FIST, because they're going to use their fist to get you. Right up your bum. That's right.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
And their goal was to do fugitive investigations, not just like one person at a time, but like, let's see if we can get a lot of these people at one time, high concentrations of these fugitives and round them up and bring them in. And how are we going to do that? We're going to do that with these really kind of wacky sting operations, which, you know, it's not like...
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
They were just out to have fun. There's a lot of merit to doing something this way. They're generally cheaper than just one at a time going after somebody resource-wise. They're safer because usually when you launch something like this, they're going to be unaware. They're not going to have a weapon on them like they might behind the door of their own home that they barely crack open.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
So it's cheaper. It's generally a little safer. We're going to talk about a few examples of these before we get to flagship. One very successful one was a program called Mr. Zip. And this is just very lo-fi. They would have marshals dressed up as U.S. mail carriers and they would just knock on your door and say, I got a package for Mr. Homer Simpson. And they would produce their I.D.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
and sign their name and they would say, thank you. You're under arrest.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
It's just it's also like it's almost like they wanted people to figure it out.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah, it did. They mailed these fake letters saying they had won that trip plus 350 bucks in spending money. 14 fugitives fell for it. And, you know, they send a limo to your house. It's like a big sweepstakes, basically. And most of them were arrested in the limo, like the limo driver is a cop and they just pull over and say you're under arrest.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
One guy did make it to the airport at Miami International and they did have a fake Puno Airlines ticket counter. So they saw it through. I'll give them that much.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Right. No, for real. Oh, was it? Yeah. I never know when you're joking anymore. So.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
That's right. That was one of them. One was a job scam. It was called the Prior Offenders Employment Opportunity Program, where they would say like, hey, are you a prior offender? Like, I know it's hard for you to get a job. We can get you a job, 15 bucks an hour. Just call our number and tell us who you are and where you are. And we'll set you right up.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Because you might think it's mean to say you've won tickets to the Bahamas, but it's really mean for someone to be like, I really want to start my life over and get a regular job.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Oh, man, I thought you were going on the flagship. I was like, are you not going to mention this one?
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah, this is part of Fist 7 in Hartford, Connecticut. This was, hey, let's do a fake TV station giveaway where you can win two tickets to a concert plus dinner and a limo ride. And, hey, it's 1984. You're going to see Van Halen on their big, huge rock tour. No, no, no. Boy, George. And Culture Club. You have won tickets to see Culture Club in 1984. Wow. And it worked.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
I don't know why they chose. I don't know if it was geographical, if boy George was just like, sure, I'll take part in this. He probably didn't know anything about it. Or if they did some research, did a little re and found out that these dudes love boy, love culture club. I don't know. I have no idea. But that's who it was.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
I wonder if they said bad karma chameleon for you, my friend. I love all the extras, too. It wasn't just like tickets to a concert. It was always like and dinner and a photo shoot. Like, I guess they really thought they needed to make it something someone couldn't refuse, I guess.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah. But we laugh. Fist seven knitted thirty three hundred arrests and is the largest fugitive roundup in American history still to this day.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
Yeah, you know what the edition this is? This is the law enforcement sometimes thinks they're so cute and clever edition. Right. Man, I can't wait to point out how many cutesy little names and acronyms pop up in this story. And this, and a lesson.
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
That feels like we have to take a break right there, right?
Stuff You Should Know
D'oh! Operation Flagship
All right. We're going to come back and talk about one that netted fewer arrests, but was definitely fun in Operation Flagship right after this.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
I really wish I hadn't have told you that. I think I've told you that before, though, so you forgot the first time, so maybe you'll forget again.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
All right. So we're back, as promised. We're going to talk a little bit about the media and politics. Hopefully, in a way, that's just sort of quick and easy and doesn't ruffle too many feathers, because what we've seen is that is media of all stripes do this and politicians of all stripes to this. So it's not singling anybody out.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
But when the media gets involved in this kind of thing to shape public opinion. They do so with sort of a three pronged fork, which is agenda setting, framing and priming agenda setting being like, hey, what's what are we going to focus on editorially, maybe in today's paper or every day until the election? How are you going to frame this thing to suit what we feel is probably our slant?
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
And then priming. It's basically, you know, it's similar to the first two, but this is the subconscious things where we're going to repeat things. We're going to use certain words, certain images as to just sort of reinforce how we framed it.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
That's right. I'd vote for you, by the way.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Oh, of course you wouldn't. But I would. Never. I would vote for you for like, you know, Neighborhood Watch or something.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Oh, man. I mean, you got that one in the bag, buddy. You don't need my vote. Thank you. Dog whistling is something that, you know, you've heard more and more as a sort of a term used in, you know, social media, politics on the news, stuff like that. And that is when you use a word or a phrase that you sort of are in. Not sort of. You are very much intentionally whistling.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
associating with a negative racial stereotype but it's not explicit so it operates on the unconscious level and this is where they tap into um implicit bias something that everybody has and you know using these coded words basically uh there are things that i i will never take one of these it scares me to death so i would never sit down for an implicit bias test
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
because I don't want to know what my implicit biases are. It's absolutely terrifying because we all have them. I guess that's probably cowardly and I should know what my implicit biases are so I can try and correct those. But it's basically when they sit you down and you say, all right, respond very quickly, as quick as you can to a series of images or words.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
And anything within 200 and 600 milliseconds is your implicit memory. Anything after that you're thinking about, and that's explicit memory.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Yeah. Oh, boy. That really lets us all off the hook, I guess.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Well, here's the thing, though, is when they when people sit down for these tests, they found that even people who explicitly disagree with any kind of racial stereotyping, like I would never do that. I don't have those at all. They even was about to say fail those tests. They even chart on those tests as showing implicit bias.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
yeah and you know we're about to take through a series of little things like that that might be mind-blowing for you where you're like oh my god i can't believe that works but just you know sort of put that in your pocket for now uh there was one study where it was again it was um unscrambling sentences half the people were given sentences that had words that were you know like healthier healthy and active lifestyle words um the other half got neutral words and afterward
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
They said, all right, you guys are great. You can go ahead and leave there. You can you can go up the stairs there and get out of here to the parking deck up there or you can take the elevator. And people who unscrambled the healthy words were more likely to take the stairs afterward. So, you know, they're like, hey, that's pretty much proof right there.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
They've been primed with these healthy words to make a healthier decision afterward.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Yeah, I thought that was interesting because it was like they'd use words and finally like, hey, I wonder if words worked, if images only alone could work. And then he was like, hold my beer. Right. What about just temperature alone? So in this one, he asked participants to hold a something warm, like a cup of coffee or warm cup of soup or something or a frosty cold beverage. And then they.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Yeah, exactly. And this is a big, big thing in cognitive psychology. And, you know, we're going to kind of get into the ins and outs of it. Some of it, there's a lot of, for some of it, there's a lot of studies that sort of indicate that there's a lot to it.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Bring them in a room where they have a conversation with a stranger. And they found that or he found he claimed to find that people who were primed with that warm beverage had a warmer impression of that stranger afterward. And people who had that cold beverage frostier had a you know, they felt frostier toward that person.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Yeah, and here's my – I mean, I hope I'm not giving anything away for Act 3 when we sort of rain down our judgment upon this stuff. But, like, even when I was first going through this, I was like, I even know there are so many variables to account for in these experiments that there's no way they're accounting for them. Like the taking the stairs or taking the elevator.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Like, who was tired that day? Who had a bum ankle or who – You know, there's just so many different variables to account for on why someone would take the stairs or an elevator or why somebody would walk slower down the hall. Maybe they were super bored by this experiment. And so they walked a little more sluggish or something like that.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
And those types of variables, they weren't accounting for ever, it seems like.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
There's another part of this that we'll get to where there's a lot of studies that aren't so great or that have been fudged or data's been massaged or completely fabricated where it seems like sometimes they've been found out as far as researchers go. But it all comes down to memory.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Yeah, but, you know, let's tick through a few of these that you found kind of quickly because I think it just illustrates, though, how a company or a political party would really latch on to this when they see stuff like this without kind of like critically thinking on how they got there. One study, exposure to fishy smells would induce suspicion on trust-based economic exchanges in a trust game.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
In other words, like they smelled something fishy, so they're going to carry that over as in something smells fishy. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
I would say this paper smells like tuna.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Oh, man. Did you text him and say, you're full of crap?
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Yeah. Here's one that's interesting to me. Money primed people are more selfish. So if you're I guess they did this experiment with people who made a lot of money and people who didn't.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Oh, OK. OK. But the long and short of it is if you were one of the money people, quote unquote, then you would not. If someone spilled their pencils like one of the researchers like, oh, look at me, I spilled all these pencils. They wouldn't pick up as many pencils as someone who didn't have the money. So people without money are kinder. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
And if you're if you're talking to a cognitive psychologist, they'll say that you have a couple of ways that you remember things. One is your explicit memory or your active or conscious memory. Like if you're trying to think of something and you're actively engage your memory to think of a thing. That's what that is.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
I can see where that's going in a way, but there are also just so many variables in that, you know?
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Uh, okay. If, uh, if you were in this experiment, you were induced to lie to an imaginary person, uh, either in an email or a phone call.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
And then in a test that followed that, uh, of the desirability of different products, people who lied on the people who lied on the telephone, they actually said the lie out loud preferred mouthwash over soap and people who typed it out and lied in the email preferred soap to mouthwash.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Is it going to be one of those? And then implicit memory is the other one. And that's just what you remember on an unconscious level. So if someone asked me, what was your senior superlative? Wouldn't even have to think about it. Best all around boy. Boom. It just pops right out as if it were my name.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Yeah, I mean, I sort of get it in a way, and we've talked about this in our Scientific Method show and other episodes too, where, you know, you put all this time and you want your thing to pan out that you think is true. So I get the inclination, but you can't, You can't fudge numbers. You can't look at stuff that just backs up your conclusion.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
You can't throw stuff in the file drawer that doesn't. And this is one of the things they talked about, the file drawer. You've got to make all this stuff public. And part of the problem is the media because they want to write about something splashy and super interesting.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
And so, like, there's a lot of things at play here that go into why somebody would do this beyond just being like, you know, you're a bad person.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Yeah. Oh, boy. Yeah. Let's do that. So because I think if we give some of these examples, it'll make a little more sense. For instance, this first exercise that Dave helped us out with this day found this one is called the lexical decision. And that is the idea that if you put a word up on a screen for a couple of seconds as a priming word, then.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Even the same person will react on a different day to the same exact experiment depending on a host of factors.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Yeah. I mean, we've talked about the Stanford prison experiment a few times. And looking back, like, especially when you see the movie, I talk about who's presenting the experiment. It's like... Those guards showed up. It's like, you guys, you look ridiculous.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
You know, you look like an 18 year old who painted on a mustache and put on some, you know, mirror aviator sunglasses trying to be a prison guard.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Yeah, which is very easy to market and sell to.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
I have to say, though, we've said the word cheeseburger so many times. I can't remember the last cheeseburger I had. All I want right now is a cheeseburger.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Well, you know, Dave said something about nasty McDonald's cheeseburgers. I saw that. I was like, what are you talking about?
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
You as the subject will indicate the next word on the screen, if it's real word or if it's a nonsense word, but that will be influenced, that's your lexical decision you're making, but that will be influenced by that priming word that you saw. So in this case, Dave, do you see example, doctor. You're sitting there in the lab, Bill Murray's on the other side, got the shocker already,
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Yeah. Well, you know, Dave may not like it. Maybe he's a Hardee's guy.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
I got nothing else. These are always fun. I like these.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Hey guys, I listen to your wonderful podcast about three hours a day on my way to and from work. I want to say thank you for all of that over the years. I had a very funny incident the other day listening to the Sea Monkeys episode. I was coming home after a long day and that episode came on. I was really tired.
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Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
And when I originally fell asleep against the window, I take it the person isn't driving. I hope not. When I originally fell asleep, I was listening to the history of Sea Monkeys. To my surprise, though, I woke up and heard white supremacists and the KKK.
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Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
I panic and jumped out of my seat thinking I had missed my stop by a long shot, and I had finished an episode and started a completely different one. I was not expecting the Sea Monkey episode to take that turn, you guys.
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Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
I was relieved to find out that not much time had passed and I didn't miss my stop, but also a little distressed to find out the dark history of such an innocent children's product.
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Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
I live in Istanbul as a foreigner, and your podcast gives me a little taste of home. It's comforting on those days when I want to tune in to two smart guys talking about something interesting. Really appreciate you for all the work you do and all the fun moments you've given me on the bus. And that is from Katie Sezenler.
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Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
uh doctor pops up on the screen for a couple of seconds that's your priming word and then all of a sudden uh other words pop up after that and our job as a subject is to see is to say whether that's a real word or a nonsense word and obviously you would think if the word nurse pops up, you're going to be recognizing that a lot faster.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
So it's all about sort of the speed at which you recognize this as a real or nonsense word. Nurse would be a much faster decision than if it was basketball.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Right. Or in another example of the same missing letter, if it was shower, water. Wash, S-O blank P. You might say poop there too, actually. Soap would probably be the word.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
So, you know, it's just a very intuitive kind of thing happening because your brain is working in a very unconscious way because, or I guess non-conscious, because it is primed by the words that precede the one with the missing letter.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Yeah, and these are all really super basic examples of cognitive priming. But it does show a lot about how our memory works, that we're not just computers where we can just access a file by clicking on it very easily. We develop shortcuts in our brain. We take shortcuts when we see words relating them to other words. And so it just makes sense.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
You know, you could access something much, much faster because you have been primed. In other words, our implicit memory can be tapped into a lot quicker than our explicit memory.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Yeah, and Deion Sanders just moonwalks through the background.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
I thought that was fairly entertaining for a not great movie, by the way. The Gorge? Yeah, it was highly watchable on like a rainy, not feeling so great day kind of movie way.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Oh, yeah, yeah, the chest one? Yeah. That's great.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
I wonder if when they go into the fMRI wonder machine room now, the person running it just goes, I'm telling you what's going to happen, a part will light up and then another part will light up and you'll all be super happy. Right. You've been primed. You've been primed and then Dion just very slowly moonwalks. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Yeah, and that's, you know, it's all fun and games to just sort of look at these little experiments on a campus somewhere. But if it has a real world use, especially when it comes to marketing and advertising and stuff like that, you can bet corporations are going to sink some money into doing that.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Yeah. As long as you beat them over the head with it over and over and over again, because repetition is one of the real keys here. Yeah. Your brain just being repeatedly exposed to that stimuli is going to strengthen that association over time. And brands know that.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
And that's why it drives you crazy during, you know, especially like sports playoffs or something when you see those same ads over and over and over again. Yeah, it's a, it's big business. They're putting a lot of money into, into, you know, sort of manipulating your brain essentially.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
There had to be some research into their viewership or something, right? Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
Well, you know, our senior friends in the world are very concerned about their health and their health care. And they still love those cheeseburgers. That's two things we know.
Stuff You Should Know
Behavioral Priming: Buy, Robot Human!
All right. Why don't we take a break here? That's a good table setting, I think. And we'll get back to how this is used in media and politics. Should be no surprise right after this.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
And there was a bartender there named Betty who said he was a really well-dressed guy. He clearly had money. He was really sort of fascinating and charming. He asked me out like the second he met me, which is, I assume, what you do if you – Three days after you have left your wife and soon to be four kids. Oh, well, probably ask out the first woman you see.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
That's right. I don't want to give away what this one contains. So let's just say it is the strange tale of a man named Larry Bader.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Yeah. I mean, didn't people see that coming?
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
OK, so this guy, John Johnson, a.k.a. Fritz, gets a job not there, but at Ross's Steakhouse. And basically it was like, hey, I came from an orphanage in Boston. There were 22 boys in this orphanage. They named us all John Johnson and gave us all nicknames so they could tell us apart instead of just naming us different things. It's very strange.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
But they called me Fritz because I reminded them of a character from a comic, the Cats and Jammer comic, Cats and Jammer Kids comic. Different times during that period, he also – would say that his Navy buddies thought his haircut made him look like a German soldier. So he went by Fritz. But either way, this is some new dude in town. And he was like, all of a sudden, the talk of Omaha.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
No, no, no. I know, but do you think he had it licensed as a hunting vehicle because he was hunting ladies and he just wanted to be able to tell people that?
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
He's an eccentric dude. He wears a leather beret. His apartment apparently was just a bunch of like beanbags and throw pillows. He had champagne parties. He had Siamese fighting fish. He was an archer. He said, you know, I hurt my back. And so archery really helps strengthen the back. And so I took up archery. And then five weeks later,
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
He's won a state championship in Nebraska and then won 13, I believe 12 more, 13 total archery titles in the state. And at parties would do the eat the whole chicken, including the bone trick.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Well, you just gave it away. Not really. This guy, Lawrence Joseph Bader, he was an Akron native. So shout out to my people, my wife's folks in Akron, Akron, Akron, Akron, as she says, because of that bridge. If you've been through there, you know what I'm talking about. He was born in 1926 to a Catholic, pretty well-to-do Catholic family. His father was a dentist.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Uh, that's right. So he's, uh, he's working at the bar, but he, he buddies up with a guy that works at a radio station, uh, KBO in, and he, he lets him come in there to kind of just monkey around because he was interested in broadcasting and he's monkeying around enough to where he figures it out and dears himself. Like he seems to be doing to everybody gets a job as a DJ, uh, reading the news.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Yeah, for sure. Um, he, I mean, we can talk about some more of his flamboyance just because it's simply really funny and interesting. Um, when he wrote a personal check to someone, he would sign it Fritz only, and then he wouldn't put it in a date. I don't know why I love this so much. He wouldn't put a date. He would just put a season.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
So he would write a check to someone on the date of, you know, autumn. And then he would just sign it Fritz.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Well, it's the 1950s, I guess. Stuff like that would happen. It was also the 1950s. So you could collect your tip money as a bartender in a milk bottle and then just go hand that milk bottle to the uncounted, to the person working at the bank and fill out the deposit slip, one quart of money. And I'm sure they thought, oh, he's such a character, but like, now I got to count on this stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Yeah. So he's working part time at the radio station, eventually works full time there and then transfers over to TV when he got a job at KETV, the local affiliate there, eventually getting promoted up to sports director. And also on the side, he was advising like consulting, I guess, for archery companies because he was just so good at it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
I did some archery at the camp. We took a big family trip with a bunch of families, and I got the archery set out, and it was quite fun. And I'm a pretty good shot. Oh, yeah? Any bullseyes? Yeah, I was hitting some bullseyes on the rag, and I've never even done much archery. It just seems intuitive, you know? Just kind of hold it steady and aim at the thing and then let it go.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
And Livia dug up some dirt from a family friend who was like, you know, Larry and his brothers and sisters were spoiled little rich kids. Larry was pretty careless with his money because he could just get more anytime he needed it. Mm-hmm. But he was a pretty funny guy. He was a pretty fun dude. Had a lot of personality. And he used to do weird things.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
I mean, I don't know what standard archery is. I was shooting, I bet, from about... Probably from about 35 feet would be my guess.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
I don't know what standard is, but everyone's like, oh, yeah, you can come up here all the time and do this. I was like, I actually never do this. I'm just good at it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
I know. Like, don't compliment me because you think I've worked at this.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Let me ask you something. Are you saying that there are people who wear eye patches just for attention that don't need them?
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Oh, man. I hope someone writes in that knows somebody or maybe that even did that for a time. If you did this in middle school, you get a pass. Like it seems like something John Hodgman might have done in middle school.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
All right, we've got another big reveal coming up right after this.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
That's right. That's because Autotrader has the largest selection of new cars, used cars, electric cars, even flying cars. Well, actually not flying cars yet, but as soon as those get invented, they'll be on Autotrader.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Like one of his party tricks, he would eat a whole chicken, including the bones.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
That's right. It's a tool that helps you know exactly how much you'll pay each month for your car so you never have to do car math again. You're welcome. So whether you're into timeless classics or the latest trends or whether you just want something practical with no surprise costs, if you see a car you like, it's probably on AutoTrader. See it. Find it. AutoTrader.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
All right, so I promised a big reveal. Things are going great for old Fritzy. He's in a town. He's scoring with the ladies in the back of a hearse. He's eating chickens through the bone, and people think it's the best thing they've ever seen. He's on TV, for goodness sakes, with an eye patch. Can I say one more thing about the chicken-eating thing? Yeah, like how do you eat bones?
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Yeah. But put a pin in that. We're not just mentioning that strange fact for no reason.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Yeah. I mean, the only party trick I ever did is that thing with the hat against the wall, and that takes like two seconds.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
You put like a baseball cap on backwards, and then you kind of get up against a wall, and then you act like you're blowing your cheeks out. And what you're doing is putting the brim against the wall such that the hat kind of levitates off your head like you're blowing it off your head.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Hey, buddy. Next time I see you, the only... I mean, I haven't done it for years because I refuse to put a baseball cap on backwards because I'm a human adult. But I'll do it for you.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
The guys out there with their hat on backwards right now are like, what's wrong? Is that not cool? No, it's not.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
I did it once, and this is something you should not do. It's dangerous.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Did you ever actually pass out? Yeah. Yeah, I did one time, and that was the only time I had ever passed out up until that point, and it was very, very strange.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Yeah, do not try this. It is such a bad idea. I can't believe we were even talking about it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
All right, so like I said, he's living his best life. Then on February 2nd, 1965, a guy who knew John Bader, disappeared man, saw Fritzie, at an archery demonstration at a sporting goods show in Chicago and was like, that's Larry Bader. Like, I would bet my life on it. And his niece lives nearby. And I know this. So I'm going to call her. She's 21 years old. Her name is Susanna.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
She drives over and she's like, Uncle Larry, basically.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
That's right. So Fritzie said it came as a literal physical shock. He said, I don't know anything about that other fellow. And he said, why would I have volunteered to give my fingerprint if I was trying to get some scam new double life and new identity? Like I wouldn't have gotten fingerprinted. It seemed genuinely like he didn't know and didn't realize this.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
He's like, I've got all these memories. I remember the orphanage. I remember growing up as Fritz Johnson. You're saying these memories are all fake. And this is really starting to bum me out, to be quite honest.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Oh, I could literally smell that. I was so in that scene.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Maybe. But he also didn't have wasn't like he had some awful family life like everyone. But by all accounts, he liked his wife and kids and enjoyed being around them as much as any dad did in the 1950s. I'm not saying he was doting, but he wasn't like, oh, God, I hate these kids and my wife's a real drag.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Yeah, he's a little bit in debt, but it wasn't like his world was crumbling down around him such that he had to escape. It was all debt that he could get out of with a little bit of work. So none of this was making any sense.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
I got to say, if you're known for money-making schemes after a semester, you must have been doing a lot of money-making. Well, highly visible money-making schemes.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Yeah, let me see. The largest city? Omaha? I said a large-ish. Oh. I was like, oh, man, that's not what I know.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Yeah. So none of this is adding up. He, yeah, you would want to keep a low profile.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
No, I liked it. The whole Omaha thing was great. So he hires an attorney, a guy named Harry Farnham. This attorney gets a team of psychologists on board. They examine Larry and test him along with the neurologist over about a week and a half. They used hypnosis on him. They're like, we can't see anything medically wrong with this guy. It doesn't seem like a scam.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Back home, Mary is or I'm sorry, Mary Lou is she gets this news. And she was like, oh, I mean, I'd kind of moved on with my life. I'm I'm engaged to somebody new who I've been dating for a few years. But I can't like I'm a good Catholic. I'm not going to like divorce Larry, who is seems to be back in my life now.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Yeah, no, not at all. So Mary, all of a sudden, her life is upended with, you know, every regional news outlet is banging on her door. The insurance company was like, that $40,000, which will be $400,000 in 2024, basically life-changing money, we're going to need that back. All those Social Security payments, we're going to need that back.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Even Eddie and his boat rental company, it's like, you owe us for boat damages, right? Um, Johnson, uh, Fritzie, you know, he loses that job. The TV station fires him. He gets that marriage annulled. He moves into a YMCA. It starts working at the bar again, making a hundred bucks a week. And he's sending money to Mary Lou and Nancy.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
And I think keeping about, uh, what, like 70 or 30 bucks for himself to live on. And it's just, it's upheaval everywhere you look.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Yeah. All my suits look like that. You know. Hey. Nothing?
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
The whole Akron thing. Yeah. I mean, and his kids, I don't think we mentioned their ages. They were two, four, six and unborn when he disappeared. So maybe that six year old has a memory. The others probably had not even any memory of former dad.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
You threw me off. All right. So he's not lasting in college. He didn't last long in the Navy. But while he was in college, he did accomplish something because he got married. He met a woman named Mary Lou Knapp with a K. They got married in 1952 and within five years had three kids with a fourth on the way. And he was doing pretty well for himself.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
The drugs started to kick in around Barstow. Right. But what are you doing at Barstow?
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Wow. I did not see that quote. Here's just the tip. Don't I'm not a big superstitious guy, but if you believe stuff like that, don't say it out loud.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
September 16th, 1966 is when he died. Did you say it was the tumor?
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Yeah, that tumor came back, passed away. First Methodist Omaha had a memorial for him. Then he was transported back to Akron, buried in his family plot. And now how many of these explanations do you want to go over? Because I almost feel like we should. Just skip to the one that you dug up. That sounds the most plausible to me.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
That is super cool and a nice little footnote. But like we said, there were some theories that don't seem to hold water about different kinds of amnesia. But then you did some digging and then I went back and did some further digging once you gave me what you dug.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
and it seems like a lot of people on the internet uh and of course these are internet people so it's not like like science isn't studying this it's just sort of one of those things that's left to smart people on on reddit um but what the the general consensus seems to be on the internet is that he suffered from what is known as a disassociative fugue
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
which is a very strange syndrome in which you can have very, very sudden, really significant retrograde memory loss that can't be attributed to like being hit on the head really hard or something like other kinds of amnesia can be explained away in other ways. And this one can't.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
He was making the equivalent of about one hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year these days. as a cookware salesman. And that was about twice the median income at the time. So he's doing pretty good, but he still had some debts. He had a pretty hefty mortgage. He had a new car and was about $2,400 in debt.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
and stressed out from that or uh i mean here's what i think i think it could that whole boat trip and fishing expedition was just on the level and that's really just what he was doing he had all that cash and the briefcase the suitcase because maybe he just didn't want to keep that stuff in the car and he went out in a really bad storm and had a traumatic event happen out there
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
uh like maybe being tossed overboard uh i think that could have been the the stressful event um so that's one thing another thing too is when this disassociative fugue ends um you will probably remember your real life but you're not going to remember what happened in the fugue state my explanation there is that he died of a tumor so that might have happened to him given enough time and he just died before that that memory of the real life came back to him
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
I mean, that seems plausible for what little I know about it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Yeah, this could I was wondering if this could be a movie, if there's enough there. And then I decided it probably couldn't be a movie, but it could be like probably like a 10 part Netflix show.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
I got nothing else. Thanks to Olivia. This is a interesting one.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
I am convinced. I know that this came from a listener, but I could not find it anywhere in email. So I don't think it did actually. I think I might've just been searching for like, you know, kind of crazy stories or something.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
I'm going to call this Rare Shoutout. We don't really give shoutouts on Listener Mail. because we get inundated with people saying, like, hi, can you say my sister's name? But we're going to grant this one because it is for a nana, and we like to honor the nanas of the world. Hey, guys, hope this message found you well. I'm reaching out to request a shout-out for Nana, my nana.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Basically, you can multiply most stuff from this era by 10 and arrive at our modern conversion rate. So, you know, roughly $24,000 in debt is pretty hefty.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
She's such a huge fan of you both. Every time I call, she always mentions your show. And you would think you guys are family members. If you get into her car, the Bluetooth speaker automatically starts playing an episode.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Your show has brought her so much joy over the years and kept her sharp at the age of 81 and has given us something to connect over because Nana's high praise has got me hooked as well.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
For the last few years, she's always dreamed of going to one of your live shows, but it's never worked out. Now with her age, it would be difficult for her to travel to any future potential shows. My Nana is the most important person in my life, and I know it would mean the world to hear a message from you guys. It might be a shot in the dark, but I thought I would try...
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Thanks for your time and for considering the request. And that is from Nori Schalles or Schalles. I'm not sure how you pronounce it. But Nana, we just want to say thank you. And you're great. And we appreciate you. And I'm not sure where you live. Maybe either you or Nori can write in and we can find out kind of how close you are. and get you to a show somehow.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Maybe we'll go do one at your house or something.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Um, and he was also, and put a pin in this, we just, we're not mentioning this for no reason. He was also very good at archery, had won, uh, some, some competitions. So he was in archery. He was a fun guy and everything's swimming along in his life. making a pretty good living, a little bit in debt.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
And then on Wednesday, May 15th, 1957, he had collected some bad payment checks from vendors from his business and said, you know what, I got to go to Cleveland to kind of clear up these bad checks with these vendors. He tells this to his wife, Mary Lou, who was, keep in mind, four months pregnant. And he said, so I'm going up to Cleveland. It's going to be the morning.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
That's right. They make it really easy to sell access to content on your websites like online courses, blogs, videos, and memberships. You can earn recurring revenue by gating your content behind a paywall even. Simply set the price and choose whether to charge a one-time fee or subscription for access.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
And then I'm going to probably do a little fishing in the afternoon in Lake Erie. And so I'll be home late. And she said what any partner should say in that situation, which is maybe you could also come home and be a father and husband instead of going fishing after you do your work. And he supposedly replied with, yeah, maybe I will. Maybe I won't. All right.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
So I'm not saying he's some really bad guy. It may have been a cheeky response. That may have been how things went in their marriage. But he just was a little vague. And that will come into play.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Yeah, he paid it and he was like, all right, whatever, buddy. He did notice. And this is stuff that, you know, they interviewed Lawrence afterward for reasons that we still don't know because we're keeping this a secret. Well, we know. Well, we know. Yeah, sure. But he did notice that he had a suitcase with him. He thought that was a little bit weird. He said, you know. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
You got a storm coming. You might not want to be out there after dark. That is not what people in Cleveland sound like. Sure it is.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
So people don't go in there. That's why the Browns play. So he warned him about the storm. He goes out on Lake Erie. The Coast Guard sees him and says, hey, there you know, there's a big storm coming in after sunset. And I've noticed you have some running lights. So you clearly plan on being out after dark. And he was like, it's fine. And so they said, all right, go about your way.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Three hours later, that storm does come in. And Larry Bader has disappeared. They find the boat the next day about five miles away. The life jackets are all on board. There was a some scratches like it had hit some rocks. There was a bent propeller. And some accounts say that it was either a gas line had been disconnected or the gas cans were empty.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
But either way, and I guess it's the kind where the gas line runs directly into like a gas can. The sitting on the boat must have been. one of those kind of boats. But basically they were like, but nothing shows the kind of distress where a human would be completely missing. Like it wasn't capsized or sunk or anything like that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Yeah, one of the oars was missing, but, you know, just do with that what you will.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
And you thought, I won't run into that body now. I might become one, but it's worth the risk. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
What's Catawba Island like? What do you do there?
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
Oh, the vacation date. That's always great. Man, that's nice. I love young Josh stories. All right. So they look for Larry Bader for a couple of months. The Coast Guard was like, no one's going to survive that storm if they don't have a life jacket. But they looked anyway. And they were also were like, well, he was a strong swimmer, though.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
So it's a little weird that like the boat wasn't that damaged and he's just nowhere to be found. Some people thought, you know, he had this big wad of cash. I don't think we said, but he cashed a $400 check. So if you do the math, you know, that's probably like $4,000. A lot of dough. So he may have been, you know, robbed and murdered or something. And also the suitcase was gone.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
That's right. Just go to squarespace.com slash stuff for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code stuff to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
So that could also explain that. But either way, they said, we just got to put this one to rest. And so in 1960, he was declared dead. And his wife got that $40,000 insurance policy and Social Security started rolling in. She went kaching. That's right. And I believe that's where we should take a break and see what happened to Larry Bader.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
That's right. They make it really easy to sell access to content on your websites like online courses, blogs, videos, and memberships. You can earn recurring revenue by gating your content behind a paywall even. Simply set the price and choose whether to charge a one-time fee or subscription for access.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
That's right. Just go to squarespace.com slash stuff for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code stuff to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
That's right. Oh, I was so busy trying to work up a Saturn joke about that 800 miles, but I couldn't do it in time. We'll wait. I'll give you an hour. 800 miles between Omaha and Akron, roughly one-third the size of the distance between, and then I couldn't remember what it was on Saturn. The Cassini Division? The Cassini Division.
Stuff You Should Know
The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader
I know. So here's what happens. Three days after Larry Bader disappears, 800 miles away, a dude shows up in Omaha at the Roundtable Bar. You said his name was John Johnson. He said, I got this driver's license here. It's got my name on it. I was a 14-year veteran of the Navy. It's a Navy license, as you'll see. I got out because of a bad back, and I go by the name Fritz.
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We Got to Sesame Street
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Oh, was this a recommendation? I'm so bad about that. I don't know. But we also have to thank a reporter for GQ magazine named Alex W. Palmer, who in 2018 wrote a pretty
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
For sure. So let's take a break and we'll come back and talk about what China was going to do about this officially right after this.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
a banger of an article as well about these art heists of cultural, very specific cultural and art artifacts from China that have been stolen from museums in the 2010s and basically pose the question, is the Chinese government behind this?
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
All right. So we're back and wondering what China was going to officially do about this. In 2009, the government said, you know what? We're all bets are off now. We're officially going to get a treasure hunting team together and we're going to go send them around the world and investigate all this art that's in the United States, that's in Europe, that's in the UK.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
One of these guys, one of the chief detectives, his name was Liu Yang.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
and he went all over the place and he was like hey um this was in the summer palace this was in the summer palace you guys have our stuff and they noticed kind of not too long after that a lot of these museums on their website started sort of quietly removing mentions and web pages about these chinese artifacts on their websites
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Yeah, for sure. I did want to point out, though, when I was making the previous point that they took down these websites, but not everybody, because the Fontainebleau in France was one of those that were like, no, you can see right here on our website and we'll tell you like what this is and when and where it was looted, like what palace was sacked at the time.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
So they kind of, you know, held held firm in their belief that it was theirs, I guess. But yeah, these these robberies started in 2010. And we don't know exactly how many of these have happened. We're going to talk about quite a few of these, but they were detailed in the GQ article. And then since 2018, there's also been more. And it seems like it there may have been a concerted effort.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
And then other people just started, you know, because they became really valuable and there was a market for it. People kind of piggybacked on stealing this Chinese art and that the entire thing may not be some, you know, complete masterminded by one group or government kind of thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Do you think the Swedish police were like, guys, we might have our first riot in the country's history? Like, I've been waiting for this since I was a boy. I've been told a car fire means a riot. And they're like, what is a riot? And I said, well, Sven will explain it to you.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
So, yeah, smash and grab, six minutes in and out. They hopped on some mopeds. They drove those over to a lake and they got on a boat and they got out of there. And this was a very sort of, you know, clearly professional job, knew exactly what they were going for. And you'll see, you know, in a lot of these cases, it's pretty similar. Like they knew where the stuff was.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
They knew exactly what they wanted on their little grocery list, like you mentioned. Right. The next one was a few months after that at the Code Museum in Norway. They busted a glass ceiling and not in a good way and rappelled down just like a movie.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
That's right. And took 56 things from the China collection there. A lot of this stuff was from a Norwegian army officer named Johan Wilhelm Norman Mundt. who was a big art guy, eventually fought on China's side in the Sino-Japanese Wars in 1894 and 1895.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
But he was big into art, had a lot of this stuff, including stuff from the Summer Palace, and that stuff was taken in the first of the Code Museum's burglaries.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Yeah. And this was a case where they used the car fire thing again, which is really surprising to use sort of the same method.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
I guess so. But it just seems like that would be a tip off. Maybe like watch the museum because, you know, Sweden and Norway aren't big riot countries as far as I know.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
After two? Yeah. Yeah, I would think after one. But anyway, they use the same method. They ended up the museum code closed the China collection for renovation when that was in 2013. And it's still closed for renovation. So if that tells you anything, I don't I'm not sure if that thing's opening again anytime soon.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Exactly. So that was Scandinavia and England around the same time. This is April of 2012. Meanwhile, in England, the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge was robbed. There were 18 items taken from here. Again, very specific Chinese artifacts. These were valued between eight and twenty three million bucks. The same month in England, the Malcolm McDonald Gallery was
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
at Durham University's Oriental Museum was hit. And they took two items this time, but they were super valuable. They were $3 million between the two of them. But these guys were caught. They finally nabbed somebody.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
The judge said in sentencing that they displayed crass ineptitude because they stashed the stuff in a sort of a swamp, a parcel of land that was super swampy, went back to get it, couldn't find where they put it,
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
And a witness saw somebody like searching the area and was really agitated on their cell phone, seemed suspicious, phoned it in and authorities searched the area and not only found the objects, but eventually arrested dudes.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
uh i don't think so um yeah i mean they figured this stuff was just successfully smuggled and eventually sold and private collectors have them but this was um i was i was sort of just surprised for some reason that these were you know irish travelers and i just figured they would all be chinese people uh but yeah they were just hired robbers basically so i was like oh okay once i wrap my head around that they were just doing a job for money
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Yeah. Should we take another break? Yeah. All right. We'll take a break and we'll talk about more heists right after this.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Yeah, and it was, you know, sort of the same pattern as before as far as getting in and out of there. And this time it was, you know, they were pretty good at what they were doing, even though, like you said, they got six of them. They questioned them. They still couldn't get the big fish. You know, I guess they're maybe not good at questioning. But they couldn't land the whale, unfortunately.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Paul Harris is an art dealer from Britain who he thought it was French professional criminals who did this. Again, just hired people. In one case, Irish travelers. In this case, French art thieves, I guess.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Yeah, I don't think almost seem like it. That seems like a certainty to me.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
So if you look at, you know, research on this, a lot of the research will say like, hey, all of these events are sort of part of this larger operation like we've been talking about. Since that article, though, I mentioned there have been other other art heists, other crimes. There was one in June of 2019 at the Museum of Far Eastern Art in Switzerland, this time in Geneva.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
uh took some couple of things from the uh ming dynasty in less than a minute this time uh they had dna evidence in this case and they did catch the people these were british dudes they said they were just trying to make money to pay off a debt so again it looks like another um either hired people to return these or just people being hired out because this stuff's valuable or just guys doing it because they know it's valuable
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Yeah, it's just too, it's just. You just can't, you don't know for sure, you know.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
No, of course not. As far as the Chinese government, you know, this whole time they've maintained like, hey, this isn't us that's doing this. The polyculture group, I believe the general manager even talked to the Global Times about it and said it was a nonsense story, the GQ story. We may sue. I don't think anything ever became of that.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Yeah, do with that what you will. But, you know, their official position as a government is like all of that stuff is illegitimate. Like everything you own, you own illegally. There's nothing like... If you have one like they had one in the airport, like you mentioned, if you have something like this in your private collection, the Chinese government doesn't dissuade any of that.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
I don't know that they officially encourage it, but they they definitely don't say like, hey, you have the stolen thing in your private collection.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Yeah, and some not so great. But we'll get to that. We should do a little back story here to kind of set this all up. And we are going to go back to about close to 110-year period known as the century of humiliation. And this is when China was kind of getting – just beat up on all fronts back then.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Yeah, I think if every piece of ill-gotten art, whether it was through looting or stealing or even started out that way and then were purchased and repurchased, there'd be a lot of half-empty museums if only super legitimately acquired art was on display.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Yeah, they're like, what are we going to put in the Chinese art wing of the Met?
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
All right, this is on swamp coolers. Hey, guys, you talked about swamp coolers in the history of refrigeration episode. We live in Santa Fe, New Mexico at 7000 feet elevation, where it's historically hasn't gotten hot enough to need air conditioning. Although summers are getting hotter here with a couple of weeks in the high to mid 90s every year now. It's pretty hot.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Our house was a custom-built house in 2005 and it does not have AC. So we bought a portable swamp cooler last summer to help just on those handful of really hot days when it's too hot to sleep. And it's really effective, I have to say, in the dry desert air. Some people have whole house swamp coolers on the roof with thermostats inside. They use a lot less energy than AC.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
So they're a good option in places where it's dry and not too hot. They only lower the temperature 10 to 15 degrees. That's not bad at all. So anything 95 we get for a short time wouldn't really work. I disagree. 80 to 95 is pretty substantial. Yeah, for sure. But that is from Chandra.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
A lot of global powers at the time were kind of coming in and saying, you know what, China, you should just sort of listen to us and do what we say. Particularly during the opium wars from 1841 to 1860, a lot of European countries in the UK forced China to, you know, to accept treaties they didn't want to accept, forced them to accept opium imports. I think it was...
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Yeah, sounds like a record name too, like an album title.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Yeah, like the Chickasaw Mud Puppies or something.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
19 different countries, you know, opening these treaty ports for imports from those 19 countries and accept them and basically said, you have no choice in the matter. Add to this later that century in the 1890s to 1900s, when China battled with Japan which ended up losing parts of Manchuria, losing Taiwan, had a lot of control over Korea at the time that they no longer had control over.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
And this all sort of leads up to the Chinese Communist Party taking power and Chairman Mao Zedong saying in 1949, we're not going to be subject to insult and humiliation any longer. That century of humiliation was a dark part of our past and we need to forget about it.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Yeah, it was. And these aren't the only things. I mean, all Chinese artifacts and cultural relics were looked at this way. But this was just a pretty notable space at the time. It was built in 1709 and then for the next century and a half, basically just got bigger and bigger. And it had temples, it had gardens and pools, and it had a lot of art, all kinds of art, like you name it, they had it.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Some of the most important art of, you know, that period of China and preceding it. And during the Second Opium War in 1860, the Europeans, you know, were again coming in and kind of doing their thing against China. And the government of China said, you know what? You have some people here on a negotiating mission. We're going to capture them. We're going to torture them.
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Why is Chinese art being stolen?
And so British, I think about 5,000 British and French forces took part in what has been kind of looked back on now as one of the greatest acts of cultural vandalism in modern history. When they looted and either stole or could just outright destroy or vandalize everything at the Old Summer Palace, essentially.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Yeah, a lot of this stuff, as you would imagine, like a lot of looted things during wartime, ended up in control of royalty in other countries. Private collections sometimes, but a lot of royal palaces in Europe ended up with this stuff. Queen Victoria even, and this is a great little find from Livia. Besides art, Queen Victoria apparently also got a Pekingese dog that she named Looty, as in loot.
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Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Well, one of the most prized sort of things at this palace was this water clock. And it was, you know, don't think of it as a normal clock because it was what it really was, was a big fountain. And the 12 spouts were carved in the shape of the heads of the animals of the Chinese zodiac. And whenever one of the fountains squirted, that was what time it was.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
So that became a really big symbol of this whole looting, basically. It was in the European wing of the palace, but it went away, and part of, and again, they were, you know, some of these, some of the repatriation and these thefts, as we'll see, was all kinds of stuff, but it seems like that these fountain heads hold particular significance.
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Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Yeah. And one good way to do that is to have a ton of money. So a lot of billionaires from China obviously stepped forward and showed a lot of interest in growing their collections or probably even starting and then growing their collections of Chinese art from history. And some of them even opened private museums to showcase this stuff. They were working with the auction houses very closely.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
And like you mentioned earlier, the Chinese art market, it went from really not much of anything in the year 2000 to about a billion dollars a year in value by 2018. Wow. Especially the stuff that was looted by the UK and by Europe and the United States. And like I said, it's everything you can think of. It's statues, paintings, carvings, any kind of art you can imagine.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
According to UNESCO, close to 1.7 million Chinese objects are currently held in 47 countries other than China in 200 different museums.
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Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Yeah, but we're going to ask for our stuff back and get most of it.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
Yeah, which we'll talk more about that, I guess, in a little bit. But as far as the government's involvement, officially, there was one group called the China Poly Group. It's a state-owned industrial company, and it was originally part of the Chinese military, and they traded arms. But in 2000, they said, you know what, let's diversify. And let's start a wing of this company called Poly Culture.
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Why is Chinese art being stolen?
And let's make it one of our missions to go and get some of these artifacts. They had their own museum to put some of these in in Beijing. So that was one of the big sort of groups trying to head up this effort. Right. Along with the Chinese billionaires. And then in 2000. Sotheby's and Christie's auction houses in Hong Kong auctioned off three of those heads, three of those Zodiac fountain heads.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
And this was a big deal. The Chinese Bureau of Cultural Relics was like, you can't sell this stuff. Like, this stuff's really important to us. It was stolen. It was looted. They They had no luck. I think they were trying to get it back for free. And they eventually said, all right, well, we'll just bid on it and get it the old-fashioned way, which they did.
Stuff You Should Know
Why is Chinese art being stolen?
That's right. Big thanks to Livia. She did a banger of an article for us.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Then the people around them might get angry at that person, even though they might just be being themselves.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Yeah. Or even like try to strike up a conversation like that. Yeah, that's unnerving and disarming.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Yeah. And speaking of stage, Chuck, I have a great intro to this. I believe it was Rush who first said, all the world's a stage, and the men and women on it are merely players or something like that.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
So just to kind of wrap up the whole dramaturgical theory part, Goffman said we have our front stage selves, which I think you referred to earlier, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
OK, yeah. But I feel like we're not that much different in real life.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Yeah. And that's a really great point that we'll see later. Like just because you're doing this doesn't mean you're a phony or inauthentic. You're just drawing on the parts of yourself that are already there that apply to the situation best in presenting those.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Hey, man, I'm always happy to be included with you. I'm along for the ride.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Right. Right. I know what you're saying. You don't have to explain it to me.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
So you've got front stage selves. This is when you're on stage, you're really out there. There's backstage when you're hanging with your homies. Yeah, have a cigarette. Homeboys. Yeah. Homegirls. Yeah. Yeah, and just general homies. Maybe your family, if you get along with your family, and you might feel comfortable and calm around them. So that would be your backstage self. Nice caveat.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
But note this. He's not saying front stage self and then yourself. It's still a backstage self. You're still attached to the stage. You're still in the theater.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Yeah, this example is just so, it just nails it. When you're a teacher and you see your student at the grocery store.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
No, exactly. So now you see them and they're not dressed like they normally are. Oh, man. They're friendly to your mom or something like that. And then they're buying olives, too, and they look like they're really into figuring out which olives they want, right? So that's just for the kid. For the teacher, you still have to comport yourself in a way that's like –
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
You know, I'm not going to just start cussing in front of the student and just talk like I might normally talk. I still have to pretend or act like I do when I'm this kid's teacher. But that still, it's like it doesn't necessarily fit the grocery store stage. So that teacher's in a really weird position right then. That would be offstage interactions.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Is that what he says? I never knew. And I've never bothered to look up the lyrics because there's definitely some words in there. I'm like, I don't know what Geddy Lee just said.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
It's a great, great song. Limelight. Very well written. Very original stuff. Yeah. So we're talking about impression management today, right? Yes, sir. And what do you think about it?
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Yeah, it's that speech plus nonverbal that equals your performance, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Yeah, it's funny to see people who are trying to say something, but their facial expression just doesn't match up.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Right. Yeah. No, I don't want to play Red Dead Redemption.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Right. So the other point of that, in addition to that nonverbal use of face, you said also you're trying to help people save face, right? Yeah. So I said earlier that you might be forced to act in a social situation a certain way just because you don't want to freak out your friend's mom who you saw at the mall by acting bizarrely or in a different way than you should.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Similarly, if your friend's mom at the mall falls, like slips and falls in the middle of the mall and is embarrassed, you're going to do something that your performance calls for you to do something to help her save face as well. That's part of face work too.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Right. So if you do that, like say if people do see you, you might like look back like closely at the ground. What did I throw over? What's wrong with this bike? Or you might say like, I hate Mondays or something like that. And what you're doing is something you mentioned earlier. You're reassuring people like I'm not a threat to you or to the social order. That was just a total accident.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
And it might seem like that person is overly self-conscious or something like that, or they might be a little neurotic to feel like they have to do that.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
But the philosopher Lucy MacDonald that you mentioned also points out that that's actually not what's going on, that everybody feels like they need to do that, and that it's a rational response to the social expectations that we have of one another. So it just kind of reveals this...
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Social intelligence that that most people have that is you don't even know that you're doing in a lot of cases and that you feel even compelled to do internally. Like when I do that, if I'm so embarrassed, I will blurt something out like oops or I hate Mondays. And it feels like it's coming up from, you know, my guts.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
And then out of my mouth, like it's not something where I'm like, I better say something really quick. It's just an involuntary reaction, essentially, because it's so ingrained. Yeah, because you're not a sociopath. Yeah, I like to think so. Yeah, I like to think so too.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
So I said that when people fall and they're saying like, oops, or I hate Mondays, or they're looking at the crack, or they're going through their book, whatever, they're reassuring people that they're actually normal. And the norm in countries like the U.S., say, in the West, is what's called civil inattention to where you –
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Yeah. And one of the things sociology gets beat up and edged out and elbowed in the face by psychology a lot unfairly, I think, too.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Ideally, you acknowledge the presence, the existence of another person so that you're on a subway with.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
And then, yeah, it ends there, right? Something that I find dismaying is I see more and more that acknowledgement doesn't even happen. It's just totally ignoring one another. And that, man, that gets me. Especially if you nod at somebody else and they just ignore you. I think that is awful. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Yeah. Yeah. And they're just like, oh, what's on my phone?
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
So speaking of elevators, Chuck, you mentioned going into an elevator and turning around and what a violation of the social order that is. The elevator is this perfect little encapsulation for sociologists to study because we just know what to do when somebody gets on an elevator and there's already people on there.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Everybody spreads out, rearranges themselves to make room for this person in their personal space. And it's not like we're like, OK, I'm going to go over here. You go here. And when somebody next person comes on, you get off and then this person is going to go where you were. It just happens. And it's a beautiful, synchronized effort. Right. It really is.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
No, this is sociology. Yeah. And if sociology started out, we should say basically examining massive institutions. It was macro sociology, religion, economics, politics, that kind of stuff, and just how people behaved and interacted or how people came together to form these institutions. And then the guy we're going to talk about today came along. He's like, let's kind of zoom in a little more.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
But when sociologists get on elevators and they turn around, there's an apocryphal story about Irving Goffman doing that and studying and people just flipping out.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Yeah. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Right. Well put. So that's actually not just what sociologists like to do. It was like a big one on candid camera back in the day for a while.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
And there was one candid camera episode where they did the opposite, where the elevator was already had a bunch of people on it, but they were facing the rear when the doors open. Oh, wow. And the person who is being, I guess, pranked came on.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
So this person, they got on and they kind of looked like they didn't know what to do for a second. And then they turned and they faced the rear. I knew it. Wow. That's incredible. Yeah. It's almost like they thought that they hadn't gotten the revised pages that day and everybody else did. So they just needed to go along with it because they didn't want to upset the apple cart. Things have changed.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
This is not what they expected, but they weren't about to be the one who just stuck to the original norm and upset everybody else.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
No, but they're all over YouTube, people doing that. I bet. It's pretty funny. But yeah, if you're ever in a mall and somebody sits down on an escalator or whatever, it's probably a sociologist experiment.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Well, no, that's why you carry a water gun around with you. You just squirt them in the face a few times and say, stand up.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
So there's ways that we figure out how to perform because, like I said, a lot of it just seems ingrained. A lot of it requires thought, too, especially if you're trying if you have a goal, like you're trying to become a member of a country club, which everybody's been through that.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
And these two researchers, they were psychologists back in 1990, 1990. Mark Leary and Robin Kowalski, they basically figured out how we do this kind of stuff. And they broke it into two things. There was impression motivation, why you're doing this, and impression construction, how you're doing this.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Right, exactly. So you put all those together and that's your motivation for figuring out some impression management. Again, this is the ones where you're like actually giving thought to it.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
In impression construction, how you actually carry this stuff out, they broke into five little parts. One is your self-concept, right? So you're going to base how you carry this out on how you feel you are. So you're starting with your authentic self, ideally, right? Yeah. Because people value authenticity. People don't want to just keep up a lie. Again, that's a half-hour sitcom right there.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Because it always crumbles. It always crumbles, everybody, in real life and on sitcoms.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Right. Exactly. So your self-concept is where you're going to start and you're going to kind of draw from that. Imagine a big steamer trunk on stage that Carrot Top's going through just pulling a bunch of props out of. That's what you're doing when you first start to figure this out. That's going through the steamer trunk of your self-concept.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
And like you were saying, he kicked off this type of sociology that examines like people, just interactions, very small interactions that sometimes we don't even know what we're doing. And apparently you're very interested in that.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Right. So you might really try to distance yourself from something you don't want to identify with.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
You want to be very careful with this. This is one of those things that shows what a tightrope you can be walking when you're purposefully constructing impression management. If you're, in that case, yucking someone's yum, that can turn people off and ruin all of the other stuff that you just did. So it can backfire. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Right. Or you accidentally say it to John Legend because you didn't recognize him.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Yeah. No, he was perfect. I mean, totally neutral. Everybody loves him. Like it was just that was great. Non-controversial in almost any way. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
He's managed to distance himself from his wife's public persona. So, yeah, non-controversial.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Yeah. So the next one is target value. And it's basically saying like you're just going to take those things from your steamer trunk of your authentic self. And you're going to adorn yourself with the ones that make the most sense for this identity that you're trying to be viewed with.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Yeah. But again, this is not where you're just like, you know, stealing stuff from other people and making it your own. You're going ideally you're going into your own authentic self and saying this one makes the most sense to what this person is going to expect or want.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Yeah. And there's one thing I think we should say at this point, because it's really easy to just assume like this is what everybody should be doing. And I think it's worth questioning. It's not inherently a good thing to change yourself or to rearrange yourself. It can be a bad thing, but it can also be a good thing, too. Yeah. Just know we're not saying like you should be out doing this.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
You should really be thinking about what you have inside yourself that you can impress other people with. That's not what we're saying. But people do do that. And that falls under the umbrella of impression management.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Right. Like you would wear a top hat and a monocle to a meeting with a bunch of bankers because that's what they would expect you to do. Exactly. And then there's current social image, which is what you perceive of yourself. And and if other people if you think other people perceive you in a way you don't like.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Yeah. If you're triggered and you have a temper because people are taking too long in the grocery store line, don't push a whole load of groceries back into an aisle and shout a curse word and storm out.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Yeah. Everybody's got some sort of burden they're carrying and some people are more vocal about it than others, I guess.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Some people misproject it in the wrong way more loudly than others.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
There's also one called basking in reflected glory, which is basically like hanging out with somebody who's a great example of the kind of self you want to be identified as.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Not necessarily good. It's much better to blaze your own trail, make your own version. But I kind of I get it. The one that's just not good at all is the downward comparison, which is putting someone down to show that you're not like them at all.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Yeah, for sure. He, yeah. And he also, I read that he developed like a real sympathy for the people who were pushed to the fringes of society unfairly, basically across the board. So he was not only, like, a really good sociologist and very intuitive, and apparently he had a really interesting writing style, too. He loved the good, like, turn of phrase. Mm-hmm.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Okay, Chuck, so just real quick before we keep going on, it's worth mentioning that forming an online identity is essentially, it's like a whole new can of worms as far as sociology is concerned. We just couldn't do it before, and it allows you to do things, try on new things in ways that it was just impossible to previously.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Yeah, because, again, everybody wants to be viewed as authentic. And just the fact that you've realized now that you're performing at all times can make you feel like you're not authentic. But we're here to tell you you're still authentic.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Yeah, I don't know where that came from, but sure. I guess I can get on board with that.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
No, and even like within yourself, like when we did the inner dialogue episode, we talked at some point about how even when you're talking to yourself, that inner voice is often shaped by external forces. And some sociologists say, yeah, it goes even that far. That's how far the self is shaped by these scripts and these performances and everything that even when you're alone,
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
He was also, like, a very empathetic, good person, too, from what I can tell.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
you still might find yourself engaging in some performance or another.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
No, no. Is that the one that's an actual, like, it's fiction?
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Nice. I definitely will. Yeah. Do you ever rehearse what you're going to say? I know you rehearse like what you're doing next. Like if you're cooking something, you've said that. Right. But do you ever like practice in your head what you're going to say? Like even mundane stuff like what am I going to say to this convenience store clerk when I go to check out?
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Yeah, it's possible. Or maybe you were just born with it. Maybe it's Maybelline. So you mentioned the automatic stuff that is essentially breathing. Like if you look at how Schlenker describes it, he's describing the same thing as breathing. Like it's just that automatic. And that automatic mode can be in a like high gear or low gear.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
And typically if you're backstage hanging out with your friends, embarrassment, again... The driver here is preventing embarrassment, preventing from embarrassing yourself, preventing embarrassing other people or making them feel embarrassed by association. Like you're preventing embarrassment.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
And one of the reasons why it's easier to hang out with people in your backstage mode is because the stakes are low. If you embarrass yourself, it doesn't matter nearly as much as if you embarrass yourself, you know, if you pee your pants in a job interview. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Yeah. And I just want to apologize for the group of Citibank cardholders from like 10 years ago who we had a meet and greet with. And it was very awkward. So sorry, guys. We never really got to say sorry.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
It's just, yeah, we just want to be backstage with our homies. Exactly.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
So there's also we can also automatically go into a much more performative mode when the stakes get a little higher.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
But either way, it's still automatic. So Schlenker is like, no, we're really kind of performing almost at all times. And then there was a scholar of gender named Judith Butler. And by was, I mean is. And Judith Butler said everything about you.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
is shaped by sociological forces, including gender, that people learn how to behave according to what society says their gender is or what's expected of that gender. And that's just how we learn to behave certain ways according to gender.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Right. Yeah. Carried over from the playground into the rest of their life.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Yeah. And speaking of gender, too, I wondered if you know how some people are just deeply offended by people who are gender fluid, like to the point where you're like, what? You don't even know this person. Why do you hate this so much? It made me wonder, like, if if the person who's so offended by it is upset because that other person is flagrantly violating a social script.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
And it's making them and other people uncomfortable. And that brings up a further point, too. Who's which is more valuable, that person's authentic self, that their gender fluid or the comfort of everybody else, the strangers around them? Which one is more valuable? Who should win out in that case if there's a conflict like that?
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
At the same time, too, you can't change social norms without violating them. They tend to just kind of stay static. And to make them dynamic, they have to be violated. And anyone who's seen the movie Pleasantville knows that that can turn out pretty good.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Yeah, I saw it a couple years ago. I watch it every couple years.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
I've only seen it once. Oh, you should keep watching. Just buy the DVD. Go old school.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Yeah, and a lot of it, I mean, when we start talking about it too, it'll just seem very common sense. Like, yeah, of course you're going to, you know, mind your P's and Q's and sit up straight and be friendly in a job interview. And that is a type of impression management, but it is way more granular than that to the point where
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Yeah, and so anybody who has a social stigma, like you just mentioned, you rattled off that list, they're what Goffman called discredited. They have less value according to society. This is where he developed that empathy from researching this stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Especially based on something like someone's ethnicity or whether they're handicapped or whether they're homeless or whatever, the idea that they have less value Socially speaking, in this in this sense, is totally unfair because the social norms that we create are generally arbitrary.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Yeah. And that's a great example of it. You could also be like my last name sounds pretty ethnic and I want to change it so that people call me back for job interviews. There's a lot of stuff you can do. So you're not you're covering your stigma. So you're not an automatically discredited person. But according to Goffman, you're discreditable. If you're found out, you will be stigmatized.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
So, yeah, for sure. It's a terrible situation all around just to stigmatize groups based on arbitrary social norms.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Yes, but there's autism researchers, Amy Pearson and Kieran Rose, and they go to great pains to basically say masking is different than impression management. Right. Impression management is something everyone has to do. Masking is specific to typically neurodivergent people to where they are protecting themselves from
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
So like if you're into language, linguistics, that kind of thing, the entire purpose of a conversation is to exchange information. Like I know this. Now I'm sharing it with you. Another person says, thank you very much. And that's what a conversation is for. As far as impression management goes and Irving Goffman and his ilk.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
pushing down their actual identities and hiding it at all costs because they're afraid of being stigmatized, because they've been taught over the years that they're not acceptable as they are. And so those are two really different things, even though they seem pretty like they have a lot in common.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Yeah. Yeah. They're just always walking around like, I love you, man. Right. Yeah. Just one note about autism, which obviously deserves its own episode still coming down the pike one day. Don't worry about that.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
But you were talking about just kind of learning as you get older, you know, that that you can't just you can't just make assumptions about people based on their ability to interact socially. Yeah. If you want to develop a familiarity and empathy for people with autism, I think you could do a lot worse than starting with Love on the Spectrum. All seasons, Australian version and American version.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
I think that is very sweet because that is like the fifth time you've recommended that show to people. People need to watch the show. It's so great. This season in America deserves an Emmy. It's a masterpiece.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
You really should. I think you'd love it. All right. So I guess, Chuck, since I did my every 10th episode mention of Love on the Spectrum, it's time for listener mail.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
conversations are essentially performances that two people share and do for one another that helps create a version of ourselves that we kind of walk around with and that that changes. And there's very little point to a conversation other than that is it's a, it's a radically different view of things.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Bob, that was a great email. Yeah. A top-notch one. I'm just going to go ahead and say it.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
If you want to be like Bob and send us a really interesting top-notch email, we love that kind of thing, you can send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
For sure. And I feel like there's, there's different tranches. Um, there's the, when you just described, there's people who, this is so effortless too. They don't even have to think about it and they're just great basically across the board. Then there's everybody else in the middle. Some people in the middle are better at it than others.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Some people think too hard about it and they become obvious and clumsy and, um, Essentially, though, no one can escape it, I think is my point. There's nobody out there who doesn't engage in some sort of impression management essentially their entire lives.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
So let's get into it. And we'll start with Goffman and where he got his start. Again, this is Irving Goffman, groundbreaking sociologist. He started off doing fieldwork in a Scottish village. And rather than figuring out how the city council worked for that or the village elders basically kept everybody in line.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
He just enmeshed himself in the village and just paid attention to how people interacted with one another. And really, like, that's a very anthropological way of studying. It was very not how they did it at the time among sociologists. So he was groundbreaking. He essentially went like, I'm going to take this field and just take it in a different direction. So let's go.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Right. Yeah. And it's also, yeah, it's been shaped by interactions with other people. It's shaped by what you've seen on TV, which can be very dangerous because stuff that's like hilarious on a sitcom does not necessarily translate well into real life. It's like you're being a huge jerk or you're not really that funny, you know, in the case of somebody who models themselves after friends.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
But yeah, so what his point was in this dramaturgical theory, and like you said, he didn't invent it, but if you look into it, he's basically like he's the guy who took it and ran with it. Yeah. No matter where you are, you're performing... And depending on where you are, you're going your performance is going to be different. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
So if you're sitting there at school, you're going to act different than you do at a bar. Yeah. Right. Sure.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Yeah. You would hope for sure. And then if you're at work, you know, you're going to act a little different from that, too. And it's essentially even when you're hanging out with your closest friends. Sociologists believe that you're still performing in some way, shape or form, just probably less than you normally do.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Yeah, like the manic pixie dream girl, right? I don't know what you mean by that.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Oh, they're always doing like crazy stuff that like makes the protagonist fall in love with them or whatever.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Well, it's funny that you say drama, too, because to me, where my mind went was comedy. Like, almost all comedy is a person behaving in a way that violates the situation that they're in, violates the scene and the script that they're supposed to be saying. That's all from Adam Sandler to late Adam Sandler. It's all basically that. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
And then one other thing, too. He made a really good point. He said that the characters or the people who are interacting and, again, just essentially performing, that they're trying to come to a common definition of the situation is what he called it.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Yeah. And so, like, if you see... Say a scene on TV. It's just such a perfect analogy because that's essentially what he's talking about. And there's just one dude standing at a bus stop and it's a businessman, say. That scene is in a superposition. It hasn't been defined yet because there's only one person. And by the entrance of the next person, that's when the scene will start to be defined.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
If it's that guy's boss, he's going to act totally different than if it's a pickpocket or something like that. So the scene hasn't been defined yet, but regardless of how it ends up, like what scene it is, both are playing their role essentially that we just innately know almost. Not innately because it's learned, but it becomes just second nature for most people. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
If you did, it was lost on me, but I like non-purple more.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and we're putting on our best faces in this episode of Stuff You Should Know. Right?
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Yeah. I mean, we could just say interacting with another person.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
Yeah. You may not have a goal. It may be, as we'll see, you're just trying to keep from freaking the other person out. You know, like you're not trying to get anywhere. You're not trying to advance or get something from the person or make somebody think that you're great. But just just being engaged, forced into a social interaction like that.
Stuff You Should Know
Impression Management
You have to perform a certain way or else the other person is going to be weirded out, is going to want to get away from you. Sometimes people get really upset when somebody violates norms. And I think you can really – this explains it a lot. Because it's like someone is expecting somebody to behave in a certain way. That person purposefully doesn't behave in that way.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
He was worked for the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the ATF. And over the course, like this whole operation was years and years long because it took like three years for him to get a few different meetings with Randy in which which culminated. And if you ask. Uh, the FBI, um, Randy saying, Hey, I want to sell you some illegal sawed off shotguns.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
If you ask Randy, he'll say, no, man, I wasn't trapped. I didn't want to sell the guns. The guy asked to buy guns several times with me saying, no, I don't want to do that until I eventually relented and sold him these illegal firearms.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
Yeah, this is Ruby Ridge, the incident, the standoff, the siege. What do you call this?
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
Yeah, for sure. Vicki was pretty upset as well. Apparently she wrote a warning letter, and this is in quotes, to Aryan nations and all our brethren of the Anglo-Saxon race. She filed an affidavit, which you knew trouble was coming.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
She filed an affidavit with a county clerk saying we might have to defend ourselves from, you know, with firearms because the federal government is going to come after us and we want to file this affidavit right now.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
Yeah. So they arrest him. They he pleads not guilty. He's released on bond, a ten thousand dollar bond on his own recognizance, which is a little surprising. Vicki, his wife, again, writes a letter to the U.S. attorney for the state of Idaho that she addressed as the servant of the queen of Babylon. And saying that we refuse to bow to your evil commandments, whether we live or whether we die.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
So she, you know, she sent a clear message that, like, we're not fooling around here. And I know we were on your radar, but you might as well really put us on your radar because we're not coming with you and you can't make us.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
Yeah, so this occurred when I was, I guess, like a— Third year in college or so. And that was, you know, I was I've talked on the show before about like us not having TV or cable and stuff. And so I wasn't as newsy then as I am now. Right. But this was a big deal. And I remember this. And then Waco literally right after happening, which we should do a Waco episode at some point, too.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
Yeah. So this is has been sort of debated here and there about the mistake and the error that he didn't even have the right court date to begin with. But all indications point to the idea that he was not going to come anyway. So I'm not saying it like didn't matter at all, but they said, hey, we're not coming. I don't think he planned on coming even if he had the right date.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
But the long and short of it is he didn't go. And so they, you know, they were really on their radar now. They're like, we've got a real situation here.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
And this is when this long, like really long surveillance program started in the summer of 1991, when they they kind of staked out around the property and around the house with, you know, binoculars and things and surveillance cameras that they'd set up in the woods.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
And they were just tracking what this family was doing. They had a couple of plans to go in nonviolently. One of them was to cut the water supply, I guess, from the spring to the house to flush them out because at a certain point they weren't even like leaving the house. You know, they were having food brought in and stuff because they knew what was going on.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
So another plan they had was they were believers in the menstrual cycle, meaning you were unclean and filthy. So when you had your menstrual cycle in that family, you had to go stay in the birthing shed on the property, one of the outbuildings during the duration of your menstruation.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
So they were like, all right, when Sarah, the oldest teenager, has her next menstrual cycle, she's going to be sent to the shed. And when the kids bring in food and stuff out there, we'll grab them. And that they'll immediately give up because we have the kids. But then I guess someone said, well, wait a minute. That's kidnapping. Yeah. You can't do that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
We don't have a warrant for any of the children. So that's we can't go with that plan. So they went with the worst plan.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
Yeah, it was an extreme reaction. I don't think there are a lot of people that would disagree with that. No. So they're watching this house. The house, like we mentioned, is very defensible. This is the house on the hill where they were to be safe from the dreams.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
When they did go out, they would send usually they would send the kids out ahead, supposedly, with guns to kind of investigate and see what was going on. They had neighbors recording license plates of people who came and went. They didn't the Weavers didn't have a telephone, but they tap phones at the general store. Helicopters were taking aerial photographs.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
They claim that the feds claim that in March 92, they actually visited and said. on the loudspeaker and via some sort of phone call that, hey, you got to surrender. Although Randy would contend that, no, until it all went down, no one said anything to me about surrendering.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
Yeah, unfortunately, we should. I just remember at the time being like, wow, OK, I don't think I really agree with these people that are having this standoff. But at the same time, it looks from as an outsider, like the government is. is just going in guns blazing and kind of murdering people. And it turns out both are kind of true for me.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
So that is that was surprising. The most surprising thing to me was an appearance by another human, because somewhere in this in this, you know, standoff while they were being surveilled, I guess Vicki and Randy got a little Randy and had another baby. It's it's. In my opinion, it wouldn't lead me to feel amorous and in the baby making way. But I guess things happened.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
They had a daughter in late 1991, Elisheba or Elisheba. I'm not sure they pronounced it. I'm going with Elisheba. Elisheba. Okay. Right there in that birthing shed is where they had Elisheba. And, you know, so that happened. Just know that there's a now a month's old baby on the scene as well.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
Yeah. So, you know, I know I mentioned that these were kids, but I just want to drive home the point that you had Vicki and Randy, the parents that were there. You had a 10 year old girl, a 14 year old boy, a 16 year old girl and the Kevin Harris kid that was living, who was in his mid 20s by now, and then this 10 month old baby.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
So teenagers and a baby, one guy in his 20s, and then the two parents. Sammy, the teenage boy, Randy is the dad, and then Kevin is the mid-20s guy that was living with them. They go out with their dog, Striker, a yellow lab, looking to see what's going on. They come to a Y fork in the road. As the story goes, Randy took it one way, Kevin and Sammy and Stryker went the other way.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
And this is where another record of dispute comes in, because the U.S. government says they were fired upon when they announced their presence as federal agents. What Kevin says is, no, no, no, they didn't announce their presence as federal agents at all. All we saw was guys in camo and their eyeballs peering through the bushes and my dog barking and one of the guys shot it and killed it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
Yeah, and Kevin is the one, to be clear, who shot and killed the deputy marshal.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
I don't think so. I mean, everything I saw was that the shootout was between the teenage boy and the 20 something year old. And, you know, he he shot Deputy Bill Deegan in the chest and killed him.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
Yeah, they said they claimed at least that the only gunfire that came from them at that point was Randy firing his gun into the air because he was so upset about losing his teenage son.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
All right. So now we're at Saturday, August 22nd. A hostage rescue team is dispatched by the FBI. And this is when things get really hinky because the rules of engagement in the United States in a situation like this are well known and generally ascribed to when things are on the up and up, which is.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
You do not engage unless you are under direct threat of violence or like somebody firing at you, basically. They amended this rules of engagement, and it was approved by the Bureau's Assistant Director for Criminal Investigation Division, Larry Potts, that basically said any armed adult man that you see, you can shoot and kill as long as you're not endangering a child.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
That was many, many, many months long in the making in which the U.S. government had a standoff with a family of children, a couple of adults, and the rest were basically kids. Oh, yeah. And it ended in lost lives on both sides when there's absolutely no reason why it should have. And this is that story of the Weaver family.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
Yeah, so they are headed back to the cabin. They get to the door. Vicki, the mom, is holding her 10-month-old daughter in her arms and kind of holding the door open, getting people in. And this is when Lon Horiyuchi takes a second shot. He said he was going for Harris, but it went squarely through the head of Vicki. through her head and hitting Kevin then in the chest.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
And she apparently was still holding her infant daughter when she hit the floor dead immediately.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
Yeah, and these are people from the Aryan Nation groups and some other militia groups. It's basically they're saying, hey, this is going down exactly how we say this kind of stuff goes down. So that's going on. They blocked off the roads, like you said. Mom's dead body now is under the kitchen table where it remains. Kevin is in pretty bad shape because he was shot in the chest.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
So he's in and out of consciousness. They're not quite sure, you know, what's going to happen to him at this point. And we should also mention that Lon Horiyuchi is a sniper that also had a lot of controversial, was also controversial in the Waco siege, like very soon after this. So this same guy was at both of these sieges and both times was a part of a pretty controversial shooting incident.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
Well, I looked into it a little bit, but then I started going down the rabbit hole and thought we should just cover Waco. But I think he was one of the guys that was charged with firing like the incendiary rounds into the building. But I might be wrong on that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
Yeah. And let's put it this way. Like, you can't find anything about Lon Horiyuchi now. Like, yeah, we know he's still alive, but I'm sure he's not available for, you know, interviews, if you know what I mean.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
Yeah. And, you know, depending on who you listen to, there are also people that say, no, they knew that she was dead. And the things that they were saying were deliberate, trying to provoke them and cause further upset by, you know, speaking to Mrs. Weaver, who they knew well was dead. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
Again, it's one of those, you know, you're never going to get the truth out of a matter like this because there are two sides. But they're trying to lure them out saying, hey, we had pancakes for breakfast. Why don't you bring the kids out? I bet they'd love some pancakes.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
They send down a robot, a remote control robot with a telephone so they could, you know, this is one of the hugest ways they broke protocol is that in a situation like this, you've got to be in contact with, and negotiate with someone in a standoff.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
And they didn't do that until well into it when they tried to get him a phone on this remote control robot that had a gun mounted to the front of it, which wasn't a good idea because, of course, they saw that. They're like, I'm not going near that thing.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
I tried to find out, but I couldn't find anything that that was rational. So I don't know.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
Yeah, so they brought some food for the baby and milk for the baby, which is great. And kind of talked Randy into ultimately coming out, but initially just kind of got him in a better state of mind. They are the ones when they came back out that told the feds, hey, Vicky's dead and they're under the table. Randy's wounded. Kevin is wounded, like big time wounded. And they were like, what?
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
Yeah. So this was, like you said, 1971. They had a daughter named Sarah in 76. And then two more kids, a boy named Sammy and then a daughter named Rachel all over the next six years. And those were, you know, there was a kid that would come later that we'll get to.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
That's news to us. So on Sunday, the 30th, Kevin finally surrendered. Randy said, it's OK. You need to go get medical help. He was helicoptered out to Spokane and I believe he's in serious condition, but he recovered. And then they also allowed Gritz and a friend named Jackie Brown, strangely enough, to take his wife's body away and the pets.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
They had a couple of pet parakeets that they took away as well.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
Yeah. And he had to talk his daughters into it. You know, they were they were ready to go. They were both brandishing guns. So he said, you know, 14 year old Sarah, put down your nine millimeter and 10 year old Rachel, put down that 38. We're going to get out of here alive. And they did that. Randy and Kevin were ultimately charged with murder, conspiracy, assault.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
And the girls went to live with their in-laws, I believe, Vicky's parents in Iowa.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
But around the latest 70s, kind of after the the latest Arab-Israeli conflict came around, Vicki started basically kind of thought that was a sign of the end times, the biblical end times. She kept having these recurring dreams of these omens about a house on a hill where they could be safe and hide. And she thought the end times were coming. And she started sharing this stuff with Randy.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
Yeah. I mean, it was sort of the facts of the case, too. Like everything I saw, it didn't seem like it was just some uneven jury where they were just sympathetic to the locals.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
Once the facts of the case came out, it was pretty clear they changed rules of engagement when they shouldn't have. They didn't follow protocol setting up, you know, communications. They went in guns blazing and just basically murdered people. Right. They, in 94, the family filed wrongful death lawsuits against the FBI and the U.S. Marshals. They settled it. The JOD settled these suits.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
They paid about a million bucks to each of the girls, 100 grand to Weaver. Harris, many years later in 2001, another settlement for $380,000. And Lon Horiyuchi, the sniper who, you know, where things really took a turn when he got involved, he it kind of went back and forth in different appeals in different cases over the years of pursuing criminal charges against him.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
So involuntary manslaughter was the initial charge. I think they moved it to a federal district court. who dismissed it, saying that he was acting in his official capacity, so you can't convict a guy for that. And there were a bunch of appeals and ended up in him escaping any justice by having the charges dropped.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
Yeah. Randy just died a couple of years ago at the age of 74. He kind of abandoned a lot of the just sort of further out there religious ideas that is was in his marriage, seemingly because of Vicki. And he was still like a, you know, sort of cause celeb in the anti-government world. And Sarah, the oldest daughter, it is very easy to find interviews with her.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
She wrote a book about it called From Ruby Ridge to Freedom. And in that book, she forgave those federal agents.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
Yeah, this is a tough one. So maybe let's do Waco in one year and then we can do the Oklahoma City bombing in two years.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
Yeah, here's a correction about porcupines that I don't think we got when that initially came out, but it must have been released as a Saturday edition, right?
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
Okay. Hi, guys. My name is Jita O, and I'm an undergraduate at UC Irvine studying biology. I wanted to write about a correction in your porcupines app. Chuck was discussing the fact of how new world and old world porcupines evolve independently of each other. The phrase for that would actually be convergent evolution, not co-evolution.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
I think I misspoke. Actually, we could probably clear that up in our peacocks episode coming up.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
Convergent evolution is what we need to remember. Co-evolution is a term where interactions between two species have a reciprocal effect on each other's evolution, which is completely different. Convergent evolution is when two separate populations in distinct geographic locations undergo similar phenotypic changes due to selective pressures.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
I want to finish by thanking you both for always peeking my interest. That's peeking. I know.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
And then later on, I was like, I mispronounced peeking. Peeking and Josh totally called me on it, but I tricked him. Peek-wing my interest in a variety of random topics I didn't know I needed until I did. Looking forward to learning more. And that, once again, is from Jita O. Thanks, Jita.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
It is J-I-T-A-O. Oh, okay. But they put a handy pronunciation next to it. That's why I'm saying it that way.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
Yeah, for sure. Hot off the presses, local couple moving to set up defensible shelter. Not here. Right. They moved in 83. I saw 15 acres. I saw 20 acres. Regardless, somewhere in that neighborhood of land, the freshwater spring. Yeah, it's a big one. This time they were in Idaho near Naples in the Ruby Ridge area. And this area had become a –
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
It's just sort of a place where if you didn't trust the government, if you didn't like paying taxes, if you maybe were a member of a Christian identity group or a white supremacist group, you may end up in this sort of rural area of Idaho at the time.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
In Idaho at the time, at least, it was not legal to homeschool. So not saying that that was part of their, you know, illegalities, but I guess technically it was.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
Yeah, for sure. Didn't have power. No, technically no, like official running water. I think they were able to get water to the house via that spring. But, you know, they were living the rural lifestyle. They took in a young teenage boy who had what sounds like a really pretty awful home life. His name was Kevin Harris.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
And he kind of came and went for a little while and then eventually basically was kind of adopted by the family. And he ended up staying there pretty much full time at a certain point.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
Yeah, for sure. And while they did kind of chum up to some of the Aryan nation groups around there, they were never like official members. They would go to meetings sometimes. They were very much aligned with the Christian identity movement, which is I mean, we can't get to the weeds too much here. But one of the main tenants is that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
Jews are literally the spawn of Satan, that Eve and the serpent bore, you know, Jews as babies, and that non-white people are mud people from a different creation. They are, I mean, how deep do you want to go here?
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
Yeah, that's as far as it went. It could have been that innocent because some of their neighbors they were friendly with, some they didn't like very much. Some of their neighbors complained that kids were wearing Nazi armbands, that Randy had fired shots at houses before. It was pretty rough and tumble out there.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
In 1988, Randy ran for sheriff, like you're saying, sort of the highest calling that you could have in that crowd. And He was it was basically a platform of like, I'm I'm anti-government. In fact, I carry around these get out of jail free cards. And if you know if you're not a nonviolent criminal, then then you're going to get a second chance with me.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
And I'm not going to I'm not going to be a government sheriff, basically.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
Yeah. I think that's a pretty good break time. What do you think? Yeah. All right. We'll take a little early Blake. Early Blake? We'll take an early break.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
All right. So this is a time in the mid 80s, sort of late 80s, when militia groups were starting to sort of be a thing, be in the news a little bit more. And so, of course, the FBI is going to start to begin undercover ops to infiltrate these groups and see what the heck is going on. And that is exactly what happened. at an Aryan Nation meeting when Randy met an undercover agent.
Stuff You Should Know
The Ruby Ridge Standoff
His name was Kenneth Fatale, and he was going by the name Gus Magasono. Great undercover name, I guess.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah, and that eventually led to just the term private eyes, right?
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah, I imagine Lincoln was a pretty hard guy to disguise now that I think about his height, that mustache-less beard, and that hat. Like they're probably like take off the hat to begin with.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
First things first, get that hat off your head.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
And they got a Sharpie. They drew on a mustache. And then they probably put him, if they would have been smart, they would have put him like in a wheelchair or something, which they may have done.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Oh, there you go. Oh, and told him to lower his voice. It was a very good movie, too. It was very shocking still when everyone saw Lincoln and Daniel Day-Lewis came out like this.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
And I clapped, but this time I also said, Schlemiel, hoping you would say.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
You don't question him. So you mentioned Kate Warren. Is it Warren and not Warney?
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
OK. W.A.R.N.E. She's very notable, too, though, aside from just assisting in this plot to save Lincoln or I guess action to save Lincoln against the plot. She was a detective like Pinkerton in a very forward thinking sort of way in 1856.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
hired her after she convinced him, like, hey, you know, there are things that women can do, places we can infiltrate, information we can get in ways that men cannot. And he saw the value in that, hired her, and then I think but four years later made her head of the female detective bureau. So they kind of staffed up with some women to work in these undercover roles.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
And just super smart, you know, because she was right on the money. I'm sure there were great assets to their cause.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
All right. So we're back with more on Pinkerton. The Civil War would begin. And Lincoln put George McClellan, who we've previously mentioned as someone who knew Pinkerton through the railroad business. Put him in charge of the Army of the Potomac. And he said, hey, Pinkerton does pretty good work. I'm going to bring this guy in as sort of a head spy. We'll call it like a secret service division.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
And he worked under Alan Pinkerton that has worked under the codename Major E.J. Allen and was pretty good at rooting out spies, but not so good at intelligence gathering and interpretation.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Oh, I think I said William too, didn't I? Or did I?
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
So Pinkerton would eventually leave his role in military intelligence. I think this was in 1862 after McClellan, who had hired him, was demoted. Essentially, he lost his whatever. Not role. Huh? Position.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah, I guess he lost his position as rank leader or whatever. Those are made up terms. Not going to be emailed by Civil War buffs at all. And then he said, all right, let me go back. You know, he still had his private detective agency. So let me go back to doing that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
And I guess we can talk a little bit about some of the other innovations, you know, aside from hiring women to work as as infiltrators and moles. He and I believe we've talked about this in one of our crime episodes. Yes. Did we do one on mugshots or just. I think it came up because criminal databases, maybe.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah. But when he brought it to the United States, he wanted to sort of codify it, I guess, and make it a more usable system and standardize everything. So he made all the pictures the same size. He essentially made little yearbooks. He made got handwriting samples and he would make these books and he would send them out. And they called it the Rogues Gallery.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
And it was sort of the beginning of the, you know, the United States criminal database.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
We had fun ones and then real ones, like official ones. And I got one of each.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
I got actually I got two of the unofficials for the unofficials. I got best style. Oh, nice. That's really saying something in high school, man. I guess so. I don't I'm not sure how I won that one, actually. And then I got most fun on a date, which was very ironic because I literally dated one person my senior year. And I was just the good friend to all the girls that I wanted to date.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
I was that guy. But then the official ones that were in the yearbook, best all round boy.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Well, you know, it's pretty. I still got my T-shirt. I'll wear it occasionally.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
So, best B-A-R-B, right? Yeah. All right. Just call me Barb from now on.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
I have a beloved aunt named Barb. I do too. Or Emily does. So she's sort of my aunt as well.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency technically was the name of it, but they were generally called the Pinkertons, led by Alan Pinkerton. And they're, you know, what they're known for is being one of the first or perhaps the first detectives And I say private detective agency, but not like we think of PIs. Not Sam Spade stuff. No, no, no.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah, pretty stand up. They also turned down reward money and he paid his agents pretty well, apparently. And this is just sort of business nuts and bolts. But he had a pledge to never raise fees without the client knowing. Like, in other words, I'm not going to hand you a bill at the end. That's not what we talked about. And also would just keep all of his clients very well informed.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
They had internal rules that were like, I think in the pamphlet, the general principles of Pinkerton's National Detective Agency. They said things like the agent must be of a high order of mind, must possess clear and honest, comprehensive understanding, force of will, vigor of body. And you can't drink on the job unless you absolutely have to.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
As assumed, assumingly, some part of like some mole situation where you're like, hey, do you want to go to the bar with us?
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
I don't know. But I mean, it was it was early on in the going for sure.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yes. And that is one in which he as the character and Kate Warren as her character, they catch a murderer. They go undercover, of course, and catch a murderer and a bank robber using a Pinkerton agent, as always, that posed as a ghost to get a confession.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Just a detective agency that's privatized, like police kind of detective work.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah, and a book potentially being like a character in a book would be, you know, back then as sort of tantamount to like they made a TV show about us or something.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
And, you know, they did a lot of stuff, including, as we'll see, busting up bank robbers and then later busting up unions.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah. I mean, you got these, like you said earlier, it's a pretty good take when you rob a train and, you know, you get them out in the middle of nowhere, which is kind of the great the great thing about robbing trains. Everybody is you can just, you know, ride your horses up. You've seen all the movies in the middle of nowhere where there's no one around to help.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
But in this case, the Pinkertons are there. One of the first gangs that they got was the Reno gang. After the Civil War, they started robbing trains in Indiana and Missouri and banks and other places. But not from Reno, but they were the Renos, John Frank Simeon and William Reno. And in October 1866, for instance.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
They robbed the Ohio and Mississippi Express to the tune of $15,000 in 1866 money, which is a huge, huge haul. We're arrested, but they posted bail and then started robbing again kind of right away trains and banks. And so the Pinkertons were like, we're on the job. I think the Adams Express Company was like, we've had enough. We got to hire these guys.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah, but they got their start doing, you know, God's work by working in the abolitionist movement, by helping to free enslaved people.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of those guys were lynched and hanged. And yeah, I don't know. I'm not sure if that's a good question, actually, if that was I mean, obviously it wasn't his call, but after he hands him over. But I wonder if he was like, oh, boy, I mean, how about how about a trial at least?
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah, I bet they weren't cheap, though. I tried to find out kind of how much they were paid. But if he was paying his agents well, which he supposedly did, then I'm sure they were not a cheap hire.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah, for sure. And, you know, after the war, of course, they gained further notoriety by robbing everything in sight, you know, trains, banks, stagecoaches, you name it. And Jesse sort of built up this... Thank you. Thank you.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
It's 1819 in Scotland, so it's not a pretty sight. No. Giving birth back then. But little Alan Pinkerton is born in Scotland. He is the son of a police sergeant. So, you know, law enforcement was in his family roots. And he went to the United States in 1842 at the age of 23.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah. I mean, it is shocking that only a dozen people died. I guess it's a testament to how bad of a shot they were. It really was. Collectively. Of course, the workers, you know, they surrendered, the Pinkertons did, because they were just so far outnumbered, even though most of the, I think most of the dozen were the workers that died, but the Pinkertons knew that they were vastly outnumbered.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
So they surrendered, but the workers lost because Henry Clay Frick, man, I have a hard time with that one.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
I know, Henry Clay people. Got 8,500 National Guard troops sent in after the Pinkertons left. And of course, you know, they broke the union and said, we're going to decrease your wages. We're going to increase how much you have to work. And this just became sort of a cyclical thing that was happening. The Pinkertons, early on, they were pretty good at infiltrating.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
But when it came to breaking these unions, the federal government would come in with the troops and do a far better job at doing so.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
And we should kind of mention just one thing he was involved in early on in Scotland before he left was something called the Chartist Movement. which was, we're not going to get super into it, but it was basically a movement of the working class over there that tried, one of the main things they tried to do was extend voting rights to all men, non-landowners, that is.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah. Yeah, that's true. So, I mean, that really changed everything for the Pinkertons there. As far as strike breaking goes, it took a huge hit. Couldn't get a lot of work after that. But they did go on. They did anti-union espionage work, of course. This is something I never knew at all was that they they just they kept going. They were acquired in 1999. Yeah. By Securitas.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
And I had no idea that they went on that much further after Pinkerton's death, after Alan Pinkerton's death.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Well, which is, you know, they could probably just do that under an overcoat. That thing's pretty small.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
They very much are. Figure very heavily into that storyline if you play the story part of that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
No, because I haven't played that in a long time. I'm not sure where I got it. It may have been, I don't know. I'm not really sure. They also figure in a bunch of movies, of course. They were in Deadwood. They were in The Long Riders in the 80s. And friend of the show, Paul Schneider, was in the great, great movie from 2007, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
And the Pinkertons figure pretty heavily in that movie, too.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah, it's pretty unusual. He died July 1st, 1884, right before his 65th birthday. And as the story goes, he slipped on a street in Chicago and bit his tongue, something which I did when I was a kid. I had 12 stitches across the center of my tongue to put that thing back together when I was like 12. But I did not die because I'm still here.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
But Pinkerton died as a result of this because it turned gangrenous.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
That's super cool. So she's there with him. Maybe I guess some of his sons are there and his wife, Joan.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
That's right. This is a little follow up on the GPS episode. Toward the end, I kind of poked fun at Garmin as being something that, you know, like my mom uses and not like a more modern system. But it turns out Garmin is still very popular because Deanna sent me an email saying, hey, a lot of cyclists use this stuff. And I asked her why. I was like, oh, that's super interesting.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
I said, do you know why they have, you know, their views by cyclists are still around in that capacity? And she said, good question. I think there are a couple of reasons why it's still the go-to for GPS. They've been around forever. They've been making GPS for planes and boats since the late 80s. So they had a really big head start. And then number two, constant refinement.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
While others are just starting to develop their products, Garmin was already fine-tuning theirs, and they had a 20-year head start, so they packed in a ton of extra features. For example, they introduced the first bike radar system years before anyone else, and the radar still blows the competition away. I even have a buddy who works for Wahoo, and he still uses a Garmin radar. Very nice.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Also, Deanna says they built a lot of brand loyalty, especially in the cycling world. Many of us still use them, even though the quality has slipped just a bit in recent years. We don't like using phones on our bikes because they're bulky and drain the batteries really fast, and Garmin just feels more polished and reliable for our needs. Who was that from? That was from Deanna.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah, it's a trade he learned in Scotland. So he opened up that cooperage in Dundee, like you said. And a fortuitous incident happened as a cooper when he was on apparently this sort of abandoned or maybe just not claimed land, cutting wood, looking for wood for barrels. And he discovered a hideout of some counterfeiters. He rustled up a posse, got some citizens together and captured them.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
And for his efforts, got a lot of local notoriety. And they said, hey, how about you become deputy sheriff here in Kane County, Illinois? And this is in 1846. And he said, well, I guess dad was a was a copper. And so maybe I should be, too, or a quasi copper, at least.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
I believe you. I just, I don't, I shamefully don't know Blues Brothers as well as clearly you do.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah, so that's what happened. Eventually, he would also be a special agent for the U.S. Post Office. And finally, in 1850, he started the detective agency, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. It apparently was the first detective agency He was named the first detective in Chicago, I think, previous to this, at just 31 years old.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
And from the beginning, from 1850 till the end of emancipation, like I mentioned from the outset, he worked to assist the escape and freeing of enslaved people. I think he even had a volunteer to stop on the Underground Railroad.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So a lot of the other work they were doing, they were doing other work as an agency besides working in the emancipate or I guess the abolitionist movement. But this was, you know, again, in and around Chicago that didn't have a real police department at the time. And he they didn't exactly work.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Work as cops, though, it was sort of this weird hybrid of a thing like they were. It wasn't like police. It wasn't like a private detective agency, but they also weren't like full on cops. It was kind of hard to define at the time.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah. If you've ever seen there weren't a lot of photographs back then, but there's a very famous photograph of Lincoln at Antietam. Have you ever seen this one?
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah. So that's Pinkerton on the left. He's with two dudes standing in front of that canvas tent. And that's Pinkerton on the left and Major General John McLaren and. on the right of Lincoln, who I always just not forget, but anytime you see a photo like that, and there aren't many where you see like full size, the full size Lincoln doll. Right, yeah. Or cardboard cutout.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
He's just impossibly tall for back then. And then that stove pipe hat just adds to it, obviously. But I don't know if he wore that hat to further intimidate people, but he was just such a tall, lanky guy. It's just odd looking for that time period.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Yeah. We never got to eat that stuff. My mom didn't buy that stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
You just mix it with some, or put it on a casserole topper?
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Well, this episode is clearly brought to you by Stove Top Stuffing instead of potatoes.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Well, you led me down the right path with Black Dove, so I'll give it a shot.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
Mm-hmm. Huh. I liked it. Maybe you just don't like things ending.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
We do our usual countdown, everyone, so we can sync sound. And you do that. Here's a little how the sausage is made. You do that by counting down and then each of us clapping. So you have a spike in the audio wave file that the engineers and editors can align so we match up.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
All right. Back to who are we talking about here? Pinkerton, not stovepipe or stuffing. So, like I said, he was, or like you said, I guess, he was buddies with Lincoln pre-Civil War and had gotten to know, what was his name?
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
That's right. So that leads us to a story, a pretty major story early on. I guess it's not that early on. It's about 11 years into the detective agency. But Pinkerton learned of a assassination plot against President-elect Lincoln at the time. And there was a barber in Baltimore from Corsica. His name was Cipriano Farandini.
Stuff You Should Know
The Pinkerton Detective Agency
And he wanted to kill Abraham Lincoln when he was coming through Baltimore, when Lincoln was on his way to Washington. And Pinkerton, you know, found out about this and was like, you're not going to kill my buddy. I'm going to thwart your plan.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
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Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
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Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
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Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
This is Stuff You Should Know, by the way, the far out edition.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Yeah. And not just stuff in general. We're actually going to zero in on one specific piece of stuff that's out there in space, a little planet called Saturn.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
The question about how Saturn or gas giants like Saturn form is more polarizing than the proposal to rename Uranus.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
If we work together, that's two. That's two. So I'm going to explain the difference because I find this fascinating. The main generally accepted model of how planets form, including gas giants like Saturn, is called the core accretion model. And that is basically when a star forms, like our sun, It forms out of dust and gas and all sorts of crazy stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
And there's a lot of other debris that starts swirling around it, forming a disk. And that's where planets form from. There's all sorts of collisions and things get bigger and kind of clumped together. And as they get bigger, they attract more stuff. And the closer you are to the star, the more likely you are to attract heavy stuff, like say iron, nickel, stuff that makes up rocky planets, right?
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
And everybody's like, core accretion model. That's just how planets form. But then there's a group of, like, renegade astrophysicists led by a guy named Alan Boss who are basically like, no, that leaves a couple of questions out there. One is that there's less rocky debris in the outer reaches of this disk that's swirling around the sun. So...
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
You know, how can a gas giant be made out of rocky core? And then secondly, that the remnants that are out there, say like dust and gases like hydrogen and helium, they will float away into outer space and out of the solar system and out of reach. before a gas giant could form using the core accretion model. So what they've come up with instead is called the disk instability model.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
It is, yeah. That's what the astrophysicists all call it. Yeah, Saturn does have rings. It's not the only planet with rings, as we'll see. Or we can see now, I think Jupiter and Uranus and is it Mercury also that has rings? But they're just, they don't hold a candle to Saturn's rings.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
And they said, you don't need rocky stuff like iron and nickel to form a gas giant. It forms from gases from the start. And the core accretion model people said, OK, smart guys, how? How could that possibly happen?
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
And the disk instability model people said that that swirling disk becomes so compressed and so dense from swirling around the sun for so long that when it breaks up, some of that dust and gas has enough density that it can attract other dust and gases and hence form a gas giant. And the core accretion model, people were a gog. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Yeah, it's absolutely nuts. And the reason why that it's got such a crazy atmosphere is because of that temperature difference, the temperature gradients. Remember we were talking about how tornadoes form on Earth and the tornado alley short stuff, that you have to have a temperature gradient Apparently the same thing happens on Saturn as well.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
But there's also, Chuck, a really weird weather system that does not come and go. It's essentially a feature, it seems like, because it was first photographed in 1981 when the Voyager 2 probe did a flyby of Saturn. And when the Cassini mission arrived, I think in like 2008, 9 or 10 or something like that, it saw the exact same thing was essentially there.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
So what they figured out is it's not a storm. It's a really, really fast jet stream. But the thing about it, I'm sure people out there who are familiar with jet streams are like, so big whoop. Well, get this. This jet stream forms a hexagon around the top of the planet. It's one of the weirder things I've ever seen.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Saturn's also a really ancient planet in that as far as human experience goes, for as long as we've been looking up in the night sky, we've seen Saturn. Because it is the sixth planet from the sun, it's also the furthest planet away that you can see with the naked eye here on planet Earth.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Yeah. So I think, Chuck, we can't really put it off any longer. I believe that it's time to talk about Saturn's rings. Because, I mean, imagine if we didn't in this episode.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
I have I have an anecdote about that. Let's hear it. So remember, we did an Australian tour a few years back. It was great. Yeah, it was. On one of the days off, Yumi and I went to the Sydney Observatory one night. Oh, cool. And they just happened to have one of their telescopes trained on Saturn. And you could lean over and look through the eyepiece. And we did.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
And both of us just started laughing because it looked amazing. So fake, like a little white cutout of Saturn, just flat as could be. It just looked like they were like, we can't find Saturn. So we're going to have to put this slide in there. But the volunteer was looking at us like, what are you what's so funny about Saturn? Basically, we just moved along.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
No, we didn't. We didn't bother to say anything. It was mine and Yumi's little joke.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
It sounded like Billy Ray Cyrus trying to do an Australian accent.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
And we've known about the rings. So remember, people have known about Saturn since we started looking up at the sky, but you can't see the rings. But right when people started inventing telescopes, they noticed that Saturn had something weird going on. In 1610 Galileo, the astronomer made famous by the Indigo Girls,
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
He spotted Saturn's rings in his telescope, but it wasn't of high enough quality for him to be like, those are rings. He thought they were like bulges on the side, like handles on a pot or something like that. He wasn't quite sure what the heck it was. He actually, I think, thought it was like a three-body system, two huge moons and a planet.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
And it wasn't but, I mean, 50 years later, I guess, even less, that Christian Huygens said, I've got a much better telescope now, and those are rings. I bet my bottom dollar on it. That was his famous quote.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Loving too much? Looking up the truth. Is that what the lyric is?
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Isn't that nuts? Yeah. I mean, that's crazy. Like, how does that thing even exist? Yeah. Is my question.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
So if you look at Saturn, especially through a Sydney based telescope, you're going to see that it looks like it's it basically like kind of cocked its rings to the side like a hat, a jaunty cap, as I put it.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
The thing is, is Saturn's not doing that. Actually, if you straighten Saturn out, its rings would be roughly parallel to its equator. It turns out that Saturn itself... is jauntily cocked to the side, too, to the tune of 27 degrees. And Earth's axial tilt, I think, is what it's called. So the tilt relative to the plane of orbit around the sun. Flat plane, tilted planet.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Let's just leave it at that. Earth is 23 degrees. So 27 isn't that much more. But Saturn's rings, like, really point out how angled the whole thing is.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Yeah, but the other thing about it, too, is with an axial tilt that pronounced, like Earth's and like Saturn's, that's how you have seasons. Some parts are closer to the sun at different times of the year. Same thing on Saturn. But since Saturn's years are almost 30 Earth years long, that would mean that the seasons are like seven years long on Saturn. Whew.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
G and then E. The best mnemonic device I could come up to remember that is don't choose brunch and forego grits and eggs.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Phil approves. Good. Thanks, Phil. So if you ever noticed Saturn's rings also, there's like dark stripes in between them. That's actually voids in between the rings, right? Saturn's got tons of rings. Some are bigger than others. And when you kind of look at them from afar, it just looks like they have, what is that? Seven. Seven rings. There's actually way more.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
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Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
These are just the rings that we can see and identify. And they're differentiated by these gaps. There's a huge gap, I think, between the B ring and the A ring. So it's about in the middle of Saturn's rings. It's called the Cassini division. And it's about 3,000 miles across. Yeah, that's a big gap. Yeah, it is a big gap. And it kind of put this in perspective, especially for our American friends.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
If you took Seattle and you took Boston and you erased the country in between them and replaced it with the void of space, the people in Seattle and Boston could look out from one another across what was roughly the size of the Cassini division. I like that analogy. I don't know what's so funny about it.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Okay, but it was replacing it with the void of space that I think really drove it home, if you ask me.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Do you know how long I went into a distance calculator to figure out two cities that most people know are roughly 3,000 miles apart? Did you come up with that? Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Wow. Now you have two more times to bring it back and then you'll have completed the comedy.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Yeah, that's pretty cool. That's how the Cassini division is created by that gravitational pull. And Mimas also is nicknamed the Death Star because if you look at a picture of Mimas, it looks an awful lot like the Death Star. Yeah. And the Death Star, it's like a space fortress in the Star Wars movies.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Let's talk about how the rings formed and then we'll come back and talk. No, let's take a break.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
If you're driving right now, look around. I'll wait. All those cars you see, they're all probably on autotrader.com.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Well, way to go, Chuck. I thought you said it was going to be funny, though.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
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Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
So, oh, yeah, like I said, people have known about Saturn for a very, very long time. And in fact, I think 2,500 years ago, the first people to document it were the Sumerians. And not too long after that or around that time in India, the world's oldest astronomy book, the Surya Siddhanta, obviously, whoever wrote it was like, I'm going to try to guess the diameter of Saturn.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Well, it's officially too cold to do anything, Chuck. But the upside is that you can cocoon yourself in Bombas socks, slippers and underwear all winter long.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Yeah, and Bama's knows that the little things really do make a big difference. So they removed all the itchy tags, fixed the annoying toe seam, and perfected the fit of everything. No more socks that slip down or underwear that rides up. Just perfect comfort.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
So, Chuck, you said a little early on, I think, that the people who study this kind of stuff are not 100 percent sure how Saturn's rings formed. Right. Right. There's a lot of different competing theories. There's a whole camp that's like they're as old as the planet. So they're multibillion year old rings. And other people are like, that's just stupid.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
And specifically, there's a researcher from NASA who in 1986 wrote a paper. His name is Jack Connerney. I don't think he actually said your idea is stupid to other people. But what he did do is he calculated the rate of what came to be called ring rain. And that is those particles falling into Saturn. And when they do that, that ring becomes slightly depleted.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
And it happens more and more and more. And on the scale of tens or hundreds of millions of years... Saturn is eventually steadily losing its rings. And apparently the particles fall into Saturn when they become charged. And I guess they're more attracted by Saturn's gravitational pull. They travel down the magnetosphere, just like particles bombard Earth's magnetosphere and produce the auroras.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Same thing happens to Saturn, but it's paying the price. It's at the expense of losing its rings.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Yes, I believe so. And I think it melts as it gets further and further toward the center.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Yeah, because guys like Jack Conner and he calculated that based on the rate of ring rain, the rings probably aren't more than 100 million years old.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
So 100 million years before this, Saturn wouldn't have had rings. And they also calculated 100 to 300 million years hence. Saturn's not going to have rings either. The way that they came up with that 100 million year old estimate is because any older than that, there should be far less rings based on the rate of ring rain. And if it were younger, there should be more rings than that.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
And I don't think they guessed at it like, you know, how many jelly beans are in this jar kind of guess. Like they used math and geometry and all sorts of great stuff. Sure. But this is long before they should have. So what makes it impressive is that they were only off by 1,000 miles. So today we believe that the diameter of Saturn is about 74,580 miles.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
And also some of the bigger ones because, you know, like you said, some of the particles in the rings are like grain of sand size, but other like boulder size. And those boulder ones are just ones that haven't crashed into the proper other boulders yet to create those sand grains. It's just a matter of time eventually.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
There's another theory, which, by the way, Saturn apparently is like a thunderdome for astrophysicists. There's so many different theories about so many different things.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
But the other theory is that a bunch of Saturn's moons collided together. It wasn't just one getting pulled towards Saturn. They all just kind of got all tripped up and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And all of a sudden you've got this debris field that got smaller and smaller, more particulate over time, just like the chrysalis theory too.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Not as much. But they do dress like Master Blaster when they talk about it. They just don't actually fight.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Well, no, remember they are out of order. Oh, yeah, the fifth one discovered. You're right. Sorry. Nice save. So there's also another ring that they discovered as recently as 2009. Because their telescopes just keep getting better and better, from Galileo's in 1610 to the Spitzer Space Telescope. Surprisingly hard to say. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
They found a new ring that basically follows the orbit of Saturn's furthest moon out, Phoebe. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's very. That's why it took so long for us to find it.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
I think we knew Phoebe existed, the moon. It could be Phoebe. They might be pronouncing it like that. But we didn't know the ring was there until 2009. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Yeah. I just think that's really fascinating. You know, you can thank the good Lord that we're alive at a time when Saturn has rings and we have telescopes. That's right. So we also talked a lot about the moons just now, and it turns out that Saturn's moons are really fascinating in and of themselves. It has a bunch of moons, as many as 146 that we know about right now.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Just last year, well, two years ago when this comes out in 2023, the International Astronomical Union, they added 62 more moons. And I don't know if they were saving up and just wanted to do a batch addition of moons. If they found a bunch in quick succession, I'm not sure. But they're like, there are definitely more moons there.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
In the Surya Siddhanta, they guessed 73,000 or estimated 73,580. That, my friend, is remarkable. Yeah, regular Lewis and or Clark. Kind of. Kind of.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
So the other thing about the moons, too, is that they orbit outside of the rings, which makes sense because the moons that were inside of the rings were what make up the rings, probably. Yeah. So these moons haven't smashed into anything else and they're just orbiting around. And like you said, Mimas, that one exerts a gravitational influence that creates the Cassini division.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
which means that it's really close to those rings. It's actually the nearest moon to Saturn's atmosphere. But it's only about half the distance of the moon we have here on Earth, which is about 237,000 miles, as every shining fan knows.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
In fact, the month is based on the moon taking a month. They're inextricable, basically.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
So there's a bunch of different moons, different sizes, but Saturn has some really, really big ones. Titan, which we've already talked about, is enormous. What a moon. It is a great moon. Its size is large enough that it can actually hold an atmosphere in place. It's one of the very few moons that we know about that has an actual atmosphere to speak of. And boy, are we going to speak about it.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
And one of the friends there was like, rain's a weird word. Have you ever thought about that word, rain? But why does it sound funny? Because the atmosphere is so thick that vibration sound can travel much more efficiently through it. So if you shouted like, hello, you would burst the eardrums of your friend on LSD.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
They just clap their hands over their ears and like double over in pain.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Oh, yes. Yeah, great. Great analogy. Sorry. It was lost on me at first.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
No, but there is a liquid ocean about 50 miles below the surface, that methane and ethane and ice surface. And this ocean is actually made of saltwater.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
For sure. But that's the point. They're like, wait a minute, there's saltwater there. It's heated by the core of Titan. There's also hydrocarbons on the planet's surface. Like, if you put this stuff together in just the right arrangement, you might have some sort of bizarre form of life. These are organic materials that you could conceivably create life from.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
So who knows what's swimming around or floating around in that ocean underneath Titan's surface.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Yeah. You know? There's also, what did you say? Enceladus? Enceladus. That's right. What did you call it? I said Enceladus. You said something else. It sounded like salad. Enceladus. I think I said Enceladus.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
So, so far, Titan's two for two that we've talked about. We've talked about two moons and both of them happen to have saltwater oceans.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Yeah, that's a big one, too. So, like, it's underneath its icy crust, which means that it's protected and heated. And heated so much, in fact, that I think we said Enceladus—no, I don't know how to say it—bursts ice from its ocean out into the atmosphere, creating the E-ring. which is pretty cool in and of itself. But that also means that there's geysers.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
And where there's geysers, there's probably hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, the floor of the saltwater ocean. And that means that life could conceivably create or start up there because that's a really popular theory these days about how life started on Earth around hydrothermal vents in the ocean. Yeah. So who knows?
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
And then the Cassini probe wrote back, wrote home from camp not too long ago and was like, hey, I sampled some of this water and it's got some mind blowing stuff in there.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Yeah, for sure. And there's actually a really cool animation artist interpretation of that grand finale of the Cassini probe that's worth watching on YouTube. Oh, cool. You got anything else? I got nothing else. I got one more thing. It turns out in the Northern Hemisphere, September 2025 will be the best time to view Saturn because it'll be on the opposite side of the sun from Earth.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Okay, well, Chuck mentioned eyeballs, so we have no choice but to unlock listener mail.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Wait a minute. Wait, wait, wait. So Rockne is the mother of one of our listeners.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Thanks a lot, Rockne. We appreciate that. Thanks for trying to spread the good word by creating earworms. That's right. If you want to be like Rockne and let us know your situation, we'd love to hear that kind of stuff. You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
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Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
It makes it look like a nickel if Saturn was a volleyball. NASA loves that one. If you ever look up Saturn's size, NASA uses that every chance they get.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
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How Saturn Works
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Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
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How Saturn Works
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Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Yeah, it's got an extra spare tire compared to Earth's, you know?
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
One of the things about Saturn, though, if you aren't like an astronomy type, the kind of planet that Saturn is is a gas giant, which means that it's made largely of gas. Or gas is. So to be a gas giant, you don't have to just be a big ball of gas, but you're made of things that typically are considered gases on the periodic table. Let's just get that straight right out of the gate, okay? Right.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
But if you put the whole thing together, Saturn doesn't have a surface to speak of. If you did go far enough in toward the center- You might eventually hit something you could stand on, but you would be under so much heat and pressure that you wouldn't be thinking about standing on the surface anymore. You'd have other problems.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Sure. Isn't that what they call lakes up in the northeast? Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
I always assumed it was size. Like, pond is smaller. Lake is larger. Well. That's how you remember. Lake, L, large, L. And pond, puny. Nice one.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Yeah, and when it's time to collect that money, Squarespace offers an easier way to collect payments so you can focus on growing your business. You can invoice clients and get paid for your services, turn leads into clients with proposals, estimates, and contracts, and simplify your workflow and manage your service business on one platform. What else could you possibly ask for?
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Or negative 140 Celsius for our non-American Liberian or I can't remember the third one, friends. That's right. So there's some other interesting things that happen because it gets such little sunlight. But one of the things that astronomers were surprised by at first was Saturn's atmosphere.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
That is very cold, but it's not nearly as cold as you would expect for how far away from the sun it is and how little sunlight it gets. And they finally figured out the reason why is because Saturn generates its own internal heat. That's why it's not as cold as it should be. Just like me. Yeah, exactly. You could never be cold if you tried, man.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
I meant in like the figurative sense, you know, like... Oh, like a cold emotional individual? Yes, yes. Oh, well, thank you. So there's a couple other things about being that far away from the sun. I think it takes 80 minutes for sunlight to get there. That's a long time to stand around and wait for sunlight. We only have to wait like eight minutes here on Earth.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Right. And then so in its orbit around the sun, it takes almost 30 Earth years for Saturn to complete a year.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Yes. And here on Earth, for comparison, a day is more than 20 hours long. That's right. So I said earlier, Chuck, that Saturn is a gas giant. And the two gases that it's most fond of are hydrogen and helium. And overall, I think the composition of its atmosphere is about three quarters hydrogen, one quarter helium. But in the planet itself, it has far less hydrogen than helium.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
That's about all you really need to know about those two for now. But the point of the whole thing is that there is an atmosphere. There are different layers. And the atmosphere itself is about 37 miles thick. And it is just generally gas, but it's also super freaky, as we'll see. But if we zoom in a little further, drop down a little further into Saturn, into its center,
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
and we make it through the 37 mile thick atmosphere, we're suddenly going to find out that the pressure is extraordinarily great in the next layer, which is a layer of liquid hydrogen.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
It really is. And then it gets even crazier because so further in toward the core, toward the center of the planet, that liquid hydrogen turns into a completely different kind of thing that they call liquid metallic hydrogen. It's still, again, on the periodic table of gas. even though it's in liquid form, but it behaves like a metal in that it can conduct electricity.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
So imagine hydrogen gas conducting electricity. And once you put your head back together, because it got blown so wide open from that, you will understand now how heat is generated inside Saturn. It's from that liquid metallic hydrogen just acting like it ain't supposed to.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
The reason why is because it's so compressed from the pressure toward the center that everything, even the electrons, you remember like electrons are, they are to like a nucleus of an atom what, you know, I think the outer planets in our solar system is to the sun. They're really far away from it. This pressure is so great in Saturn's center that their electrons are touching.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
It's all mushed together, and that's why it's behaving weirdly, because the electrons can conduct electricity a lot more easily.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
But if we're going to compare core to core, the core of the sun is 27 million degrees Fahrenheit, not 15,000, you know? Yeah. I saw one other thing about the core of Saturn, and then maybe we'll take a break. Apparently, some researchers have concluded that it's actually slushy. So it's not solid, which makes sense. I mean, you'd think it'd be kind of molten or in some weird state.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
But that it's also made of, in addition to iron, ice, rock, and gas. And how there could possibly be ice in a core... That's 15,000 degrees Fahrenheit is totally beyond me. I couldn't see a good explanation of this whatsoever. It's possible that the researchers who've proposed this completely off their rockers. I don't know.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Hey, and welcome to this podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. Did I flub that line? Yes. Am I going to retake it? No, I am not.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
But I thought it was worth mentioning because I think that's fantastic if it is true. And hopefully there's a Stuff You Should Know listener who is out there is like glaven. I'm going to email in and explain to Josh and Chuck how there could possibly be ice there.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Hey, everybody. It's Chuck and Josh here to talk to you about Squarespace. Squarespace makes it easy to build the website of your dreams and do whatever you like with it.
Stuff You Should Know
How Saturn Works
Yeah, and when it's time to collect that money, Squarespace offers an easier way to collect payments so you can focus on growing your business. You can invoice clients and get paid for your services, turn leads into clients with proposals, estimates, and contracts, and simplify your workflow and manage your service business on one platform. What else could you possibly ask for?
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
So by the time World War I rolled around, what was it, 1911, I think? I'm sure I'm wrong and we're going to get a bunch of emails, but let's just say for sake of argument, it was 1911. This is just a couple of years after the Bureau was formed and Sir Cumming was, you know, running around doing his thing. But by this time, he'd—yeah, writing letters with invisible ink all over the place.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
Wow, that was a silver lining. How's that? There's not been any better NSYNC since Lance Bass and Justin Timberlake were running around together.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
By this time, though, he'd cultivated some sources already in Germany. He had one guy named B. He was C, and his first source was B. who would report on, you know, comings and goings on the coast and the harbor and their ship sizes and how many ships were in their fleet.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
And although they totally dropped the ball on Germany invading neutral Belgium, which was a big deal, they still managed to give them a lot of like really important intel that basically proved the idea that Britain could really use a MI6 or something like it.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
Yeah. So by the time the interwar period comes along, the 20s, 30s, well, there were some more legendary people. This was a time where it was just like the Wild West in Great Britain as far as spy crafts and intelligence goes. And there's this one guy who's definitely worth mentioning. He was an early agent. And we should say most people call anybody who would be working for MI6 an agent.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
With the CIA, you'd be correct. With MI6, you'd be wrong. An agent, as far as MI6 is concerned, is one of those sources who has turned code on their country and is supplying MI6 with secrets.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
Or just a plain old agent. A double agent would be somebody who is actually spying for their country but posing as a spy for MI6. This is just a plain old agent. Officers are the people who are employees of MI6 that run and handle agents in the field.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
Yeah, there's a couple where he was giving MI6 really valuable intelligence from flying over aircraft factories in Germany. Apparently, there was one particular piece of information, or I guess a bunch of information, that really formed a good picture of the size of Germany's Luftwaffe, their air force.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
And Winston Churchill apparently used that to decide whether he was on the side of appeasing Hitler or fighting Hitler. And I guess because of the buildup of this air force, he was like, we can't let this guy keep continuing. So he was against appeasement, thanks largely to Bertram Mills' intel that he was directly giving him.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
Yeah, and a circus director is understating it. He was known as king of the modern circus. Like, he was a really big deal outside of his spying activities. It would have astounded anybody who had ever heard of him that he was a spy.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
No. There you go. Yeah, it would have been one of those things where it starts out normal, but as it gets closer to the edge of the card, they start cramping letters together. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
Yeah, I'm not that good at it either. Don't worry. All right, good. So for a long time, not a lot happened. And then World War II broke out. And World War II, by this time, remember, MI6 had proved its metal and worth in World War I. You had a whole decade or two where it just kept proving its worth. And so by the time the war broke out, you would think that they would be totally ready for this.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
But I don't know if it caught them off guard or they were just allowed to... kind of be pruned in peacetime? I don't know. But it took them a minute to get their footing and regenerate intelligence, like human intelligence networks in Europe.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
But they apparently got their footing fairly quickly and were very successful in basically generating a lot of intelligence coming out of different countries, including occupied countries in Europe during World War II.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
Yeah, she was the chief at the time secretary, and he imbued her with enough power to run a program. So a lot of people say she was probably the inspiration for Ian Fleming's Miss Moneypenny, who James Bond used to like to flirt with.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
Oh, yeah. One of the things that lets us off the hook, though, that I found, and I'm sure Kyle, who helped us with this, we had our man in Britain to make him an agent and us officers. That's right. Because he was giving us intel on MI6. If you go and just start researching it, especially if you just type in MI6, they've done a pretty good job of... keeping search results pretty sanitized.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
Right. My dad used to go around telling people he was Q.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
Yeah. And speaking of Q, it turns out that they did kind of develop devices, like you said, figuring out ways to hide compasses and maps to get to POWs in World War I.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
But the idea of their research and development and technology branch that produced someone like Q that we all who know the James Bond movies are familiar with, that actually came from them absorbing a rival agency that was developed in World War II that MI6 did not like one bit at first. The Special Operations Executive or the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
Well, yeah. I mean, they definitely did have their fun stuff curtailed because MI6 had a department called D-Section. And D stood for destruction. Like, they were supposedly perfectly capable of doing sabotage. I don't know enough about World War II British military history to understand why they felt a special operations executive was needed.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
Or if somebody just managed to have enough power that they developed their own thing and it just became the SOE. I don't know. But eventually, MI6 prevailed, especially after World War II, and they absorbed the Special Operations Executive, including a lot of their really interesting, useful stuff, like their research and development group that produced people like Q.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
For sure. Yeah. So, I mean, there's a lot of what we understand about MI6 and like the movies and all that. It does apparently bear some resemblance because I don't know if we said or not, Ian Fleming worked for MI6 during World War II. So he had firsthand knowledge about all this stuff, which is why there are real life people who these characters were based on.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
So our understanding of what MI6 does and has at its disposal and the way it runs is is not that far off. But one of the big differences I saw was the idea of a lone, loose cannon running his own operations out there is totally incorrect. It's just backwards. I've seen current employees say, like, that guy wouldn't even make it through the door.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
Like, he would get voted out so quickly that he wouldn't even have a chance. You need somebody who's not a loose cannon. Yeah. Rather than solo missions, apparently it's all teamwork. And it's not one person coming up with one giant piece of information. Like there's a supervillain who's created a layer at the bottom of the sea that he's going to shoot nuclear missiles from.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
Like I would say out of the top 20 results, two are not official MI6 pages. So it's kind of hard to research them, especially considering they've only been publicly recognized as actually existing since the mid 90s.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
That usually doesn't come up in one big package. It takes thousands of people to work together to piece little pieces of information and then go back and double check and triple check with other sources whether those pieces of information are correct. And then eventually you create a whole picture and you hope that hope that it's true and accurate.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
Yeah, and I'm guessing the camel drivers came from the Special Operations Executive Heritage because that's exactly the kind of guerrilla warfare the SOE engaged in in World War II. So I'm guessing that's how that survived into the Cold War.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
Yeah. And not just like, OK, we they have a huge stockpile of these weapons. The opposite could be just as valuable to like, actually, they don't have that many missiles. So all this bluster about them blowing the UK into the ocean is actually full of hot air. So we don't need to be quite as scared about it.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
Really to spy on the Soviet Union as a whole. It was massive and it's it was made up of what are now a bunch of independent nations. But at the time you had one big enemy rather than today where you have like terrorism, non-state bad actors like it's just much more dilute. Whereas before it was like those guys, those are our enemy. That's who we need to spy on.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
I'm sure you could apply it to that, but the impression I had is that was just how they decided if somebody was worth approaching to recruit as a spy for them.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
It would apply, yeah, for sure. So if you're recruiting people, that's one way to do it. You can flatter them, make them just be like, this person clearly wants to feel like they're important or helping their country or something like that. You can have... Stuff to blackmail them with. Apparently MI6 is more than willing to blackmail agents into working for them. Bribery is another one, too.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
That's how a lot of very famous and prolific spies have been brought on to being a spy is just getting paid. Although in the end, when they're being executed, you're like, you did all this for $300,000, really? Yeah. You know, it just never quite adds up. And it's like, and also it's like $300,000 over like 12 years or something like that. It just, I never quite get it.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
So maybe there's like, they're really in it for the thrill. The money was just the extra bonus. I don't know.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
Right. And then another gambit is called the dangle. It's not dirty. It's just this way of getting somebody to spy for you.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
Or actually, it's a way of creating a double agent like you were talking about.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
So a dangle is where you say like you have somebody in Moscow that you've turned into an agent for you. You try to make them attractive to, say, the KGB to recruit them as a spy. So now you have a double agent working inside.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
I don't know if he came to them. No, he came to them. He became disillusioned with the Soviet Union. And he's like, I think I'm going to start helping the UK.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
Yeah, which is pretty useful, as a matter of fact. Yeah, he was hugely helpful just over like 18 months and then he was caught and executed. But I think at that time he gave up 5000 photos of Soviet documents to MI6.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
Wait, can you say I can't do a very good British accent?
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
Almost always is. So I say we take a break and we come back and talk about one of the most thrilling moments in MI6 history.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
So there's two things that MI6 does, and that really does kind of get it across. They're like Britain's equivalent of the CIA, or better yet, the CIA is America's equivalent of MI6. So they gather intelligence, and they gather internationally, abroad. There's also MI5, which you could say is roughly equivalent in the U.S. to the FBI. They do domestic stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
Yes, that's exactly who I'm talking about, a KGB colonel.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
I don't know where they'd fall in the MICE acronym, money, ideology, coercion, ego, taste.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
I'm not sure. But yes, he definitely turned. But he was caught. He was found out. So he became the station chief or working out of the embassy as a KGB agent. in London. So he was able to actually kind of easily pass secrets to the Brits because he was there already.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
He was found out by Aldrich Ames, who was a famous American trader who spied for the Soviets in, I think, the 80s or maybe even into the 90s. And he told them about Gordievsky spying for the Brits. Um, Gordievsky was not immediately jailed, which is weird. He was definitely taken back to Moscow and held like basically under surveillance, but he was going to be jailed. He was going to be executed.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
But MI6 is concerned about everything else in the world. And by gathering intelligence, they usually use two methods or they gather – yeah, two methods. One is human intelligence, which is good old-fashioned spying, using people who are secretly spying on their own governments or whatever. And then the other is signal intelligence, which is intercepting communications. And I saw that –
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
So he started, um, what had been planned seven years before and named Operation Pimlico, uh, And by standing in a Moscow bakery or outside of a Moscow bakery holding a plastic Safeway bag, he was signaling MI6, like, get me out of here right now.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
Yeah. Which is really showing off because I think you could trade a Mars bar for a car in Moscow in 1985. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
Yeah, those dogs were like, oh, God, and just went back to their post.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
Yeah. Isn't that amazing? So then they they got him across the Finnish border. Finland is neutral and he was safe. But I mean, like that is real deal spy stuff, you know.
Stuff You Should Know
What we know about MI6
Like holding a Safeway bag. That's awesome. The Mars bar. I love every part of that. So he actually, he was actually tried in absentia and sentenced to death by the Soviet Union, but he had defected to the UK and they protected him. And he died an old man, I think age 86 last March at his home in Great Britain.
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What we know about MI6
No, but one thing that we really should say, and I was kind of touching on it earlier, one of the really valuable things he provided was he could understand the state of mind of the Soviet government and Soviet military. And he fed this information to the UK, to MI6, who turned around and said,
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What we know about MI6
Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, you guys need to tone down this evil empire rhetoric because you are scaring the Soviets so bad. They're plotting a first strike because they think you're going to strike out of nowhere. So you actually might trigger a first strike from the Soviets if you keep talking like this. And as a result, they really dialed it back quite a bit.
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What we know about MI6
Another intelligence firm, I guess, in the UK, the Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ, they seem to do most of the signals intelligence while MI6 still does most of the human intelligence.
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What we know about MI6
Right. So that law that essentially acknowledged that there was such a thing as MI6 back in 1994, it had a section called Section 7. And it basically said if one of our agents is off running around committing crimes in another country that they could be tried for back in the U.K., they cannot be held liable for that. They'll never be tried for this.
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What we know about MI6
And some people have taken that as admission that there's such a thing as a license to kill. And that makes sense. I mean, apparently there is a new law that's being talked about right now and is making its way through the Supreme Court there that basically says, yes, and pretty much murder, too. We're not going to try them for murder. And it actually extends to agents, too.
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What we know about MI6
So if somebody murders somebody for MI6 and then they defect to the UK, the UK is never going to try them for that murder. So people are like, that's a license to kill. And I saw an agent say on, I think, a PBS or BBC documentary, a license to kill doesn't make any sense. Like if you're in another country and you kill somebody there,
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What we know about MI6
Like when the cops come, you're not going to show them your license to kill and they'll let you go. Like this is not, you're breaking that country's law. You've murdered someone in that country. You're toast if you get caught.
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What we know about MI6
So there is no license to kill, but. Symbolic, perhaps. These laws essentially kind of potentially give something like a license to kill.
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What we know about MI6
But I think, like, if they capture an email or something, they don't just delete it because they don't do signals intelligence. They're still going to use it. Right.
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What we know about MI6
Right. That building too, it is secure, but it was blown up not once, but twice. Well, not blown up. The first time it was attacked by the IRA, they shot an anti-tank rocket launcher at the building on September 20th, 2000. And that building just like shook it off immediately. Like it did almost no damage to it whatsoever and really kind of showed just how crazy reinforced that building is.
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What we know about MI6
But it suffered a much different fate in James Bond's Skyfall, where it blew up.
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What we know about MI6
Well, if it's not Idris Elba, I'm going to be really surprised.
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What we know about MI6
Yeah. It's said that that is the lowest moment in MI6 history since Kim Philby was discovered as a traitor and longtime spy, which is really saying something if you've heard our episode on Kim Philby. But I would say that this was even much, much worse because of how many people died in the Iraq war.
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What we know about MI6
And the reason why it was such a big deal, this bad intelligence, is because the U.S. and the U.K. essentially made a pact like we're going to invade Iraq together to topple this regime. We just want to get rid of Saddam Hussein. That's not legal. If Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, now it's legal under basically international law.
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What we know about MI6
So they really went to a lot of trouble to try to find anything that suggested that. And in the end, they just relied on these sources that just were totally untrustworthy. And I don't remember where we talked about it, but one of the sources that the U.S. and the U.K. relied on to invade Iraq with said they have weapons of mass destruction.
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What we know about MI6
They keep them in these glass canisters and in these like little glass balls. And the glass balls are green. And Nicolas Cage protects them with Sean Connery.
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What we know about MI6
Yeah. And that the handful of British ministers and politicians who saw this intel had not seen The Rock, apparently. It just didn't ring any bells if they had seen it.
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What we know about MI6
I guess so. It wasn't that good. But, you know, if you want just like a, you know, shoot them up, bang kind of thing, action movie, I guess.
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What we know about MI6
It's all right. Yeah. So today, MI6, they're realizing openly in interviews and stuff that they really need to start keeping up with technology because of like facial recognition and surveillance states like that China has and the UK. It's basically impossible to create an agent somewhere. Like human intelligence is really hard to do now. Especially in China.
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What we know about MI6
Yes. And apparently they're starting to use AI to run scenarios and situations to predict how somebody will behave in different situations. That's a new one they're starting to do too. So I don't know how ahead of the curve they are. And it sounds to me a little bit like they're behind the curve, but at least they're realizing they need to wake up and smell the hard drives. Yeah. Sorry.
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What we know about MI6
Oh, that's even better. So we just edit that in, but you say it.
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What we know about MI6
Right. It is still risky, though, is I can't remember what year it was. In the 2010s, I believe, there was a codebreaker for MI6 named Gareth Williams who was found dead in his bathroom inside a tote bag that was locked from the outside.
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What we know about MI6
Either that or that it was like a sex game gone wrong and the partner like took off, freaked out and took off. I think that's the official explanation. But there was a former KGB agent who came forward in 2015 and said no. That guy, the Russians tried to recruit him and he said no. And so they killed him.
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What we know about MI6
Oh, my God. I think that's a pretty good way to wrap up this episode, if not have wrapped it up 30 seconds before you said that.
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What we know about MI6
Well, since we both agree that this episode is wrapped up, then that means it's time for Listener Mail.
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What we know about MI6
What do you think? It did have a Hoffman in the form of Wayne Knight, who played Newman.
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What we know about MI6
He was even wearing a Hawaiian shirt. Like, you couldn't get more obviously Hoffman.
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What we know about MI6
I don't think it is a disaster movie, though, but that's just my opinion.
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What we know about MI6
I did see some people agreed with me, though, that Godzilla Minus One is definitely a disaster movie. So, I was right.
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What we know about MI6
Yeah, like that tunnel collapse with Stallone. That was localized.
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What we know about MI6
Yeah. Well, Kurt, thank you for starting this conversation. It's a great one. Like I said, we love that kind of thing. Send us an email. Send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
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What we know about MI6
I don't know. My dad was big time into John Le Carre, but I never have been.
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What we know about MI6
I've heard it. I think it's probably both ways. I mean, unless you're his mom. I'm sure there's just one way to say if you're his mom. But, you know, he's dead. He doesn't care.
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What we know about MI6
Yeah, and apparently even still today, that's where their official history ends, 1949. Anything after that, don't ask, Jack, or else they'll take you somewhere and render you. Yeah, politely. They will. So we should probably say that MI6 started, and I think when we did our Kim Philby episode, I said that MI6 stood for the Ministry of Intelligence. Yeah.
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What we know about MI6
But it actually is military intelligence, which is, I think, like you said, what it grew out of originally. But the whole thing started, there was a scare, a German spy scare in Great Britain in the turn of the last century. Germany was this imperial power that was rising. So there was reason to be scared of them. But really, the whole reason came down to this guy named William LeCue.
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What we know about MI6
He was a totally made up adventurer, soldier of fortune who was just as patriotic as you could get. He made up this huge backstory for himself to give himself credit. legitimacy. But really, he was just weaving these yarns saying essentially that Britain is sleeping right now and it's loaded with German spies. And if we don't wake up, we're going to get taken over by Germany.
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What we know about MI6
And it just hit this perfect nerve in the British public, so much so that it directly led to the formation of what would become MI6 and MI5.
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What we know about MI6
Yeah. And apparently, even though they are now publicly acknowledged by the government as existing, that hasn't changed very much still today. Like they do not you can't as a government official go to MI6 and be like, I demand these records of your torture program in the Iraq war. Right. They'll just say, we don't know what you're talking about.
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What we know about MI6
We're not even having this conversation. And that's that's what they don't have the kind of political and legal hamstringing that the CIA has. It's much less of a bureaucracy. And so they can do things that, say, like the CIA legally couldn't do. They have a lot of legal cover in Great Britain.
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What we know about MI6
And they're all called C, too. It's the title for the chief of MI6.
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What we know about MI6
No, in Q, that was the scientist who would come up with all these amazing devices and gadgets and everything. And as we'll see, MI6 has gotten way more talkative publicly. They're trying to like kind of recruit more and more people. So they're giving, you know, interviews, even though their names are anonymous.
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What we know about MI6
And one of them said, like, we have those gadgets, but they're even better than what James Bond has. Right.
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I think just the fact that people that became a legend around him says a lot about who he is.
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What we know about MI6
If I were in a car wreck and I lost my foot, no one would create a legend that said I cut my own foot off with a penknife to escape. Like it just you just wouldn't make that up. No one would believe it. This guy, at least it was believable.
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What we know about MI6
Right. They're like, it's really just going to bruise us all. So there's one other thing. There's a lot to talk about. Like you said, the guy could definitely deserve his own movie if it hasn't been made multiple times already. But one of the other legendary things associated with him is like he was really into spy craft. Like he came up with disguises.
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What we know about MI6
He would like disguise himself and go walk around London and see if any of his people would recognize him. And he was, I don't want to say obsessed, but he was really into the idea of invisible ink. And he searched high and low to find a good invisible ink that couldn't be detected through standard methods.
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What we know about MI6
I don't know who came up with this idea, but somehow it came around that semen can be used very effectively as an invisible ink. And I saw that somebody put it, the supply is renewable.
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What we know about MI6
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and there's Jerry. And this is Stuff You Should Know. And I have to say, we didn't have the most auspicious start just now, Chuck. I stepped on you at the countdown for us to sync. That's not a good sign. Don't you think that's not a good sign?
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What we know about MI6
Yeah, exactly. Wow. Thank you. Exactly. So you want to take a break or you want to dive into World War I era?
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Yeah, I mean, this is... Again, it's not like hard evidence, but this is a very famous photo. I remember seeing this when I was a kid. And like, I guess it was probably the Guinness or Ripley's Believe It or Not or something.
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Was it? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I remember that it's a very famous picture of like a pick, like a, you know, pickaxe. Yeah, used for scale. Yeah, right next to it. And I remember that very distinctly when I saw this picture. I was like, oh, yeah.
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Yeah, I mean, like you said, it was really... What made it different than other photos is that it was so sharp. It was a really good picture. And that little toe thing basically looked like a thumb. And it just, you know, it looked odd. But this Daniel Taylor guy, he actually, when I started reading that article, I thought, oh, boy, this crackpot.
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Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
But he actually turned out to be a pretty cool guy because he spent a lot of his life looking for the Yeti, went over there, even met with the King of Nepal. And the King of Nepal said, well, if you want to go like to the wildest place and the most remote place in our land, go to Barun, B-A-R-U-N, this Barun Valley. Right. And he went there and he looked around and he –
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Did not find a Yeti, but what he did do was ended up helping to work toward conservation of that area, which was kind of a nice silver lining to his story was he got there and he was like, this is one of the most beautiful places on earth. All right.
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And one of the greatest wildernesses I've ever been to, he realized it wasn't protected and that like Chinese loggers were infringing on one side and farmers were infringing on the other. So he kind of spun it into like good work doing conservation work in that area, which was kind of cool.
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Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
No, but his notion that it could have been a tree bear makes a little more sense with these tracks because a tree bear does have a, I don't know if you call it a thumb, but some sort of opposable digit to make climbing easier. Totally. And that would at least explain this weird thumb-like thing in these prints. Yeah.
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Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
Did we do that one or did we think about it and not do it? The latter of those two. If I remember correctly, I said it stinks or something.
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Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
Yeah, for sure. So there have been other photographs through the years as, you know, supposed evidence. In 1986, a hiker named Anthony Wooldridge said, there's a Yeti over there. He's about 500 feet away. And he saw a bunch of tracks in the snow that looked like it was going that way. And he took some photographs that were proven genuine. But I think by genuine, that just means they weren't faked.
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Because wasn't this the photo that they said, actually, those are just rocks standing up?
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Yeah, they even made a movie about it called Ernest Goes Hiking.
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Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
So over the years, there have been not only things like, oh, look, footprints, or hey, look at that rock across the valley. There have been... I don't want to call it evidence, but alleged evidence brought forward by legitimate scientists and people like Sir Edmund Hillary. Like he brought back a scalp and said he didn't say I scalped the Yeti, but he said, hey, I think this is a Yeti scalp.
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Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
And I don't think he's trying to fool anyone, though, was he?
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Man, can you imagine a time when an encyclopedia company would send Sir Edmund Hillary out on assignment? Like how great is that?
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So, yeah, he comes back with his scalp, and it turns out they did a little research, and it was a – it's an animal called a serow. It's kind of like a goat.
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Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
Yeah, but that happened a lot. Like there was this finger, and this is a pretty good story, that actor Jimmy Stewart, believe it or not, was involved in smuggling out a supposed Yeti finger.
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Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
Yeah, and wasn't he just on vacation there and just got sort of mixed up in this plan?
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Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
Yeah, because he figures into this story. He was a rich... Guy who he was one of these dudes is sort of adventuring rich guys that was like, I'm a Yeti hunter for this year.
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Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
Yeah, I mean, and that was a big thing that Daniel's guy talks about, just these legends in history and how, quote unquote, science back then was in the Victorian age were, because, you know, all these tales of Tarzan and these fantastic beasts.
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People would just, these rich people would go into the jungle and search for animals that no one had ever seen before so they could shoot and kill them and bring them back and say, look at this weird thing.
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Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
Yeah, and I don't want to leave everyone hanging on Jimmy Stewart. He was on vacation, I think, in Calcutta, got mixed up in this – And this Yeti finger helped smuggle it back. And they finally did DNA testing about seven or eight years ago. And they said, oh, this is a human finger.
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Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
In my head, I was like, Jimmy Stewart, can I blow that off? You did, man. You nailed it. All right. Well, let's take another break and we'll come back and talk more about DNA and how that is figured in the search in more recent years. Right after this.
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Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
That's true. So science wins. In 2013, there's a geneticist at Oxford named Brian Sykes who said, all right, holders of Yeti genes, Pieces, send them to me. If you have any Yeti hair, Yeti teeth, Yeti tissue, send it to Oxford University. And he got it. He got 57 samples. They picked 36 of those to do some DNA analysis on.
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Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
And most of these turned out to be animals that we all know, like bears and cows and horses. At the time, though, he found a couple of samples. from Bhutan in India that he said were 100% match for jawbones of a polar bear from the Pleistocene era. Yeah.
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Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
And this kind of excited people because this may have been, I mean, not the Yeti, but this may have been sort of a combination, a hybrid of a polar bear and a brown bear because this is when they were diverging genetically. And that in itself would be a pretty cool find.
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Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
Some more scientists came along later. They did reanalysis. And I think what they landed on was, you know, unfortunately, these, I think you're getting a bad reading because of a damaged sample. What these really are, are just brown bears.
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Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
Yeah, but science at least was getting involved and scientists kind of roundly were like, you know what? This is great because we're using real science finally. And regardless of what result we get, like we're doing it the right way. And that's really kind of the thing that counts. Mm-hmm.
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Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
Like don't be disappointed that we're not finding the Yeti because – and if it's not clear to everyone listening, it seems like the Yeti are almost always just bears. Yeah.
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Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
Well, I don't know. It just sounded an awful lot like him. Kind of does, doesn't it? Yelping in the mountains, grubbing for roots.
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Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
Yeah, pretty much. The Russians got involved. You would think, oh, and what, like the 1960s? No, they got involved about eight years ago and went searching for the Yeti in Siberia. And what they came back with were things like, oh, look at this. These twisted tree branches were made into beds or sleeping pods by the Yeti, and they twisted these branches. And look at this.
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Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
It's evidence, but it turns out that they were clearly man-made. There were tool-made cuts, and they were located not in a remote area at all.
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Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
Yeah, and what people think is, oh, they just cooked this stuff up to try and bring tourism to a not very tourist-friendly area.
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So I think we should just tell, like, if you don't know what we're talking about, this is the legendary beast that lives in Asia.
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Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
So, I mean, I don't have much else. Yeti or bears, right?
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Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
Yeah, so it's known as Asia's Bigfoot, or maybe Bigfoot is known as North America's Yeti. I don't know. I guess Yeti came first, right?
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Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
Or we should mention, if you're in Disney World, there's a roller coaster ride called Expedition Everest, colon, because, you know, every good roller coaster has a colon in the name. Right. Colon, Legend of the Forbidden Mountain. There is a track on display there that the reason it's not in a scientific museum and it's at Disney World is is because it's a Yeti track. But you can go look at one.
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From a TV show. Yeah, this guy named Gates, who is not a zoologist at all, but he's an actor and an animal tracker. I don't even think he's an animal tracker, is he?
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Yeah, so they presented one on his TV show, and now it's in Disney World.
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Yeah, I got distracted. Sorry. So I'm going to call this a follow-up on the Chili Finger. that Jimmy Stewart planted at Wendy's. Nice. And quick shout-out, this is a local listener from Georgia Tech, but I just wanted to say hello to a couple of people I met last weekend at the High Museum when I went to the Infinity Mirrors exhibit. Oh, isn't that amazing? Yeah, you always Kusama. Yeah.
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I thought it was... Here's what I think. I think it was really cool, and it would have been a lot cooler if it's just like... yeah, you just walk through all these things and you don't wait 30 minutes to spend 20 seconds in the room. Yep. That took away from it a bit.
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Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
Yeah, and that's sort of the deal of this, the origin story of this thing is the Yeti has been told for many, many years in traditional stories in that area. There was someone named... Shiva Dhakal that collected a bunch of these stories in a book called Folk Tales of Sherpa and Yeti.
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It was cool though. And I also think like I went with my brother and his family and Scott was kind of like, I could build one of these in my backyard by next weekend. Yeah.
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I don't want to take anything away from her, though. She's a great artist and it was really neat. I love the I think the one that was sort of like the Christmas lights was my favorite one.
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Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
Yeah, I got a couple of cool photos, but I largely kept the phone in my pocket and just tried to be in it, man. Yeah, man, I'm with you. So anyway, I met a couple of listeners that just happened to be there, and they both came up and were like, are you Chuck? And so my brother got a kick out of that as well.
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But this was not one of those people. Okay. It just reminded me because it's a Georgia Tech student. Hey, guys, relatively new listener. Have probably listened to about 100 episodes so far. I tend to hop around. As you can tell, I'm a Georgia Tech student and really hope to run into you guys at some point in Atlanta.
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Anyway, I finally sort of had something to write in about. I was listening to the Wendy's Chili podcast. Suddenly heard the name of a place that sounded very familiar, Cole's Custard. Remember we mentioned that at the end as a place where there was a finger. Oh, yeah.
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He said it was one of the places where a finger had been found, and it shocked me as it is just a tiny little custard shop that is not a chain on quite expensive beach property in North Carolina.
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I've been to the place probably five or ten times as a frequent visitor to Wrightsville Beach and had never heard of anyone mention this incident. I just think it's very impressive that a small little store managed to stay afloat after such an incident occurred. Hearing about the finger incident will not deter me from going again, though. And that is from Ethan Lyons.
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Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
And, Ethan, maybe that is exactly why it endured. It's because people just want that custard so bad.
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Yeah, and it didn't make, like, big... national news probably because it's not a chain.
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And all of them kind of figured the same way, which was whether it's a story called The Annihilation of the Yeti, in which this is pretty good. It's about Sherpa seeking revenge on a tormenting group of yetis. This sounds like something that should be on like the sci-fi channel. I'd be very surprised if it wasn't. But all of these stories basically have the same moral message at the end, which is,
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Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
It's sort of like a Grimm's fairy tale, like be careful out on the woods.
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Which is funny because there are all sorts of real things that could kill you in the Tibetan Plateau.
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So throughout history, these legends have been pervasive in the region, so much so that supposedly the great Alexander... Or Alexander the Great. I'm not sure why I did that. When he came through town and conquered the Indus Valley, he said, I'd like to see one of your famous yetis. I don't know if that's what Alexander the Great sounded like. No? No. What did ancient Romans sound like?
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Oh, was he? Uh-huh. Jeez. I really screwed that up.
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You can rebound. Yeah. Why did I think he was Roman and not Greek?
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I'm not firing on all cylinders. But regardless of my bad accent, or maybe I should just edit back in and say that was my Greek accent. There you go. He said, I want to see a Yeti. And they, the locals there were like, you know, we totally would do that. However, you can't get them down this low. And you'd have to hike really high up in those mountains. And I know you're not down with that.
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Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
Yeah, and things really took form in 1921. There's a journalist named Henry Newman. He did an interview with some British explorers, and this is a time of great exploration, especially from the British, these sort of explorers.
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these, I guess, Indiana Jones-like mountaineers who would go all over the world in search of these, you know, jungles and mountains in search of crazy beasts and treasures and things like that.
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So he interviewed some of these guys, and they said, you know what? We found these huge footprints up in the mountains, and the locals there, I guess Sherpa, said, because isn't Sherpa the plural Sherpa? Didn't we determine that?
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That was a good episode, by the way, everyone.
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Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
It's so great. Yeah. So they said that their guides, our Sherpa guides, called them Mito Kangmi, which the translation, the real translation is a little awkward, Man Bear Snowman. Right. But Newman confused all that. He got the snowman part right. Right. But he translated that first part to mean meto, M-E-T-O-H, to mean filthy or dirty. And then he changed that on his own to the word abominable.
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Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
Right. And that's where we get the abominable snowman.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
Yeah, there was one description, one of the earlier written descriptions from 1942. There was a researcher named Mira Shackley, and I believe that she got this information from two hikers that reported seeing the Yeti. Right. And this is what they said. The height was not much less than eight feet, so tall for sure, but it's not like it was ten feet tall.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
The heads, because there were two of them, were described as squarish and the ears must lie close to the skull because there was no projection from the silhouette against the snow. The shoulders sloped slowly down to a powerful chest covered by reddish brown hair, which formed a close body fur mixed with long straight hairs hanging downward about the size and build of a small man.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
The head covered with long hair, but the face and chest not very hairy at all. This all sounds like—they always describe him or it as bipedal. Right. It means, you know, walking upright.
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Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
Yeah, and some pretty legendary mountaineers. And granted, these are not like zoologists or anything, but they're respected men in their field. People like Reinhold Messner and one Sir Edmund Hillary, both men. searched for evidence of the Yeti while they were hiking, and Messner even wrote a book called My Quest for the Yeti, Confronting the Himalayas' Deepest Mystery. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot
But, I mean, well, we'll save the big reveal till the end. Right. Or the third act of this show. Okay. Is there a third act? Yeah, there's got to be. Okay. We're in big trouble if there's not. Well, why don't we take a break, and then we'll come back and talk a little bit about a couple more of these reported sightings. Let's do it. All right.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
Well, yeah, that's a slippery slope right there because then all of a sudden if things go wrong, you can say, well, the doula told me to do that. And the doula is like, I'm toast. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
Yeah. And I mean, if you already have an idea of what you want, the doula can kind of tell you how to make that happen. Or if you have no idea what you want, the doula can also tell you some other alternatives that you might not have thought of. I saw a Parents Magazine article about doulas. They laid out basically what you can expect from the average doula for the doula's fees.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
One to two in-person prenatal visits. And then access to the doula for follow-up questions through email or phone calls. Their full attention and presence during your labor. And then sometimes frequently I get the idea, a follow-up visit at your house after the baby comes home. that typically if you hire a doula, this is about the average you can expect to them.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
There's definitely a lot of differences. Some will give you a little more, some will give you a little less. Some will charge more, some will do it for free. It's just all over the place as far as what you're actually going to shell out and what you're going to get from a doula. But for the most part, you...
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
The doula is going to have met you before you give birth, and then the doula will be there throughout the whole labor and delivery process.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
I found, I think it was through a Buzzfeed article, I stumbled upon a, there's a huge rift in the doula community, actually, between the typical traditional approach to being a doula, which is, I'll work with you on a sliding scale for how much you can afford, or this is my fee, but I'll throw in an extra visit just to, you know, make you feel like you're getting your money's worth.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
Or I'll do it for free. I just want to help you. Because Dona's mission is a doula for every mother who wants one. Like every mother should have a doula, basically, right? And then there's this other group called Pro Doula. And they are...
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
can't stand doulas who who charge less than like a a decent amount for their services or do it for free they actually call uh doulas who who do this for free oxytocin vampires like they're just there to to bask in the reflective glow of this this amazing experience that the mother just went through the parents just went through um and they're really kind of
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
kicking other doulas around and they're kind of bullies in a really weird way. But there's like this big debate over whether doulas are undervalued or underselling themselves. But I mean, I definitely get the idea that
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
I guess is what I'm trying to say. You can be a male doula. You can, although this is the only article I ran across that in. Did you find anything about that anywhere else? No, I mean, it happens. It's just super rare.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
every woman who wants to have a doula should be able to have a doula regardless of her income you know yeah that makes sense to me like a pro bono for uh for people that don't have as much money yeah on the other hand i also get that if you are a doula and you're doing your job really well that yeah you should expect to be paid um i think there's a happy medium i don't think it has to be like nope this is the price and anybody who goes underneath it should be ostracized from the doula community
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
And then so during labor, this is where the doula shines, right? They're there to help with alternatives to pain, right? Treatment, right? So again, they can't administer any kind of drugs or anything. I would guess that they could even get in trouble for giving you an Advil. But they can do other things, like they can massage you in ways that you had not ever heard of before.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
That helps with labor pains. I came across this one technique where they pull on a couple of toes, specific toes, and it helps actually move the labor along if you have a slow labor. There's kneading techniques, there's stroking techniques, pressure on the bottom of your feet.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
There's all sorts of stuff they can do at various times throughout the labor and delivery process that can help alleviate the pain that you're going through. And that's one of the big roles that they play during labor.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
That's cool, man. Yeah, it was amazing. Did I ever tell you the story for when my niece Mila was born and my sister-in-law was giving birth and she let everybody in the –
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
labor room i was surprised you can have a party in there yeah and um when she really was going into into she was delivering um i stood back behind this curtain right and um the doctor comes in and walks past me and kind of gives me a nod and i hear him go to the crowd he's like you know there's like some guy standing behind that curtain right they're like yeah he's supposed to be there
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
I'm like, okay, I've heard enough here. I'm going to the next room.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
Yeah, yeah. And this is actually, so this is an ancient thing that's kind of come back around full circle. And even the name doula is a Greek term used way back in the classical Greek days. when a woman giving birth would have female servants attending to her during birth, helping her with it, probably feeding her some grapes, waving palm fronds on her, that kind of thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
All right, Chuck. So if you wanted to become a doula, basically you start in training at age three. You're sent off to Europe to apprentice at the one doula school in the world. And they make you eat a lot of magic cake. And then when you're 60, you get to actually start out on your own.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
You don't even have to be certified. It's not law that you have to be certified.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
Right. So when you're when you're starting out, you would go to if you wanted to get certified, you would go to one of the certifying bodies like Dona or what are the other two that are mentioned in here? There's one called CAPPA. Sure. And then the American Pregnancy Association. All three of those certify and train doulas. Donut, from what I could tell, is the oldest, obviously.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
It was the first one. And it seems to be the most respected. But I would guess if you get your training from any of those three, you're probably doing pretty good. They'll offer online classes, in-person classes, self-paced study, and you typically need to go take a birthing class, a breastfeeding class. Because, again, you need to be current on all the stuff that's going on with breastfeeding.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
So doula means female servant or female slave, depending on who you're talking about. And after, you know, ancient Greece fell, Rome and the Roman Empire fell, and all of civilization took this weird course, throughout it all, women were helped by other women while they were giving birth. Basically up until about the first third, first half of the 20th century in the West, where
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
labor and delivery, right? If you took these classes 10 years ago and then did it again today, you would probably find some real differences in new stuff that's been discovered in the last 10 years. So you would need to be pretty current, even if you've had kids of your own before. And then you also need to attend at least one, I have the impression that multiple
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
births under the apprenticeship of another doula who's already certified or trained or experienced before you really go off on your own to become certified yeah and and that's I mean that's just I would I would say how many births have you been a part of you know, already before I hired a doula? That's a pretty big question if you ask me.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
So they would want to say, well, I've been, you know, I've assisted in like three or five or however many, but you're going to be my first solo. Your first solo flight?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
I saw like $3,500 at least for each of those cities.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
But again, if this is the doula's first time on their own, you're probably not going to be paying top dollar. And if you say, look, I really, really, really want to have a doula, at my child's birth, but I really genuinely don't have this money.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
I actually got a lift once from a doula, and she was talking about having to deal with this family who clearly was very well off, but was pleading poverty. And she was like, I'm the one who's a doula and driving a lift here, and these guys are trying to shortchange me. Interesting. I don't know. Thank you. Thank you.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
hospitals entered and all of a sudden it was just the mom giving birth surrounded by a bunch of nurses and doctors is that true yeah because i could see scenarios where there were uh women in the birth room helping along
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
I think once you started to get into hospitals and the physicians in the hospital starting asserting their authority more and more, especially through drugs, like I saw that when hospitals kind of took over the birthing process or took responsibility for it from the family and from midwives and moved it into the hospital, they used to administer a lot of sedatives.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
as part of the birthing process, as part of labor. You could understand why they would, but then there were all sorts of complications from it, problems from it. So they stopped giving sedatives as much. And about that time, women who were giving birth Started to like kind of come out of it and look around and say whoa.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
It's just me and you guys in here I need some family members in here right and at the time like if you were a dad You were not in there. You were not in the delivery room at all. You were out in what was called the stork club handing out cigars maybe pacing and And the reason why was because to the doctors involved, it was just another medical procedure, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
So you're not going to have randos who have nothing to do with the actual procedure in the room during a procedure. They treated childbirth the same way. But women started to say, no, I need more than just you people who I've never met before really attending to the birth of my child. And so dads started to come in and then more family members. And then now doulas have definitely kind of come back
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
like they were originally. That's my understanding of the whole thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
Right. And I think at first, what was the name of the woman who brought it back?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
So she had like a pretty good idea that was actually ahead of its time. When doulas really started to come into use and come into their own as a profession was in the 80s. And the reason why they came into wider use was because hospitals were going to C-sections a lot earlier. C-sections went up from 1970, 4.2% of live births in the U.S. involved C-sections.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
16 years later, in 1986, a quarter of live births in the U.S. involved C-sections. And there were a lot of complications with C-sections. And so... You could have your husband in there, you could have your mom in there, you could have friends, but they're just there for you. One of the first services that doulas started offering was to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, does she really need that C-section?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
Are you sure about that or are you just doing it because you can charge more money? I think that was overstating exactly the interaction they had, but that was the role they had was to basically provide a barrier between a doctor who wanted to just give a C-section because he wanted to go home and the mom who really didn't want a C-section.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
Yeah, and is coming from a place of empathy and sympathy and, most importantly, experience. Like you said, most doulas have had children of their own, but they've also, after a while, attended other births, too. So they know what they're talking about.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
They know what to expect, and they can tell you what to expect, which can make the whole process easier, I would imagine, for any mother giving birth.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
Yeah, that was question eight. Would you like to use a doula?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
Yeah. Twenty seven percent said yes. And so if you get the impression that like a doctor would not really prefer a doula to be in the labor and delivery room, you've kind of read between the lines there.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
Especially at first, the medical community saw doulas as they were starting to really kind of come into use in the 80s as basically meddling busybodies who could potentially put their patient's life in jeopardy, right? But then in 1992, Doulas of North America was founded, DONA. It's like the first doula licensing body, certification and training and licensing body.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
And they were founded, it was founded by medical professionals, which kind of created a bridge. It bridged the gap or... kind of smoothed over the rough feelings between the medical community and the doula community. And it also added a real air of legitimacy to the profession of being a doula.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
Yeah. Now all love doula. That's right. One of the other reasons or functions that doulas provide you kind of hit on is that they provide a service that hospitals used to provide through nurses, right? Where if you had a nurse in a labor and delivery room. They wouldn't spend as much time or give you as much attention as, say, like your mom would or a friend or your husband even.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
But they gave you a lot more early on than they did as surveillance of patients moved to electronics, right? to where somebody could just kind of sit at the nurse's station and check on everybody and they didn't have to go into the rooms. And now you nurses were charged with watching even more people at once, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
So the personal attention dropped dramatically as electronic surveillance of patients increased and the doulas kind of came in to fill that role as well.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
So you want to take a break? Yeah, let's take a break, and then we'll come back and talk about what to expect when you're expecting to work with a doula.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there. And this is Stuff You Should Know, the podcast. Childbirth edition. Yeah, we are traipsing into more territory. What does that mean? I don't know. I mean, we've done two on, you know, feeding babies. Yeah. Done female puberty. Yeah. This will get into childbirth a little bit.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
Right. Yeah, they're not allowed anywhere near the medical stuff. But they need to know what the medical stuff is so that they can say, well, this is what they're about to do, or this is what they're suggesting right now, and here are your options.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Deal With Doulas
And then also, when they're administering the medical stuff, which can be pretty uncomfortable pretty frequently, I would imagine, the doula's there to kind of tell the mom what to expect and to comfort her in all sorts of ways.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
Look around, everyone. Every car you see is probably on AutoTrader. Like that sleek convertible that turned heads when it picked you up from the airport, or the custom ride from your favorite van life couple on social media. Even that vintage sports car that's tailing you a little too closely. New cars, used cars, electric cars, even flying cars.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
All right, so we're back. There were 25,000 total patients in the system in Michigan State, in Michigan State hospitals. And he went through all of these, you know, he sort of tried to cull them down to, ideally, to Christ figures. He found a man who thought he was Cinderella. He found a Mrs. God. And then about six people who thought they were Christ, and three of them
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
were really into this idea and really consistent with their belief that they were Jesus. And two of them happened to be at Ypsilanti. So he was like, this is perfect. I'll just transfer the third in and we'll get going.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
Yeah, exactly. So they were willing participants. In so far as, yeah, they got these great perks. Worth pointing out. So he changed the names of the guys to protect their families and to protect them to some degree. But we should go over sort of the bios of the three men. Should we say who played them in the movies? Will that help people?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
Well, I mean, the acting, they did a good job. It was just the material. They're all great actors, you know.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
It's just when you write – I don't want to call out the script writer, but it wasn't that good.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
The Queen movie, that's what I called it.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
It wasn't so much that. And again, I only watched the first act before I realized it was just really sanitized and like a feel-good type of thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
No, I mean, there was some tough stuff in there. It's not like it was completely like, hey, this is great, but it kind of reeked of like an Awakenings kind of thing, and I liked Awakenings.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
We're comfortable doing that at times.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
So the first guy was in his late 50s, Joseph Cassell, 58. He had been in the hospital for about 20 years and was Canadian, born and raised in Quebec. And he was named after Josephine, his female relative in his family, named Joseph. And I think the... The big takeaway from his childhood was that it was not good.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
A very abusive father, very quick-tempered man who abused his mom, and his mom actually died while giving birth to her ninth kid. And so he had a rough go of it from the beginning.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
It's funny. My daughter finally lost her first tooth, and it's changing the way she talks. She's got a little funny little lisp, and she's always tonguing on it, and I'm like, I'm going to be there with you soon. I've got to get this front one redone.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
Yeah, and by the time he got around to Rokic or Rokic found him, he was in a pretty bad state after those 20 years. He had about half of his teeth left in his mouth. He was still hoarding books, carrying around books everywhere. And when asked who he was, he said his name was Joseph. And he said that I am God. And I guess Rokic said, well, you'll do just fine.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
Yeah, and it seems like the drinking was the – anytime you have an undiagnosed condition like this and you pour alcoholism on top of it or any kind of drug addiction, it's just going to be even worse. And eventually he was arrested for public drunkenness. It was a pretty violent arrest, and in jail he was violent, and he was saying he was Jesus Christ, that he was God.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
and that he was reborn through his first wife, Shirley. I believe she had passed away and he did get remarried. And it was Shirley, the queen of heaven. And at this point, they committed him to a mental hospital when he was 53, where he got that diagnosis. And he was the one that was easily the most far gone and toughest to reach and sort of walked around mumbling.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
Yeah, I'm going to wait until right before we have live shows so I can pull that front tooth again.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
He also didn't have many, if any, of his teeth. And but occasionally would like still had that violence in him where he would have these sort of violent outbursts, but then kind of calm down again.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
I don't think so. I think it just could be scary at times.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
Okay, no flying cars yet, but as soon as those things get invented, they'll be on AutoTrader. If you see a car you like, it's probably on AutoTrader. That's kind of their thing. AutoTrader.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
So Leon was perhaps one of the saddest of the three cases in that he was had only been hospitalized for about five years. He was younger. He was 38 years old. And he was the snap judgment is great because they had his two initial graduate assistants on Richard Bonnier and Ron Hoppe. So like real firsthand experience on the podcast.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
And they were saying that he was the one that broke their heart the most because he was the one that most likely could have been rehabilitated. And it just tore them up. And they liked him a lot. He was a real personable guy. And it was very engaging with his stories. And they really thought that they could have helped him had it not been, you know, in part by what happened with Rokeach.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
Yeah, so Leon's deal was his mother was almost certainly schizophrenic as well and had delusions, religious delusions. So he was raised in a household with basically a religious fanatic, and that impacted him from the very beginning. Of course, he ended up diagnosed with schizophrenia as well. But growing up in that kind of environment definitely, I think, led to the Christ thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
Yeah. I gave up after the first one on wearing that thing. I was just like, who cares?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
Right. And that was Walton Goggins.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
Yeah. So this is when he hires those two grad assistants is when he finds the guys, gets this experiment going in earnest. And, um, You know, his hypothesis was that if I can have these three men confront one another about them being the real Christ, that it could rock them into what he saw as reality and get them out of these delusions.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
It was, as is this podcast episode.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
And that didn't happen – well, it didn't happen at all through the experiment, but initially – They what they did was they really dug in and they each had their own way of doing so. But they each dug in and said, no, no, no. I am the real Christ. And they each had different sort of methods of dealing with the others. But none of them wavered initially. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
Yeah, for sure. I think Joseph said Joseph was more one to sort of laugh it off. He said, there's nothing wrong. Yesterday, I knew I was what I am. Today, I am what I am. I'm not worried about losing my identity. And we also should point out that Joseph and this was portrayed in the movie, too, by Peter Dinklage. He was spoke with an English accent.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
He thought he was convinced himself that he was from England. that he was descendant of royalty, and that the hospital was an English stronghold.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
It is, and that was one of the things that came through on that snap judgment with the two research assistants. was that their take was that these men were generally, like after the initial sort of denial stuff, that they were generally pretty respectful and wanted to give each other the space to believe that they were Christ if they wanted to.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
And what that showed was empathy, and that's something that none of them saw coming. At this point, Rokic is being – kind of, uh, hassled by these two grad assistants saying, Hey, listen, man, these guys are kind of okay with this and you're taking this thing too far. And eventually he was, he ignored them basically. And eventually they quit before this next phase starts.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
Yeah, The Three Christs of Hypsilanti. And I studied this. I remember this from studying it in psychology class in college and got kind of into it at the time.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
And, uh, because they didn't agree with what was going on because they saw these three guys that were generally respectful for one another. They saw, um, Rokeach would do things like, uh, a journalist wrote a story about them at one point, uh, that was really, obviously not flattering at all to the three Christs.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
And Rokic read this aloud to them, like he was just trying to push their buttons and initiate this conflict. And the two grad assistants eventually were like, we're out of here.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
Totally. Should we take a break before phase two?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
All right, we'll be right back.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
I followed them on tour. It was great. I don't—for some reason, I thought I read the book, but— I don't think I read the book. I think we just covered the book in college and in a psychology class. Like, I don't think they made you read the whole book. We basically just kind of went over it. But I had been pretty fascinated for years.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
So before stage two starts, when things get really unethical, well, not before. This is kind of part of the unethical. The two grad assistants had left and he hires this new young pretty woman as a grad assistant and basically tells her to flirt with Leon and to see if he can make her make him fall in love with her. And that's exactly what happened.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
And, you know, eventually when Hollywood made a movie about it four years ago, I was excited and even paid to rent that thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
And Leon fell in love with her and was destroyed when he basically came to realize on his own that that was never going to happen for him.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
Yeah, this just kept getting worse and worse. So he identified these authority figures in all three of them. I guess, to his credit, he laid off of Clyde because, I mean, I don't know if it was so much empathy as it was he knew he wasn't getting very far with Clyde.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
Yeah, because Clyde definitely could be a little scary. So he laid off of Clyde, but he found that – Joseph said that a superintendent of the hospital named Dr. Yoder, Y-O-D-E-R, was his dad. And Leon said that he had a wife. He had a couple, his wife, the Blessed Virgin Mary, who was an uncle reincarnated as Michael, the archangel. Archangel?
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pretty good i watched the first half hour and realized oh man they've just sort of disneyfied this thing and it's not good yeah although our buddy kevin pollack is in it and he's always great hey that guy can steal a scene better than the hamburglar yeah the movie uh just so everyone knows is called the three christs of hypsilani from john abnett starring richard gear is the name changed dr
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Right. It sounds a little confusing, but when you're dealing with stuff like this, I think it has to be a little confusing. Yeah.
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Yeah. And he we should point out that he supposedly had gotten not supposedly. I think he did get the hospital's permission to sign off on this as long as he said, listen, it's all going to be positive stuff. I'm not going to be writing them letters saying to go start a fight or anything like that.
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So I'm going to send them positive message messages and I'm going to stop if this becomes upsetting to these guys. And so they said, sure, go ahead.
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Yeah, and eventually what broke it was, as posing as Madame Yeti Woman, asked Leon to stop using the name Dr. Dung. The name thing seems to have been a sticking point with a lot of people. Or maybe he just thought that that would, since he... held onto that so strongly, that would have been like the toughest thing to make him do. And that was sort of it.
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He was asked about the letter and Leon doesn't really say anything about asking to be, to drop the name Dr. Dung. He just starts talking more and more about God being both male and female and insane and sane and said, I don't care for the insanity of God. And then said, I don't want any more letters and basically kind of shut it down.
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And then the three Christs in the movie are portrayed by Peter Dinklage, one of my favorite actors, Walton Goggins.
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Yeah, and when he said, I don't want these letters anymore, I don't want to receive them, you would think that that's when Rokic would say, all right, well, let's just stop this altogether. But he didn't because he remembered that Leon had another authority figure in his life, which was his uncle, George Bernard Brown, a.k.a. the Archangel Michael.
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And so he said, hey, I'll have someone call and pose as his uncle now. And this didn't work from the beginning. Leon – I guess the voice was just so far off or maybe Leon was just really wise to it at this point, said, you know, no, no, no, this isn't even close to the voice. Goodbye and hung up. And then they asked him about the call and he said, I don't believe in mental torture, sir.
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So it seems like he was sort of onto him at this point or, you know, was onto him from the beginning, but onto him about this ruse.
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I think that he— No, I mean from the beginning of the experiments. He was wary of him.
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Yeah. So this was the one where the superintendent, the fictional Dr. Yoder. was the authority figure for Joseph, who he saw as a father figure. And so, of course, Rokic is going to play up this whole father figure thing in the letters, saying that he loved him like a son. He just wanted the best things for him.
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And if you remember from the original sort of quick bio, Joseph's father was awful and abusive. So he's really playing into his deepest sort of insecurities here.
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It's really tough to even research this stuff.
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He's just the best. And then what's the guy's name? Bradley Whitford, who's also great. Everyone in it is good. It's just one of those movies that they – I think just over-sanitized and should have made a documentary instead.
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Yeah, so the stomach pills, placebos supposedly worked. And then he said, all right, well, that worked. So I'm going to give you pills to basically cure your mind. And if you want to fix yourself for good, take these pills, which is – I mean, this is so far off the charts of unethical. Like, I can't even describe how far off the charts it is.
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And he said, basically, I think he said he gave him an ultimatum. He says, I'm only going to continue to give these pills that will supposedly make your mind right. If you admit that you're in a mental hospital and it's not an English stronghold, And Joseph finally said, like signed something. And Joseph said, no, I'm not going to sign this.
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And he cut off this placebo medication that he believed might be fixing his brain. And it kind of petered out after that. And it was just like, it's just brutal to think about these guys going through this, like hope that they're getting better. And it was all fake.
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Yeah, it took Rokeach a long time, though, to really kind of come to terms with what he had done. And he eventually did, though. About 17 years later, they reissued the book in 1981. And he wrote a new foreword. He admitted in interviews and other places as well. that he was also, you know, in a sense suffering from godlike delusions and that he was playing God with these men and regretted it.
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He regretted publishing. He said, I regret having written and published a study when I did. I don't know if that means that he wishes he could have reflected more on it or what.
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He did sort of recant and say he didn't do the right thing. It's worth pointing out that this was – six years into his suffering from spinal cancer. So I don't know if that had, you know, if knowing the end was near for him had something to do with his sort of self-reflection. But he eventually died in 1988 at the age of 70 after a 13-year battle with spinal cancer and, you know, left the...
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Social psychology world sort of rocked. Like I said, I studied this in college and it became sort of like the Stanford prison experiment.
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It became worth studying, but not for the reasons that they initially launched the study to begin with.
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Yeah, and I got to tell you, when you read some of his – regret about it. Uh, he says things like, or he said things like, you know, and in, in, in the end someone was cured and it was me. Uh, it, it's, it just, that all bothered me a little bit too, how he, he still made it about himself somehow, even though he did say he regretted it and everything.
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I just, I never heard as much, um, regret about these three men, uh, And just in and putting them in the positions of like they were the ones who helped me out in the end. It was just I didn't like that.
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No. I mean, if you want to see some of his later work that you were talking about, the value stuff, there are all kinds of really wacky YouTube videos from people about that stuff.
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I'm going to call this a guy who has the same step on a crack thing as I do.
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This is from Jared Miller. Hey, guys. I've got to say, Chuck is the only other person I've heard to express the same compulsion that I have. If I step on a surface that is different from the majority of where I'm walking, I try to get my other foot to have the same sensation. This can be the line between the sidewalk segments or a traction sticker, an unpaved patch, etc.,
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I got to say, Jared, it's the same with me. It's not just cracks. It can be anything.
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Even which part of the foot is affected, same with me, dude. If I do it on my heel, I have to do the next one with my heel. It's very interesting. I've even found myself doing it with the colors of tiles on a patterned floor. Same here. For me, it's about symmetrical sensations. I sometimes realize I'm doing it when I'm eating and have equal chewing time on each side. I don't do that. Okay.
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You're like Jerry, you're so weird. Yeah, you're really out there. Once I became aware of it at a fully conscious level, I also became self-conscious about it and tried different things to break myself of the habit. At times it's been as extreme as forcing myself to maintain an even gait no matter what. Yeah, I've done that.
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While consciously reminding myself that sensations are temporary and that it will even out or go away, especially if I ignore it. Thanks for all the hours of entertainment. You were an early discovery of mine in the podcast world back in 2009, and almost none of the shows I started listening to back then are still going. That's our motto, Jared. Just keep doing it.
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So that's Jared in Anaheim by way of Idaho.
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Or was it Iowa? I don't remember. Sorry.
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That's the worst thing to confuse. I apologize.
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Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
No, because we just listen to each other. Uh, yeah, at first, and it was a little fun game. And then I think the five-year-old even said, you know, this is just a game, right? Dad and dad said, no, it's real. And, uh, I hear him saying it in that voice and, you know, pretty soon they were begging for him to stop.
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And I can verify that this is a thing I've been, uh, I think as a parent, sometimes you'll call your kid by another name as a joke, like I know I've done it like called my daughter my dog's name. If she's like she'll come into the room and like bark or something as a joke. I'll say, oh, you're Nico. And she'll say, yeah, I'm Nico. And then for a few minutes later, I'm like, hey, come here, Nico.
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And then it's fun for about five minutes. And then she's like, no. I am not. So there is very much a thing to a child's identity, especially from their parents, where they kind of get their identity and seek their identity. When that is challenged, it is very quickly kind of traumatic.
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We just call each other Jerry. I think it would cancel each other out.
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Yeah. And that is the very bedrock and foundation of how we think about ourselves. And he already saw messing with that can be bad. So he was like, hey, why not take it a step further? Yeah.
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Yeah, there's a quote here from the book, and big thanks to Dave Ruse for putting this one together. I know this was a tough one to wrangle, but he did a great job. Here's the quote from the book.
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Because it is not feasible to study such phenomena with normal people, he didn't even put it in quotes, it seemed reasonable to focus on delusional systems of belief in the hope that in subjecting them to strain, there would be little to lose and hopefully a great deal to gain. And, like, I read that sentence, and I'm like, Stop there, dude.
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Yeah. He like indicted himself with that one quote.
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Yeah, there's – I don't know if you listened to the snap judgment on this. Did you hear that?
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That's right. Just go to squarespace.com slash stuff for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code stuff to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain.
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It was good. Snap, you know, great podcast or public radio program turned podcast.
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I used to listen to a lot more of it.
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When is Terry Gross going to have us on? Do we need to get to 20 years?
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And then we just start asking.
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Yeah. So in that snap judgment, they pointed out that he that Rokic actually read a Harper's article about two women who believe they were the Virgin Mary. And that put an idea into his head. And I know that in his book, he also talked about being inspired a little bit by some some stuff that Voltaire wrote about it. Right.
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Yeah, and I'm sure he was, you know— He was turned on a little bit about the idea of three Christs or however many Christs he could find.
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Well, I mean, not even like that. You know what I mean, though? But as a social psychologist, he was probably like, you know, this would make for a pretty mind-blowing experiment.
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Yeah, it's not like the three Richard Nixons of Hispalanti.
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Yeah, I'm sure all three of those towns are like, is he insulting all of us or none of us?
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I know you don't. And I think generally back then that's where a lot of these institutions were because they needed like lots of land and so they'll just leave it at that. Okay. Maybe take a break.
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We'll take a break and we'll find out how he found his patients right after this.
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I think I knew that. Did you? Yeah, he was our Russ Vic. No, he was their Russ Vic. That's right. Russ Vic is ours. That's right. So, Chuck, the whole thing that changed everything for him was Sesame Street. Yeah. He wasn't a creator of Sesame Street. They just hired him on.
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And they actually kind of won him over because remember one of the things that Jim Henson always struggled with his whole career was he wanted to – explore places that puppets had never really gone to.
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In themes that they hadn't gone to, at least not in the modern age. Sure. But he was fighting against them not being taken seriously.
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Russ Vick, by the way, made the little interstitial things for the Stuff You Should Know television show. Yeah, the animations. Which is why I reference him. Yeah. So the Children's Television Workshop, which is now called the Sesame Workshop, from what I understand, they won him over big time.
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He makes all of these characters from, like, Big Bird, and I think Kermit came before Sesame Street, and he started out, and I think we talked about this in the Muppet episode, too, he started out looking really weird. Yeah.
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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Howdy. And Jerry, for the last time this year. Yeah. She's just informed us and she's all smiles. She is. Not very nice, Jerry.
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Yeah, not cool at all, like really kind of freaky.
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Which is something that I – now that I know a little more about Jim Henson, I think maybe he might have even been going for. Right. But one of the things that Sesame Street allowed him to do was to really kind of – explore something that he'd long been obsessed with, which was television and where it converged with puppets, which was all new territory.
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Because if you think about it, when you go to a puppet show live, you're looking at what's essentially a mechanism for hiding the human. And there's just a little area that the puppet can move around in. A little tiny fake stage.
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So Jim Henson stepped back and said, okay, the television is that little tiny area that the puppet can move around in. Yeah. But it also opens up the whole world for a puppet because you're using camera angles and there's editing and it's not in person. Yeah, just frame out the people. And again, we talked about this in the Muppet episode.
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He created something called platforming up to where the puppeteers no longer had to crouch down to maneuver the puppets.
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So yeah, the performers could stand up Which was a huge weight off.
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But at the same time, because you're working with cameras and stuff like that, and they have the whole universe to move around in, and Jim Henson wanted them to move around as much as possible, it also put them in some weird positions.
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And we gave that warning in the Muppets episode, too. Did we? Yeah.
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Yeah, the Center for Puppetry Arts is, I think, the nation's largest puppeteer organization.
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The sensitivity training? Uh-huh. It was great.
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Yeah, because they have a museum with, like you said, Emmett Otter. Oh, man, all sorts of cool stuff. Like a full-size, life-size Skeksy behind glass. Scary as you can imagine.
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Oh, yeah. I think anybody who works even remotely in puppets has got to be inspired by Jim Henson. He's the man. One of the other things that he came up with that was based on putting Muppets or puppets on TV was using softer materials. Yeah. Everything else was, like, up to that point, stiff wood, marionettes, marionettes. ventriloquist dummies, that kind of stuff. Right.
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He used, like, foam, and it allowed the puppets themselves to have more expressive faces, which is great for a close-up on TV.
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And it also, I mean, now looking back, you just are like, well, yeah, of course it's what puppets do. I know. But that was Jim Henson that came up with that, and it changed everything because it took something like I mean, imagine Howdy Doody. It was like, yeah, it's cool. You know, it's Howdy Doody or whatever. But whether close up or far away, he looked exactly the same.
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It was like a wood head with like a moving lower jaw. And, you know, he gave you nightmares. With Kermit the Frog or something like that, the fact that he could have different expressions and react differently and and his emotions could be shown on his face, that made him that much more popular, that much more approachable... Sure. ...to people who were into him. Absolutely. Which is everybody.
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And you can really see Jim Henson's love of variety shows and just kind of... Well, just the stage in The Muppet Show, because if you think about it, the whole thing's set backstage at a variety show. It's such a great idea when you look back at it.
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I was wondering how much that production company made from that. They did what, like five little vignettes? I'm sure they paid the actors literal peanuts. Yeah, they were bad actors. They were like, there's the peanut bucket over there. You can pay yourself.
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Right, where The Muppet Show started all that. Yeah. I don't know if Carol Burnett was before The Muppet Show. Yeah, it was before. Was it? Yeah. So she did a lot of backstage stuff, didn't she? I wonder who started that. I don't know. I mean, hers was more sketch. Yeah, but some of it was like backstage. Was it? I believe so. I don't remember that. Unless I'm hallucinating right now.
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Remember our cabaret? No, it wasn't cabaret. What was it, the episode we did?
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Yeah, how that started out in Vaudeville, and Burlesque had, that's where stand-up comedy came from. That was an interesting episode.
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Although Kenny and Dolly could just sit on a couch and stare at the camera for an hour, and I'd watch that.
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They are the best. Great entertainers. Yeah. Love those two.
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Well, Chuck, the Muppet Show has just hit. Oh, that's right. Things are going pretty well. They have been going pretty well already for Henson. Apparently in 1970, Rubber Ducky hit number 16 on the Billboard charts. And for those who don't know, Ernie is voiced by Jim Henson. So Jim Henson sang a song, Rubber Ducky, that made it to number 16 on the Billboard charts.
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That was 1970, a year after the Cube, before the Muppet Show even happened.
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know a lot of awards it garnered critical praise and won the hearts of children all over the world but it was also for adults too oh yeah i think that's why he was able to pull it off in great britain because they have better senses of humor
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We either had Showtime or we didn't have HBO. Didn't have anything.
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And he I mean, he wrote a lot of songs, too. I think he wrote Rubber Ducky. I'm sure he wrote a lot of the stuff on Fraggle Rock. It was just yet another thing he did was write music.
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The other show that he came out with in the 80s, in the mid 80s. That I was big time into was Muppet Babies. I never saw one second of that. Man, I love that show.
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You know what's weird, though? I'm just going to say this. So you, me, and I are the same age.
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Her sister is like five years younger than us. And I used to love Muppet Babies.
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Yumi's sister used to watch Muppet Babies. So Yumi was like, why were you watching Muppet Babies if my younger sister was watching Muppet Babies? And Yumi didn't watch Muppet Babies? No, she watched like Donahue or something like that. I watched Muppet Babies. I'm not ashamed anymore to say it.
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I think it was on for like four or five seasons. So maybe I was watching it at the beginning of the series. No, that makes sense. And Mika was watching it. That's what I've been telling you, Mika. In 84, you would have been what? Eight. Oh, yeah. That's a perfect age for Muppet Babies. So I think we just saw it on different ends of the series is what it was. Is that what it is?
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But have you ever heard of Ron Funches? Yeah, the comedian? Yeah. Yeah. He has a little bit about Muppet Babies that's pretty hilarious. Oh, really? Yeah.
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Love that guy. Yeah. We saw him live. He's just a beautiful human being.
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At all? No, it was cartoon. Okay. It was so cute.
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Yeah, and they, like, used their imagination, and, like, Gonzo had a thing for Indiana Jones, so he was frequently, like, exploring caves and, like, swinging on vines with an Indiana Jones fedora on and that kind of stuff. Well, see, I would probably enjoy that now. You would. Yeah? Definitely. All right, I'm going to go get Muppet babies.
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Chuck, he did even more TV that we'll talk about in a second, okay? Okay.
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If you want to know more about that movie and some of the cool facts from it, go, again, listen to the Muppet episode.
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Well, yeah. I think it actually is probably better received now than it was originally.
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I think critics appreciated it, but it didn't do so well at the box office. But now it's become kind of a cult classic for sure. Yeah. And one of the reasons why... it didn't do that well at the box office because audiences didn't quite know what to make of it. They heard Frank Oz, who co-directed it, Jim Henson, and puppets, and I think they went expecting the Muppet movie. This is 1982.
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And they got the Dark Crystal instead, which is really dark. Yeah. The theme is good versus evil, and the evil in it is really, really evil. And the stuff that happens to some of the puppets, including really cute puppets, is really horrifying. And I read this awesome quote recently. By Frank Oz, and basically he says, like, Jim thought it was okay to scare kids.
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As a matter of fact, he thought it wasn't healthy for kids to never be scared.
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So, like, he purposefully was trying to scare kids, and he wanted to take the tradition back to, like, grim fairy tales, which were very, very dark and graphic. Oh, yeah, that's a good point. That's what he was going for with The Dark Crystal.
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And he still had a lot of cred, even in the late 80s. If you think about it, his heyday was the late 70s, early 80s with the Muppet show, the Muppet movies. And then after that, it was like, yeah, I'll try this with Jim Henson. I'll try this with Jim Henson. And even still, he was on a pretty great streak And at the end of the 80s, he had two TV shows on, The Jim Henson Hour and The Storyteller.
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The Storyteller, I hadn't seen before. I was, I guess, aware of, but I don't know why I wasn't watching it because it would have been, like, right there for me.
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Because I would have been 12 in 1988. But I watched one today, and it was really good. It's like human-puppet interaction. Yeah. Which is – and it's just seamless. Like there's – one of the things from studying this that I've realized is like we take for granted and expect our puppet-human interactions – to be so seamless that we don't even realize that we're looking at puppets right then.
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And the reason why we expect that is because of Jim Henson and the people he worked with and inspired to work so hard at creating that illusion.
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Yeah. Apparently somebody who was working with, uh, Jim Henson was, I guess a director of the Muppet show would be giving Jim notes on Kermit and Jim would just respond, like let Kermit respond. That would freak me out. And the director said, eventually you're just sitting there, you turn and you address Kermit.
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No, apparently not at all. So there's a lot of quotes in this article. I thought John Strickland wrote it. It turns out that's not the case. I'm surprised. Because he's friends with, or down with at least, one of Jim Henson's kids. Oh, really? Who I believe lives here in Atlanta. Oh, wow. But in this article, it's one of those things where everybody who compliments Jim Henson, who worked with him,
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Like he'd just force you into like interacting with the puppet, even like during a notes session.
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Yeah. And he did, too. And he died in 1990 of a staph infection. Organ failure brought on by a staph infection. Did you know that?
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I saw organ failure caused by a group A strep infection. I'm sorry. Not staph. Staph.
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Yeah, because apparently he believed in Disney's commitment to characters. So he thought that would be a good place for the Muppets to live.
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They own the Muppets. Apparently, the Henson Company sold the rights to the Sesame Street characters to Sesame Street, which is pretty cool. And the Jim Henson Creature Shop still builds the Sesame Street puppets and Muppets.
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Oh, yeah, the fact that he died in 1990 still had a couple of TV shows going. He's 53 years old. Yeah, he had a lot of work left in him. If you want to know more about Jim Henson, go listen to our Muppets episode. And while you're looking that up, you can also search Jim Henson on the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com, and we'll bring up this great article.
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And since I said search bar, it's time for Listener Mail. Beep.
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They go to the trouble of complimenting him in a way that's not just like, oh, he was such a great guy. Yeah. They all back up just a little bit because they're cognizant that that doesn't get it across. Sure. And they want you to understand that... They're talking about more than just the great guy like, oh, he's dead and I'm not going to speak ill of the dead.
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Yeah. In the meantime, if you want to suggest some Middle Eastern topics for us, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. And as always, hang out at our beautiful home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.
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And he was a great guy and that's a really thoughtless, polite, inoffensive thing to say. So like Frank Oz said something like he was a great guy, but at the same time, you know, he was a human. But he was still a really great guy. Right. So, like, what you're thinking of as a great guy, get rid of that and actually replace it with a genuine human great guy.
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It's like everybody relax. It's just millions of dollars.
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Yeah, and I read, I guess it was a book review of a biography about him that showed that it was all, somebody said it was all just play to him. Yeah. Like work was play. Yeah. Even though he worked really hard. Uh-huh. he was able to commit himself like that to his work because to him he was having the time of his life all the time.
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And apparently there was no line between work and play, which now that we've seen that sensitivity training could have gotten him in a lot of trouble. But he just enjoyed the life that he had from what I understand. Loved cars. He had like a Lotus that was the same color as Kermit the Frog. Mm-hmm. Um, he had a, a Rolls Royce early on from his work. Yeah.
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Um, let's talk about, let's talk about the guy.
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So that's actually one of the reasons why we can do this episode, because we already did a Muppets episode. And they tweeted about us, too, remember? Yeah. The Henson Company did. Yeah, they did. Which was huge. They approved. It got their actual approval. That's right. Man, that was something. The Muppets episode is its own thing. It's about Muppets.
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This is about Jim Henson, and it's appropriate that we're doing this because he was more than just the Muppets, even though everybody pegs him with the Muppets, and that is a huge thing. He was more than that. Like you said, he was a filmmaker, but originally started out as a puppeteer, but kind of a reluctant one. Yeah.
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Yeah. And one of the things he got into, well, he was originally kind of a fan of ventriloquism a little bit. But he said later on in life that he was never like obsessed with puppets or anything like that, like you would have expected him to be. And as he went to college, I think in Maryland, he got into – he started out as a studio artist. That's what he was studying.
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He was just transfixed by the tube. He almost kind of made himself destined to be on television by being obsessed with it.
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But he kind of stumbled into puppetry in college and –
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and he started out as a studio art major and ended up graduating with a home ec degree because home ec was the only degree that offered puppet making courses yeah he majored uh or he took a puppetry course at first and uh then a bunch of textiles and crafts courses which is a great way to you know start building and making your own puppets right so but he graduated with a home ec degree
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But by the time he graduated, he was already extremely successful. The Rolls Royce that I mentioned, he bought in time to drive to his college graduation because he'd already created successful shows in his town.
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That one was pretty cool. It was great. In its way. And did you see The Cube? I watched parts of The Cube. Did you see the end?
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Oh, you've got to see the end. I skipped the middle because I was like, okay, I get where you're going with this.
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Yes. Okay. And he starts to go kind of crazy. And it has the look and feel of a color TV ad, like lots of overacting and like Carol Burnett-esque characters and stuff like that, but the sentiment behind it and like the... everything behind it is really neat.
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And it really gives you a good, um, an eyeopening example of like what Jim Henson was capable of, but also like what he was into because, you know, when you think of him, you think of Muppets and Sesame Street in particular.
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I think Jim Henson had Jim Morrison beat by a mile as far as experimental films went.
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And lifelong collaborators of his. Yeah. Yeah, but he started out making basically a puppet-based commercial ad agency in New York. Yes. In 1963. Yeah.
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Right, and they did pretty well for themselves, and one of the smartest moves he made early on was all of his contracts said that he retained the rights to any of the creations he made for these companies. Yeah. So he was creating some of the things that would later become famous Muppets, like the Cookie Monster was originally made for a chip maker.
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It was this puppet that couldn't get enough of these chips.
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Yeah, okay, that's what it was. Yeah. And he ended up being the Cookie Monster, and the reason he ended up being the Cookie Monster is because Jim Henson retained the rights to that creation. He was a very savvy business guy, too. Yeah, and he was using somebody else's dime, these advertisers' budgets, to kind of hash out and form and make his Muppets.
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Which I remember that from the Muppets episode. Rolf was the first big Muppet. He's such a bit character now that it's just mind-boggling to think he was the one that started it all. Even before Kermit, before Big Bird, it was Rolf. Kermit kind of stole the show, I think. Yeah. We'll talk a little more about Kermit and where he came from right after this.
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Okay, so we got a nice background on Mount St. Helens. It had been very active for about – or on and off active for 40,000 years, including I believe the last sort of big one was in 1857. Not too long after that, in 1908, about a million acres of land became part of Columbia National Forest, which was hence renamed Gifford Pinchot or Pinchot. I never know how to say that.
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National Forest, and that was in 1949, and Mount St. Helens is inside that National Forest. All this is sort of a long way of saying it wasn't, like, super populated. It didn't have – it wasn't surrounded by neighborhoods and suburbs and stuff like that. Right.
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But there was something – or is still something called Spirit Lake there near the base of the mountain, which is – they have, like, youth camps there. People had cabins here and there. There were – recreational activities that all over the place. So it's not like no one was there, but it wasn't heavily populated.
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Yeah. So they, you know, the word gets out and they did come running from far and wide and they, you know, set up camp there at various places. Other just sort of as I learned from watching this A&E special that there are like volcano chasers even that. They hear about this stuff. They're fascinated by it. I guess it's just sort of amateur geo enthusiasts.
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And people started kind of coming in there because they got wind that something may be brewing at Mount St. Helens, including – and this is – there are all kinds of people we could feature story-wise. But one gentleman we are going to feature, his name was David Johnston. And he was a volcanologist at the USGS, the United States Geographical Survey.
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I wish you all knew him, but we do, and so he's ours.
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And he was one of the – there were some great interviews with him in this A&E special. He was a very young guy, super excited to be there. And he was one of the ones kind of sounding the alarm along with his partner, this guy named Don Swanson, about, hey, like, you know, the S is getting real here, everybody. And it looks like people need to start leaving. Yeah.
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Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, they did eventually set up what they called a red zone. And a lot of people did evacuate. There were some notable people who didn't. Certainly, we need to mention Harry Truman, obviously not the president, but he was this old codger who ran the lodge there.
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And he became a folk hero because he famously thumbed his nose and stayed and said, you know, I'm a part of this place. It's a part of me. If the mountain... goes, I'm going to go with it. Art Carney played him in the movie version.
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He got a lot of media attention, along with his 16 cats, which is the only part of the story like, hey, man, I'm all for people evacuating to keep people safe, but I'm also like... Some old mountain man wants to stay up there and go down with the volcano. Like, that's his right, but send the cats away. Don't say, like, I'm going to go down and kill these 16 cats at the same time.
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Yeah, I just, I don't know, man. Once I heard about the cats, because I was all into this guy.
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And then I heard about the cats. I was like, oh, dude, you should have at least sent the cats away.
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Yeah, this is a good one. This is, I mean, this is so bread and butter stuff you should know. It is. I don't know why it took us almost 16 years to get to it.
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Yeah, so this was, I mean, compared to what eventually ended up happening, you could call this sort of mini-eruption. even though it sent – it made a big boom. Apparently it was a pretty cloudy day, so it wasn't super visible. But the ash column went up 6,500 feet into the air. That's nothing to sneeze at. And a new crater formed at the summit, which grew to about 1,600 feet wide.
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So it was a major thing. There was another one on the 28th, again throwing ash into the air. And this is like basically from that point – through the big one in mid-May, it was just constant warning, constant upheaval, mudslides, avalanches, craters growing, and, like, the mountain is saying, like, it's going to happen, people. This is not a false alarm.
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Until things calm down, and that's what you were talking about earlier, like, things kind of settle down on, what was that, like,
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Yeah, around the 15th of May to where the people got antsy that were evacuated and said, hey, listen, we want to go back and check on our stuff.
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And the governor eventually was like, all right, I think, you know, at the time, and I think Washington still is a little bit of one of those, like, not quite live free or die, but, you know, like, all right, listen, these people pay taxes. They want to go back to their homes. Sign a waiver that you're not going to sue us and let them go back there. And that's what they did.
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Yeah. Well, I mean, just prior to this, I guess let's back up one half second and let you know about what happened when David Johnson and Don Swanson, they had moved from their initial base at Coldwater 1, which was about, I think, eight or nine miles away, to their second station, which was called Coldwater 2, which is about five to six miles from the mountain.
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And notably, it was on the northeast side of the mountain, which...
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turned out to be the wrong spot to be um but you know these guys knew what was going on uh they know it's a dangerous job and apparently they were swapping um taking shifts and don swanson got the call from johnston and he said hey listen i've got tonight and tomorrow if you come and relieve me the next day and then on may 18th 1980 is when johnston was there when everything went boom
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Yeah, mainly with like baking and cooking. It's like that's when it matters.
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Yeah. So, you know, like we said earlier, that pressure is building up a lot under the surface. There's a lot of moisture down there. Some of it was, like you mentioned, from that initial plate subduction. That's called magmatic water. Some of it is just regular old groundwater from rain and snow and everything because it is the mountains. That's called meteoric water.
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And all of that stuff is just heating up. It's got pressure from below because it's heating. It's got pressure from above because all of that weight of the rock is just pushing it down. Yeah. And all of this magma is just... like boiling under there.
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Oh, boy, it depends. I mean, I love to get the, I hate to be that guy, but I do love to get the local butter when we go to our farmer's market and get it from our CSA.
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But I know we talked about this before, I guess it was in one of the volcano episodes, but it's not allowed to turn to steam because there's no room for it. Like steam is expansive and it can't expand. So it's just this superheated beyond the boiling point level of liquid that's just distributed all throughout the upper half and notably sort of the north side of this mountain.
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Yeah, and it's like you should really go check out the footage of this stuff. It's some of the most amazing like natural geologic disaster footage I've ever seen. Just to see this mountain and then, you know, especially in the A&E thing to see people interviewed describing like seeing this with their eyeballs.
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It was just like it was incomprehensible what they were witnessing, like a mountain that large and part of it just going away immediately. Yeah.
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Well, I don't know, Pete. You can't just say parquet, can you?
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Yeah, where's her quote? Should we read that? Yeah. This is Dorothy Stoffel in 2019. She said, Amazing. I saw somebody else describe it as like a zipper opening along the mountain. Yeah, and, you know, there were amateur photographers around for some of this stuff.
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Some of these hikers, like that guy you mentioned that was telling the story in Funny Voices and Volcano Chasers, like, they got some, like, one guy got, like, 22 pictures in a row, and this is when it eventually blew. The other guy got, like, six or eight pictures.
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I do like that. What's the stuff, the Irish butter in the grocery store? That's my brand. Kerrygold. Kerrygold. That's good, too.
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there was a family camping with their two young daughters.
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And that guy, they were, you know, on the north side, you know, well below it, but, you know, within the range. And he was like, you know, speaking to how it didn't blow from the top, he said it looked like somebody shot a shotgun out of the side of this mountain pointed at us. So ash was raining down, but it was raining like at people and less down from the sky.
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Yeah, I mean it was – if you look at it, it looks almost like a controlled demolition blast or something. It definitely doesn't look like any kind of volcano blast that you might think of in your head. It happened kind of all at once, and it was a 24-megaton blast, which I know everyone always tries to compare it to like Hiroshima. It was 1,600 times as powerful as the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
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Yeah, he obviously didn't make it there. I think they found pieces of his trailer like a decade later. He had time to send out one signal, which was over his radio, Vancouver, Vancouver, this is it. The only person to pick that up was a ham radio operator nearby. And they renamed that area Johnston Ridge in his honor. Obviously, Harry Truman perished along with those 16 cats.
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And he was close enough to where I saw that they said that he and everything around him was basically instantly vaporized. Like he wouldn't have felt anything. It would have happened. His death and vaporization would have happened in like less than a second. Yeah.
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Yeah, I totally agree. I love Kerrygold. I take that stuff camping.
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Well, I like that you can get a tub. It's a smaller tub, but I do like a spreadable tub as opposed to a stick.
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Yeah, because what you've got, you know, beyond this avalanche happening is you've got all of a sudden all this heat happens in a place where there's a lot of snow. So that snow melts, all that glacier ice melts, and you have flooding and you have mudslides. And you have a word that I had never even heard of before Ed included it in here, which was lahar.
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which sounds like just a mudslide on steroids. Yeah. Like a mudslide carrying ammunition with it. Right. And this is just raining down everywhere and causing a path of destruction that hasn't been seen in modern times in this country.
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Yeah, we'll take a break and talk a little bit more about the After Effects right after this.
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Yeah, I was nine and I remember it being a big deal. But it's funny when I was researching this and then watching, there's a really, really great thing on YouTube that I recommend that A&E put out recently. Years ago, it had to be. It was called Minute by Minute, colon, The Eruption of Mount St. Helens. Really gripping stuff, as A&E used to do. They probably still do that kind of stuff.
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Well, we talked a little bit about it. Obviously, Spirit Lake, which we mentioned at the beginning, which was at the base of the mountain. that has very strange effects on bodies of water. It did two things. It made the lake larger, but it also made it shallower because it just flooded all this water down there and raised it such that the outlet was basically dammed up.
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And so the lake got a whole lot bigger, but it reduced its depth by about 80 feet. I think five years later, they built a spillway tunnel to control the depth of the lake. 200 homes and cabins and about 200 miles of road and railways were completely obliterated.
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And I think it lowered the ultimate height of Mount St. Helens, right?
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And a young Trey Anastasio said, one day I shall play at the base of that amphitheater. Oh, did he? And bore people with noodling on my guitar.
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No, I don't think so. I don't think there's anything there. I was just kidding.
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Oh, yeah. I never will miss a chance to take a ticket fish. I'm with you. So ash is raining down and out. It literally darkened the skies. When this ash, if you were close enough to it, it would literally burn you alive. If you're far away, it can just create a lot of problems. Everything from... You know, just equipment not working, electrical outages and blackouts and brownouts.
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Visibility is obviously terrible. As far as crops go, certain crops were wiped out by this ash and the toxic gases. Some of them did a little bit better because they just got a little bit of the ash in it. Ash will help promote rainfall and hold moisture in the ground better. So apparently wheat crops and apple crops fared pretty well. Yeah, that was surprising. Yeah.
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All of the media around it, I was thinking, man, I don't know if it was more regional or if it truly was nationwide, but I remember the eruption, but I didn't remember the six weeks leading up to it, which was a very big deal.
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I mean, that's what will happen, right? If the earth ever just burns up into a fiery ball, that'll just become a big mushroom field, right?
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Yeah. The the other thing I want to point out, too, about Spirit Lake was if you look at footage of the lake and now these kind of rivers that were just happening and it literally like rerouted. you know, the Columbia River and the Cowlitz River in sections. But it looks like, it looks like a logging operation is happening.
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And like you could almost, and may have been able, well, obviously it would have been too dangerous, but it looks like you could have walked over these logs. They were so like packed and these were just trees, you know, an hour before.
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Yeah, they said it just picked them up and all of, they were driving and then they were floating. And they said that they're, you know, they're, she said like my instinct was to get out of the car, but there was like nowhere to go.
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Yeah. And this is, you know, these are just sort of that's what was so cool about the special is it really brought in the human element of these people that were around there.
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And, you know, they all survived because they were being interviewed, obviously. Dorothy Stoffel, who was the the geologist that was flying with, I guess, her husband, Keith. Was that her brother?
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Okay. They survived that plane flight. Like, they got out of there. There were stories of people that literally, it was like from a movie, drove, you know, 110 miles an hour, like, outrunning this ash debris slide coming at them.
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Yeah, it started sort of getting a little more active again. This time, though, you know, one of the things that to the benefit of the surrounding area when a volcano blows like that is that pressure is released. And it's going to take a long time to build back up to that level again, kind of depending on how it reforms on top of it. But this time, apparently, there are
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There are more ways for this pressure to be released. So I think it's just sort of the pressure is being released a little more gradually since 2004.
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But they do say that like, oh, no, like it will happen again. Like things are there is a new lava dome growing and the pressure is going to build up. And it could be in a thousand years or it could be in 10 years.
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No, but they are studying it. Like there's a lot of active research and study going on at Mount St. Helens now.
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This is following up on an email that you particularly liked from our Spooktacular.
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Hey, guys. Thoroughly enjoying the most recent Spooktacular. The accents are comedy genius. Meagle, do you want to pop in and say hi? Hello. Perfect. I'm going to bring Miegel back every now and then, by the way. I just want to prepare you and the audience.
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I wanted to address a couple of 1800s diction issues that cause some puzzlement. When you guys talked about toilet, it's basically what Josh said. I've always thought of it as freshening up in the bathroom, washing your face and hands when first waking up or going to bed. I double-checked with Merriam-Webster, though, and it's more generally dressing and grooming. Okay. That makes sense.
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Yeah, sure. On the other hand, the strangers in the beverage from the toll house is a lot more puzzling. I had no idea what it meant. And although Josh's guess that beverage meant the pub was clever, it doesn't really make sense.
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Just as a reminder, the sentence is talking about some men drinking tea in an inn and pausing to, quote, discover the sex and dates of arrival of the strangers, which floated in some numbers in the beverage, end quote. I think I found the answer, though, guys, in a dictionary of Scottish dialect. We love this stuff by the way. Yeah, this is amazing.
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Tea leaves floating on the surface of your drink are considered omens that you'll meet someone new. So these tea leaves are called strangers. If you pick up a stranger and bite it, the toughness will tell you whether the new acquaintance will be male or female.
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Amazing. I'm going to guess there's also a way to predict the date you meet this person, although I didn't see reference to that. So that's what the characters are doing, guys, using tea leaves to predict the future. By the way, other omens can also be strangers, like unburned candle wicks or soot on grates. I've loved the show for years, look forward to many more.
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Yeah. I mean, because like you said, Mount St. Helens is basically saying, it's coming, everyone. Would you like to document this?
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That is a great email, Nat Jacobs. Fantastic sleuthing, and we are super grateful.
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I'm telling you, again, it's coming. Yeah. And I'll show you in lots of different scary ways that it's coming. Yeah. And people left, people stayed, people came there.
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Like tourists came to see this thing. So for sure. Let's get into it.
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Yeah. 2010 was volcanoes. 2017 was super volcanoes.
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Yeah. It's a part of the Cascade Arc arranged there in the Pacific Northwest. And all of this happened. And, you know, geologically speaking, pretty quickly. Yeah. It happened over the course of about 40,000 years in the case of Mount St. Helens, which is pretty speedy. And Ed helped us out with this. We did a great job on this article.
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And Ed points out that, you know, in the Pacific Northwest, that's why you see so many, you know, sort of coney mountains like that is because of this Cascade Arc and how these mountains were formed, you know, not too long ago.
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40,000 for St. Helens, and I think the whole arc is less than 100.
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Yeah, this is pretty notable. This magma chamber is – well, is and was quite large. And like you said, it's looking for a place to go. But if it doesn't have a place to go, what will happen – and as you'll see, this is what happened in the case of Mount St. Helens – is it starts bulging. And like the mountain –
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If you're a geologist, it's super exciting to see this happen, even though it's very scary and dangerous. But when a geologist sees an actual mountain start to bulge out in a direction, and we're talking hundreds of feet of bulge over the course of a pretty short period of time, then it's a pretty notable thing.
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And that's exactly what was happening in the case of the magma chamber there in Washington. Yeah.
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Yeah, I mean, it had been an active volcano for 40,000 years, but the big one before 1980 was... Yeah, like you said, I was trying to look at a specific year, but let's just say 4,000 years ago. Yeah. Because once you get back that far, you know.
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Who cares? But it became, like you said, part of folklore. The indigenous people there, especially the Puyallup people, called the mountain Luit, L-O-O-W-I-T. And there is a Luit brewing company. So I wanted to shout them out. This is one of those things where – I thought, I wonder why, because there's been such a push to change names of things over the past decade or so.
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This is one that seems so sort of egregious. that we should call it Lewitt and not Mount St. Helens. Right. I'm pretty curious. I'm sure there's been pushes over the years to get it changed, but the Europeans, of course, named it Mount St. Helens in 1792 after Captain George Vancouver, if that name rings a bell, it should, gave the name of it because of a diplomat named Alan Fitzherbert.
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Didn't call it Fitz... Herbert Peake or anything like that because his noble title was Baron St. Helens. Thank God. But here's the rub is that Alan Fitzherbert never even saw Mount St. Helens, the mountain named after him. So, like, I don't know. Maybe let's call this one Lewitt.
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That's huge. And all this to say that Mount St. Helens, which has an S, by the way. Did you know that? Yeah, I did. You keep saying Helen. I just wondered.
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Oh, that's good. That reminds me of the guy in college who fell on the sidewalk and his books splayed out and then he acted like he was reading.
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All this to say is that Mount St. Helens had a long history of activity, so it's not like anyone ever thought, well, that thing is done and it's never going to happen again.
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All right. Shall we take a break? Yeah, that's a nice prelude. I think so, too. All right. We'll be back right after this.
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All right. We've mentioned lying. And, you know, I joke, but for real, if you want to be a publicist, you better have a certain comfort level with stretching the truth and lying.
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Because you're going to have to do that. If you're not comfortable with that, you shouldn't go into that line of work.
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Is that safe to say? I think very. You need to be good with people and cultivate those relationships. You need to be a good writer. Yeah.
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when we recorded this, so maybe we'll hear from some again. How publicists, publicists, publicists work.
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You can't be afraid of rejection. You've got to be outgoing and you've got to take your licks because a lot of your attempts are going to fail just by nature of the job.
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so you can't get your feelings all hurt yeah because you could but you don't want to show that because then the journalists will be like geez chuck's such a baby you're going to be eaten alive i didn't run the story and he's complaining crying i saw him choking up in the bathroom While they may get a good laugh out of that, they probably won't want to work with you as much. Right.
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You got to be very patient and you have to be very flexible because if you're working for celebrities, it is a very tough job.
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Yeah, I mean, when Twitter came out, I remember thinking at the time, like, publicists aren't going to be around anymore because people are doing this themselves.
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Well, ways to use Twitter, but Twitter is also their biggest security blanket as well because of Twitter, more and more celebrities are saying really stupid things that the publicist is then going to have to cover their tracks.
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So they'll take down the tweet and then try and spin that or just, you know, the apology is always very funny to me.
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Well, it's never like... Did you hear about Chris Carter, the NFL guy? He's a former NFL player, wide receiver. Sure.
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Yeah. He... Is in hot water this week because he spoke, was hired by the NFL to come in and speak to the rookies. They often do that for guys that had been in trouble to come in and say, don't do what I did.
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Yeah, sort of. And he said in his talk to the rookie symposium said something about, you know, if you get caught with, you know, da-da-da-da-da, he went, just make sure you have a fall guy on your team. Like the guy in the car that's like, it's my weed. Wow. And he got in big trouble for that. And his apology... His apology was like, that's not the kind of advice I would ever give young people.
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It's like, but that's the advice you exactly gave young people.
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Like, how can you say that days later? It's just so obvious it's a forced... insincere apology.
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Right, and it sounds like there's a lot of crisis management, and that is a part of it, but publicists also are just trying to cook up opportunities.
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Yeah, yeah, for sure, depending on the client, of course. Sure. But I remember our former boss, Connell, was in a band years ago, and I read online somewhere that his band was – went to Elton John's... Do you remember this story?
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Went to Elton John's house and spelled out their band name and fire on his tennis court. No, I hadn't heard that. To try and get on his label or something.
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I know, and I went and asked him. I was like, dude, I can't believe you guys did that. And he went, we didn't do that. I was like, no. And he was like, no. He's our publicist, made that up. I was like, nothing true about it. And he's like, no. They completely fabricated that story as a publicity stunt that never happened.
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Yeah, isn't that amazing? When something like that could so easily be fact-checked, like by calling Elton John.
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Boy, that sounded like you were introducing the final episode.
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I do, too. All right. We mentioned earlier that you might end up getting the laundry or dry cleaning as a publicist.
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Yeah, that's probably what's going to happen is you might get asked to go get the laundry and then you'll say, sure, I'll take care of that for you. And then you will go down the chain until you find the underling who is trying to be a publicist who still does things like that.
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No, like you can go and major in journalism or communications or PR, but it's not like you get that diploma, that PR diploma. And you're going to get like some entry level job as a publicist.
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See, it says right here I have a PR degree. So where's my job? Right. My advice is to skip college and go straight into the workforce. as early as you can if this is what you want to do.
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That's right. Yeah. Good way to say it. So go in and get that job in the mailroom or as an assistant or as – an intern.
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Absolutely. Like we said, you might be picking up dry cleaning. You're going to be Returning a lot of phone calls, drafting a lot of probably not so fun press releases.
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Yeah, well, I'm talking about being like a junior assistant.
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Yeah, and press releases that aren't like the sexy ones, you know. You're not going to be writing like the press releases for Billy Ray Cyrus, in other words.
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I think both of us had a bit of a dark time researching this article.
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You are going to be handling your publicists that you work for, their schedule. They're contacts. You're going to be putting together press kits and EPKs, electronic press kits, and blasting those out. Basically, all of the nuts and bolts of the job you're going to be doing as a junior staff publicist or an assistant. Right. Not a bad gig if that's what you want to do. No.
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And if you stick to it and you're good at it, you're going to end up being a publicist.
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That's right. And you know what? Let's take a break and we will talk more about networking and some of the skills you still need.
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Well, because... And we're going to get... Well, we're going to get flack. That's a teaser. From publicists... Because what I learned is that publicists are professional liars.
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Well, what do you mean? You're saying there are publicists who don't lie?
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And I don't consider it – networking sounds like just doing something to serve you in the end. I don't look at it that way. I enjoy meeting and getting to know professional colleagues. And then later on, if I can hit them up for something or if they hit me up, that's great. But if not, it's just something I like. Gotcha.
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I agree. Well, one of the skills that I don't think we pinpointed was networking without seeming like you're networking, which is sort of what I was just talking about.
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I read a blog, and I sent it to you, and I want to shout them out because Sonic Bids, S-O-N-I-C-B-I-D-S. It's a blog where they did an interview that was pretty insightful, actually.
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A dual interview with Julie Lichtenstein of 37 Media and Lily Golightly of Golightly Media. And I think they work with bands and musical artists mainly.
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What I am saying is no matter what, who you work for... If you are a publicist, then a percentage of your job will be lying.
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But it was super insightful. And they said just some little tidbits here. Like I was always curious how they get paid. And I think if you're a publicist for a person and like you are on retainer, then you just get a salary. Or if you're part of a firm that just works with that person. But you can also just be hired for a campaign. Wow.
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Agreed. Julie said that they try and get out for a major artist three or four months ahead of the release of the album is when they want to start their job. So it's not like, hey, it drops next week. Let's think of some good ideas. They want some good lead time. And they said that they like to work around goals. If it's like a tour, like for us going on our tour, we don't have a publicist.
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But we have promoters working with venues that sort of do the job of a publicist as far as trying to sell tickets.
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But if you are booking a tour and you have a publicist, they're going to be the ones that are getting you on the local radio stations, morning TV, getting you in the local newspaper or alternative newspaper to get you some press.
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Yeah, that's a good way to put it because the artists, we've even experienced this, is the ones who gets their feelings hurt. Saying like, oh man, they interviewed us last time, why didn't they do it this time? And they're always great about massaging the ego a little bit and saying like, it's okay guys, it's no big deal.
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The other thing they're going to be doing if they work for you is they're going to be sending you weekly or biweekly reports on what's lined up, who passed on stuff, who bit, stuff like that. Like they're keeping you informed. Yeah. You're not just like in a black hole. And some artists like to be well in touch on that stuff, and some probably don't care about being bothered.
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Conan shot in Atlanta, 15 minutes from our house, where we live. Yeah. And we couldn't get on Conan. I know. And it was while our TV show was debuting.
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Yeah, from HuffPo. She is the author and CEO of Marketing Experts, Inc., and she listed out nine things that a good publicist does.
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Right. Got to play within the game. You can bend rules, but if you start breaking them, people have a long memory.
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Here's a good one that I didn't think about. Reading outside of your market. I'm sure it's pretty easy to just think New York and L.A., Like what else do I need to know about?
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Google Alerts, that's kind of a no-brainer, I would think. Understanding the importance of local media, that's a good one. Because while your artist is not going to be super stoked about appearing on Good Morning Toledo, if there's a tie, like you're from Toledo, like you, then that's probably a smart thing to do because the local media loves people that were from there that moved away.
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They might work for USA Today in a couple of months.
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That's right. And then earlier you mentioned something about subject lines for emails. I never really thought about this, but... Penny says, can I call her Penny? You can. On a first name basis.
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Well, she says that crafting a subject line is one of the most important things that you can do as a publicist.
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And that they agonize over this. And it makes total sense with the glut of emails that people receive, especially journalists. You want to grab their attention. Otherwise, it's just going to be bye-bye time.
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So crafting, redrafting, editing, tweaking, she says it's just like maddening how much you have to do that.
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Yeah, because it's the minutia. So much importance on the minutia.
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Yeah. It sounds like a weird relationship for sure.
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That's overstated. What really happened was this.
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When we had different PR firms working with us at times, they've gotten in touch and said so-and-so at SpaceX wants to know if you want to come on and talk about this. Or when we did that stuff on ABC about when the housing crisis hit.
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Yeah, I got you. It used to come across our desk every now and then.
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Yeah, that whole new job of being an aggregator, a curator.
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I need to take back a little bit of my tirade about liars. I think that what I'm talking about are people, publicists for, like, big celebrities and stuff like that.
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Oh, yeah. I'm not saying that all publicists do is lie, but I'm saying if you work as a publicist, part of your job is to cover tracks and to lie. Gotcha. And, you know, don't hate the publicist. Hate the system is what I say.
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Like, we've had publicists work with us, and I bet 80% of the clients that they work with are, like, people like us where you don't have to, like, lie and spin.
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Yeah, it's just, you know, regular stuff. Like, let me find a good opportunity for you and connect you. So I was overstating, and I think that's just the far edge of the celebrity end of things.
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Because I just got to thinking about what if they're listening? I don't want them to think I didn't think they were doing a good job.
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I got one more little thing on Jim Moran. Moran? You just said Moran. M-O-R-A-N. I think Moran.
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He is was known as the master of the publicity stunt Back in the day like he did things what his big thing was was to take a saying and try and disprove it like for a company so he literally went to Alaska on behalf of GE to sell a refrigerator to Well, it says an Eskimo, but I guess an Inuit. Yeah, what you would say today. Yeah He walked a bull through a china shop in New York City and
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how'd that go as a stunt I think they broke some things he got on a horse for a politician and changed directions midstream on the horse like rode it through a river and changed directions yeah like you can do this and then in 1959 for the premiere of the mouse that roared the great Peter Sellers movie mm-hmm he opened an embassy remember the movie was about a mm-hmm small country that declared war in a big country
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But they ended up winning or something? I don't remember. Wasn't that it? He opened an embassy in Washington for a mythical country.
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One of the best satires, let's say. It is a great movie. Great movie. And Peter Sellers, man, just...
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He was amazing, and the guy, I can't remember his name, that played the colonel or whatever.
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What was it? That movie, America's Sweethearts. Did you ever see that with John Cusack?
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Billy Crystal played a publicist, a pain in the butt Hollywood couple.
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Yeah, a larger system, which includes all of us who digest news.
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She played Phoebe's half-brother, Giovanni Ribisi, played his girlfriend or wife.
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And I think they were, they got her to be a surrogate for them.
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When Lisa Kudrow got pregnant in real life, I think that's how they handled it.
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All right. I'm going to call this one We Were Actually Right, and this lady was nice at a dinner party. How's that for a subject line?
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Hey, guys. Have a little story. I was at a small dinner party where the host was making his own sea salt. Okay. The topic about, it's one of those dinner parties. The topic of kosher salt came up, so I dropped the fact from your salt episode that kosher salt is actually just salt used for drawing blood out of meat to make it kosher, not salt blessed by a rabbi.
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And a fellow guest disagreed, to which I responded, I'm quite sure about this. The host then said, raise your hand if you're Jewish. And the guy that disputed me raised his hand. I felt rather embarrassed while he explained to me what kosher means and that salt also goes through the same kosher process that would never explain how. I backed down and didn't try to defend the fact that I just told.
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It's not that I doubted you guys, though I jokingly said I'd write an email to complain, but it's because the appeal is disrespectful to correct someone on their own heritage. Good move.
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I also didn't want to start any petty debate with someone at someone else's dinner party. Also a good move. So I decided to take in the embarrassment while he was explaining what kosher is, at the same time eating his plate of pasta with chorizo. Hope you find this amusing. Please keep up the good work.
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If you're reading on the show, please give a shout out to my friend Amber, who introduced me to the show. And that is from Chloe Cisse.
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Because I looked it up today just to be sure. Yeah. And apparently kosher salt is kosher because, in fact, they said it should be called koshering salt.
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Because it's used to make things kosher. It is not the salt itself that's kosher.
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It sounds like the other guy's a bit of a blowhard.
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Yeah, well, I think any celebrity is going to have a publicist, but it's really a matter of your directive and your goal.
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I think some of those people like to be like the old adage, there's no such thing as bad publicity.
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And by the way, that no such thing as bad publicity, I tried to find the origin of that. And the closest thing I could find was P.T. Barnum. But I don't know if that's true. I don't think that's verified.
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And I don't think that's even true anyway. I think maybe that used to be true.
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No, that no such thing as bad publicity. I think at one point that may have been sort of true. Yeah. These days, there's clearly bad publicity. Sure. So you said the word flack earlier as a teaser. Apparently, too flack or a flack is a term originating from Gene Flack, early movie publicist.
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Two different things. But in this case, it is a pejorative term. For a publicist, they don't like it. A PR flack. Yeah, you shouldn't say that to someone that works in PR. No. Or call them a liar. They don't like that either. Yeah. Yeah, I looked it up. Apparently it means that you can't be trusted. You'll do anything for money. That's what a flack is to them.
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One article I read said that's like calling a personal injury attorney an ambulance chaser.
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Just not a nice term. Gotcha. So there you have it. So a publicist, like you said, works for their client to make them – to get their good deeds out and to – if they don't have good deeds, to spin things to make it look like they do.
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And then they get photograph later eating gyros down the block.
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No. So what they do is they pitch ideas to the media, and they probably have to be good writers themselves because a press release oftentimes is a starting point. But press releases, as we know, can get lost in the shuffle and never see the light of day.
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It can be. But if you have a good publicist, they will be well-connected to the media to ensure that that publicity blast is not lost.
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Yes, a publicist is only as good as their relationships, I think. The other way on that street that you were talking about is from the journalist back to the publicist. If they hear, I heard Billy Ray Cyrus drank a bucket of tequila and ran over a prostitute with his car. They will then get in touch with the publicist, and then they go, Jack, buddy, hey, we go back a long way. Would I lie to you?
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Would I lie to you? Yeah. So that's how that goes. And they will be more forthcoming with people who have – it's a scratch your back, you scratch mine type of scenario.
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Feeding the machine. I've seen a lot more women as publicists than men, and I've always wondered why that is true.
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It seems like every publicist I've ever known has been a woman. and I just figured it's because women may be more level-headed and more able to like smooth out a situation and some big dumb guy. But I guess the guys who are publicist aren't big dumb guys like me. I'd be a bad publicist.
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I'd say, you know what? It's really none of your business. Stop bothering me. Bad publicist.
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Yeah, or they'll just say, let me send you a gift bag from Fred Siegel. You like the last one, right? But publicity also – and it depends. People that have a staff of people working for them – Sometimes the lines are blurred on who does what, but a publicist can arrange interview requests and set all that stuff up.
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If you have like a book tour or you're a politician or you're a band with a new album coming out, they might arrange all those interviews. in which case they are prepping two things. They are prepping the interviewer saying, you can't ask about the bucket of tequila.
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If you want this interview, I'll give it to you, but this is off limits, all these things. And then, as we've learned, when we've had people work with us in publicity, they'll be prepping you as the interviewee. Like, if they ask this, this is how you should probably deal with it.
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And my favorite thing ever are videos where celebrities walk out of interviews because the interviewer has asked something they weren't supposed to ask. Yeah. Those are great. Yeah. I just sit around and watch those all day.
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All right. Well, let's take a break. And when we come back, we will talk a little bit about the skills you need as a publicist.
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Hi, everyone. We're going to jump back in podcast time to September 15th, 2015, for this week's selection, How Publicists Work. We've never had a publicist. You know why? Because nobody cares that much about us. So it's really not a job that would get a lot of billable hours, if you know what I mean. But anyway, it's a pretty fascinating, weird job. And we heard from a few publicists, I believe.
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Yeah, his wife to be. Oh, she married him, huh? Yeah, still married.
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I think I picked this one because I had just recently seen the movie on the... Stanford Prison Experiment. The movie is okay. It's not great. It's not bad. It's fine. The podcast episode was pretty good from what I remember, though. But you should do both. If you've seen the movie, listen to the show. If you listen to the show, then give the movie a shot. It's got Billy Crudup.
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All right. That's a great setup. So we'll take a break here and come back and talk a little bit more about the experiment and the realities of it right after this.
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He's always awesome. And it's called How the Stanford Prison Experiment Worked. Where friend becomes foe, foe becomes friend. What'll happen in the end? Listen in to find out.
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All right, so you've got John Wayne in there. I don't think we mentioned that he took on the persona of the prison boss in Cool Hand Luke. He did a fake southern accent and everything and dove right into this role. If you talk to Dave Eshelman today, he will say he's very much on record as saying, I'm not some jerk, and I didn't get off on being sadistic. He said, I wanted to—
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Do what they paid me $15 a day to do, which was to be a prison guard and to treat these guys poorly. Right. And so I – he said I did some drama in high school and I literally acted this part as well as I could.
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Right. And I put on this fake Southern accent. And if you like ask friends and family today, they would laugh at this because I'm really not this guy at all. Right. Because he really comes off as as a bit of a villain in this movie for sure.
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He said he feels bad about it, too.
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Give them some power and you will turn evil.
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Yeah. So Corpy comes out and says, I was faking that. And I put on a big act so I could get out of there because it sucked. And I didn't want to be there anymore. Right. So I fake like I was – and he like – one of his quotes was – I don't have it here. But he basically said like any trained clinician would have been able to see right through this. Like when I hear the tapes years later –
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It's like I'm not an actor. I wasn't like apparently the John Wayne guy at least had been in like high school plays and college, too, I think. Yeah. And he was like, I was not an actor. And it was so clear to me looking back at these tapes that I was faking it, faking a nervous breakdown, faking a nervous breakdown to get out of there.
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And Billy Crudup went in there and said, why is everyone saying, whoa, whoa, whoa? Only I can say, whoa, whoa, whoa.
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Yeah, so we've kind of poo-pooed the two major findings from the study already.
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Like, you could write a letter to your family or girlfriend or whoever you wanted to come visit you to ask for visitation rights, and the family came in, and they did. They came in and visited for an hour, and there were, in some cases, parents who were like, I don't know about this. This is, like, this seems like a really weird thing. And Zimbardo would be like, oh, no, it's totally fine.
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I'm a psychologist. Yeah, like, they want to be here. Like, ask them. And the kids, you know, they did say that they... wanted to stay.
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Which is, which is important.
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Like no one in the visiting hour I don't think were like, get me out of here. Okay. They're all like, no, this is all part of the act.
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Essentially. All right. They had parole hearings inside the course of a week somehow. They said that if they – they could be released if they would forfeit the money, and this is after I don't know how many of the six days, but they could – Not get paid and be paroled if they went in front of the parole board. They went in front of the parole board. Some of them did.
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We should just call this episode the Stanford Prison... experiment aka perhaps the hackiest experiment of all time and it's really not an experiment anyway no but it's the most famous psychology experiment ever
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And most of the prisoners said that they would give up their money, in fact. And the parole members, like I said, they were the graduate assistants. They even had one former prisoner, this guy that was a 15-year inmate, 15- or 17-year inmate on the board that I guess Zimbardo, I want to call him Zamboni.
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Right. So he was on the parole board. And he was kind of one of the ones, at least in the film version, that was kind of saying, like, no, this is like how it is. Like, you should keep it going.
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But I don't know how much of that was dramatized.
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There's been a lot of, in the years since, a lot of complaints that a lot of these kids were screaming, I want to go home, I want to go home. And for his part, Zimbardo said in the contract, it says, I want to exit the experiment, is the official line to say, and they could have gone home. And he was like, but you hear, no one ever said I want to exit the experiment.
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They would say I want my mommy or I'm going crazy or my God, please stop this. Please stop this. But they never said those exact words. The safe phrase. Yeah, the safe phrase. But it turns out that's bunk too, right?
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All right, some other things that happened to make it realistic. They brought in a lawyer when parents asked for one and played along like it was real. They brought in a chaplain who came in to speak to prisoners, and he played along with it too. They basically – did everything that you would think would happen in a real prison on a slightly scaled-down level.
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Because I used to think it was cool, like, oh, man, what a cool experiment.
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Yeah, and he did leave but was supposed to – agreed to come back supposedly to like play a different role as a prisoner who like maybe escaped and came back I think.
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Yeah, then I researched it, and I was like, this is a bunch of BS. All of it. This is one of the worst executed experiments I've ever heard of.
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Yeah. Well, and they were working in shifts though, which is important.
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I watched the movie today, too.
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Well, I'm a fan. He was good. But, like, I don't know. The movie, A, was pretty sensationalized as far as the violence. They showed a lot of straight-up physical violence in the movie, which supposedly didn't occur.
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All right, the final takedown.
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I would read it. All right, so where are we here? Basically, we're at the point where he has ended the experiment, and now we're dealing with the fallout since 1971 and how this should be viewed.
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Yeah, when the whole idea of this thing is to try and prove that without any influence, this is what happens.
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Like beating them with billy clubs and hog-tying them and, like, real violence. Hollywood.
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Well, and the fact we already mentioned that one of the researchers was a warden and Zamboni himself was the superintendent. Like, the minute he decided to do that, like... I looked it up. I think he was like in his late 30s when he did this. How did he not – like was he that bad at doing his job? How did he not know like, wait a minute, this will taint the experiment?
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Well, I mean, I can't fault that, but you can't call it a scientific experiment either.
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Yeah. Yollywood is what they call it.
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Yeah, so one of the other things he did wrong, and this one I just can't figure out either, is he didn't have a control group. And one of his – this guy wasn't in the experiment, but one of his colleagues came by one day and was like – You know, what's your control? What's your independent variable? Yeah, and he was like, what? Yeah. He's like, I don't have one.
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Yeah, what would you have here? Two different cell blocks? And one that literally isn't coached and completely left alone. That's what I would have done for sure. And then one where you're saying, hey, be brutal and we'll see if everyone falls into these roles.
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And then... What was I saying? Oh, I don't feel like it came down hard enough on this Yahoo. What was the guy's name? Zimbardo. Yeah, Zimbardo for just crafting a really poor, doing a very poor job at crafting a supposedly scientific experiment.
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And this is where it gets really scummy if you ask me. Zimbardo found out about this and supposedly Haslam and Riker said they discovered he was privately writing editors to keep them from getting published. And claiming that they were fraudulent.
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Yeah, that was a problem in and of itself. They shouldn't have known what they were doing.
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Yeah, which was, in fact, one of them was a liberal activist who kind of purposely went in there because he thought maybe these findings could be used one day for prison reform.
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Yeah, and that's basically that external circumstances are the drivers of human behavior.
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Yeah. Well, and not just the Nazis, but everything like the Vietnam War, which was... I mean, this was 1971. Right. And, like, the Maile Massacre, and, you know, I was just following orders. Like, this has his fingers in a lot of relevant politics of the day.
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Yeah, which is what the John Wayne guy very much has said all his life since then is, that this is what I thought they wanted was for me to be a bad guard so we could prove ultimately that prisons need reform.
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So is this being taught this way in classes now?
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Because one of these quotes from the article you sent, the guy said, I don't think it's scientific fraud in the typical sense. It was never considered to be scientific. It's typically represented in classrooms as a demonstration, not an experiment, and is a notorious case of ethical malfeasance.
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So that's almost a fourth takeaway is that it's an example of how to not do a study correctly. Right. Which is interesting.
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But it was approved by the Stanford Human Rights Subjects Review Committee at the time. Those were Zimbardo's experiments who he presented this to. And, you know, he still says that it was ethical.
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Yeah, you couldn't do this today.
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Or at least not with, like he did it.
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No, I mean, boy, I thought we were pretty scathing, but... We were.
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Yeah, the movie, you know, the documentary is probably a little more accurate, but the movie wasn't bad.
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But it was okay. It felt like a movie of the week. Gotcha.
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Yeah, watch it on your next flight. I will. That's my recommendation.
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I'm going to call this beautiful landscaping. Hey, guys, I spent the last two years fixing up the yard in our house in Point Pleasant, Pennsylvania.
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Yeah, it is. My husband actually introduced me to your show a few years back. And thank God he did because I've literally listened to you for hours and hours. while working in the yard.
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It was a huge undertaking. I have a more flexible work schedule than he does, so I volunteered to absorb most of the responsibility, although he did a lot of heavy lifting, too. I enjoyed the show so much, I stopped allowing myself to listen to it any other time. You were only allowed during yard work. This made me much more ready to get outside and get into it.
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You guys were with me while I carried literally tons of redstone uphill in buckets, hauling rocks for a firing landing, planted... Pecky Sandra, ferns, and hostas in the rockiest soil I've ever had to work with and just clearing away overgrowth.
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Yeah, I mean, you know it's a red flag when you don't publish your findings in a medical journal. You publish them in New York. Was it New York Magazine? New York Times Magazine.
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which it turned out included a fair amount of poison ivy. During it, I learned about a tiny, adorable little creature called the tardigrade, the business of head transplants, the hookworm, her favorite episode, and some haunting information I cannot unhear, such as you provided in the bullfighting and drowning episodes. You're always very entertaining, full of information.
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Even when I think it's boring, you make it fun. There were times you had me LOLing in my backyard. alone and covered in dirt and sweat like a crazy person. Attached are some pictures of the progress, all from your climate-controlled studio. That is from Sharon Proshinsky. Sharon, you did a great job. That is one beautiful yard you got going. Yeah, for sure. It is lovely. It is.
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Yeah, and down the hill, and then back up the hill, and then back down the hill.
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Well, great rag, but... that's not the place to go publish scientific findings.
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Yeah, for very good reasons.
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Yeah, back to the year of my birth, 1971. Wow. And Stanford, at Stanford University. Sure. Which is what, Palo Alto?
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I do feel like it has something to do with trees.
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No, I looked it up. The Stanford tree. Oh, okay. Cool. And the first question is, why is it a tree? Uh-huh.
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Well, I mean, I'm sure it's just because of where it is in California, but that doesn't answer the real question, which is, why would you have a tree?
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All right, we're at Stanford. It's 1971.
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Yeah, which would be about $93 today, funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research.
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Yeah, I mean, I kind of forgot what it was like to be a college student. That'd be... You know, what, between $1,200 and $1,400 starting off your summer?
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Good scratch for a 21-year-old.
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That's right. So you were divided into two lots, like you said. They asked people supposedly what you wanted to be unless this was purely a movie creation. And they did try and look up and try and find out the differences. Yeah. But they supposedly asked them, and most everyone said, or in fact everyone said prisoner.
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And one of the reactions from who ended up being the bad guard, the guy said, they asked him why, and he's like, because nobody likes guards. Right. It's like, why would anyone want to be a guard? Yeah. Because they thought, we'll just be prisoners because they just will lay around and smoke cigarettes.
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The prisoners had been arrested, by the way.
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Yeah, they weren't told when, but, like, the real cops came by, arrested each one of them for, you know, a variety of crimes.
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Yeah, they call it the Stanford County Jail. And they did a legit job. They put up signs. They had these— Rooms decked out like jail cells. They had a hole. They did a really believable job of making this seem like a prison environment at least.
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Yeah, like here's your uniforms. Here's your sunglasses.
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Yeah, naked under the smocks.
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Right. And, you know, this is the early 70s, so most of them had these big, afros and long hair and stuff under these panties. Right.
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to the the turnover from day one to two there was a prisoner riot Yeah, I mean they Like you said they were sort of laughing at first and I think we didn't mention too And this is will end up being very very problematic and the first sign that he didn't do a good job Zimbardo actually acted as the superintendent of the prison involved himself in his own experiment and
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and he had some graduate assistants that were assisting in the program. They acted as a parole board, and one of them was the warden.
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Oh, were they undergrad assistants?
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So, yeah, like you said, it escalated pretty quickly after kind of laughing at first. These guards got into their roles, to say the least, and really kind of started being jerks in quick order. And after the prisoners were like, hey, this is kind of funny. Like, you're not being very cool.
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And they were, you know, kind of smacked down and, you know, made to do things like push-ups and jumping jacks. And they would withhold food and stuff. Eventually, they would, like, take their beds away from them and stuff. Like, it just got worse and worse. And there was, I think, like you said, on day two, an uprising.
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They got together, threw the cots off their beds and threw the bed frames against the door and wouldn't let them in.
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Yeah, they were referred to only by their prison numbers. They would never say their names. They were made to memorize everyone else's prison number and like they would line them up and tell them to repeat their numbers for like an hour. If they didn't do it fast enough and then in reverse order, they would get punishment.
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They would do kind of the classic moves of holding one responsible for the punishment of others. Yeah, that's a big one. Like if you didn't make your bed good enough, then no one could go to sleep, stuff like that.
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Yeah, and I think even before that, when they went to stage the uprising, I don't think there were three rooms of three, and I think six of them, two of the rooms participated, and one of the rooms did not. Because not all the guys... not all the prisoners rebelled as much. Some of them just kind of went along with it.
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Hi, everybody. Chuck here. Hope you're having a great day. Hope you're having a great weekend. I'm thinking about you, each one of you individually. I'm thinking about you. I know where you live. I'm standing right behind you. Actually, I'm just kidding. But I hope you're doing well. This one goes back to July 5th, 2018. It's a good one.
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Yeah. He also said that one of them broke out in a psychosomatic rash. There was all manner of pain. Various levels of psychological breakdowns happening.
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Yeah, his name was Dave Eshelman. And he was the one who, he was the ringleader. He's the one that came out as the most brutal guard of them all. And all the other guards kind of fell in line behind him and took their cues from him.
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So Girl with a Pearl Earring, everyone has seen it. Like I said, it's very famous. It's of a young girl, looks to be sort of like mid-teenage years, looking over her shoulder. She's wearing a dress. She's wearing that turban, very prominent earrings, large pearl earrings, and pearls factored into quite a few of his works over the years.
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And it's one of those paintings where the eyes follow you, supposedly, which we've talked about in one of our short stuff episodes. Yeah.
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I think so, yeah. It's, you know, the effect of the eyes following, which doesn't happen in all paintings with eyes.
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Was it? Yeah. All right. So he paints this painting. And then, of course, the mystery of this one is who is this person? There has been speculation that it might be a mistress. A lot of people think it was his daughter, Maria, who would have been about 15 or 16.
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You know what I just realized? We record these in twos, and we just recorded the Pogs episode. Right. And you didn't say, welcome to the podcast.
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And like you said, who some people believe painted about a fifth of the works attributed to him because about a fifth of his collected works were I mean, this sounds mean to say, but they aren't up to snuff compared to his other works. So they sort of stand out from the rest. So they think that they may have been Maria's. Good painting still.
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Yeah, they're still a lot better than anything I could do. Yeah, it's not like they were stick figures, you know, out of nowhere. They're like, this Vermeer seems off. But... There was a 1999 novel from Tracy Chevalier, The Girl with the Pearl Earring, and then the 2000 film adaptation starring Scarlett Johansson, who was perfectly cast. She looks quite a bit like the girl with the pearl earring.
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But this was historical fiction. If you've seen that movie and you're like, no, she was the family's maid's assistant and love interest to Vermeer, that was just – I don't even think that was based on anything. It's just historical fiction. Yeah.
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Maybe she was an improv comedian and she was yes anding.
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You never know. But this is a mystery that will never be solved, which sometimes I like those kind of mysteries when it comes to stuff like this.
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What a missed opportunity for a great dad joke.
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And we would have found out by now, I think.
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Or I could see you pulling the trigger and then making fun of yourself.
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Yeah, so the mystery here, and this is one of our – this actually has a Simpsons crossover as well, which is kind of fun. Because Raphael painted a very famous painting called Portrait of a Young Man and is largely described as one of the most famous, if not the most famous, pieces of art to go missing during the plundering of great art in World War II by Hitler and the gang.
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And this is a crossover with The Simpsons in that in the Fighting Hellfish episode, when Grandpa Abe and Burns are stealing art, this is one of the paintings, Portrait of a Young Man.
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It's one of the paintings that they stole. Wow. Which shows that, you know, Simpsons writers back then at least were definitely doing their work, like their research work, because that's a nice little Easter egg, I think.
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I don't know. I don't remember. I mean, it's been a long time since I've seen that one, but it was one of the great episodes, I think.
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Well, retroactively, I'm going to say I hope everyone enjoyed the podcast. Now let's talk about art mysteries.
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Yeah, and, you know, they almost got these hidden away successfully. When Poland was being invaded, they knew that the art was going to be plundered. And so those three paintings were actually rescued by the prince and hidden away in a house in a place that I can't even pronounce. Sienawa? I'm not sure what that is. But they were ultimately found by the Gestapo and handed over to Frank.
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And Frank, you know, they were supposed to go to Hitler. Hitler was going to open a museum, the Führer Museum in Linz. And Frank actually kind of kept it for a little while, hung it in his residence. And then eventually this thing went to Germany and then Austria for a little while and then back with Frank in 1945. Wow.
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Yeah, they found a lot of other stuff, too.
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Yeah. And they, you know, along with I think over 800 other artifacts, they got from him and they could not go on to question him very long because he was executed just a year later. And since then, there have been a lot of rumors about where this thing ended up. Who has it? A lot of speculation that maybe a private collector in another country has it.
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Well, it's because we don't do these top lists anymore. That's part of it. You know, very famously, we used to have top tens on our Old House Stuff Works website, of which usually there were maybe seven decent entries. So we never did. I don't think we ever did a full ten on anything. Maybe somebody could probably correct us. But this one actually came in. At seven. They didn't even try.
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I think in 2012, there was a false report that it was supposedly in some bank vault. And they really don't know. It's just sort of one of those great mysteries of a disappeared painting. And my money is on a private collector probably has this thing stashed away. But you would also think that at some point somebody would talk.
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Unless it's really stashed.
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Yeah. And I think this is oil on panel, so I don't think this could even be like rolled up in a tube and put under your bed or anything.
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Yeah, it turns out that's a thing I didn't know was a thing. Empty frames in galleries. It's kind of sad.
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I'm Tom Brokaw. We'll leave the light on for you. All right. Well, that means it's time for another break. And we'll be back right after this to talk a little bit about Van Gogh.
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And I don't even know. We may do like five of these. We haven't even figured it out yet.
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I don't know. It was from the filmmaker who dare not speak his name. It was from a Woody Allen movie. I think it was in the most problematic movie, Manhattan, when he's with Diane Keaton and some obnoxious person says, or I think it's Diane Keaton says, Van Gogh, and he's, you know, he's incensed. He's like, Van Gogh, like how pretentious.
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Yeah, sure. Yeah. And we can cut all that out if we don't even want to talk about Woody Allen. That's fine.
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Yeah. So he suffered from definitely depression. There is speculation that he had bipolar disorder.
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But never furious.
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Was, you know, just sort of long suffering as an artist. He didn't, he only sold one painting before he died in 1890 at the age of 37. And the story goes is that he shot himself in the chest with a revolver, but it gets a little more complicated than that. And in what year was the book? In 2011, there was a book written called Van Gogh, colon, The Life, written by Stephen, I'm going to say, Meifa?
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No. Because he wants to be mad.
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And Gregory White Smith, and it seems like they sort of launched this idea, or at least really put it in the public forefront, that he was actually killed almost certainly accidentally by one of two boys, a younger gentleman that he was hanging out with that day.
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They should have called that series Fast and Loose. Tokyo Drift.
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Yeah, so this bullet misses all of his internal organs very improbably because it deflected off his rib cage. And he walked, like you said, to the doctor. They didn't have a surgeon on duty, so they couldn't remove the bullet. He lived a total of 30 hours after the shot and died of infection. Got to talk with his brother, you know, was speaking to people.
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So he had every opportunity to say that these two boys that I was hanging out with, that I was drinking, and I say boys, I think they were maybe late teens, early 20s. No, they were 16.
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I saw early 20s in another thing. Oh, yeah. But, you know, hanging out, getting drunk with them. One of these boys, Rene Sacretin, had a gun that apparently misfired a lot, and he liked playing with this thing. He liked to play cowboy, supposedly. He did. Yeah. And so it all just seems – and even his statement, he said – he didn't say, I shot myself. He said, do not accuse anyone.
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Yeah, you know what's funny is at one point we were – this was years ago. We were talking with Ludacris about doing something with the network. And I – because he's a local guy here in Atlanta. That's right. And I talked to our boss and said – what's he doing these days? Like, I haven't heard any music. And he went, he makes Fast and Furious movies. Like, that's his job now.
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It was I who wanted to kill myself.
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It's ambiguous, I think, as far as like – because the idea is that maybe he was accidentally shot, and then after he was shot, he was like, this is kind of what I wanted all along. I've been heading down this road. toward suicide, and then now it's just done for me.
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Yeah, and these two authors, they put forth some other circumstantial evidence like – That the bullet went in at a weird angle that would not have been the angle if you shot yourself in the chest. That his more recent works were a little more upbeat and a little more positive. And that he was not in that kind of mindset at the time.
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And that he had recently even written his thoughts about suicide, that he thought it was sinful and immoral. And so they sort of use all this as evidence that he would not have done it himself and that it was, you know, they believe it was an accident. His last words, very sad, were the sadness will last forever. He spoke to his brother, which that's tough.
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And I think Secretan came out in the 50s even and denied it, right? Like finally, once and for all.
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Right, but hey, that ain't my fault.
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Yeah, and it makes sense what he said was do not accuse anyone. Like that really seems like he's trying to cover for these kids that he didn't want to get in trouble.
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Because he's just getting rich off of making these movies.
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Yeah. I'm going to that immersive Van Gogh thing in July. Yeah.
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It is here in Atlanta. It's at the Pullman Yards.
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Over in Kirkwood where they shoot like every movie in Atlanta shoots there. Right, yeah. So, yeah, it's supposed to be pretty cool.
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I think that's the deal. I think you go in and you are surrounded by projected art in different ways. from what I can gather.
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Yeah, it looks kind of cool.
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Don't you mean Hilter? Did you notice that?
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Oh, my gosh, yes, in the headline. In the headline. Did Hilter really do these paintings? Do these paintings? Who wrote that? I feel bad, but, like, did Hilter really do these paintings?
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by the music industry. I never really kind of really thought of that parallel. But in 1909, Hitler is traipsing around Vienna and he is selling watercolors copied from postcards to tourists. So... If you've ever traveled to Europe, he was one of those guys that was down by the river, the river bank. In a van. Yeah, in a van selling these and literally copied from postcards.
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So he did that for a little while, made a little bit of money. Because, you know, if you look at his art, it's way better than I could do. It's, you know, it's okay. Oh, yeah. But like modern – and it's hard to tell if modern art critics like – so much goes into looking at a Hitler painting and reviewing it. Like, it's really hard to kind of separate those things.
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But the general thought is that he had – nothing exceptional about him at all. It was, he was the kind of artist that would sell stuff down by the river to tourists. He was, they were fine. He was capable, but they were copycat paintings. He was copying things. He had no point of view. He did this in 1913 as well in Munich, painting Munich cityscapes and landscapes and selling them to tourists.
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And then in 1914, got hauled in by the police of all things for failing to register for the military.
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I only saw one of those, I think.
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Yeah, I mean, and that was one of the major reasons that he was such an art plunderer during the war and stole as much art as he could from real famous artists and famous paintings because he had all this backstory as a failed artist. And it was interesting. I did see that, like, one of his major – I mean, because he wasn't an utter failure at first.
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He had a backer early on, I think, who was a Jewish man.
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Yeah, which was really interesting. And there was – I don't know, man. There's a lot of speculation about what that all meant to him. And, like, people try and draw parallels to, like, some of the paintings. I mean, some of it feels like a stretch. Definitely like the –
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You know, the cold streets of Munich, like, were painted, like, clearly with a future cleansing in mind to make it look like this. That's a stretch. Yeah, some of that stuff seems like a stretch, but you could definitely read into the backstory, at least, I think, with some accuracy.
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No, I think any sociopath, you can look at their past and see the dots connected, you know? Yeah. So like you said, there was this kind of just was the deal for a long time. And then like anything else, like people wanting to get original Charles Manson music reels in the early late 90s, early 2000s, there was a market for for Hitler's work. I think in 2009, a British auction house opened.
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That's a great note. I love it. I've always wanted Bob Newhart as my podcasting partner.
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Someone paid $150,000 for 15 early sketches and watercolors, including a self-portrait. And then in 2015, some unnamed investors paid $450,000 for a set of watercolors. I think there were 12 or 13 that survived. Yeah.
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Unbelievable, but totally believable.
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All right, number one on the list. You want to talk a little Caravaggio?
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I got nothing else. That was a good five. I think we have committed to doing a robust episode on the Gardner Museum heist because that's a good one, and that was on this list and way underplayed.
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Yeah, I'm going to call this... Middle names, because we had a little discussion in our John Muir episode about how Emily and I and our friends, Justin and Melissa, one night were going by our middle names as a joke. And I had the theory that you have no emotional connection to your middle name if you don't have a reaction when you hear it said out loud.
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And I just meant sort of the non-dominant name. It didn't necessarily mean middle names because my brother goes by his middle name. Scott is his middle name and some people do that. It's a thing. And certainly Amy does. She said, I was listening to the show and at the end you were chatting about using middle names and how you don't have an emotional connection when you hear it.
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I have an interesting situation that everyone, everyone in my family uses their middle names. So I've always been called Amy ever since I was born. But my first name is Helen. This causes an interesting situation at airports and doctor's appointments. where they refer to me as Helen, and I always have to remember that they're talking to me.
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Big fan of the show, kept me curious, and my curious spirit satisfied over the last three or four years. And it's such a comfort knowing there's always another episode to listen to. Best wishes from the UK. They're always so nice. And that is from Amy. Helen Amy.
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Yeah, because we say Helen, she's like, who?
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That's right. That wasn't even forced. Nice work, Bob. So Michelangelo Marisi da Caravaggio was an Italian Baroque painter. He, at one point in 1606, killed a man named Romuccio Tomassoni and said, I got to get out of here because I'm in big trouble now, and went away from Rome and fled to Malta where he had a pretty brief but – I guess, notable stay.
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He was only there about six months and kind of hiding out and quickly hooked up with the Knights of Malta and was briefly one of the Knights of Malta.
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Yeah. And painted one of his most famous paintings there, the oil on canvas, 12 feet by 17 feet, the beheading of John the Baptist.
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Well, at any rate— Because they really, in this How Stuff Works article, they called it a petty squabble, and that really doesn't tell the story.
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Yeah, and it kind of took a while for it to be even very visible because it underwent some restorations over the years. And in the 1950s, they did a restoration where they really could see the signature and what it said. I don't know about for the first time, but like super clearly at least. And it said F period dot F Michelang, M-I-C-H-E-L-A-N-G. And then, you know, of course –
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Everyone's like, well, what does this mean? Because there is no F in his name. It's not like his initial. Is he saying, you know, hey, screw Michelangelo, myself, screw me, or I'm screwed? No, no one really said that.
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They thought the F, there are a couple of different theories, thought it was shorthand for fratter, or which means brother, because he was one of the knights, and maybe he just meant like brother, brother. or whatever. Uh, and then some other people said, no, maybe it means, stands for, uh, FECIT, F-E-C-I-T, uh, which is Latin for did, translating basically into, uh, I did it.
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And it's spelled out in blood, kind of confessing to his crime.
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Right. Like before God.
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That painting still hangs at St. John's Coe Cathedral in Malta too.
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But they said, nice try, buddy. And they kicked him out for being a, quote, foul and rotten member, end quote. So it didn't work. A month later.
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Well, I think we should take a break.
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And we'll be back right after this.
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All right. We had a great cliffhanger with Vermeer. Vermeer, the very famous Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer, had a very famous painting, a lot of very famous paintings, but one in particular that has had a bunch of names over the years. In fact, it did not get the name Girl with a Pearl Earring until the 20th century. It was called everything from Girl with a Turban to Girl with an Earring.
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It had lots of different names because it was not officially titled by Vermeer, nor dated, even though they think it was around 1665.
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Yeah, and a true show of American spirit and determination. just love of the game, these men got together, they formed their own teams, and they did what's called barnstorming.
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And they would load up in cars or on a bus, and they would go from town to town and take their show on the road, and they would get a game up wherever they could. and wherever people would pay a couple of pennies to come watch a baseball game, they were playing white players in these barnstorming games or black players or Latino players.
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Yep, and one white guy. All right, so barnstorming's going on. Like I said, they would roll into town. They would play whatever teams they could play. And it started to gain some momentum. Like, people started to follow these players. Yeah. And they actually got fans. And there was a former player named Andrew Rube Foster who owned one of those teams. And he said, you know what?
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I think we need our own league. Yeah. They won't let us in their league. Let's start our own. Because besides the fact that people want it, there's money to be made here.
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Oh, I don't even think he was in as a player. Oh, really? Yeah, I think just for his achievement. I gotcha. Although it may have been both. I don't know. But in 1920, he said, all right, here's what we'll do. Let me get these seven team owners of the Midwestern League that are doing these barnstorming traveling shows, basically.
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Let's get together in Kansas City, seven all-black teams, in addition to those two Chicago Giants, You have the Cuban Stars, the Dayton Marcos, the Indianapolis ABCs, and the very famous Kansas City Monarchs and St. Louis Giants. And this is the really great thing about this story. All of these teams, except for the Monarchs, were black-owned teams.
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Well, I even put a note in here. If you don't like sports, listen to this one anyway. Yeah. Because this is about much more than baseball.
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Yeah. And not only that, like the Major League Baseball site points out like this was – It should be embraced in some ways because this, at a time, was one of the only ways that minorities could fully excel to their fullest potential. Right.
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Right. Sure. Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Christy Matheson. Like, we know they were good. Like, we're not knocking their talent, but. who knows what it would have been like in a truly integrated league.
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This is about history and about... Overcoming adversity? Yeah, like it's a very interesting story because, and we'll get into this, but I think people tend to think of the Negro Leagues, and that's what this is about, the baseball Negro Leagues, which is what they were called. We don't use that word anymore. No. But you call this that because that's what it was. Right.
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I'm not doubting you, of course. I just want to... Sure, no, I'm with you.
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So we talked about the integration of the Negro Leagues, which was awesome. Pretty soon, other leagues formed, not just teams. There was one right here in the South, the Negro Southern League. With teams from right here in Atlanta.
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Yeah, I don't think this was the first team in Atlanta that played in the Negro Southern League because they folded that same year. But the Atlanta Black Crackers, we also had the Atlanta Crackers, which was the white team. We had the Atlanta Black Crackers, and it sounds funny that we say Ponce de Leon, not Ponce de Leon, but that's how we say it here.
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It's the street that fronts our office building.
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But that's the street in Atlanta that fronts our office. And if you go and look on the Internet, you can see these awesome pictures of this cool little office. Baseball stadium right there hundreds of feet from where we sit. Yeah, really neat. Yeah And now you have Whole Foods Now you just have to listen close to pay seven dollars for artisan mayonnaise. Yeah
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Oh, that's just for the... Just for one smear? Yeah, just one smear.
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Yeah. You know, never get anything with bones at one of those. Oh, never. Or liquid. What a waste.
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You throw half of that chicken leg away.
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You paid for it. Sure. Or just, you know, grind that chicken bone up and eat it and get your money's worth.
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That's a great idea. And you can say, I'm no chump. Yeah. Just go around screaming, I'm not paying for that bone. All right, so where are we? The Negro Southern League folded. The Eastern Colored League opened in 1923. And then finally, in 1928, the American Negro League formed, and that was...
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That was when things like they called eventually the American Negro League and the American, I'm sorry, the National Negro League, the majors of the Negro Leagues. Right. Like that was where the creme de la creme played.
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You tend to think of it in a certain way, which is only... Yeah, well, baseball was segregated, and they couldn't play in the white leagues, and that's awful, which it is and was. But there's another side to it, too.
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They profited on certain days of the week. Sundays were big days because they played double-headers. But the fact is, black Americans didn't have a lot of expendable money to throw at going to baseball games, even though they were pretty cheap. It was commiserate with what people made at the time.
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Guessless. So they were making a little money on Sundays. They weren't hugely profitable overall, even though they were known as somewhat successful.
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Where these men and these business owners were empowered. And the players. Yeah, and it's, yeah, that's just a tease. I just wanted to whet their appetite. Oh, you did. For people who hate sports. You whetted my appetite.
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Yeah, and these are the players trying to make ends meet. The owners themselves were struggling here and there. White people came to see games sometimes, especially when they were exhibition games against white teams. Right. Because they loved to go out there and see something they had never seen before.
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Which many times was the black team mopping the floor with the white team. Yeah. Although... it seemed pretty evenly matched. Like from what I gathered, it wasn't like lopsided one way or the other. Yeah. Like they were good competitive games.
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Right. So they list out four things here on the site. They said the two leagues the the American and National Negro leagues were northern and basically city dwelling teams all right couple that with There weren't a lot of black people living in northern cities at the time the South was you know was way more well, I want to say integrated but
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wasn't integrated way more black people living in the south at the time yeah which is I wonder why the southern negro league didn't take off like a rocket then yeah I mean probably for the other reasons like you couldn't afford to go to the games and all that stuff yeah that's a good point black people that were in the north didn't have a whole lot of money and so basically all that adds up to not a lot of audience buying tickets and the only way to keep a league afloat is to sell tickets and to sell concessions same as it is today yeah
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So all those things coupled with Rube Foster. And the depression. Their greatest champion and probably sharpest mind, sadly, succumbing to mental illness. And then the depression, and that was the end of the beginning of the Negro Leagues, right?
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All right, so it didn't take long. The old saying, you can't keep a good man down. People wanted to play baseball. They were good at it. They thought there was more money to be made in leagues. And so what happens is these numbers guys get involved. And a numbers man is... The numbers game was basically like an illegal, unsanctioned street lottery.
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So numbers guys had a lot of money. And some of them said, you know what? Let's put money into starting baseball teams and leagues.
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And one guy in particular in Pittsburgh, Gus Greenlee. Great name. He was a bar owner in Pittsburgh. He bought the Pittsburgh Crawfords in 1931. He said, well, I've got a team, but I don't have a league. So two years later, he formed the second Negro National League. And other numbers guys bought in, and all of a sudden they had another league going.
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Yeah, they eventually migrated back to Pittsburgh. Did they? Over to Pittsburgh, yeah.
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No, I think there was still the other Pittsburgh team. But from what I understand, the Homestead Grays eventually became part of Pittsburgh.
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Or maybe there was another team. I'm not sure. But I do know they eventually went to Pittsburgh. Because you know Homestead. We've been there. We did a show there.
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Yeah, nine years in a row. Josh Gibson, cool Papa Bell, and Buck Leonard, some of their stars.
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Well, some of the Yankees teams did over the years, but I don't think anything right now.
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No, like, even the best team right now doesn't have five future Hall of Famers.
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No, I mean, he's our best player, but... Come on, Freddie. The best player on the worst team in baseball? Right. Not very good. Casey at the bat. All right, so we did mention that there were exhibition games going on, and things really picked up with the exhibition games now, because they were a little well-funded, and this is when...
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So players are starting to make some, like the top players are starting to make some pretty good money at the time. You can't go any further without talking about Satchel Paige, Leroy Satchel Paige. Dude. He was a pitcher? Yeah. Very interesting dude.
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So have you ever seen video or, I guess, film of him pitching?
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Yeah, that was the style. But he had a weird wind-up. He had this sort of double windmill that he would do with his pitching arm. And then... When he was younger, he had a great fastball, and he was noted for his control, like Greg Maddux-like in his pinpoint control. Yeah. Supposedly could just put a baseball within a half inch of where he wanted it to be, which is a big, big deal for a pitcher.
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Sure. As he lost his fastball over the years, he learned... Basically every pitch under the sun. He pitched until he was 59 years old.
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He was even older than Gaylord Perry. How old was he? No, he was in his 40s. Oh, was he? Like Nolan Ryan, Gaylord Perry. Gaylord. A few pitchers. Nolan Ryan made it to 50? No, not 50, but. He came close. Like pitchers notably have been a little older. Which is crazy because like. Their arms. Yeah. But they're not, you know, they're not like running around and batting like other players.
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Shutouts, right? Yeah. If you don't know baseball, shutout means you have pitched a game where no one scored a run. Right. And back then, they were probably complete game shutouts, meaning he never came out and was relieved by another pitcher.
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yeah to put that into perspective for non-baseball fans again if you have 300 wins wins not shutouts wins then you're a hall of famer yeah and in fact they don't think there will ever be another 300 game winner again because of they are more pitchers in the rotation now they usually have five guys instead of four they don't pitch as deep into games they rest them a lot more so it's just we may not ever see that happen again right just because of the way it's built right
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And that's counting his entire career, I assume.
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Yeah, like, let's say that people don't count the Negro Leagues as being in the top league at the time. Like, cut it in half, and he's still way ahead of everybody else. If you subtract 50% of everything he did.
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Yeah, so he learned all sorts of pitches. By the end of his career, he was pitching knuckleballs, and he was famous for the— The hesitation pitch, which he invented, which was when he got to the white major leagues, they were like, that's illegal. You can't do that. It's called a balk. And he was like, all right.
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It was very sneaky. You know, it's like you act like you're pitching, then you stop. Because he was like, you know, I got guys up there that are starting to swing. Cause I'm so fast. Like when they see me winding up, they're starting to swing.
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So if I just put a little slight pause there, then they're swinging and then the ball comes. So it was very, very tricky little pitch. Um, and he was making between 30 and 40 grand a year and the Negro. And this is also with, uh, appearances and stuff like that. Right. But in the Negro leagues, which is about half a million dollars today.
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Yeah, to be a draw. Yeah. And here's one little cool thing about our own Atlanta Braves. In 1968, Satchel Paige was lacking one more season to get his Major League Baseball pension and was out of the league and retired. And the Atlanta Braves signed him as a player-coach contract Like Terry Pendleton. Yeah. He was never a player coach, was he? No, but he was a player and then a coach. Oh, yeah.
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Pete Rose was a player coach. Was he really? Like he managed the Reds and played for them. I did not. And bet on them. Yeah. But they signed him to a one-year deal so he could get his Major League Baseball pension.
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Yeah. Go Braves. So if you see a picture, when I saw a picture of him in the Braves uniform, I was like, wait a minute. He never played for the Braves. And he really didn't. It was sort of, you know, just a little sneaky way to get him in there.
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Which is great. All right. So Satchel Paige is killing it. Other players are killing it. It would not be long before somebody... in the white leagues, somebody said the talent is too good. Somebody has to be the first to make this move and break the color barrier.
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Maybe. Well, I didn't see the most recent Jackie Robinson movie. That's what I'm thinking of. Was it Harrison Ford? Maybe. I've seen him portrayed in other movies before.
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Yeah, that's a huge point. Because like I said, Roy Campanella was probably a better player at the time than Jackie Robinson. But if you see the Jackie Robinson story, I didn't see the recent one, like I said, but I just know a lot about his story. was the right guy. He had the temperament. He had the leadership. Roy Campanella would take your head off. Yeah, he did. He was a tough guy.
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But Jackie Robinson was the man in every way. And we should also shout out to The Road Being Paved. by people like Joe Louis and Jesse Owens before Jackie Robinson.
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As far as just white America accepting mainstream black athletes into their lives.
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For sure. Yeah. So Branch Rickey was... He was a very puritanical guy. He would often lecture players on sex and drinking and stuff. And he was... He wasn't just some benevolent champion of the black man.
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Exactly. Let's put it this way. If Branch Rickey... hadn't wanted to sell tickets by fielding a good team, he would have never signed Jackie Robinson. He was a businessman. That's a good point. The Dodgers sucked at the time. Did they? But he was an idealist. I mean, he was very much like, no, this is wrong, and they should be allowed to play. Yeah.
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Yeah, Jackie Robinson played one year in the minors, which was ridiculous. They should have just, like, he spent his entire life playing in the minors. They should have just promoted him right away. But I think they just wanted to ease that transition. He won the batting title in the minors, his only year there, and then won Rookie of the Year in his very first year with the Brooklyn Dodgers.
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Yeah. And that was April 15th, 1947, was when he made his debut, which was a very, very historic day.
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An amazing day. Major League Baseball has really honored Jackie Robinson to the fullest now.
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Yeah. Larry Doby, Cleveland Indians. Willard Brown, the St. Louis Browns. Henry Hank Thompson, the St. Louis Browns. Dan Bankhead. Leroy Satchel Paige made it finally. And, of course, Roy Campanella, among others. These were the first African Americans in Major League Baseball. And by 1952, just a few years later, there were 150 black players.
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And by 1954, all but four major league teams had black players. There were a few holdouts.
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So with the signing of Jackie Robinson and all the players to follow, like you hinted at earlier, and like this article plainly says, it was a very bittersweet end Um, in one way it was great. The color barrier was smashed. League was being integrated and they were getting their due.
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Um, although it was a struggle, but in another way, it was also sad that this league that had so much gumption and such a, a great, like, we'll do it ourselves then, attitude, and empower these men to play and these people to own these teams and start their own leagues. So it was definitely like a weird time in history. Yeah, it is.
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I think nowadays there's much more of a reverence and a bit of mourning for the disappearance of that league. But, you know, in another way, like I said, it was smashing the color barrier was way more better.
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Oh, actually, you know what the best possible thing could have been was if the white major leagues absorbed those teams and owners and ownership as part of one big league. Nice. But they were like, no, we're just going to take your players.
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Yep, officially disbanded in 1948. And this article says into the 1950s, there were still a few teams playing here and there. And in the early 1960s even, there was like one final team, or I guess one final pair of teams. I guess they had to play somebody. Still playing.
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Yeah, it says the Negro American League was the last to throw in the town in the early 60s. Yeah. So, yeah, more than one team.
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Yeah. And, you know, there's a big push. I think like one of the least represented demographics now in pro baseball are African-Americans.
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Yeah. Partially because of the rise of Latino players and then partially because they've. there's not a big a push to play baseball these days as kids in America. And so there's a lot of concerted efforts to try and get baseball going again in black communities, which is awesome.
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Oh, yeah. Should we rattle off a few of those? Sure. All right. Boy, these are some good nicknames. How about Jelly Gardener or Spoonie Palm? Turkey Stearns. Turkey Stearns. He's a Hall of Famer. Copper Knee Thompson or Steel Arm Davis?
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Yeah. And boy, we need to do one. I've had it on my list for a while on Jim Crow, period. Yeah. How about this? First of all, where did you get this other good, really good article?
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Possum Poles, Ace Adams, King Tut. Smokey Joe Williams. Bullet Joe Rogan. Yeah, Joe Rogan. Did you know that? Ratz Henderson? Boy, Turkey Stearns. That might be the best. That might be my new hotel pseudonym. Cool Papa Joe. Yeah, but no one would buy that at a hotel registry.
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This one I'm going to call Short and Sweet. What do you call it when you... remember something with a pneumatic device?
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Was it nomadic? You remember it while you're wandering around? Pneumatic, of course. Nice. I feel like a dummy. Uh, howdy Josh and Chuck. A friend recommended your show to me recently and I love it. Love it. Uh, you satisfy all my nerdy entertainment requirements while I'm at work. Um, you seem to have a bit of trouble recalling the order of, uh, taxonomic taxonomic there you go categories
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Boy, I'm going to have trouble in this next show. Categories. During woolly mammoths. Not woolly mammoths, as our typo originally said. Yeah, it was my fault. That's all right. You just forgot to know. Wally. Here's an easy memory trick we learned in high school biology. Kings play chess on fine green silk. Kingdom phylum class order family genus species.
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I love that stuff because I will never forget it now.
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I have no idea why this is still in my head over 10 years later. Well, that's exactly why.
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Katie. So I hope that helps. And that is Katie from West Texas.
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In the prehistory section of that one, and this is just to show you the tone of things, in 1857 there was a Supreme Court Chief Justice, Roger Taney, who, it's funny the way this writer put it, he said he's campaigning hard for a spot in the American Scum Hall of Fame. I like that. It's pretty funny.
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In his official writing, this is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, said, Negroes were so far inferior to whites that that they had no rights which a white man was bound to respect. This is the chief justice of the Supreme Court.
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I think I need to say that like four more times before it sinks in. That was two or three. This is what was going on despite the Emancipation Proclamation, despite the 14th Amendment. Well, that was actually before it.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just to excuse that guy. But after... After that, despite the amendments to the Constitution, despite all of that, it took to the 1960s to even begin the slightest bit of real progress. Yeah. That's true. Not quite true because history is littered with people who've made advancements. They did. And I don't want to knock that.
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Yeah, totally. You're right. It wasn't until the 60s. But part of the problem, too, was – and this is a valid point – Other courts had said, like there was this Justice Henry Billings Brown, said legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences.
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Basically what he's saying is like we can create laws, but you're not going to change public's mind by creating laws. You can't like abolish prejudice.
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I think 99% of people think that Jackie Robinson was the first black American to play pro baseball.
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Yeah, I mean, I'm a big baseball fan and a bit of a student of its history, so I knew.
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Yeah. I mean, not within a couple of decades, a couple of years. Oh, really? Yeah. Like literally two years after the end of the Civil War, there was an African-American team called – I actually don't know what their name was, but they were out of Philadelphia – And they said, we want to join your league, which was the National Association of Baseball Players at the time.
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And they were rejected as a team, of course, at the time. But that didn't mean that there were not players individually. Right.
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Yeah. It was a little bit later, in 1886, finally, and not for too long, we had two brothers, Moses Fleetwood Walker and Welday Walker. Who did they play for? The Toledo Blue Stockings.
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You are totally right. Moses was older. He played 42 games for the team. Well, they only came along and played in six games. Moses hit .263 that season. And they were the son of a physician. Oh, yeah? Like the first black physician in Toledo.
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And went to college, played baseball at Oberlin in Michigan. Yeah. So I know the Wolverines. I didn't know Oberlin even had sports.
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Phased him out in favor of acoustic guitars and debate. I know a lot of people that went to Oberlin, weirdly.
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Well, my good friend Robert Shahadi from Boston that you met that came to our show. Lucy Wainwright went to Oberlin. Didn't know that. David Reese went to Oberlin. Okay. And I feel like a couple of other people. Yeah. He's got a nice reputation. Yeah. Great name, too. Oberlin? Oberlin. It sounds Ivy League. Yeah, Oberlin. The sound of quality. Oberlin. Sounds Ivy League-ish. Right.
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That's on their t-shirts. Although, we do need to give a shout-out. There was one guy in 1879, William Edward White. who substituted and played one game. Oh, yeah? Who was officially, and this is a little murky history-wise because we don't know much about him or how it happened, but supposedly he played one game as a professional baseball player as a black man.
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Yeah. There was another player too. I read another story about, and we'll get to Roy Campanella. He was a, He was better than Jackie Robinson at the time. A catcher who was just amazing, Hall of Famer. And he had a, there was a white pitcher. It was like, you know, he was a great catcher, but I didn't want to play with him.
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So I would, when I pitched to him, I would just ignore his signs and threw whatever I want. Like to his own detriment and to the team's detriment. He just wouldn't take the signs. What a putz. I know. Career sabotage, essentially. I don't think he lasted long either. And Campanella's in the Hall of Fame, so he can say that.
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I want to give these names all out, though. The four black men in the minors in 1866, besides Moses Walker, we had Bud Fowler, Frank Grant, and George Stovey. And as far as I'm concerned, all these dudes are American heroes. So, all of a sudden, they succumb to pressure in 1890 after hate mail and death threats to...
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Coaches and managers and umpires and, you know, basically everybody, the players themselves. And they said, you know what? We're going to shut it down. Officially in 1890, we can no longer have any black men in our league.
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Well, and it was never on the rule books either. It was an unofficial non-gentleman's agreement. Right. Because eventually when it was broken, it wasn't like a rule was broken. Right, right. It was just an unwritten rule.
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But thankfully, by this time, even though they were doing the job, it was too late. The tides had turned and the Allies were steaming toward victory. And even though they started pumping out these bazookas, it was sort of too little too late.
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All right. That's a great setup. Thank you. That's only part one into what is a very interesting story. Yeah. So we're going to take a little break, and we'll come back and talk about what went wrong with these two brothers right after this.
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We've got to go back in time a little bit because we sped right up to World War II.
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But we need to go back to about 1933 because these brothers ended up fracturing in a big, big way. And there have been some legendary sibling rivalries through the years, but this is really one of the greats. And I believe even Rudy wrote as an older man, the relation to my brother was ideal from 1924 to 1933.
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Yeah, it's weird. Andrew is wearing white Reebok high tops with bronze pantyhose and orange dolphin running shorts. And he claims he doesn't work for Hooters part-time. Oh, oh, oh, yes. Yes. I like that you didn't know that because that means you don't go into Hooters.
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Then his young wife tried to interfere with business matters, although she with her 16 years had no experience at all and the warfare began. So here's how the story goes. Is that in 1933, Adi was indeed married to a 16-year-old, which seems very creepy now, but back then it was not the strangest thing in the world. Slightly less creepy. Slightly less creepy.
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Well, they just, it was a different time.
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So he was married to a 16-year-old and tried to get involved in the business. Rudy was not happy about this. And they all lived together. The two brothers and their wives all lived together in the same townhouse.
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Which is not a great recipe for success anyway. Right. You know, you need to have your own place. Yeah.
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Yeah, this was true evidence that things were really bad. If something as simple possibly as just a little misunderstanding of whether or not the bastards were the Allies bombing or you, my brother, and my sister-in-law. Right. So, I mean, things were pretty bad if this is what did it.
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I had to go. Actually, I've only been there once, and that was when I worked at that awful job with the chicken killers. And it was on a stupid work trip they made me go on, and that was like the only place in town. And all these yokels that I worked with were like, yeah, man, let's go to Hooters. And I went in there and I was just like, oh, my Lord, what is – they were trapped in time.
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Yeah, so in April 1945, the Americans march into Herzog. Those tanks pull up in front of that factory. And the soldiers, the American soldiers are out there like kind of going over what they should do. Should we destroy this building or not?
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Yeah, so Adi's wife, Kata, comes out, and she basically walks right up to these enemy soldiers and says, we only want to make shoes. We only desire to make shoes. And they're like, why are you talking like Colonel Klink? And she said, we all do. Oh, okay. And that's basically like she convinced them to spare the factory. They did so. And not only that, the Air Force, the U.S.
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Air Force set up operations there at their air base and realized that they really liked these shoes.
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Yeah, and so it went off the charts. They started getting these huge orders for sports teams, American sports teams because of this.
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Yeah, 15 years after that bunker incident. Yep. So it took a long time to finally boil over. Right. And in between there was another war. They were not good Nazis, we should point out. Kind of, you know, they were members of the Nazi party and Rudy did get drafted. But like you said, he deserted his post a lot. And, you know, they really did just want to sell shoes.
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So, like you said, they split up the company. And we mentioned earlier that this river ran through the center of town. And I said, significant. And it is significant because it literally divided the town. And they set up their business. It's not like one of them said, well, I'm going off to Berlin. Right. They just set up camp on opposite sides of that river. Adi Dassler.
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said, I will name my company Adidas. Actually, at first they named it Adas. Well, yeah, but everyone said that stinks.
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Yeah, Rudy went with Ruda, and everyone said that no one's going to buy shoes named Ruda, especially in the United States. And he said, I don't understand. And they said, don't worry about it. So somehow he got Puma out of Ruda. Right. Which I don't get, but it's a name that stuck.
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Yeah, and, you know, there were mistakes from both of them along the way business-wise. One of the big ones for Puma early on was that Rudolph got into a spat with a coach of the German national soccer team. And, of course, all that did was open the door for his brother in Adidas, to go in there and say, what about these shoes? Which is exactly what happened.
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And so at the 1954 World Cup, Germany wears Adidas with those signature stripes. And even though they were not favored at all, West Germany actually won against Hungary, I believe.
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And that was a huge, huge deal on a national, international stage.
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The miracle on ice on grass. That might have legs, my friend.
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I love it. So that was one mistake. Adidas would, of course, go on to make some mistakes later. I know that you sent that one article where they talked about how – They said, you know, at one point that like jogging, no one's going to do that. So we're not going to make jogging shoes. Right. And aerobics, that's a... It's a flash in the pan. Sure.
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And so you mentioned Reebok earlier. It's hard for the young folk out there who are listening to know this, but there was a time when Reebok was the name in sports apparel.
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And, hey, we don't want to yuck your yum. If you work at Hooters or if you love going there, more power to you?
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Yeah, and Adidas is two and Puma's three, right?
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Hooray! Let's take a break. Yeah, we'll take a break and we'll talk about how this rift still oddly carries over in that town today and run DMC.
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All right, so back in the day when they first split off this company and that river's running through this town, it was a really big deal. It wasn't just a sibling rivalry. It became a townwide rivalry in that you worked for one company or the other as a family. Like husband and wife didn't work. They didn't split up, and one worked at Puma and one worked at Adidas. Right.
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Yeah, and it still carries over to this day. Some of those recent interviews that we both read, I mean, it's certainly now it's a little more good-natured ribbing. But they say when you walk around this town, walk through a playground, and you will see kids kitted out in all Adidas or all Puma clothes. And this is carried down from generations where they were Adidas or Puma families.
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And it was a really big deal and still remains so to this day such that the mayor, who actually came from a Puma family.
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Yeah, it's funny. I was thinking about a couple of weeks ago when it was like the Costanza moment when you thought of a line after the moment when you were talking about how I was crazy for not liking olives and I got on to you. I should have said, don't yum my yuck.
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But to be mayor, you can't, you know. You've got to be a politician. Sure. So he will wear to some events, casual events, Puma gear and sometimes Adidas gear. Eventually in 2009, they had a friendly soccer match between – the official Puma-sponsored team and Adidas team, and he wore one Puma shoe and one Adidas shoe just to remain neutral, I guess. And to look like a total jackass. Probably so.
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Then it showed him rubbing his Adidas foot later on. They caught him on camera.
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Yeah, and the mayor hacker, his first name is German.
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I wonder if he pronounces it German. That's what I would say.
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Because they don't say Germany over there anyway.
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No, I guess they spell their Hermans with an H. Yeah, I think it would be Mayor German Haka.
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German Haki Saka. Who's on grass. But he says if someone comes in through the door to this day, your gaze still wanders to their shoes. It's just in the DNA of those people that this athletic gear is so important. It's so strange. It's such a cool, cool, weird story.
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And like you said, they didn't speak for decades. Apparently – Much later in life, there were a couple of times when they were rumored to have spoken. Once, I think they ran into each other at an airport. Once, they saw each other at a hotel. And I believe on the deathbed, which one tried to get in touch with the other? Rudy.
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Rudy put out the call, said, I would like to see my brother Adi one more time. And Adi went, no thanks. I'm good. Nine. Can you believe it? Yeah, man. That's tough.
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Yeah, or he's an attorney and he was just after the most money.
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So we have a fun little postscript on this. I know we've been talking about Run DMC. And again, you youngins, it might be second nature now to associate athletic gear and hip hop and rap music and culture. But back in the early 1980s, that was not the case until Run DMC came along.
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Yeah, or just like, I mean, sometimes I feel like I've seen just like denim jackets and just sort of like, just sort of street wear, which is the unhippest thing I've ever said.
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I think it's weird that we both thought about that moment afterward.
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Because usually we just go back into our hyperbolic chambers and float for the next six days.
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Yeah, and in 1986, a senior employee at Adidas named Angelo Anastasio went to that tour at Madison Square Garden, saw this happen with the Adidas sneakers, and was like, hold on a minute. Wait just a second. We could have something here. Ran back to the headquarters, and within just a few days, they signed them to a million-dollar endorsement deal, and that was like...
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a sea change forward for hip-hop groups getting money in all sorts of ways.
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And it's like that began the marriage of, like, I'm going to put out a record. I'm going to get a shoe deal. I might get a vodka sponsor. Oh, yeah. I'll get money flowing in from all kinds of directions and Run DMC started it all.
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Andrew's nodding. That means you're correct. Awesome. Thanks, Andrew. Jerry would have been like, what? My miso's getting cold.
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I am a PhD student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, and I study marine sponges because they make all sorts of unique molecules that can be used as new medicines. I think sponges are the coolest animals on Earth, and I'd love to share some of my favorite sponge fun facts. You ready? Yes.
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Not only are sponges thought to be the oldest single living animals on Earth, but some evolutionary biologists even think sponges were the first animals to ever evolve. In other words, our last common animal ancestor could very well have been a sponge.
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Did you know the first antiviral drug approved by the FDA was developed from a molecule in a sea sponge? I didn't until just now. As a PhD student, I collect and study sponges because they are known to produce thousands of bioactive molecules, many of which have medicinal potential.
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I think it's pretty incredible that the ocean may hold the cure to some of the most devastating human diseases, and I hope my work might inspire people to protect the world's oceans and the valuable resources within them. That's awesome. Heck yeah. Thanks for all the hard work you guys put into the show. Y'all have kept me company on many a long night in the lab with my sponges.
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That's right. That's from Kayla Wilson from San Diego.
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Yeah, we'll look into these sponges, as you call them.
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That's right. And before we dive into that awesome story, to head off emails, I know I said hyperbolic instead of hyperbaric. There's no such thing as a hyperbolic chamber. No. I guess there could be. It's a chamber that's like, I'm the biggest chamber ever. Probably so.
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All right, so this is a great story, and I had heard bits and pieces of this over the years, but it is interesting that Nazis and run DMC and feuding brothers all come together. Because you know my Pumas. I've been a Puma guy.
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For many, many years, even though I did have a pair of Adidas superstars at one point. But they're two— Flashy? No, I liked them, but they were, you know, white shoes aren't good on me. I get them too dirty too quick.
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So now I just vary my Pumas between the black and the black suede and sort of like the olive green suede usually.
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Yeah, but those classic white superstars with the three blue stripes, those are the ones.
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Yeah, my brother was into—I wore gazelles for a while when I was a soccer poser, but my brother was into Stan Smiths.
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Well, I'm a Puma guy just because they look good on me and they're comfy. But I was also a low-top Converse all-star guy for a while. And in high school, of course, in the preppy days, I was all about the tree thorns.
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And then what was the other shoe? The Vans. There's a particular style of Vans that I really still enjoy.
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No, those are cool, but I don't know if I can pull those off at 47.
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Yeah, I'll remember at some point. Okay, well, just shout it out. And plus, I just wanted to cover our basis by saying as many name brands as possible. Don't forget British Knights. Oh, the BKs?
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And I thought it was interesting that we're recording this now because we just acknowledged and recognized the— 100 years removed from World War I?
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Yeah, and so the name of that town is Herzogenarach. Herzogenarach.
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Yeah, so Gebruder is, you know, for brother. So Gebruder Dassler is the Dassler Brothers shoe company. And people were like, wow, so I don't have to wear my high-heeled leather sport boot any longer on the pitch?
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So their nicknames, you'll probably hear us refer to them as Adi and Rudy, R-U-D-I. And if you kind of put your head to it, you can see where this is headed.
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So the laundry business wasn't going well. So like you said, little Adi started making these shoes and things started going great. And it turns out they made a pretty good team at first because they complimented one another in what they were good at. So Adi was creative and he was the brains and Rudy was a little more extroverted and he was a really good salesperson.
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So that should say it all. It does. So he was wearing these track spikes, and this helped him. This got him a little bit of notoriety. But it was really in 1936 in Berlin at that very, very famous Olympic Games where a young athlete named Jesse Owens – dominated and literally tore up the track wearing those Gebruda Dassler track spikes with Hitler in the stands.
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And people are like, those shoes are amazing. And Jesse Owens was like, it's kind of me. But yeah, sure. The shoes are great. But I'm also a vastly superior athlete to the rest of these chumps out here.
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Oh, man. Slapped his little stash right off that lip.
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Yeah. So just like in the United States and actually in countries all over the world, the war effort was it's not like they were just like, all right, we have a few companies that manufacture military needs for our military and that's going to be good enough. It's like, no, we need to really co-opt kind of any manufacturing that we want to. to go toward the war effort.
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And certainly Germany did that along with the U.S. and kind of everyone else. And everything from Hugo Boss to Lufthansa to these little shoemakers in this small town in Bavaria.
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Yeah, it's December 1943 is when they kind of made the full switch in these little, you know, German ladies who were sewing shoes the week before were now manufacturing German bazookas. The good news is by this time – because these things were really effective actually. And had they been – Had they been brought into the war sooner, things might have really changed.
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Just go to squarespace.com slash stuff for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code stuff to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain. You know, we've all been there. You're sick. You're trying to schedule a doctor's appointment only to spend hours on hold. And then you find yourself crammed into a crowded waiting room with other sick people.
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You should have said that in a British accent.
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And don't get me started about the prescriptions. That's a whole other story.
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How was that? It was great. You're a regular rich little.
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In Orlando, meetings reach another level thanks to a growing list of award-winning restaurants, a world-class convention center, a great hotel community, easy access through the airport, and, of course, the weather.
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And while you may know Orlando for its attractions... Industries like healthcare, aerospace, and advanced manufacturing make it a hub for cutting-edge businesses. Or, in the words of Mr. Moyes, Orlando can really be that destination where you can innovate, collaborate, and look to the future. And that's what makes Orlando unbelievably real. Learn more at OrlandoForBusiness.com.
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Yeah, one of the other causes, it can be from the onset of MS, from multiple sclerosis. This one woman that we'll talk about in more detail suffered from chronic migraines but had a migraine attack so severe that it spurred this, and we'll get to her. But all of these in a bucket from some sort of trauma or an event are called neurogenic type.
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And for a long time, they used to think that was the only way that you could get foreign accident syndrome.
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Yeah. So there's another kind called psychogenic, also non-organic or functional or psychosomatic. But one of the leading experts said that they prefer psychogenic.
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He said because, quote, this term has the advantage of stating positively based on an exploration of its causes that the disorder is a manifestation of psychological disequilibrium like anxiety, depression, personality disorder, or conversion reaction, end quote.
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Yeah, but what was the name of her character?
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And, you know, we're talking about Could be bipolar disorder. It could be some other form of mental illness. And this really kind of rocked. I mean, it's not a huge community studying this, but the people that do are obviously super fascinated by it.
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And it kind of rocked their world when they found out that someone that had no head injury, no stroke or anything like that would could have something like this.
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I knew I had some. Like they said that every time, right?
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That was pretty funny. She's great. Yeah, she was. Pretty lady.
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Yeah, it's also, the neurogenic is also much more common. Out of the cases, I think it's about 86% are from some sort of neurological damage.
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So what does that leave, 14%? Unless, I guess, you're accounting for the new super odd one that could be both.
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Yeah, this one's the most recent case, actually.
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Funny, smart. Yeah. Good actor. What else? That's all I got on her. She can macrame. Oh, really?
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Yeah, I wonder, I didn't see anything in there about her if she, like, had a, I mean, is it another personality? Is it multiple personality disorder?
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Oh, because that would make sense, you know, if you have just a British personality that came out that's violent maybe or something.
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Yeah. Another case that I said we were going to get to, this one is really weird and super sad. This woman named Sarah Caldwell in England She is the one that had the migraine that set it off. And this one is super odd because she's an English woman who now has a Chinese accent. I mean, just straight up sounds Chinese. And like broken English Chinese.
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Yeah, I mean, her case is really sad. It was, I think, 2010 when she was diagnosed after this migraine incident. And in 2015, she couldn't work anymore. And she has a lot more issues going on than just the speech with these migraines that have come on. She's got a whole range of physical problems. She's had to stop work. She's in a wheelchair.
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Even though her limbs completely work, her brain basically can't tell her limbs to do what they should do.
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Yeah, from, I think, these really extreme migraines. I think they even likened it to, like, having a stroke. They were so severe. So she's had to sell her house, and I think her husband is afflicted with something, too. It's just a really, really sad case. But, you know, there's all kinds of interviews with her, and it's just so strange to hear that accent coming out of this white lady.
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Oh, yeah. You know? And, you know, I saw videos where they would sit down and play her. And before I looked up further that she was having even more troubled times, it seemed like she was getting a little better throughout the interview through therapy because they were
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Playing her, one of the things they do is they play old recordings of herself, and she would sit down and listen to them and try and mimic it, which kind of brought up one of my questions is, can you even mimic an accent? Like, you know, people can fake an accent. Like, can you even do that?
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and I didn't get an answer on that but Then you're just mimicking an accent your entire life too, even if you could yeah, you know So that's problematic on its own sure, but um it seemed like she was getting a little bit better in that interview But apparently not it's really sad.
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So one of the other things that's really troubling is you can't just go to a neurologist and get it cleared up. There are a whole range of doctors that you'll probably see along the way, including a neurologist. You talked about a speech language pathologist. You might go to a clinical psychologist to deal with the fallout from everything. maybe a neuropsychologist, maybe a radiologist.
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You might see six and eight doctors and still not get anywhere.
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Yes, and we're specifically not talking about... There's a thing sometimes that certain people do when they meet someone with an accent different than their own, where they accidentally, or sometimes purposely, adopt it momentarily. Yes, it's called code switching. My mom's done this before. That I remember it happened when I was a kid. My brother and I thought it was so funny. Yeah? Yeah.
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You know, we've all been there. You're sick. You're trying to schedule a doctor's appointment only to spend hours on hold. And then you find yourself crammed into a crowded waiting room with other sick people. And don't get me started about the prescriptions. That's a whole other story.
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That's right. And with Amazon Pharmacy, your prescriptions are delivered directly to you quickly and affordably. That means no more trips to the pharmacy and no more surprise costs at the cash register.
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In Orlando, meetings reach another level thanks to a growing list of award-winning restaurants, a world-class convention center, a great hotel community, easy access through the airport, and, of course, the weather. That's right, Chuck.
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And while you may know Orlando for its attractions... Industries like healthcare, aerospace, and advanced manufacturing make it a hub for cutting-edge businesses. Or, in the words of Mr. Moyes, Orlando can really be that destination where you can innovate, collaborate, and look to the future. And that's what makes Orlando unbelievably real. Learn more at OrlandoForBusiness.com.
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I don't know. Yeah, I think I have a little trouble wrapping my head around this whole idea that it's only in the ear of the person. Because, you know, that lady clearly has a Chinese accent. It's not, oh, I'm just hearing it that way.
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Yeah, I don't know. I mean, that makes sense in some cases, I think. But I don't see how anyone could hear this woman and say, she sounds British to me.
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And it seems like it's usually a parent of an embarrassed child. Sure. Is there an explanation behind it?
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that's the difference yeah i still don't get that what i do get though is we take second nature just when we open our mouth we talk we don't realize the complex uh series of events that's going on to make your voice come out the way it does so you know you're you're well in the brain they think um and again the mysteries of the brain they're the what how you create speech is really complex and involves all kind of uh areas of the brain but
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specifically damage in the left hemisphere and the cerebral artery, they know a lot of times can cause foreign accent syndrome.
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But when you're speaking, you're using your tongue, you're using your lips, your jaw, your larynx, and the way all these things combine and who you are is going to make you have, and we should do one on accents, period.
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It's going to control how your speech comes out. The one example they use in here is if you have a little too much to drink, you might lose some of that muscle control and you might slur your words or talk funny or differently.
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So that's a pretty basic way of understanding it. But I know vowels are sort of a big deal when it comes to foreign accent syndrome.
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Yeah, I get that, but that happens within the Mandarin accent between people, too.
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I just don't get it. All right. One thing I do get is that there's no, like... And this is probably what's so frustrating, or one of the things that's so frustrating, is it's not like they wake up with a new cultural identity, either.
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I mean, this woman... still wants to have her tea and biscuits every afternoon. But when she says that, she says it with, Chuck would call it a Chinese accent. A neurologist would say, well, you're just hearing that. Right, right. So, you know, like you said, people suffer a bit from their own, like, sense of self.
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You know? Because, see, here's what I wonder, is in their... Do they hear it in their head as their own regular accent?
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Well, because the reason I say that is because when, and I think I've talked about this, when my grandfather had a stroke, he still talked.
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but it just came out as gibberish but in his head he was saying the things that he was trying to say which is you know one of the most frustrating things I think yeah after a stroke victim is I remember seeing him talk and getting so frustrated yeah he would just you know say things out loud and it would come out as gibberish to us but in his head he's still saying you know his English words right it's got to make you feel trapped in your body yeah however
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FAS is a little all over the map because there have been other weird cases because we've been saying this whole time. There's not a new identity. It's the same. You're saying the same words and everything. But there have been cases where people do substitute out words like you would say lift instead of an elevator.
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Yeah, they'll just make up a new name. Yeah. This one other case I thought was interesting about the Dutch woman.
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She was Dutch, is Dutch, and she developed a French accent, but she spoke Dutch using French syntax and occasionally French words as if she was a French person learning Dutch. And it turns out that she was a Dutch language teacher who taught French people to speak Dutch. Right. And I don't know, was her psychogenic or neurogenic?
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Like you never use different words and things?
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That's right. I'm going to start off with Nathan Ferlazzo.
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He sent us some really lovely hand-drawn calendars and bookmarks, and you can find those at wildlife.com. Wildlife.mariniferlazzo.com.au. And that's M-A-R-I-N-I-F-E-R-L-A-Z-Z-O.com.au. And it was really, really beautiful work. And it's a cool thing because a portion of every sale is donated to a nonprofit wildlife organization.
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Well, I got a couple of more coffees. I'll just knock them both out. You have one sitting. Actually, you have two of them sitting on your desk right now, my friend.
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True Stone Coffee Roasters from St. Paul, Minnesota sent us their medium blend. And I can't vouch for the taste yet because it just got here, but it smells good. And then Devin from True Coffee Roasters in Fitchburg, Wisconsin sent us Dark Roasted Sumatra and a Mexico Alutra.
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We've got coffee coming out of our ears. That's great.
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Meg from Seattle, she sent me a card about Leron's passing, my cat, which I lost last year, which is very, very sweet. And while I'm on that. Buckley, my old boy, passed away a couple of weeks ago, and everyone on Facebook was beyond supportive and sweet, and that really helped out. So thanks for that.
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Thank you. It was a very dark time.
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That's okay. We'll always come back to them. Okay. Our buddy Jeff Barney was kind enough, and I still haven't tried it. It's in my fridge. But you said it's the best. He sent us Kewpie Japanese Mayo.
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Well, I'm finishing up a gallon of Duke's.
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Yeah, I'm just going to shoot it down, and then I'm going to dive into the Kewpie and see what's going on there. Got to see what the difference is.
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All right. Well, thanks, Jeff Barney, for that.
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Ian Newton of the Baltimore Whiskey Company sent us some ginger apple liqueur and gin.
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I think they got what they wanted out of this, which is for us to say Soylent 12 times. Soylent. This came in today. Thomas Kregel, K-R-E-G-E-L. He sent me a frigging monocle. Oh, that's neat. And he heard me talking about my eyes going and how I just need him to read things close up. And he said, buddy.
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Here's what you need to do because you will one day embarrass your daughter like I embarrass my children. You need to rock a monocle. And it's a monocle.
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Yeah, I mean, I tried it, and it's kind of like a reader. It works about the same as my prescription. But he uses one. He sent a little picture of himself.
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And I guess I should plug the company. It's Nearsights Monocles is what he used.
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And, yeah, I got a monocle now. Nice job, Chuck.
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Bridget Massoth, M-A-S-S-O-T-H, sent us some really cute, along with an extra large handwritten note, sent us some really cute Josh and Chuck cutouts, like kind of paper cut and paste cutouts. Nice. And yours is on your desk. Thank you. You've got to get out of this room and go over to your desk. You've got a bounty.
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Well, I got a few letters, actually. I'll just knock those out because Sandra, maybe this was because of International Correspondence Writing Month that we got these because apparently that happened.
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But Sandra sent us a nice handwritten letter in honor of that specifically. And then Austin from Bakersfield sent us a very nice handwritten note. And then Kristen Cook sent us a Valentine's Day card to all of us, including Harry Knoll. Not Harry Knowles of Ain't It Cool News, but our own Noel, who is just Harry.
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I got it. It's handwritten. You can't, you know.
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uh i've got two more um megan moon waltzman that's megan with two g's oddly she sent us a copy of uh this really cool thing she made it's a book it's called song book a book of music for all levels all ages and it is 11 songs uh kind of written out as chords and things and illustrated for different instruments like there'll be a song for guitar an intro song for
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Hopefully that doesn't happen because Doyle is one of our oldest, and I don't mean by age, but one of our longest time listeners.
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I got one more, and this one... Boy, you have no idea what's waiting in there. You just came right into the recording studio for a change. Yeah. On your desk right now, Josh. I can't wait. You have a handmade cutting board. Awesome. And it's really, really nice. This is from Christopher at The Timbered Wolf. And it's just, you know, it's gorgeous.
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He sent a couple of these in, and they're really, really nice.
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So you got to take care of it, though. I left the instructions for you.
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Yeah, someone needs to send Josh a wheelbarrow.
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They are super cozy and the secret is in their fabrics. We're talking about the really good stuff like Merino wool, which feels as cozy as a ski lodge. But if you want to brave the cold on the slopes or on a snowy run, Bombas has athletic socks built for that, too.
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Well, I just remember – The only one I remember specifically, and, you know, you just have these random childhood moments that sort of stick with you, was we were in Florida and we were talking with an Irish woman, I believe. She may have been from England, but I think she was Irish. And the other thing, too, is, you know,
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I don't think my mom had probably talked to a lot of Irish people at that point. She's from West Tennessee. They moved to Georgia. We didn't have Irish people all over the place. She wasn't super well-traveled back then, although she is much more now. So it was probably a bit novel to her. And I remember very specifically the woman said something about going to Disney instead of Disney World.
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And my mom said, she got kind of proper, and she says, you know, we haven't been to Disney yet. And I remember my brother and I just thought that was so funny. Instead of saying Disney World.
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No, I don't think so. We may have laughed a little under our breath. But, I mean, I don't think we even teased her. I'm teasing her now a bit.
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But I don't think, like, we made fun of her, really. I think we just kind of, like my brother and I want to do, very quietly looked at each other and in that way that brothers do.
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But it's funny. I was listening to the great Judge John Hodgman podcast with our pal John and Jesse Thorne, Bailiff Jesse. And they had an actual case a few weeks ago that was very funny where this mom does this on purpose. She's a trained actor and loves to put on accents when she goes to places. And the daughter was just she took her to the Internet court and was just like, stop doing this.
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Like, you've got to stop doing this. And the mom's whole thing, she was very just fun and whimsical and having a lot of fun with it. So it was really hard to. to rule against her. But I think Hodgman ultimately did rule against her. He's tough, but fair. Well, I think his whole thing was like, you know, I think he ruled partially in her favor.
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Like you got to let them know where you're from and you can't do it to like waiters and service people because their job is to like,
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take your dumb jokes and and have a stiff upper lip about it and it just kind of makes their job harder if they think maybe you're making fun of them and right you know like you may not realize the unintended consequence of this is somebody may feel uncomfortable that they have to put up with this
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No, it did. I mean, that's what's great about that show is they're funny cases, but he adjudicates seriously. I think that's why it works.
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Yeah. Beehaw. So anyway, I just thought it was pretty weird that this article came up and then that episode had just aired. But that's different than what we were talking about. Totally. Like I started saying, this is not that at all. This is a legitimate super rare. This reminded me of alien hand syndrome and its rarity. Yeah.
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Because I've seen different numbers, but the most I've seen is about 150 described official cases of foreign accent syndrome.
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Yeah, so I guess we should just go ahead and talk about a couple of cases so people know what we're talking about. The first one mentioned in our own article is really interesting for a few reasons, and it's the most recent case that's documented. Oh, I'm sorry, it's not the most recent, but it is fairly recent. A woman named Lisa Alamia, she had jaw surgery because of an overbite.
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And then when she came out of surgery, even though she was from Texas and had never been to England, she spoke with a British accent.
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Well, I'm known on the show for doing the bad accent, so I'm glad you're taking it. No, yours are good. No, I don't know. Mine are... They verge on decent at times.
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So she woke up, had that accent, and her husband and three kids thought it was a joke. She had only been outside the country to go to Mexico, and it was a real thing called foreign accent syndrome.
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Oh, really? I didn't hear. I didn't see this one on YouTube.
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Yeah, this one had a much darker turn because it was during World War II. A Norwegian woman named Astrid suffered injury. And the ironies here are really sad. She suffered a brain injury from shrapnel from a German bomb and a bombing raid. And then when she came to, she had a German accent.
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Yeah, she was shunned. She couldn't even speak German, but she had that accent and was... obviously very distraught by this, and she went to a neurologist named Jorg-Erman Monrad Krohn. Nice job. It's a great name. And he coined the first term for this, which is dysprosity, which is, prosody is like the tone and rhythm of your speech. Yeah. And the prefix dys, obviously, is like abnormal or ill.
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Yeah, but foreign accent syndrome is way more catchy. Oh, it's sexy. In 1982, a neurologist named Harry Whitaker came up with that. So Whitaker coined it in the 80s. I think 1982 was when he coined that official term.
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Well, yeah, because that's one of the factors in foreign accent syndrome. It's not like in a case where you might have a stroke and lose the ability to speak. You still can speak in perfect dialect, whatever that dialect is, as far as being articulate and coherent.
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Selects: Night Trap: The Video Game Failure that Changed the Industry
We can't have what we call reproducible violence. So anything that a kid, like kids love throwing stars, and we can't show ninjas throwing throwing stars into people because a kid will go and do that. You can't have a knife because a kid can go get a knife out of a drawer. It's got to be something that a kid cannot reproduce.
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Selects: Night Trap: The Video Game Failure that Changed the Industry
I think it came the other way, though. I think that was a note from Hasbro. Oh, was it? I'm pretty sure they were like, what if they were vampires?
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And Jim Riley was like, okay, I guess I can do that.
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Biting people's necks. And then Hasbro was like, can't do that because kids can bite necks, too.
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Like a clamp sort of.
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Yeah, so what Hasbro did was they noted it to death and neutered it to death. Because they said – he even was like, all right, I can do vampires. I can run around and hurt people. And they said, no, no, no, they can't even run around. It's too scary if they're fast.
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So they came up with augers who in the game they're described as vampires who had been half-bled and left to die. So they are not quite vampires, but they aren't human either. And that makes them lopey and lumbery instead of being able to move fast. Right. And if you see them, they look like they're wearing garbage bags. They're lumbering around.
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They're drawing the blood using a trocar is what the name of that thing was.
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Because it was definitely its own thing. It was its own thing. And it's funny. In the documentary, Jim Reilly was like – In the end, he said this trocar, which, you know, it didn't show it explicitly. It showed the clamp going around the neck and this little drill inside of a shaft start and then sort of moving and then blood being drawn. But it doesn't show like going in the neck or anything.
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But he said what they ended up with, he said, to me, was something far creepier than a vampire biting someone's neck. Sure. But they were like, it's not reproducible, though, so it's fine.
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Video, obscure, lost video game. episode. How did you hear about this?
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Because it looked like something that they understood.
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Selects: Night Trap: The Video Game Failure that Changed the Industry
Well, I think in the documentary they make the point that Hasbro was – I think the adults were looming out there as a possibility, but they were like, adults will never play video games. So what they really wanted until they grow up and continue to play video games, what they really were after was a teenage market, which didn't fully exist at this point.
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Like an old, like 16 and 17-year-old boys, which is why they put sorority girls in like a nightie at a slumber party. was in all in an effort to sort of titillate people like me.
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So they actually had to shoot this like a movie. They shot it in Culver City on a soundstage. And what they would do back then for – and there were more full motion games of the time. And you would try and cast one – recognizable face among this cast to sort of, they called it the anchor, to like, all right, well, this has got so-and-so in it. And who did they cast for Night Trap?
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Yeah, so Night Trap is the game that we're talking about and I heard about this from watching the Netflix documentary series High Score.
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Kimberly, who passed away very tragically.
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Very tragic story.
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I don't know if I knew that.
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I think I knew that, like not super long ago, right?
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Yeah. Oh, man, very sad. But, yeah, Dana Plato was cast as that anchor. She played Kelly, who was a secret agent who had infiltrated the house.
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Yeah, she's undercover, and she would talk right to camera and say things like, you've got to get to the other room because the augers are after whoever, Mary. Help her. Yeah, go help her.
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Selects: Night Trap: The Video Game Failure that Changed the Industry
Jerk. No, I Netflixed by myself and chilled because Emily wasn't watching this. That's a different thing. Yeah, that's a different thing. Okay. This was a documentary series on Netflix, I think six parts that covered the history of video games.
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And they don't attack people.
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Right, right, right. To source their blood, I guess.
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There is a pretty funny scene in it when, did you watch any of it?
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The best part is when they're explaining in the game what the augers are and the woman says, you know, it's a vampire who's been blah, blah, blah. And one of the scat guys is in the background and he goes, you've got to be jiving me. I didn't see that. Oh, it was great. It was like... Was this game made in 1989 or 1973? It was really confusing, like what era it was.
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Yeah, and we should say that the violence in the game, like we said, is suggestive for the augers. You don't really see anything. The only real violence is when the augers are dispatched of, but it is very much a Wile E. Coyote, Bugs Bunny sort of thing.
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Yeah, like a Murphy bed will flip them out of a window or they'll just, whoa, like fall through a trap door. Yeah.
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Selects: Night Trap: The Video Game Failure that Changed the Industry
But it was shot by Don Burgess who was nominated for an Oscar less than a decade after Night Trap for Forrest Gump. So they had a real team. It wasn't just – they didn't say, all right, let's go out in the valley and use some – like a porn – Sure. And just do this thing. Like, they had a real crew.
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Yeah, they said one-five in the documentary. So they put some money into it, and it is not apparent on the screen. The sets look terrible.
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I can recommend it in one way in that it was a very light kind of fun watch. But it is by no means comprehensive and a little goofy at times in how they handled some stuff.
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The doorways, I don't know if you noticed, but any doorway, they didn't build the door down to the floor. They built the door down to like a one-foot-tall stepover. So anytime someone opens the door, they step over this like one-foot-tall like wooden set.
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Or no, they probably would have said like, this doesn't look good.
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There is no nudity, we should point out. But it, again, was never going to be kid friendly. But also when you when you will get to the court stuff, when you hear how it's described by these senators.
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It's so over the top.
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Should we take a break? You don't want to take a break, do you?
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Selects: Night Trap: The Video Game Failure that Changed the Industry
All right. Well, I guess we should take a break by saying that Hasbro dumped the game. This is a nice cliffhanger.
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Hasbro dumped the game. Wait, wait.
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Okay. We'll find out right after this.
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Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug thing is.
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I got you. But it was fine. And it's, you know, if you're from a certain generation and in the mood for like five plus hours of a bit of a nostalgia kick, you could do worse things.
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Selects: Night Trap: The Video Game Failure that Changed the Industry
Hasbro dumped the game.
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Selects: Night Trap: The Video Game Failure that Changed the Industry
Because, A, it wasn't that great. But the big reason was because CD-ROM technology started up. And they were like, we've got VHS technology. And we sunk a million five into this turkey.
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Like, let's just dump it. And that should have been the end of it.
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It's great. I think our old buddy Josh Bierman might have written the original story that that was based on.
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Yeah, by Jim's telling on the documentary, I don't know if they were already going CD-ROM or if it was initiated by Sega, but he got a call, he said, out of the blue from Sega, who had their gaming system at the time, Sega Genesis, and then Sega CD was an add-on system featuring this new CD-ROM technology. And he said they got a call that said, hey, you want to develop this for CD-ROM?
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Selects: Night Trap: The Video Game Failure that Changed the Industry
And he probably got a good laugh out about that and the irony and then said, sure, because Night Trap must live.
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He had something to do with that. But Night Trap I learned about because in Episode 5 they covered when video games started becoming violent. So Mortal Kombat obviously factored in heavily in that episode. Yeah. And then this game called Night Trap. There's another game I do want to cover on a shorty, by the way, one of the first LGTBQ games ever that was really interesting and had a cool story.
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1992 is when it was finally released as a CD-ROM game, yeah.
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But it looked like the late 70s.
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Yeah. And so this very much mirrored if you listen to our Satanic Panic episodes and the PMRC and music labeling. MPAA. MPAA. Like this was all the time when everyone was saying, hey, listen, we need to start at least labeling this stuff so parents know what their kids are doing. And just watch a little bit.
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It was in the Netflix documentary, but there's all sorts of stuff on YouTube about these hearings where they're talking about the disgusting trash and the filth and the hyperviolence. And it's like it's really not that violent.
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Yeah, which was super violent.
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Right. But it had ladies in lingerie.
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That were a thousand times worse than this. Yeah. But the fact that you were controlling, yet they never said, and they make a big point about this in the documentary, like... You weren't doing the violence. Like the whole point of the game was to stop the augers.
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Like you weren't the person doing the augering.
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Yeah, I guess that's why they called them augers because it was kind of like an auger.
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The tool was. Yeah, that's what I guess. Well, crowbar, towbar, what was it called?
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But, yeah, they never – I mean, Jim Riley was like, they clearly never even played the game.
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They were talking about – The cover of the thing was lurid. They didn't like the cover of the box.
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But even then, like, even in the most disturbing scene, which was the one with the lady and the nightie looking in the mirror, the augers come in behind her, and it's for sure creepy looking at first.
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But, you know, then they get out the crow car. I can't even remember. Crow car. Crow car. And she's like, ah, ah. And it's like the worst B movie. And then they just sort of drag her over the threshold of one of those doors.
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I can't remember now. I saw this a couple of months ago, so it's been a while. Oh, what was it? I can't remember, but it's great, and that will make for a good shorty. Okay. But a really cool story behind it. But this is Night Trap.
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Like you don't see any of the violence even. No. It's all just suggested.
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Right. So Sega pulls the game eventually. It became really popular because of these senatorial hearings.
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But Sega did eventually pull it. Digital Pictures re-released it as their own distributor and rated it M for Mature, which And that should have also been the end of it, right?
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which figured in as the game that kind of brought about, along with Mortal Kombat, but was really central in forming what ended up being the ratings board for video games.
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That was not the end of Night Trap. The bad game that refused to die. In 2016, there was a video on YouTube that showed someone playing Night Trap on their telephone, on their smartphone. And I don't know if it was Jim Riley or one of the original devs saw it. and was like, what is going on?
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You can't play Night Trap on a smartphone because it was never developed that technology unless that smartphone is playing a CD that I don't know about in the background. And they got in touch with a person. His name was Tyler Hogel, and he was a mobile game programmer who followed was a fan of the original like in a cult fan way. That's a deep cut at that time. Oh, super deep cut.
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And then basically said, I'm going to get a playable version hacked together for smartphones and did it like semi-successfully.
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Yeah, that was the 2017 25th edition.
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rated t for teens this time still preposterous which is funny uh and apparently the um you know you said he lost the code but he was like that that's really easy like i've got all this footage that's time stamped yeah it's like i can code this thing in my sleep basically he basically did so there is a 25th edition um of uh night trap which apparently nintendo has a version of
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Yeah, and Nintendo is still sort of known as the more family-friendly unit. I think they even had a bloodless Mortal Kombat, if I'm not mistaken. Or maybe it was a setting.
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Did you see the new Mortal Kombat movie?
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The new one just came out on HBO Max. Is it good? It's pretty good. I mean, did you play the game?
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Do you have nostalgia for the game?
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Yeah, you should watch it.
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It's good enough. It looks good, and there's great fights and then some nice Easter eggs.
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It's like the Mortal Kombat movie that should have been because they made one previously that wasn't that great.
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Yeah, but this one looks pretty cool.
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You rip out spines and hearts and all the good stuff.
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And the way they do the blood, it looks just like the game.
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But we mentioned that it wasn't that great of a game because of the gameplay. One of the biggest problems was that you've got all these stories going on in these different windows, but you can only kind of control one at a time. So when you're controlling one scene... Other stuff is going on, and we mentioned that makes it impossible to follow the actual story. That's a big problem.
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Yeah, so that's really why it's notable. The other thing that made it notable, and we'll get into all this, was that it was a live action as in they shot, you know, a little movie. Right. That you controlled. Yeah, that you sort of controlled.
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So it suffers there.
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But there's also this thing where you have a red light, a green light, and a yellow light. And when these lights turn on, if it's the right color light, is when you engage the trap button.
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And that's when the auger will flip out the window, but it has to be timed right. Yeah. And apparently while you're in these other rooms, if you want to follow the story for a couple of minutes, they will change the codes. The color codes.
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So if you're in another room, they'll be like, the code is now green.
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And you don't know that because you're not watching it. So you go back and you think the code is red. Right. And so you're losing the game.
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On a different screen that you may not be watching.
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Yeah. I mean, hats off to the grabster because he actually played this thing and tried to play it, which was more than I was willing to do. But I did watch the walkthroughs.
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Oh, man. I kept waiting in the documentary for a big reveal that like George Clooney was one of the augers or something like that. But Dana Plato was about as, you know, A-list as it got at the time, which was probably C-list at the time. Yeah. Yeah.
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I got nothing else. Night Trap. Go seek it out.
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Because it wasn't a great game, but it lives in infamy because it's a really cool story, I think, in the end.
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I'm going to call this speed reading trauma. Hey guys, I should start with the obligatory long time first time. Finally reason to email, and here I am. So hello. I didn't think that a short stuff on speed reading of all things would trigger my first email, but here we go. Halfway through the show, I was flooded with a vivid memory of speed reading in my elementary school gifted class.
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Speaking of other scams, this is in the early 90s. My teacher would drag a transparency with a printed passage. Oh, I kind of remember this across an overhead projector at increasing speeds. And after each pass, we would take a comprehension test. I had no idea that this was a scam. I just thought it was a standard part of the curriculum that I wasn't very good at, and I felt terrible about it.
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Then again, in my Louisiana public school curriculum, we also had to get a hunting license and shoot clay pigeons as part of Louisiana history in middle school. I grew up shooting clay pigeons. Really? For school?
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Oh, okay. I would like to try that. It's cool. Skeet shooting? Yeah, that's another way to put it. Looks like fun. Just stand behind. That's the rule, right?
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Anyway, thanks so much for the entertainment and education, edutainment. Especially this past year, I've often had you in my ear while I work from home to feel a little less solitary. That is from Kate Ellis Jensen in Boulder, Colorado.
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Yeah, I kind of remember that happening, but I certainly was not in a gifted class.
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Yeah, the wheelchair and fire scene was very visceral.
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Oh, all right. Yeah, he wrote this, and it was, if you've been to Sleep No More in New York, you may have the play Tamara to thank because it is a lot like the concept of Sleep No More.
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I think so, and the ground they broke, it's about the painter Tamara de Limpica, who I've never heard of.
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No guff.
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But this is a play about her where it is set on a multi-floor building. There are scenes taking place at the same time in multiple rooms. And as an audience member, you can move from one room to the other, missing out on some stuff, seeing some stuff, interacting. I mean, it's sleep no more. Yeah. I don't know if they just totally ripped it off or if they said, hey, it's been, you know, 30 years.
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Who's going to remember Tamara? Yeah.
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There's probably been other stuff that did this. But Sleep No More, I think, just got so much attention in New York for its run. I think it might still be going or maybe coming back after the pandemic.
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Yeah, and the idea of the game, and we'll get a little bit more into the development of it in a minute, but it is basically like a party happening at this house. Young, like, co-ed types, like sorority girls maybe. It's very sort of titillating, and that was one of the big deals.
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Well, you know, obviously part of the controversy comes from assaults on women in the game, understandably. But again, we'll get to that. It is even tame compared to a lot of the stuff that was out at the time. But what's going on in the game is they are these pseudo-vampires called Augers. that are the bad people in this game.
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And Jim Riley, who conceived of this game, when he had the idea of, I think he was watching security camera, a security camera screen with all these different rooms, and it hit him like, what a great idea. And then he saw this play and he said, we can actually do something like this.
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Like what if a user and a game player could go into any of these views that they want and if they're missing something, they're missing something. It might be important. Yeah. But they're in control of the game.
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VHS-based, we should point out.
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Which was I mean, it looks archaic, but it's a remarkable technology at the time to be able to do that.
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Yeah, and this was 85. One of their designers was the legendary Tom Crane who designed Pitfall, one of my favorite all-time games on the Atari.
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But it was a good team, and they went apparently to these Tamra performances. They were also inspired by Dragon's Lair. Do you remember that game?
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It looked cool. I mean, it was an animation game where it was fully animated and used LaserDisc to project this animated footage. So it looked awesome, but it wasn't that great. The gameplay wasn't great.
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Yeah, but you're not actually controlling the player, which was the big difference in these games from the regular games.
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All right. Well, let's take a little break here. That's a good setup, I think. And we'll come back and get more into Night Trap right after this.
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Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug thing is.
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All right, so I mentioned the Augers. We need to explain a little bit about this game and what it was supposed to be and what it ended up being because in the Netflix documentary, Jim Reilly— Basically, it's like, well, the first thing they created a demo called Scene of the Crime.
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And it was a detective game. And Hasbro liked it, like I said. But they had a big problem because the original idea that Jim had was to have ninjas. And he's like, it would be great. These ninjas come in. They got throwing stars. They got weapons. And they're doing all this stuff. And you can control it. And it's super cool. And Hasbro was like, wait a minute.
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That's right. And most of the grisly stuff is out of the way, and we'll be back to reveal the famous investigator right after this.
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Who is it? It's my favorite thing when you play coy. It was Mr. Elliot Ness, very famous for being the head of the Untouchables, for putting Al Capone behind bars. Good friend of Sean Connery's? Very good friend of his.
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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
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If you wanted to do Connery well, you got to have an esh in there.
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Don't bring a knife to a gun donch. How's that?
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Back to the serious stuff. Elliot Ness was the – after that work in – what was that? Chicago, I think? Oh, yeah. That was – he became the alcohol – investigator in charge of the alcohol tax unit for northern Ohio in August of 34. And then the Republican mayoral candidate, Harold Burton, who would go on to win – Said, you know what, Ness, you're a famous guy. I like the cut of your jib.
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Let me make you, in December 1935, the safety director for Cleveland, and let me nudge you towards this outstanding case that we have.
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Right. Although the lead investigator – what was that guy's name? Peter Murillo. Yeah. He was – I don't know about obsessed, but it became sort of his main focus of work was to tirelessly find out who this murderer was. And I assume that it's weird because I really don't know what a safety director was. I don't think, is that even still a thing?
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But not the guardian angels because they do what they want to do.
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So the coroner, A.J. Pierce of the case, I think he was the first coroner on the first case, said, you know what we need to do? We need to get together. We need to have a little summit and start sharing information. I'm going to call it the torso clinic, which was interesting. I don't know if he did or the press did.
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Yeah, either way, because the press was very much involved in this whole run, obviously. But at this conference is where he first put forward a profile, which was, this is someone who would not stand out in Kingsbury 1 run. Someone who knew the area, could blend in. Somebody, you know, we think it's a man who is a powerful man, because they need to be able to
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You know, it takes a lot of work to dismember a body and to haul these bodies around and drop them off in different places. And we think he also might have some anatomical knowledge, not saying that he's necessarily a doctor or a surgeon, kind of like the Jack the Ripper thing. But this person clearly knows their way around a knife and a scalpel.
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Yes, content warning episode, everybody. This is one of our... I was about to say rare. They're fairly rare. But one of our true crime episodes that is very grisly. Gruesome. Gruesome, but took place in the 1930s. So there's something about old and gruesome that makes it a little more palatable for me.
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Yeah, and I think they eventually learned that most of the victims died within a few days of being discovered. And most were moved except for victim five, where they found a bloodbath, you know, that was, this didn't happen at the other place. It was virtually no blood to be found. And in fact, I think one was completely drained of blood.
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Oh, really? So that, I mean, that takes, I don't know if that happened naturally just because of the nature of dismemberment or if it was a purposeful thing, but only one body was found kind of clearly murdered there. Yeah.
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Yeah, I mean, that would be a big clue if they had some murder room, Dexter style. Sure.
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That's coming back, by the way. I don't know if you ever watched Dexter.
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Uh-huh. No. Yes, they are, indeed. And I have mixed feelings because we loved that show for a long time, but it is one of the shark jumpier shows of all time. It's like the shark itself jumped a shark. I think so. It's insane.
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I mean, I love Michael C. Hall, though. We're just now finishing Six Feet Under again, so I'm always happy to see him again, but I'll give it a go.
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Or watch The Lighthouse. It's probably better.
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All right. So Peter Murillo, who, like we said, was a lead detective, he's sort of obsessed with this thing. He starts not only focusing on this land down by the river, but – no, I didn't mean that – But that's what it was. But he started focusing on the railroads and these hobos. The railroads.
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I know, exactly. So he started looking in these boxcars. I mean, is hobo an offensive word? Can you still say that?
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Okay. So he's still out there doing his thing. At this press conference, Elliot Ness ends up holding a meeting with the head of Scientific Investigation Bureau. His name was David Cowles. And an editor of the Cleveland Press. So this is a big deal. They're actually getting the press involved at this point.
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Oh, no, no, not a press conference at all. This was very much in secret. But he's involving the press, and they said, here's what we're going to do. Ness says, you go and pick out eight tough guys that can go undercover that know a lot of bad guys in Cleveland and have all those connections. We'll give them the police support they need, and we'll fund them.
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Yes, it does. Well, it heals all wounds except for some of the things that happened in the torso murders because you can't come back from that.
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How did they fund them with the press's money? What does that even mean?
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And whoever chipped in the most got to break the story, I wonder?
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Right. So this is, in a way, attempt to assuage them and bring them into the inner circle a bit.
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All right. So the police are – they've got these undercover guys working their scene. They're checking cars randomly at all hours. They're canvassing laundromats and places where you wash your clothes. So if there are people trying to get bloodstains out of something, they're kind of doing everything they can at this point.
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And this is where the Coen brothers sort of moment comes in, which is in Sandusky, a dog – and Sandusky is about – Now it's about an hour or ten minutes away by car. I don't know what it would have been back then, but probably less than two hours, I would say, even in an old-timey car. A dog shows up in Sandusky with a human leg in its mouth.
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I want to say that literally happened in a Coen Brothers movie. It might have just been a bone of a body. But I can't think of which one it might be. Someone will write in and tell us.
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I had heard of these, and the more I read about them, the more I was shocked that there wasn't a good period movie about this.
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It is, but it's not. Or I might be thinking of the kids who ripped the toupee off the guy in Miller's Crossing.
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There's definitely a movie, it might not have been Coen Brothers, where a dog shows up with a body part in its mouth, probably more than one movie.
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But this dog shows up in its mouth, and Morello goes to Sandusky, and it turns out that the leg was actually surgically removed during a real surgery, not a serial killer surgery, and just didn't get disposed of right, ended up in the lake, ended up in the dog's mouth.
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Yeah, and I'm sure he thought this was a great idea at the time, but he really didn't think it through because the people of Cleveland did not take kindly to that. They hated him for what he did, and this was during the Depression. And everyone was struggling, basically, or not everyone, but most people were struggling at this point. unemployment rate of 20% in Cleveland.
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And so the idea of this big shot Chicago G-man coming in and basically running these homeless people out of their only option and burning it to the ground was not a good look at all. However, there were no more murders after that.
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Yeah, I think before we take a break, we should mention there was one, and get into who we think is probably the real suspect. There was one suspect in Cuyahoga County that the sheriff brought in. He was a bricklayer named Frank Dolezal, who did confess. He was brought in for the murder of Flo Palillo originally because he had lived with her for a little while.
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But supposedly he knew Rose Wallace and Edward Andrussey as well. But then they looked into it, and by all accounts, that confession was not just induced, but in the days where you would literally beat a victim into confessing.
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Right. All right, so let's take that break, and then we'll come back and talk a little bit more about the investigation and who people now believe committed these horrible murders right after this.
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Yeah, I mean, it has all the makings of a good movie. It's got a – and we'll reveal who this person is. We'll hang on to it for a second. But it's got a famous investigator.
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Oh, you thought I meant who the murderer was? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you've got some false starts. You've got some Coen Brothers-esque whimsy with the dog discovery.
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All right, so Elliot Ness has run everyone out of the Kingsbury run camps, did not go over well. He then says, here's what we'll do. Let's skirt the warrant rules so we don't have to require warrants, and let's get together, since I'm the safety director and I control the fire department too, let's go around and start searching for, quote, fire code violations, end quote.
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Basically, so they don't have to get any kind of warrants and they can just basically go into people's houses and just at will and search and do whatever they want to under the guise of searching for fire code violations. He was desperate.
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Very much. And I think we're at the point now where we can talk about this mystery person, right? Yeah.
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Yeah, and he kept it very secret. He even used a pseudonym for this person. He called this person, this gentleman, Gaylord Sundheim. Pretty good name. Good hotel check-in name. Yeah.
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Yeah, I did like that. And, yeah, it has all the makings of a great movie in a cool period setting, which was Depression-era 1930s Cleveland, Ohio. Yeah.
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And privately, you know, word gets around a little bit what's going on, but privately he would describe this person as an alcoholic, maybe bisexual, a doctor who came from a wealthy family and who had a relative in Congress who was protecting this person.
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And took this man under the dark of night to a hotel room in Cleveland, held there without charging him for two weeks where they interrogated this person.
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I mean, I've had nights that were a little rough and you're always okay the next day.
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No, no. I'm not talking about a hangover, but you're not still drunk the next day. Oh, gotcha. Or in two days or three days.
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I should just shut up about the whole thing.
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Yeah, but I think he did it, so who cares?
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I think that polygraph back then was, there wasn't even a machine. Keillor would just sit there and look for a bead of sweat to break out on the forehead and then punch the guy if it did.
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So the case was never solved. Ness's reputation obviously took a big hit. He eventually got out of Cleveland after a drunk driving hit and run accident that he was involved with. and tried to cover up, so he left in great shame.
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But back to this Gaylord Sondheim, later on, many years later, there were crime investigators and writers who put two and two together and basically identified, and in fact, in one case, crime writer Marilyn Bardsley came out and said, yeah, this is who this person was. It was a...
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Former World War I Army medic who was discharged for mental instability following head trauma, which was big warning lights going off. And he was an alcoholic, another big warning light. And his name was Francis Edward Sweeney, who also happens to have a relative in Congress.
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That is your birthright. So let's go back to September of 1934. When a woman's torso is washed up on the shore of Lake Erie, her legs are amputated below the knee. There is no head, which is why I said torso, and arms.
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He looks like the definition of a torso murderer.
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Quick sidebar. I'm not sure if I ever mentioned it on this show. I know I've talked about it on Movie Crush, but I want to recommend this great, great documentary. And forgive me if I'm repeating myself here, but it's called Crazy, Not Insane. It's an HBO documentary about this doctor, Dr. Dorothy Otno-Lewis, who basically spent her life trying to understand serial killers.
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And one of the main, she was kind of one of the first people to really try and understand what's actually going on. And she put together, I think, like three very common stories common commonalities among serial killers, but one of them is head trauma.
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And that's why this really stands out to me about Francis Edward Sweeney was that he was discharged from the army because of head trauma leading to mental instability. It's a commonality in most serial killers is some sort of head trauma, especially when you're younger.
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Yeah, and the – I may have – I thought I talked about it on this, but it was the – who was the guy in L.A. that also just had a great docuseries on? The Night Stalker, Richard Ramirez. He suffered multiple head traumas when he was younger as well. So I think it's – I can't remember the third one.
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It's head trauma, some sort of physical and even sexual abuse as a child, and then there was like one more thing, and those are like – That's just a recipe for ending up some sort of sociopath or serial killer.
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Yeah, maybe so. Be warned. It's great. You'd really love it. It's a really good documentary.
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Well, and other stuff, you know, the head trauma, the medical training. He was a surgeon in residence at St. Alexis Hospital. His career deteriorated because of his drinking experience.
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A very suspicious way. She was never identified. They called her the Lady of the Lake. And this was just sort of the beginnings.
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Yeah. He also had a deal apparently with a local mortuary where they would give him bodies to practice surgery on, which would explain maybe the kill room or the dismemberment room. He would have a place to go and dispose of these bodies without, you know, there being a big blood trail, you know.
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Yeah, there was a couple of other things. He did send taunting letters to Elliot Ness for years. Yeah. One of them was signed, F.E. Sweeney, Paranoidal Nemesis. Yeah. But was this after he had been kidnapped by Ness?
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Nothing was put together at this point because it would be two years before any other murders took place and that they finally sort of put together that the Lady of the Lake was perhaps victim zero, really victim one, but they called her victim zero of who would become known as the torso murderer or the mad butcher of Kingsbury. Right.
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Yeah, that's true. And then, I think, to me, one of the biggest red flags pointing in the direction of Sweeney is, I mentioned a near victim earlier in the episode, right? This was a transient. His name was Emil Fronick, and he was living in Cleveland in 34. And one day he was lured into a doctor's office on the second floor along Broadway Avenue.
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And the doctor said, here, I'll give you some shoes and a meal if you come up here. Fronick goes up, eats a little bit of the meal, starts to feel lightheaded. and bolts and makes it to a train car and basically passes out for three days.
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And then later on, I think in 1938, was being interviewed after the cops hear about this, old Morello goes to pick him up and they narrow down the area to 50th to 55th streets along Broadway where Sweeney had a doctor's office.
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Yeah, the one theory that it wasn't him that I don't buy, did you say where he was living in Sandusky?
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All right, so here's the deal. He, Francis Sweeney, was apparently enrolled or checked into the Soldiers and Sailors Home in Sandusky, which I guess is an old, like a veteran's home, right?
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So that's what it seems like. So he was checked in there. And one of the reasons that people say he didn't do it was because he was checked in in this place in Sandusky, like a couple hours away. And I just don't buy that. They later came out and said they could come and go as they pleased.
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He could easily have, if he didn't want to get caught, be committing these murders in Cleveland and then going back to Sandusky as well.
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I'm going to call this, we did not help out this gentleman.
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Hey, guys. Love the podcast. I've been listening for the past several years. I've almost gotten through the whole library. Has some left from 2018, apparently. I work as a musical instrument repair technician at a local university and independently in Greensboro, North Carolina. So I usually listen while I work on repadding clarinets and cleaning tubas.
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Cool job. Anyway, I was listening to your show this evening on Korean fan death. Remember that? We talked about it. I don't think it was all about that, but it was... It was a short stuff about it.
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Okay. I remember that being like a top 10 or something. Anyway, I immediately thought, finally, a way that I can find some legit reason for getting rid of the fan in our room. My fiance, Abby, loves having a fan and that noise when you go to sleep. It's something I can deal with, but honestly, I do not care for it. So when I finally got home, I told Abby, hey, we got a serious episode.
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Stuff you should know we should listen to. I started the episode without pre-screening and trusted you guys would pull through for me. Needless to say, an interesting episode, but I did not get the confirmation bias I was looking for. Instead, we had a good laugh and a great evening. Looking forward to getting the book. I wish you guys the best and looking forward to many more.
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We love you in the Coen Brothers stuff. His name's John Goodman. I'm going to plug his business, Goodman Custom Woodwinds. If you're in the Greensboro, North Carolina area and you need that clarinet re-padded, go to John Goodman.
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I mean, where else are you going to do it? Charlotte? I don't know.
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That's right. They were both men in this case. They were castrated. They were also decapitated, which would become sort of a signature— The decapitation and any kind of dismembering really would become the signature hallmark of this murderer. And it's interesting in that victim one of these two men was actually one of the only ones that they got a fairly positive ID for.
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They actually got some fingerprints and it matched a man named Edward Andrussey. And he was sort of a petty thief that the police had brought in before. So he was believed to be gay. And if he was, which all accounts say that he was, this was at a time when, in the 1930s, certainly it was still illegal. And it was also listed as a mental disorder in the – what's it called? Not the DMV.
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No, that's right. So he, I think, was one of only two that was ever even positively identified of what would end up being probably 13, maybe 12 murders.
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Yeah, exactly. So it was a grim scene down there anyway. Certainly the fringes of society, during the course of the investigation, there were accusations of the press that they weren't working as hard as they needed to because these were people on the fringes of society and sort of forgotten about. And I think one of the other people identified –
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It was a few months later in January 1936 when they found the body of Flo Polillo. Florence Polillo was a waitress and bartender and sex worker who was discovered once again, dismembered, wrapped in newspaper and a couple of bushel baskets. And then about a week and a half later found other parts of her body.
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So she was sort of found in – it's very grisly, but found in pieces over the course of a week and a half in different places. Yeah.
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Yeah, and not to trivialize any of this, but again, that stuff is very ripe for movie making.
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Like you wouldn't, you know, you would write something like that in a screenplay and this actually happened.
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Yeah, so Victim 4, they were making great efforts to find out who this man was. So they actually, the police circulated a photo of his face and made a death mask. If you don't know what a death mask is, I encourage you to go listen to our episode on death masks.
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It's basically what you would think. It's a recreation of this man's head. And they put this thing along with a tattoo map. He had tattoos all over himself. An illustrated map of his tattoos in this death mask on display at the Great Lakes Exposition of 1936.
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Where, you know, 100,000 people could walk – I mean, it was a smart idea in one way because they had a – you know, could blast it out in the best way possible to try and identify who this person was. But it was also, again, like something from a movie. These people going to an exposition all of a sudden are walking by this tattoo map and the death mask of this man.
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And I'm sure the question came up like, well, why is it – where's the rest of his body? Why didn't they just show pictures of the tattoos?
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Yeah, I think there were seven more victims over the next two years. Victim eight were skeletal remains, but they did think they identified this person as Rose Wallace, a woman in her 40s. She had gone missing about a year earlier, and there was quicklime used to decompose this body. And this one, interestingly, had evidence of more of a clumsy dismemberment,
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To me, this one stands out a little bit as one that possibly might not be a victim and could have been misattributed to the mad butcher. That's just my personal feeling. I don't know if anyone else is saying this, but it's the one that stands out to me as being slightly different.
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Victim 9 had his heart removed. Victim 10 had morphine in her system. And I think... They're not quite sure how they all died. I think at one point they thought most of them died by the decapitation, but some were found with their blood completely drained from their body. Like I said, this one woman had morphine in her system, which could make sense.
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We'll get to something else later on of a potential victim that never happened where drugs might have been a factor. Yeah. You know, it's sort of all, you know, there were men, there were women, there were black people, there were white people. There wasn't any real rhyme or reason, it seemed like, aside from the fact that they were probably culled from this area of Ohio.
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I appreciate that. I mean, trust me, we're in this tiny studio now, the three of us. I know. I'm trying not to breathe. You've done all this on one breath. It's impressive. I know. Well, quickly, before we take a break so you can breathe again, we're going to talk about symptoms afterward.
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Before you get these symptoms, though, what's happening is your respiratory system is going to become inflamed. And this inflammation might stick around for a few weeks. But from there, it moves into your bloodstream. And then that's when you're going to get these symptoms once it sort of moves into the bloodstream. Right. And we're going to talk about the symptoms as promised right after this.
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Oh, God. Hi, everybody. It's Chuck here. Oh, boy. My selection this week is How the Flu Works. And I'll give you one reason why. This is from November 14th, 2017. I hope you like it. I'm going back to bed.
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It will get everybody else sick except you and Jerry. So the symptoms sound a lot like a cold because the symptoms are kind of the same. A cold is usually not as fraught with potential complications and maybe a little less severe. But they're pretty close, which is why you couldn't tell earlier if you had a cold or flu. Right.
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Yeah. I think that's kind of the way I just distinguish it, right? Yeah.
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Do you remember when Peter Sarsgaard was on Saturday Night Live years ago? No. You know the actor? Sure. He was on there during the SARS, when there was that SARS scare in the United States. And one of their skits was he had developed the SARS card, SARS card, which was just basically a surgical mask. But it was just funny. They said SARS card, SARS card like 30 times, and I laughed every time.
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I didn't know there were two different things. Well, there are the Skarsgaards, which is like Stellan Skarsgaard is the dad.
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And then the son was the dude on... True Blood, The Vampire Show, and then recently on that Pretty Little Liars, I think. I don't know. One with Nicole Kidman. Okay. That's Alexander Skarsgard. I think that might be him. Is Sarsgard the one who's in Fargo?
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All right, here's the deal. Okay. The guy in Fargo, man, this is such a bad sidetrack already. It's pretty bad. The guy in Fargo was Peter Stormare.
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No, but I definitely know that there is Peter Sarsgaard. Okay. Because he either was or is married to Maggie Gyllenhaal.
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And then there's Stellan and Alexander Skarsgård, and I don't know who It the Clown was. It's Bill Skarsgård. And is he related to the Skarsgårds? I guess so.
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No, actually, we never looked stuff up, but I did look that up.
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Because the headline here says Alexander Skarsgård's reaction to his brother Bill's clown costume.
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Oh, yeah, it was good. I know there were so many people screaming at their phones, but I think we finally got it right. Yeah, sorry about that, everybody.
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All right, this all got started with Sarsgaard Sarsgaards.
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That's correct. And the symptoms, like a cold or coughing, sneezing, the fever, which is different, like we said, with the flu, achy body, which usually comes with that fever, and then Josh's runny nose and congestion that you can hear and your overall lethargy.
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Severe dehydration is another secondary symptom of the flu. That's why, of course, you always want to drink plenty of water when you have a cold or a flu. I looked that one up too, Chuck, because if you think about it, why?
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That's right. Ear infections, especially if you're a kid. Sinus issues. Emily always gets bad sinus problems along with this stuff. I know. She was starting to get a little sniffly. Is she sick? She did get sick. Oh, that poor lady. Yeah, New York, man. Yeah. It killed everyone I love. And then if you, like in Emily's case, she's slightly asthmatic.
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But if you are asthmatic, you have like diabetes, it can make that stuff worse. Yeah.
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Well, actually, in the episode coming up about the silly one about the 10 cursed movies, remember the little girl from Poltergeist died at 12 from a heart attack brought on by the flu. Yeah. Right?
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Oh, okay. But I thought it was never like a virus like that? I don't think so. I think they mistook it. All right. Well, then forget all that.
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Okay. So how you get the flu. Is this. Like you said, it's generally about November through March. January and February tend to be the worst of it here in the United States. And as we mentioned, offices and schools especially because children are filthy monsters.
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I think the difference that I can tell, and I don't get the flu much. You know, I always get the stomach bug, which, as it turns out, is not a flu. I just learned. But I don't get the flu flu much. But I can always tell, though, when I'm super achy. Like, the flu just makes me feel like dog doo-doo. Right. Whereas a cold is just a big inconvenience.
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who just don't wash hands and they breathe on each other and touch each other and they don't cover their mouths when they cough or sneeze. But it's pretty cute when they hug each other. It's very cute, actually. It's worth all the sickness in the world. It's pretty great. But...
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That's the reason that kids tend to spread it more because as much as you try and teach them to cover their mouth when they cough and sneeze and wash their hands a lot, it's just not really on their radar like it is for adults.
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And then, you know, the kid then in turn brings it home and the family gets infected pretty quickly because try as you might, there's just a lot of close contact with kids that you can't avoid. And even if you're washing your hands, they will find a way to infect you. Right.
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Yeah, that's right. As far as, and you know, a lot of that was just spread from bird poop.
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Yeah, as far as the regular flu, the garden variety flu that we're talking about mainly here, it spreads from... Well, like we said, from touching stuff, from coughing and sneezing, when you cough and sneeze, even if you think you're covering your mouth pretty well, there may be little fluids squirting out between your fingers up to a few feet. Like a firehouse. It's in the air around you.
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That stuff can travel, you know. So if that lands on a doorknob or if someone covers their mouth like a normal and then opens a door or borrows a stapler or whatever, it's going to be on that doorknob. And then you touch it. And that's why like handwashing by the sick and by the non-sick is so crucial.
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You are toast. And as you mentioned earlier, it bears repeating, you can be sick a day before symptoms and you can – or you can be contagious a day before symptoms and still remain contagious up to seven days after death. the symptoms start. Right. So even if you feel better after day four, you could still be spreading that junk around for a few more days.
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And that's when you just lay in bed and watch Stranger Things 2. Right. I haven't seen it yet. Is it good? Yeah, we just finished it last night. Cool. Did you see the first season? Oh, yeah. That was great. Season 2 is... Just as great, if not better, I'm happy to say. I'm glad to say that, too. I was a little nervous, you know, because it was something I loved. And it's like, oh, man.
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Yeah, so great. I want to get those Duffer Brothers on Movie Crush. Oh, yeah, that'd be cool. Those guys would be great. Should we take a break? Yeah, I think so. All right, we'll come back and talk a little bit about pandemics.
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Yeah, and I think also in a pandemic, doesn't that mean it has left the country? Yeah, I think that is kind of one of the indicators of it, too. 1918, these numbers are staggering. This is the worst flu pandemic in world history in 1918. Mm-hmm. I don't know what months exactly, but 1918 and 19. And it killed more than 20 million people around the world.
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More lives were lost than all 20th century wars combined to the flu. Yeah. You said 20 million? 20 million worldwide, about half a million in the United States.
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Yeah. I mean, it's scary to think about. I mean, surely that couldn't happen today, could it? Or could it? Oh, yeah.
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Man, you'd think that we could head something like that off these days.
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All right, so as far as your risk of getting the flu, if you're a kid, like there's different risk groups, like high risk, low risk, whatever, medium or average risk. But if you're under two years old, your little immune system isn't quite smart enough yet to know how to fight things off. So you're definitely more at risk. And as always, what affects the children also affect the elderly.
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So if you're over 65... Seniors. Is elderly wrong to say? I think elderly is technically 81. Oh, really? Yeah. All right, so we'll go with seniors. Seniors. Active senior adults who have decades left ahead of them. That's right. Who else? Anyone who has any kind of chronic, like I mentioned, asthma or diabetes, any kind of chronic condition.
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If you're pregnant, if you work in a hospital or a doctor's office or a nursing home.
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Yeah, sure is. It's also a recipe for tapioca pudding. It is. The best around. Yeah. Remedy-wise, and we'll talk about vaccinations here in a minute because I thought that was kind of one of the most interesting parts of this. But as far as remedies, if you get the flu, it's a virus, so you can't take antibiotics. No. You can't take a pill that's going to cure you.
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There are some antiviral drugs, which I've never tried any of these. Have you? No. No? No. I tried Zycam last year once. I think that's for colds.
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Well, I mean, I had a few people say, oh, you know, you should try Zycam. It helps knock out your cold faster. It killed my sense of taste and smell. Oh, no. For several days to the point where I was scared. I don't remember that. I'll bet you were scared. Yeah, and I looked it up, and it's a thing.
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Yeah, it was pretty freaky. Yeah, I'll bet. And super noticeable. It wasn't like a subtle thing. You'd be like, chilly.
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So that was my experience. I'm not making some sweeping statement about that medication.
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But there are antiviral drugs called, there's one called Tamiflu, Relenza, Flumidine. A little on the nose if you ask me. Right.
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Yeah. How about a stat right off the get-go here? Okay. The flu, the CDC.
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Yeah, and that's what they do. What they try to do is just keep the spread, cellular spread from happening as much as it can. Right. And that's sort of the easiest way to say it.
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Yeah. I didn't get flu shots for many, many, many, many years until I had a kid.
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Yeah, like our close family, the grand-grands and the abbas, and the pop-pops and the papas and the poopas and the meemings and the momos.
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Yeah, Momo got a flu shot. That was nice of her. She's very kind. So, yeah, we all got flu shots, and I just wasn't, you know, I never got the flu much. I didn't have a disbelief in the flu vaccine. I was just like, nah, I don't really need to bother with that. Yeah. I was fine.
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Well, yeah, now they just sort of recommend it when you have kids. Up until they're a certain age, you should get vaccinated as a family.
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Right. Which is also what I said in my very first episode.
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I don't remember the schedule. Yeah, I don't remember the schedule. Well, ask your doctor, okay? We're not doctors. Stop pressuring us. Well, they'll tell you. Like when you go to get your little kiddie checkups, they say, you know, come back in this month and get your flu shot. Right. Number one and then flu shot number two.
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Remember that? Yep. It's not any funnier now. So the CDC right here in Atlanta, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, not the CDCP. No, they just stuck with the original. They reckon that between 5% and 20% of United States peoples get the flu each year compared to about 10% to 25% in dirty, cold Canada. Right, I know. Yeah.
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Well, and when they were doing it, when we say kids, you had to be over five because it was a, like you said, a live virus. Right. It was a live weakened virus. Yeah, and that's different. Like if you think – all right, I'm going to get a flu shot, so that means I'm going to get the flu virus shot into me, and so I might feel like I have the flu. That's not really the case.
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It's really kind of neat how they do it. These scientists and doctors, like you said, track what's going on in the world of flu all over the world, and they... They sort of make a – well, they don't sort of. They very definitely make a prediction and say here's the flu strain specific to the United States, let's say, that I think we're going to be faced with this year.
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And they make their best scientific guess possible. And that is the – You get a not live version of that virus injected into your body. Your body sees, hey, foreign invaders here. Let me produce antibodies. Then if that virus or if the real flu knocks on your door later that winter, your body says, wait, I've met you before. I know how to fight you. Yeah. But it's pretty cool.
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Like and it literally the effectiveness. I looked up this year, and it's a year-to-year thing. It's 40% to 60% on this year's strain, and it varies because it really just depends on how well, those scientists have predicted how much they get it right.
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Well, and they say there's a list of people who should not receive the flu shot. And one of those qualifications is if you are allergic to chicken eggs, then you shouldn't get a flu shot. Right.
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Yeah, if you currently have a fever, wait on your flu shot. Under six months, of course, we said you cannot. If you have had flu shots in the past and you had a bad reaction, because like I said, it's not going to make you sick, but you might feel a little achy or have sore muscles or something. But you can have a bad reaction. And if that's the case, then maybe flu shots aren't for you.
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Wow. Yeah. So you got anything else? No. I mean, I guess we're not going to cover the boogie-woogie flu. I thought that was boogie-woogie fever. No, it's the rock and pneumonia and the boogie-woogie flu.
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Uh, yeah, this is a Simpsons overlooked, uh, overlooked Simpsons bit from us. And this is not one of those, we get plenty of things where people are like, how could you not have mentioned this quote or this episode? But the response was good. Then people weren't necessarily, uh, poo-pooing it.
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Totally. But this is something we failed to mention, which definitely deserves its own email. And this is from Rich, our man on Cape Cod, as he says. Hey guys, was listening to the Simpsons two-parter. Enjoyed it very much. You explained how an episode came to be from conception to animation, etc. And you paid respect to each portion.
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But then you slided off one of the most important men in the franchise, you just said. And then they slapped Danny Elfman's score on it and it's done. Well... As any true Simpsons aficionado would know, Danny Elfman has never once written a score to the Simpsons. He wrote, as we know, just the title or the theme song.
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So he says that job fell to the immensely talented and recently terminated via email, Alf Clausen. For 27 years, every score, every cue, every song was composed, orchestrated, and conducted by Clausen and his live orchestra. He's won two Emmys and seven Annie Awards for his work. The reason this is such a painful sight was because this omission has been happening for years.
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Clausen has worked insane hours writing music for a live orchestra to accompany an animated show. He's always played second fiddle. Nailed it, he said. to all those who think Elfman is any part of the show after he pinned the main title. In fact, the main title theme song we all know and love is actually Clausen's re-orchestration of Elfman's theme that took place mid-season three.
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with a lusher, more crisp orchestration. Wow. I bet you anything rich plays the oboe. Alf Clausen, I'm so sorry. I know. He said, I admire your podcast for bringing light to information that has been stuck lurking in the shadows. You always make sure credit is given to those who sometimes went their entire lives without getting the nod they deserve.
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Well, this guy's really turning the knife in our backs, isn't he? And I feel you, O'Clausen. That respect. So, Alf Clausen, for real. And then it was a bit of a longer email. He told the story of how he was recently fired by email, which is not cool. No, it's definitely not.
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Yeah. And apparently the World Health Organization says around the world, as many as a quarter of a million people to a half a million people can die every year from the flu. Right. There's a lot of folks.
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Yeah. So it is a respiratory illness. So like I said before, when you hear people say the stomach flu, which I've said a lot in my life because I get it once a year with the poopy butt and the vomitous mouth. In the ill belly. At the same time though, I can't, I think I've asked you this before, but I don't remember. Has it literally ever happened at the same time? Mm-hmm. I think once in my life.
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Man, that's rough. I was on the john with a bucket. Oh, God. It's so rough. Well, the worst time I ever had it, I may have told this story before, I was sick at a friend's house, which is the worst, when I was not living in Atlanta, but I was in Atlanta. Oh, no. And I was like, I just got to get to my mom's house.
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Yeah. I was like, I just was much more comfortably being sick there.
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And he was working. It was just one of those things. And so I got in my brother's car that I was borrowing while I was in town. I don't like where this story's going. And I drove... No lie, probably about 100 miles an hour to Snellville from Atlanta. Yeah. Thinking – and I pooped in my pants in the car.
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And I remember thinking if a cop pulls me over, he would have to be a cold, heartless individual to give me a ticket because I would just say, sir – Don't take me to prison. Take me to a hospital because I'm dying. Yeah. So I drove 100 miles an hour. It was kind of fun. So you made it home. You showed up with poopy pants and your mom took care of you? Yep. Showed up to Diane's house and I lived.
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But anyway. That was a long way of setting up this, which is that is actually not a flu. The stomach flu is not because the flu is 100% a respiratory illness. Right. And it's not something that happens in your stomach or in your butt.
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So A is the most common and most severe. That's the bad news. B is a little milder, a little less prevalent, and then we go all the way down to C. which is I get the feeling C doesn't happen a lot, and it definitely isn't the one that you're going to have like a big epidemic of the flu from a C. Yeah, I couldn't find much on C influenza either.
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Yeah, I mean, remember the avian flu? That scared the world. Oh, yeah. And that was A. Right. That was A strain.
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So, I mean, that's a good little factoid. I don't think anyone really understands what those letters mean. That's what they mean. You know? Yeah. But as far as you're concerned, just pay attention to the news and when they talk about the scary ones. they'll mention those letters and numbers and then you can impress your friends.
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So as far as the standard flu that we're talking about here, the virus. It gets into your body and it kind of makes a beeline to your respiratory tract. And it binds with your cells. It's viruses. Did we do a general one on viruses?
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It is. So they bind to the surface of the cells in that respiratory tract. And then they say, hey, I'd like you to meet my little friend, RNA. Why don't I inject my genetic information into your nucleus and see how you like it?
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Yeah, like this is happening so fast. It moves in there. It says, I'm in charge now. Yeah, out of the way. Yeah, completely out of the way. I'm running the show here. We're copying each other, and we're going to move out to the cell membrane because this cell is going to die very quickly. And then that's just going to poof me out into the body further to infect other cells.
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It's true, man. Like, my kid didn't get sick at all for the first 18 months of her life. And I thought, I've got a wonder baby. Yeah, really? I don't know what's going on. We put her in daycare a couple of days a week, and she was sick nonstop for the next six months. Man, that is rough. It is rough. And then they get the family sick. And we'll talk a little bit about that and how that happens.
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But all this is to say... During flu season, especially if you work in an office where when you hear the flu's going around or whatever, or anywhere you work or in school, if you hear about the flu going around, Even if you don't feel sick or your cube mate doesn't feel or look sick, just start washing your hands a lot.
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Yeah, and they don't really know what that means. They didn't know if it was just something to keep them busy, preoccupied. They didn't know if the person who was designing the scavenger hunt got interrupted or knew that the cops were around and they were doing it sort of in real time.
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But at any rate, unfortunately, the scavenger hunt just kind of fizzled out because that was kind of a cool part of the story.
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Yeah, and they very smartly said, well, wait a minute. Why don't we check out what that last delivery was supposed to be? There may be a clue there. And it was an interesting place. You could only get there by Dirt Road, and it was right next to a TV transmission tower in kind of a remote wooded area. And cops combed the area, found shoe prints that matched Wells.
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They found those classic, iconic Geo Metro tire tracks that everyone recognizes by sight. But there really weren't any more clues as far as the cops were concerned at that location.
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So where the cops had found a dead end, a reporter and photographer for the Erie Times News went and did a little investigating of his own and saw this house, you know, next door where the pizza was delivered and said, well, you know, I'm just going to go knock on the door. This guy answers the door and his name was Bill Rothstein. And he actually said, you know, you can look around if you want.
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He's 59 years old. He's a handyman, wasn't married, had lived there his whole life. And apparently he seemed really smart, had a very – articulate way of speaking and apparently was fluent in several different languages. And the journalist kind of did a little poking around and didn't really see much and took off. But he made contact with Bill Rothstein.
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Hey, man, we were we were dabbling on the periphery of true crime. when most of these people were wet in their diapers. That's right, man.
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He's the first person that kind of went to knocking.
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Right. And if you're like me and you start hearing wife of the ex-girlfriend's dad's cousin – Your brain gets a little jumbled. So just very plainly, he used to date this woman. This woman called him up and said, hey, I've murdered my current boyfriend or was it her husband?
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And she said, and I need your help here. I blasted him with a shotgun. And I know we dated, oh, 20 years ago. But will you come help me out? Because they were still in contact, I guess. They remained friends. I guess so. And this racked Bill Rothstein, apparently. He thought about committing suicide, apparently. There was even a note they found, a suicide note.
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We were occasionally doing a poor job of covering true crime 10 years ago. That's right. We're going to do it again. That's right. We continue that great, rich history.
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But he maintained, like you said with the cops, that he didn't have anything to do with anything but most of the cleanup.
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Yeah, but which the reason he held on the body, he was supposed to get— Apparently he's supposed to grind this body up. And that's where he finally stopped short and was like, Jesus, I can't do this.
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He's like, I dated this lady. Right. She's not a nice person.
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Well, extremely seriously because the next day they arrested her. That's pretty serious. For murder. And about a year and a half later, a little short of that, she pled guilty but mentally ill. She was sentenced to seven to 20. Okay. And then Rothstein, for his part, eventually died of cancer in 2004.
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Yeah, that's a weird thing to put if you had nothing to do with that, you know. Right. That's just a very odd thing to do. It's like when the cops come in and you go, there's nothing under the bed. There's no reason to look there.
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Yeah, she asked for the old Hannibal Lecter treatment.
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I mean, I think so. This is in the Wired article. It said that there was a phone call from a state cop who had just met with her about something unrelated, like a different homicide. And she just – and it kind of makes sense, though, now, actually, when we – as we will learn, she talked a lot. Yeah, a lot.
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So it doesn't surprise me that another cop was just meeting with her about something unrelated. She was like, by the way, that whole collar bomb thing, I got all the skinny on that.
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Yeah. And eventually, you know, when they met with her about this, She admitted that she was involved, but... Well, she didn't admit she was involved in the plot, but she said, I knew about it. I gave him those two kitchen timers. And I was really close by when it happened. And by the way... The guy who blew up with the collar bomb, Mr. Wells, he was actually in on it too.
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She asks for immunity at this point. Yeah. After she had basically completely incriminated herself. And previous to all this, a lot more happened. There were four different informants who had come forward and said that this lady's been talking about this for a while. She very much had everything to do with it.
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And then a couple of months after she had started talking to the feds, another big break came. This witness came forward and said, hey, there's this crack dealer named Kenny Barnes. That is a crack dealer's name. Kenneth Barnes. And he was involved. They used to go fishing together, Armstrong, Deal Armstrong and Barnes. And- She sang like a canary to him, basically, and said, here's what she did.
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You got homemade bombs. You got a scavenger hunt. You've got a crack dealer. Well, you've got to have a crack dealer. You've got prostitutes. You've got pizza. Yeah, and let's start with the pizza, shall we? You've got a Geo Metro. Right. Which, by the way, I just wanted to point out ahead of time, there is no more... pizza delivery car 2003 than a Geo Metro. A teal one, no less.
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She, her brother-in-law put him in touch with Barnes while he was already in jail. on unrelated charges, basically. And so Barnes was already in prison and said, hey, I think I can shorten my time, so I'm going to try and get a reduced sentence at least by spilling the beans on Deal Armstrong.
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Yeah, and before the trial even, he told, his story was, is that she wanted me to kill her father. He was spending what would end up being her inheritance, she felt, and so she wanted him dead. And so she was doing this collar bomb heist to raise money to pay me to kill her dad.
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Yeah, the thing is, it's almost like they rolled them right off the line in 2003 straight to a pizza place. With the pizza guy inside already. Yeah, and the little sign magneted on top.
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That's right. So previous to this, she she had gotten the indictment. But in that indictment, it's very important that she was not I mean, granted, she was the only one technically indicted. But they in the indictment, it said that Rothstein was definitely a conspirator. And Wells, the man who was who was the victim, supposedly, he was definitely involved in this thing from the beginning.
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Yeah, they said he agreed to rob this bank. He thought it was a fake bomb. And he was told the scavenger hunt was a ruse to fool the cops. And if and when he did get caught, he could say, you know, I was just following orders, basically what he did.
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Whether Wells was in on the thing from the beginning.
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Or whether or not he was in from the beginning and then at one point wanted out and was forced to do this or whether he was forced from the beginning. Everyone's telling a different story. And, you know, basically the trial is where we will learn, you know, if all that is true, what really happened.
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That's right. But before she took the stand a few days earlier is when they trotted out Ken Barnes and he took the stand and he said he had, you know, by the time she took the stand, he had given a different account of the story than she would later do. So he got up there and said she was behind all this. She was the mastermind. Rothstein was involved. She just recruited him basically.
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She recruited Wells because Wells needed money. And here's where the prostitutes come into play. Apparently Wells had a relationship with a prostitute who was also a crack addict. So he would buy crack to give her presumably – as trade for sex, he ended up falling into debt with these crack dealers and needed money.
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And so basically the plot of Boulan Rouge, uh, and he contends, um, Barnes did that, that, uh, Up until the day of the crime, Wells thought this whole thing was fake, realized that it was a double cross, it was a real bomb, and he tried to run away and was tackled, and they put a gun to his head and locked him into this device.
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Well, yeah, and on the final day of her trial, at the very, very end of her taking the stand, is when she finally said that she didn't know him, never met him. And the first time she had ever laid eyes on him was on the news that day.
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Yeah, the jury took about 11 hours, and she was convicted of armed bank robbery conspiracy and using a destructive device in a crime of violence.
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Yeah, and she would die in prison, just like her prognosis said. She didn't, I think she lasted a few years.
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Yeah, so she finally passed away. And, you know, that's kind of the end of the story, even though there is a retired FBI investigator named Jim Fisher who said, I think they got this all wrong. I think that Rothstein was the guy the whole time. And he makes a decently compelling case, but it's, you know, everyone's dead now.
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Yeah, I mean, it's kind of hard to tell with literally everyone having died. But for his money, he thinks it was Rothstein.
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Oh, man, I don't know. I mean, it sounds like I kind of believe the story that they were all in it together and he was probably double crossed. But this is just from reading about this thing many, many years later.
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I'm going to go with one on emoji and John Adams. Hey, guys, enjoy the recent podcast about the history of emojis and emoticons. Reminded me of a discovery I made in the diaries of John Adams that makes a historical figure who's sometimes described as aloof seem completely charming. When the future president was about 22 years old, he made an entry in his diary in 1756 saying a cloudy morning.
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about 10, and he drew a little sunshine, breakout, a warm day. He uses a little line drawing of the sun that I always call an 18th century emoji. He liked the little creation so much he reused it a month later in the same diary, a misty morning, little sunshine, breakout, about noon. On the Massachusetts Historical Society website, the text of his letters and diaries is faithfully transcribed.
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But in these cases, a parenthetical note tells readers that there are small drawings of the sun and advises them to refer to the scans of the handwritten page where you can actually see this. Apparently, he grew out of his habit, though, because his later diaries do not use the adorable little son. Keep up the great work. My wife and I host a local history podcast for Boston. Nice.
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It's tightly scripted. Oh, man, he didn't tell me what it was. I would have totally shouted it out.
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One of these days, we'll be confident enough to have an unscripted conversation like you guys do. And that is from Jake Sconyers.
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Yeah. So, first of all, he was walking with a cane, kind of a funny-looking cane.
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And then under his T-shirt, he had clearly, and if you've seen the footage and the photos, which you can see, warning, by the way, for video.
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For the future, it's quite graphic. It's out there. But it is out there. But he had clearly some large boxy looking thing. It looked like he was wearing a shoebox around his neck with a T-shirt pulled over it.
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Oh, really? So either an officially licensed or not licensed, but whatever brand shirt or a homemade janky spray painted version.
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Yeah, which is kind of a long time if you're a bank robber.
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Yeah, and importantly, we did not mention, he lifted his shirt up and showed this teller this bomb, what's called a collar bomb, strapped around his neck. Right.
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Yeah, so these coppers, these troopers come over, and he says, hey, guys, this is a bomb around my neck. A group of black men chained this bomb around my neck at gunpoint, forced me to rob this bank for them. I'm not lying here. This thing is going to go off. So the cops call the bomb squad, and they do – I saw, you know, his –
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The family of Wells is still angry about the fact that she says they did nothing to save them, but... I would be, too. By the way, we should shout out Wired Magazine. Oh, yes, we really, really should. A lot of this came from a great, heavily researched story by Rich Shapiro from about eight years ago called The Incredible True Story of the Collar Bomb Heist.
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So thank you, Rich, for your work, but... The dude's on the ground. I mean, I kind of remember this happening because when I went and looked at the still images, I was like, wait a minute, I've seen this footage.
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And it's this guy sitting on the ground with this thing around his neck, kind of just waiting, seated on the pavement for about 25 minutes. He says very interestingly, like, did you call my boss at the pizza place?
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And then all of a sudden this bomb starts beeping fast, which is never a good sign. And when I was reading the story, I thought, well, that's just a ruse. But no, this thing detonated and killed him. It blasted a hole in his chest. It did not blow his head off like the Internet says. No. But it was a violent, awful death.
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Yeah, so the cops obviously check out that Geo Metro, and it's sweet, sweet styling, and they saw his cane in there. It turns out the reason why the cane was funny looking is because it was also a gun.
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Yeah, when you look at it. The bomb was clearly homemade. It had a couple of different parts to it. It was this banded metal collar that he wore around his neck. It was like locked to his neck. It had four keyholes and then a combination lock. Yeah, it was really locked to his neck. And then an iron box with two pipe bombs.
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Loaded up, ready to go, and then interestingly, and this will figure, put a pin in this one because this will figure in the case later, it had two kitchen timers in there in addition to an electronic countdown timer.
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Yeah, and then some decoy wires. You always got to have those if you're making a bomb.
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Hi everybody, Chuck here, curating a specially hand-picked, selected episode. This one's from May 2018, and boy oh boy, this is a good one. I forgot all about this one. This is part of our True Crime series. Not so grisly, as far as, like, you know, it's not about an axe murder or anything like that. It's about a heist, and I'd love me some heist. And this is called The Collar Bomb Heist.
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That's right. So the most important thing they found in this car, though, were some letters, some handwritten notes addressed to bomb hostage. So one of them said, I mean, these were instructions, basically, on what this guy should do, which further kind of cemented like, hey, this guy's probably telling the truth. It said, go rob this bank of 250 grand. And then, very strangely, outlined
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this little scavenger hunt, basically, to where eventually you will land upon the keys in combination to get you out of this thing by going all over town and finding these various hidden notes. And at the last note, you will be able to free yourself.
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Yeah, so the scavenger hunt was, like you said, he had gotten just to the one place. So the cops then say, well, here's what we're going to do. We're going to complete the scavenger hunt.
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All right. Scavenger hunt has just started by the coppers. We'll be right back.
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All right. So we're back. And we promised talk of chemistry. And I think we talked about this briefly on one show. I have tried to bake. I did a birthday cake for Emily a couple of years ago, red velvet, Waldorf Astoria cake. And it was okay. It wasn't pretty though.
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It just, you know, it didn't look like a cake you would buy in a store or, But it tasted really good. I'll bet it was made with a lot of love, too. Oh, of course. But my deal is I'm not a great baker because baking requires you to be very precise with your ingredients because it is chemistry.
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I'm a much better cook because I'm going to fly by the seat of my pants and throw a little of this in there, throw a little of that in there. You can't do that with baking. No, there's much more forgiveness in general cooking than baking.
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Yeah, and like when you're following a recipe, if you've never baked a cake before – And it says cream the butter and sugar or sift the flour. You can't just say, like, I don't have a sifter, so I'll just throw the flour in here. Like, your cake is screwed.
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I mean, I guess if you're a master baker and you know what you're doing, you can do something in lieu of something else. Sure. But if you're just an ordinary non-professional baker at home, just follow the recipe and do what they say.
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True, unless you're making a traditional South Georgia salt cake.
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Cake. This made me just frankly want to put my face in a cake. I know. Sheet caking. Oh, man. Yeah. I know we had a discussion about cake or pie quite a while ago. I don't remember exactly where you landed on that.
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Yeah. And so in other words, you couldn't just put the mixer on with your eggs and leave. No. And go get on social media.
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Yeah, like when you slice a piece of cake, not so much pound cake because it's way more dense or other non-floured cakes, but your standard birthday cake, you slice it up and you see those pockets, those holes, those are air holes. Those were where the bubbles were.
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Fat source, very important. Sure. Fats improve the texture of a cake, allow it to be moist, flavorful, because we all know fat tastes great, and butter improves. You know, people can use shortening, which is good. Margarine is good. Cooking oil, this can all be used. But for me, just get some real butter. And I say that for all foods. I went on a butter, not a kick. No, no, no.
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I am on a butter kick. I went on a butter, a boycott of sorts for a while. Like real butter. But now I'm back on butter.
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Right. And all these fat sources, they can be used sometimes together or swapped out for butter. But again, you've got to know what you're doing. You can't just say, well, I'm not going to use butter. I'm going to just use the same amount of cooking oil as melted butter.
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That's right. Sweetener. I was about to say sugar. Instead of sweetener. Might as well, though. But let's be honest. You can use honey and stuff. You can use agave, artificial sweetener. But sugar is the best thing to use, in my opinion. It bonds best to water molecules. It's really going to help. That'll help everything be nice and moist and soft. And you don't want to overdo it, though.
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You want to use, again, the right amount of sugar because not only could it affect the taste, but it could make the texture. It could be too tough.
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Yeah, and you can – I mean if you don't want to use sugar and you want to use honey – Look up a recipe that is specific to honey, and they will help account for that in certain ways. But it's still, to me, white sugar. Do it.
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Yeah, that and the eggs for sure. Yeah. Well, we're at eggs. Sugar. Sugar. And eggs.
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Yes, absolutely. The emulsifiers in the yolk, they help. It also kind of serves as a binding agent. There are a lot of things, including flour, that help bind things together. But those eggs and those yolks very much do because there are certain things in cake sometimes that don't want to mix. Yeah, like the water.
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Yeah, and the egg comes together and says, well, you know, can't we all just kind of stick together here?
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We already mentioned that fats are awesome and taste delicious.
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Yeah, a lot of bad, the carcasses of a lot of bad cakes have been left in its wake. Sure. To get where we are today.
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And I bet in the olden days when times were a little tougher, they probably still ate those cakes. Oh, yeah, I would guess so. You know, you probably didn't just toss it out to the mules. No, you gave them to sailors who were glad to have them. All right, that brings us to flour. Very, very important ingredient in most baked goods. And flour is what is going to really be the binding agent.
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It's really going to hold everything together. Give it its structure. Yeah, a lot of structure and strength. And this is – when you mix these proteins with water, it's going to form gluten and gluten – I know a lot of people hate gluten, my wife being one of them.
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But gluten is a pretty key ingredient here, although I will say they've come a long way now with gluten-free cakes. They have. It doesn't make you quite as sad to eat one. No, they're pretty good now. If you get a good gluten-free cake, it's... Well, a cheesecake is gluten-free, so that's okay with me. I mean, you know, your standard... substitute flour, they've just gotten a lot better, I think.
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They're probably the ones that are like... that are saying that. Oh, yeah, probably. Maybe. I don't know. It's a cake, huh?
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And finally, that brings us to the liquids. The liquids are obviously going to help keep things moist. They hydrate those proteins. They allow all those chemical changes to take place. But that liquid does, when you actually bake the cake, when it comes time to put it in the oven, which we're going to get to here in a sec, that creates a steam, like that liquid cooks out and vaporizes.
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So that steam expands the air cells and that volume, and it really lends itself to the light, airy structure and texture that you're going to get.
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All right. Well, we should talk about ovens. Yeah. I was about to say you can't bake a cake without an oven, but apparently you can. You can in Egypt. Yeah. Ancient Egypt. All right. So let's say we're not in ancient Egypt. Let's say we're in regular North America and Europe. And the 18th century is basically when the semi-closed oven came around.
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And before this, if you were baking cakes well, you were probably a professional baker because these ovens weren't in every household.
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For sure, because what you get there is... You get a consistent, even temperature. And, of course, that just got better and better over the years with advances in oven technology. Yeah. And more than anything, you get a reliable temperature, ideally.
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That's right. You also want to put your cake in the middle. Where you place your cake in the oven can even cause problems. It's very finicky, cakes are.
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Yeah, they're basically like, do this right, jerk. Or I might just take a nap here. In the middle of the cake. Maybe it'll burn. Maybe I'll stick up your whole house. But like you said about opening the door, like ideally you know the temperature of your oven. You know how long it takes. And maybe don't wait until literally you think I can pull it out.
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Although if you're a good baker, you're not sweating it. You pull it out and you know it's pretty much ready. Right. But definitely don't keep opening it. Try and at least wait until the end. And if you have – They're not quite as in fashion now, I don't think, but ovens with a window and a light. You can obviously take a little peek that way. Sure. Those are kind of out of fashion, right?
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Or are they? Not that I know of. I feel like I don't see those a lot.
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I think everyone does. I literally cannot picture my kitchen right now. Jerry, he's got a window, right? I've been baking in the dishwasher. Jerry and I say yes, you have a window and you're up. Yeah, that might be – I might have just said something very dumb. So it's staying in now. Well, I do know – you know what? I think I do have a window, but I don't have a working light.
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That's why I think I don't have a window. You need to replace the light bulb. Yeah, but who wants a bottle of that?
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I don't replace light bulbs in my house.
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All right. The heat of the oven is very important. So depending on how good your oven is, it may be a little off, maybe a little hotter or cooler. So you might want to purchase an oven thermometer just to give it a double check because baking is science. And when you think that that cake is done, take a little peek through your window that everyone has or open it if you really think it's done.
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Give a little tap in the center. If it springs back, then it's probably done. If you're an experienced baker, you just know by looking at it. Or you can always do the old toothpick trick, which is sticking that toothpick, wooden toothpick, in the center of the cake and pull it out. And if there's no cake on it, then it's pretty much done. Right. If it's covered in goo, that means it's not done.
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But then you can also lick that goo off that toothpick.
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That's true. And if your cake is done, you're not finished baking it yet even. You need to let it cool in the pan.
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You don't just pull the cake out and turn it upside down in your sink and eat it with your hands while it's still hot. Right. That's not the way to do it. No. No. You want to let it finish in the pan cooling because it's still doing a little bit of baking and it's getting used to its new room in the kitchen and saying, all right, this is a different temperature in here.
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10 or 15 minutes later, get out that wire rack, flip it over, and ideally it comes out all in one nice thing.
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The frosting grooves, in other words. Yep. Should we take a break? Yes. All right. We're going to talk, well, just about other cakey stuff right after this.
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Yeah, they need, I know you've noticed, they need to chill out here with the sweets at work. Oh, dude. Like they have Little Debbie star crunches and Swiss cake rolls and stuff all over the place.
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Yeah. And then, so just, you know, leave that baking soda in your fridge to soak up the stink. Sure. Because that's all it's good for. Well, that and... No, you can use baking soda for a lot of stuff.
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With your parents' help. Yeah. Pre-packaged cake mix was a very big deal when it came out in the 1930s. But it was a company named P. Duff & Sons, and they said, we've got a problem here. We've got too much molasses on our hands. And this is kind of how a lot of great things have been invented. They had too much of something. They said, well, what can we use this for?
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So they got to work, and they said, Mr. John Duff, the owner – I said, you know what, throw a little wheat flour in there with this molasses, a little shortening, some spices. We got a gingerbread mix that we can sell to the public. All you got to do is add water, dum-dum, and you can bake yourself some gingerbread cookies.
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Yeah. I mean, pre-made cake mixes did get way more popular after World War II, but it wasn't because there was so much flour.
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Not you. My toothlessness is for different reasons.
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And I've also noticed, though, there's this weird mix in our office now because they try to get super healthy. Yeah. So there will be like Swiss cake rolls next to a bag of like clam chips or something. What chips? I don't know.
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Right? Not true. No? Yeah, that is a total urban myth. Most of these pre-made mixes for years had said to add your own eggs because it just was better to add fresh eggs. Yeah. It tastes better and perform better. So I don't know how that got started. Yeah.
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Yeah. Champion cake decorator. Is that right? Not literal champion. Like, she never won a contest. Yeah, because it is out there. But, yeah, I mean, as far as the home cake baker goes, like, she couldn't go on one of these shows. Shows now where they make, like, giant submarines and stuff out of fondant.
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But just for, like, mom making special cakes every year for the birthday, every year she would say, what kind of cake you want this year? I'd be like, I want a Star Wars cake. I want an Atlanta Falcons cake. Lo and behold, I would get my Atlanta Falcons cake.
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Was it a keytar or a keyboard? It was a keyboard. Okay. Yeah. You never know. Strap a guitar strap on it, you might could have held it. I would not have put it past her to make it a key tar. Man, that is a very sweet story.
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Hojo fans, huh? Yes. Isn't that his nickname? I don't think so. Did I make that up? Yeah. I think that's the hotel chain. I think you're totally right. All right. Well, another tip here for baking a cake. If you were looking at recipes... And it says, use this kind of pan. You think, well, I don't have that kind of pan. I've got this kind of pan. It's aluminum and square.
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And they're calling for a round, dark pan. It makes a big difference. Like it can literally ruin your cake.
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Yeah. It says a dark nonstick pan requires 25 percent reduction in temperature. So you want to knock that heat down 25 percent. Yeah. But also like Google that stuff. Don't just say Josh and Chuck said this should work. You know, like you have to have the right pan for that recipe. And they will tell you in the recipe. And if you don't have it, just look up the cheat for it basically.
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I don't know about that. But those are the two leading ways that we will mess your life up. For sure. All right. Well, I guess we need to talk about the different methods. We're getting super wonky into cakes here.
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All right. Well, let's talk about creaming then because that is one kind of method of making a cake. And creaming is what we talked about. You may not have known exactly what we meant. But when you combine like the butter and sugar and it says cream it with an electric beater.
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That's what you're doing, and it's really tough at first to get it going, but just hang in there because that butter will start to break apart, mixing it with that sugar, and you've got a nice creamed mix of ingredients, starter mix of ingredients on your hand there. Right. But you don't skimp on that first step.
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Yeah, so in the creaming method, when it says, then mix ingredients in this order, wet, then dry, do that. Right. Right. Don't just say, ah, just throw it all in there, right?
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And also pound cakes, too. The reason why you're not going to find a pound cake with a big buttercream frosting is because that will send you into sugar shock in a second. Because pound cake is already. Really dense and sugary. That's why you just have a little glaze on top. Yep. I do like that glaze, actually. I'll eat a pound cake. I think that glaze is, what's it called?
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Yeah. I don't, I don't indulge. I'm not getting into those Swiss cake rolls, but it is tough to walk by the miniature candy bar section.
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Yeah, you probably don't even have flour in this. This is probably a flourless cake.
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I didn't know that you used a water bath. That was news to me.
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And not be like, well, just one of those little guys. Look how tiny it is.
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At Isle of Palms for my vacation that I've spoken about, they had one of the – I can't remember which one. But one of the seafood joints where I would get all the fresh seafood had a homemade key lime pie. And I bought and ate one of them with my friends that week. And I bought two to go home with. Did they make it at home? Huh? Did they make it all the way home? Yeah, I stopped at the border.
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Just put my face in it. No, they made it home. I think there's still one in the freezer, actually. And then one of them was consumed. Nice. Yeah, good key lime pie. And finally, with the non-aeration method, you are not doing the beating. You're not creaming that stuff. You're folding it. the batter.
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And, uh, we could describe it here, but if you don't know what folding is in baking, just, just look it up on the YouTube for a proper folding technique. Right. Generally done with a, like a rubber spatula.
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It's post-Halloween stuff, too, so maybe it'll die down.
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Yeah, Emily makes a really good gluten-free shortbread. She's kind of gotten into baking a bit in the last five or six years and gotten pretty good at it. So she makes a good gluten-free shortbread that we've had as shortcake with homemade whipped topping and good fresh strawberries. Those are good, but my one complaint with her baking is –
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It literally looks like she came in there and just started throwing ingredients everywhere with her bare hands like a three-year-old. And then baked. Right. And then said, I'm done. Yeah. Good night. It is a mess. Yeah. A big, big mess. And she always just says, get out of here. I'll clean it up afterward. Don't worry about it. Yeah. Yeah.
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Oh, for sure. Yeah. Especially if both of you do different things in the kitchen. Right. Like one's hovering like, are you going to clean that up? Well, I'm the kitchen cleaner.
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Well, I'll do this, and this is such a passive-aggressive move for me, which is my style. Not endorsing that. I'm just saying it's one of my downfalls I need to work on. But I will just go in there and just, like, groan or something. And she'll just say, no. Out. Right. Again.
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That's pretty nice, Chuck. It's always with love, though.
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Well, and at my house at Halloween, we gave away two things. We gave away whole slices of pound cake and just figs. It was the worst house on the block. Did you – are you a pound cake fan? Not typically. Like I would never order a pound cake or say, hey – Can someone bake me one for my birthday? You wouldn't say, like, Clark me a pound cake? No, I would never ask someone to Clark me a pound cake.
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You put it all together at once. Yeah, well, we should talk a little bit about frosting and icing. The earliest versions of frosting was just sort of an almond and sugar paste. Eh, not so big on that.
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Sure, understood. Stuff it in a pastry. A French chef, though, is the first person, they think, that created the first legit iced layer cake in the 15th century. And then about the middle of the 17th century is when the first frosting recipes started spreading around on the Internet. Right.
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Yeah, I'm not into it. Buttercream or cream cheese or even Emily's Waldorf Astoria frosting. Believe it or not. I mean, it has a bit of a mouthfeel because of the shortening, but like a residue on the palate. Yeah. On the roof of your mouth. Yeah.
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Okay. I read it on What's Cooking America. I'll try it. Because I'm making Emily, her birthday is in a couple weeks, and I'm taking another stab at it.
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No, no, no. I have to use the recipe she tells me to use. Oh, I got you. Which is the gluten-free Waldorf Astoria version.
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I can't remember. It's been a couple of years since I tried it.
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Well, and the thing is, too, a lot of people that don't try red velvet cake don't try it because they think it doesn't, like, it tastes like chocolate cake pretty much. Yeah. It just is red.
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Yeah, like we called, my grandmother, Bryant, called one of the great all-time southern cooks and bakers, like, you know, banana nut bread?
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She called that hummingbird, and I don't know if that was specific to her or if they are interchangeable.
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See, maybe, I mean, that's sort of like banana nut bread. So I don't know if they're interchangeable or if it's a variation, but give me some banana nut bread, which is not a cake, but it sort of is, and slice it up and put some butter on it. Yeah. Toast it in the oven. Yep.
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But occasionally, like in my life, someone has had pound cake and said, would you like some pound cake? And it's, you know, it's good. It's good, sugary and dense stuff. Yeah.
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All right, let's talk about Indian pound cake. Apparently, that's a thing that has cornmeal in it. And I can't imagine that taste, but I'd like to try it.
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Yeah, apparently the good old-fashioned chocolate layer cake came out of Boston because there were chocolate companies there. Even the German chocolate cake is not German.
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German-American. Could be. Maybe they should call it the German-American chocolate cake.
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This is where cakes were born, really. The pineapple upside-down cake is... Heaven help you if you eat that stuff. I love it. Do you really?
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I just don't like fruit anywhere near my cake. Yeah. Unless it's strawberry shortcake.
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Yeah. Maybe that's the difference between the hummingbird and banana bread. Right. Although bananas in there.
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No, or coconut, which is in the German chocolate cake, isn't that coconut in the icing? Yes, yeah. Yeah, see that? That's so good. I don't want coconut anywhere near my cakes. But that pineapple upside-down cake, apparently that stuff sort of sprang out of a contest. Dole had, the Dole Company in the mid-1920s, that said, hey, bake some cakes with fruit.
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And so thousands of pineapple upside-down cakes came out. So I don't think they were invented for that, but maybe that's just what made them so popular. I don't know. Gotcha.
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Yeah, I am not a fan of lemon cakes. Oh, really? It's like a lemon pound cake I'm not into.
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What else? What about Tres Leches? Tres Leches. It's great, too. It is.
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All right. I'm going to call this a special one-man administrative details episode. Shout. Oh, wow. Because we got a box today from a man named Nick Pagan from San Jose Bay Area. And he sent us just a lot of stuff, like good stuff. It wasn't a box full of garbage. Not that anyone ever has sent us a box full of garbage. He sent us framed things, sent me a framed pavement poster, which is great.
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I'm going to toss it up between a carrot cake with cream cheese frosting. That's Bill Clinton's favorite. Well, you know. As Bill goes, so goes Chuck. Which is not true.
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Very nice. And sent us CDs of music. He sent bottles of liquid stuff, most notably wine for Jerry. And then bourbon and scotch for us. And he is a whiskey enthusiast that lives in the Bay Area, like big time.
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And just a good dude. And beyond that, he added this. He's a list maker, an amateur list maker. Right. And he sent us a list, and Nick, if you're listening, please send us the Word document, digital version of this printout that you sent. Because he said every time you said we should do a podcast on that, he made a list alphabetically of that stuff.
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And the list is so comprehensive and awesome that we need it to work from.
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He made a list of films that each of us said we need to see.
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which is pretty good. And then finally he sent us a list and, and encouraged us to play a little game here, which we'll do very quickly of, uh, see if Chuck can see if Josh can guess how many times we've done the following things. You ready? Why me? Well, because I have the list in my hand and you're sitting across from me and you can't see it through this paper. I don't think so.
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How many COAs and for people that don't know, it means cover our butts. Uh, how many COAs have we issued over a thousand shows?
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How many times have we admitted on the air that it is a take two? Oh, man. You're not going to get anything, or maybe you might. It'll be total luck if I do. Eight. Seven. Oh, so close. Rare listener mail shout outs. Oh, I don't know what that means. Like where we say, hey, can you say hello to my boyfriend?
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Did we used to do it more than we do now? I think so. I think that's what it was, too. We were a little more generous in our earlier days. Yeah. Trips in the Wayback Machine.
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The carrot cake with cream cheese frosting or I like a red velvet cake. Really? Yeah. Well, that's the southern version, I think. With buttercream or cream cheese frosting. Yeah.
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Four. You need to step it up. How many times have I done this? Wow.
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Simpsons references, I'll just go ahead and tell you, 197. Does that include the two episodes on The Simpsons? No, no, no, I don't think so. Apparently we have high-fived once. Okay. I'm surprised we even did that. Sure. Number of times Josh has done this a lot.
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Almost half of our episodes. That's great. Yeah. And then bonus name all of Josh's nicknames for Chuck. I'll just go and read those. You have called me Chuckers. You've called me beautiful. Don't remember that one. The famous Chuck Tran, Cheech, Rusty, Zonkers, and The Flash. Nick is my new favorite listener.
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Yeah, so Nick Pagan, you are now on the guest list for the San Francisco Sketch Fest show. Just hit me up with an email, send that list of shows that we need to do via digital document, and you are in like Flynn.
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Yeah. Emily's favorite of all time, hands down, is the Waldorf Astoria red velvet cake. which is red velvet cake with a frosting that is basically only like shortening vanilla and sugar.
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It's not a cream cheese thing. What's your favorite?
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Yeah. I'm a big frosting and icing guy, too. So a corner piece of sheet cake is pretty much heaven.
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All I know is get out of my face with any coconut or any pineapple. I'll take that. I'll just slide that over to your desk then.
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I don't even like German chocolate cake, really.
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See, I think that's what it is that I don't like. I like sort of a tradition.
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All right. The funny thing is we really haven't even started yet.
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No. Let's at least give out like three facts first.
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All right. How about this then? I'll start you out with the word cake. Apparently is an old Norse word, kaka, which is kind of funny because I don't know where it came from. But here in America, kaka can mean doo-doo. Yeah. But K-A-K-A is where the original word supposedly came from.
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Yeah, they'd add a little honey to it, but it's not like what we think of as cake today.
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It seems like, I bet the Chinese were doing it too, didn't say in here. Right. But it seems like anytime you're talking about who did stuff first. It's like Egyptians, Chinese, Greeks, and Romans. Pretty much. I mean, you know, ancient civilization. But maybe not China because it doesn't seem like a very cakey culture.
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I bet you someone knows, though. And I bet you there's like one of the best things in the world. It's probably a Chinese cake.
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That's right. I mean, clearly, like in Germany, like you talked about in the 15th century, they were making cakes. They were actually even serving cakes at birthdays. And by all accounts, that's probably the first people to start the birthday cake tradition. But and I think they even put candles on top. Well, none of the Greeks put candles on top, but it wasn't like a happy birthday cake.
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No, it was more like, hey, this cake is round like the moon. And we're going to put candles on it to make them glow. And they're probably huge candles now that I think about it.
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That's right. And then the Germans in the 1400s started doing birthday cakes. And in the 1700s were... full-on, like, it's a kid's birthday party, it's got candles, it's a cake, and we'll sing some depressing German song.
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This is from November 30th, 2017. This is supersized because somehow we did 73 minutes on cake, probably because we talked about cake a lot. Beyond just the facts and figures, I know our personal opinions came around in this episode. So I hope you enjoyed as much as you enjoyed pie.
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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
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But apparently they were like, are you mocking us? And the soda jerks union said, no, no. And they changed the spelling from S-U-N-D-A-Y to S-U-N-D-A-E.
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Right. Yes. And they were like, this is their act of retribution, changing the spelling of sundae.
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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry. So this is Stuff You Should Know, the dreaming of summer in the middle of winter edition.
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Yeah, the world's first floating ice cream parlor. That's awesome. In the Western Pacific. Yeah. Well, even before that, in World War I, ice cream was deemed an essential food. And so ice cream manufacturers got rations of sugar so they could keep making ice cream during the war, even though everything else was being rationed.
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Is it this campy? I thought it was the country's best yogurt.
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Yeah, I'm not the hugest fan. I love that stuff. Each bite is just like, it's just a trip through a flowery meadow. Every bite. Really? Yes.
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I get the regular. like the yeah yeah just the i guess plain version yeah and then you throw in a little mango some blueberries oh look at you the white yogurt chips on top that's a good combination or if you want to go a different route there's like you know a chocolate crunch and maybe some other kind of um chocolatey delicious treat on top man i want some ice cream so bad
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Oh, yeah. Yeah, they were delicious. Nice. Was it heavy or light? It was light. Yeah. Yeah, after reading this, I was like, man, this is very light. A lot of air in there. I taught myself to juggle with them.
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Yes. So ice cream... is a colloid, right? Yeah. Which is an unusual and complex substance. And actually, quicksand is a colloid. It's a colloidal gel.
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Technically. I remember that. But ice cream is a colloid, and a colloid is a substance where you have things that don't normally mix that are mixed together. Right. And in this case, you have fat and sugar and milk mixed together with a little bit of air thrown in. And what you need to create a colloid is something called an emulsifier.
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That's the bonding agent that holds everything together, these things that don't normally mix. And in the earliest cases, egg yolks were the emulsifier that held everything together. And, of course, if you're making ice cream at home, you can still use egg yolks as an emulsifier. It's an easy go-to thing. But...
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If you're manufacturing it on a large scale, you're probably using something like xanthan gum or something else to emulsify and stabilize the whole thing, to hold it together. But yes, ice cream specifically is a colloid that has undergone a very specific manufacturing process.
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And if you take or add different ingredients or different steps in the process, then you have something different, like frozen yogurt or soft-serve ice cream or sherbert ice cream.
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Yeah, you don't start with yogurt. You make yogurt during it. Yeah, I didn't know that either. Pretty cool.
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I think that's neat. Yeah, sure, because as we learned— The federal government can't get its act together on anything, but it can define ice cream.
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Yeah, and the grabster who wrote this points out that that's usually a general rule of thumb, that the heavier the ice cream, the higher quality it is.
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But he points out, to be fair, you need to compare like types. Sure. Like you can't compare something that's loaded down with like brownies and Snickers with like a plain vanilla. Yeah. Because, you know, the brownies and Snickers are going to add weight and throw off your judgment.
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Yeah, about 14% to 16%. Yeah, that sounds pretty good when you're talking butterfat. 10% for the cheap stuff that Ned Flanders would eat. Yeah, totally. So like I said, ice cream is a colloid, and it's created by adding egg yolk to milk fat and sugar.
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Then you just inject a bunch of casings directly into your neck? Yeah.
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Right. So that's just like – well, not necessarily. Well, cholesterol-wise, sure. But the ice cream itself is specifically just this combination of different – types of ingredients with other agents that hold the whole thing together that's put through this process, right?
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And no matter whether you're making it at home or if you just bought a factory or inherited it from your rich uncle who just died and left it to you, then you're going to be following pretty much the same process using virtually the same ingredients.
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Oh, no way. You did it without freezing the canister first?
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We luckily figured that out. Yeah. From the get-go. Made some pretty killer lemon gelato once.
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Right. Or if you're using the hand crank thing, that's what you just said. The Johnson crank? Right. Yeah. What you just said listed off all of the necessary components to making ice cream. You've got something that's cooling it, whether that little drum that you put in the freezer or you have ammonia-filled tubes that are freezing a tube that your mix is in. Yeah.
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What do they call it? Like mildly sensitive maybe?
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The ammonia is not being introduced to the ice cream. Not at all. It's just, yeah, the tube is up against the tube that the ice cream is in. That's right. Or if you are making it at home using a Johnson crank, you're going to use rock salt, right?
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So I was kind of, I didn't understand what the point of using rock salt was. So I looked into it.
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Okay, so basically the reason that you would add rock salt to ice is because if you just used ice, the freezing point of ice is 32 degrees Fahrenheit.
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It takes more than that, more degrees than that. Let me put it a different way. Milk freezes at a lower temperature than ice. Yes. Right? So when you add salt, you actually lower the freezing point of that ice. Oh, okay. Because when you're using ice, it's a freshwater mixture. Yeah. Saltwater ice has a lower freezing temperature. Yeah. So you're melting it, and it's melting and refreezing.
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And as the ice melts, the way that it's melting is by drawing heat from something else. In this case, your ice cream mixture, right? Right. So when you add salt, it has to draw more heat to melt because it has a lower freezing point, freezing temperature. Yeah. So that's why you add salt. It actually lowers the freezing point, which allows you to cool your ice cream faster. Yeah. Ah. Right?
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Like you're cool with lactose at work, but you don't want lactose marrying your kid. You're that kind of intolerant to lactose, right?
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So it lowers the freezing point. Yeah. Milk has a lower freezing point. And it draws the heat out more quickly so those ice crystals don't form on the side.
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I'm sure I did. I don't really remember. I just remember the wooden bucket thing with the crank on top.
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That's what I remember. And like a bag of rock salt.
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And we should say by this time you've got your ice cream mixture, but you've already added whatever flavor you're going to add. Right. But if you're adding chunks of stuff. Which you should. You're not doing that quite yet. No. So you're freezing it. What you've just created is a frozen ice cream mixture.
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It's not technically USDA standard ice cream yet. If you stopped right here, and even if you added the Snickers or the brownies or whatever. Or both. what you would have is soft-serve ice cream. Yeah. The ice cream still has another step to go through to become regular old ice cream, and that's the hardening process.
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Making ice cream? Sure. Sure, yeah. Well, actually, it's funny that you say that because whether you have a hand crank or one of those awesome electric ones that you have to freeze the drum ahead of time, you can also just make it at home with basically nothing. Yeah. Just using a couple of bags, baggies, like a bigger baggie, a smaller baggie, and make a little rock salt mixture.
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And, well, I won't go through the whole recipe, but if you go to HowStuffWorks and look up how ice cream works, there is a recipe for five-minute ice cream that makes just a little bit using nothing but plastic bags and the ice cream ingredients.
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So we'll talk a little bit about just how much everybody loves ice cream right after this.
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That's a good one. Well, basically any Ben and Jerry's is good. I'm not a big fan of cherries and stuff. Ooh, me neither. But other than that, I'm like pretty cool with all ice cream. And I used to not like bananas and things, but now I'm like I'm cool with bananas. Oh, yeah? Yeah. Like bananas and ice cream I would never have eaten before, and now I will.
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Yeah, so if the volume goes from one gallon of ice cream mixture to a completed one and a half gallons of ice cream, it's a 50% overrun.
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Yes. But you can also get into a situation where your ice cream is dense because you're not using much stabilizer or emulsifier.
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So just really dense ice cream is not necessarily the best thing. Right. You want a mixture between the two of somewhat dense but not totally dense but not super light ice cream. There's a balance that you want to achieve.
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No. No. And, Chuck, we were remiss in not mentioning ice cream cones.
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If I get a cone, I like it all except the, I don't know what they call the non-sugar cone ones.
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Yeah. That's definitely the lowest on my list, but that one's fine. But yes, I guess it does go waffle, sugar. Cheap cone. Okay. As far as order of preference goes. Right, sure. But, no, waffle cone, obviously. That, like, just adds to the whole thing. Smelling like fresh-made waffle cones being made while you're ordering ice cream really... I always get the cup.
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I'm trying to think of one I really don't like, and nothing's coming to mind except for stuff with cherry in it.
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Yeah, I almost always do just for, like, just to be healthier. while I'm eating ice cream.
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Yeah, for sure. But it is preferable in a waffle cone.
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So there's an origin story to the waffle cone, and a lot of people place it at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis.
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And that is probably not where ice cream cones were invented, but that is where they were popularized.
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There definitely was some waffles being made, but there was also some ice cream being served. That's documented.
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And the story goes that the ice cream makers ran out of plates or bowls or whatever they usually use, and they turned to the waffle makers who said, hey, we can help you out for a fee.
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Let's turn these things into some sort of cone and – Bam. That's what happened. But it turns out that the person who actually invented the ice cream cone was an Italian immigrant to America named Italo Marchione. Please, go ahead. You mean Italo Marchione?
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No, supposedly there's French cookbooks that date back to the 1840s that have recipes for ice cream cones.
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So if you want to become like a Jacob Fusel type, you can actually go, depending on where you are in the country, to your local major university. And they may or may not, depending on the size of their dairy program, offer like a real ice cream course.
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Actually, Penn State graduated Ben and Jerry back in 1977. Really? Yep.
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No, one of them tried to get into med school. He graduated and couldn't afford med school.
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Candy bar pie? Like, what kind of candy bar is it modeled after?
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The other one just dropped out of college, but both of them went together to Penn State's ice cream course and graduated. Oh, cool.
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What's interesting, though, is the United States isn't the leader in ice cream consumption. Did you know that? Who is? New Zealand. No way. Yeah, New Zealand... Per capita, I guess? Obviously. Yeah, well, yes. Yeah, so the average New Zealander eats 7 1⁄2 gallons of ice cream a year. Wow. Americans eat 5 1⁄2 gallons. Huh.
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There are really good vanillas out there that you're just like, this is all that's needed.
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I want to try that. I like Butterfinger in ice cream. Yeah. What about places to get ice cream?
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And I was thinking about it, and it's probably because, like at a Japanese restaurant, you don't really have any other options besides green tea. Yeah. I've never had the green tea ice cream. Is it good? Oh, my God.
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If you go to a good Japanese restaurant, they bring it out whether you ask for it or not. Oh, really? It's part of the meal. And it'll be like green tea or red bean is another one, too. That's a pretty good ice cream, but green tea definitely has it destroyed. That sounds delicious. Yes, it is.
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Yeah. So if you want to know more about ice cream and to get this awesome, really easy five-minute ice cream recipe, go to HowStuffWorks.com and type ice cream in the search bar. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail.
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There's a place in Old Town Alexandria outside of D.C. called Pops. It's like an old-timey ice cream parlor. Awesome.
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That was nice. Man, usually people have a better chance of getting struck by lightning when spelling Jerry's name correctly, but he nailed it.
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Wow. So how about that? Man, scientists are smart. If you want to get in touch with us, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com, and you can join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.
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It's pretty much just ice cream. There's a couple of long cases. They've got the old turn-of-the-last-century furniture and everything in the striped wallpaper. They're doing it right, but then their ice cream stands behind it, too. It's good. And then, of course, Friendly's.
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Friendly's has the Reese's Pieces Sundae, which is probably the greatest ice cream treat ever created in the history of humanity.
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They had that in Ohio, too. And on your birthday, they'd come out with that big drum. Oh, yeah. Scared me to death. I went under the table a couple of times.
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I have one more, though. Have you ever been to the Plaza Fiesta, I think is what it's called, over on Beaufort Highway? No. Yeah, oh yeah. Okay. They have a gelato place there that had tuna-flavored gelato. Raw tuna-flavored gelato. And by God, it tasted exactly like raw tuna flavor. I thought you were going to say it was good.
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it wasn't bad really like yeah if you if you eat like sashimi or something like that i love sashimi you would appreciate this it's not something you're like oh man i've got to get some tuna flavored gelato but you're not like it's not like one bite and you spit it out yeah yeah you're just like this is really odd but interesting unusually tasty i have to try that yeah uh my other quickly my other thing i like lately is a little heat in the ice cream
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I am so over salted caramel or bacon and sweetness. I'm just so sick of that combination. Really? Yeah, it's all basically a ripoff of Wendy's fries and a Frosty dip together. That's good, too. That's fine. That's the original. The original salty sweet.
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I am as well. Let's get through this and we can go get some ice cream, okay? Yay. You're buying. Okay. So the history of ice cream, Chuck. How long could it possibly have been around?
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Yeah. I think the International Dairy Association, the big guy.
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They came up with this history of ice cream or frozen dairy treats is a better way to put it. Because ice cream is the lion's share of frozen dairy treats, but technically it falls under the umbrella of frozen dairy treats.
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Apparently all this was going on in a vacuum, too, like over in Asia.
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Yeah, in the Mideast in Asia, wherever they had mountains in these areas, and they could get snow and ice. Because Marco Polo, in I think the 13th century, came back to Italy and said, this idea out yeah frozen fruit treats and that was basically the origin of ice cream in the west
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Yeah. No, it was a big deal to have ice. Unless, of course, it was winter. In which case you're like, oh, yeah, I can have a frozen treat. But if it were summer and you were enjoying a frozen dairy treat... Send the runner. You're rich. Yeah. You're super rich. So apparently by about the 17th century...
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There was at least one cafe in Paris, I think it was the first cafe in Paris, that started selling ice cream to the public in 1660. Nice. They basically made it egalitarian. And from that point on, ice cream was a definite luxury item, but you didn't have to be royalty to obtain it.
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Yeah. George Washington had a recipe. Thomas Jefferson had a recipe. Yeah. Dolly Madison used to like to serve it at the White House. George Washington ate a lot of it, right? Didn't he say $200 for one summer? Yeah, and I failed to go to the West Egg Currency Converter. That's a lot of ice cream.
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Especially if that's like $50,000 worth of ice cream. That would be a lot. You can't eat that in one summer. Even if you're Joey Chestnut, world record holder for most ice cream eating.
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1.8 gallons in 6 minutes. 1.8 gallons in 6 minutes.
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No, I've done a Don't Be Dumb on it, though, before.
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Like, what is brain freeze? Yeah. Oh, what is brain freeze? Yeah. Oh, there's a...
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There's a blood vessel that runs from your brain into the roof of your mouth that becomes constricted, which changes the volume of your brain, which gives you a headache, which is why if you place your tongue against the roof of your mouth while you have brain freeze, it warms up that blood vessel, allowing it to relax again.
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You'll concentrate on that pain instead of the brain freeze.
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I've gotten it accidentally, though, as an adult from time to time.
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No, it's terrible. It's as terrible as an adult as it is when you're a child.
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But even still, you had... You had the manufacturing in place. The distribution, though, was still limited to, say, like a store, somebody who could make money by investing in some freezer cases and then selling it to the public. It wasn't until ice boxes became widespread in America that the ice cream industry really blew up because then you could sell to the guy down at Pops.
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You could also sell to Pops' next-door neighbor who took it home to keep in his freezer.
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Yeah, and actually, as far as making ice cream, the hand crank ice cream maker that used rock salt and all that stuff, that was invented by a woman named Nancy Johnson in the 1830s.
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1850s i think yeah and she patented it and apparently everybody ripped her off she sold the patent for like 200 bucks and the guy who bought it from her turned around and likes made a fortune off of it but i guess he ultimately got ripped off by a bunch of copycats but that that same thing is still in use today like you can go buy the johnson crank that same yeah the johnson crank ice cream maker and make your own ice cream the 1850s way
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Well, I saw that 87% of Americans have ice cream in their freezer right now.
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Oh, that's a bad move. That's a bad move for me. Yeah, it's a bad move for everybody. Well, no, some people have willpower. Yeah, I guess you're right.
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Yeah, you don't see floats very often anymore. I'm sure there's some places that sell them. They were good, though. Oh, yeah, man. Root beer and ice cream is a winning combination.
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So listen and find out if you don't know.
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It's like a... It's like a wedding or a prom or anything where there's a lot of pressure on this one, you know, six-hour experience.
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No. And it depends on the church where you're going to have. And, you know, sometimes the celebration also occurs at the church. Sometimes that occurs at a different spot, kind of like a wedding. You know, sometimes you'll have the reception somewhere else. Right. That's not how it started, which we'll talk about that in a minute. But go ahead.
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But it depends on the church where you're a member or where you're having this initial ceremony. But the girl before this all happens for weeks ahead of time may actually be required to attend classes in advance of this. So they're prepared. They know what to expect.
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It's a very special day for Jerry. She's celebrating her very special day because today Jerry turns sweet 15.
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Yeah, and I've also seen that a lot of churches now are... straying away from these because they feel like there's just a lot of disrespectful behavior. Like, you know, people partying on the pews and taking pictures with their phone and texting and like they kind of forget that they're in a church.
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All right, so before the mass takes place— This young woman has, and Kristen Conger, remember Kristen? Of course. What's the name of their podcast? Unladylike. Unladylike, that's right. Yeah, Kristen Caroline, formerly of Stuff Mom Never Told You, now with Unladylike. She wrote this article, and she said that custom calls for 14 damas, or maiden attendants,
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to represent the 14 years of her life up until that point. I saw elsewhere seven. That's what I saw too. To be paired with seven young men. You want to pronounce that? Chambalons? Yeah, that's how I took it. Chambalons.
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I read in another place, I was like, well, wait a minute, which is it? And it apparently can be seven to 15. So, depending on, I guess, how many really close friends you have, kind of like picking out your bridesmaids and groomsmen.
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No, Jerry started producing the show when she was five.
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That's right. And again, I'm sure that there's some leeway. The quinceañera cops aren't going to come by because you don't have enough friends helping you. They have larger fish to fry on quinceañera day.
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That's right. And I don't think we mentioned, but the dress is a very big part of the celebration. Traditionally, it's either pink or white, very satiny. I mean, it looks kind of like a prom dress, a big frilly floor-length gown.
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All right. So the first stop, though, like you said, is the church. And this is where a lot of the ceremony takes place. They receive a blessing from a priest. The young woman commits herself to protecting her virginity and her spiritual devotion. And then they leave a bouquet of flowers near the Virgin Mary statue.
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And then traditionally, they would give away a porcelain doll, one of their childhood dolls, or, again, tradition varies these days. It might be a teddy bear or something else that just meant something to the girl. One thing I saw was a quinceanera Barbie. Oh, yeah?
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All right. Well, they'll pass that along to a younger sister or another relative, another female relative, to basically say, like, again, symbolic of I'm entering young adulthood and I'm passing on this silly Barbie to you.
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And now she's just a pretty little lady in her pink lacy satiny dress.
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Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I think our universe is absolutely extraordinary.
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All right. Well, basically, we're both nerds. We love learning about this extraordinary universe, and we love sharing what we've learned. So that's what we're going to do.
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From the tiniest particles to the biggest blue whales.
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Learn all about our amazing and beautiful universe on Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe every Tuesday and Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Okay. Instead of quinceañera? Yeah. That wasn't very good either. Right. I used to do a good R-roll because of German, but... I feel like I've lost it a bit.
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Yeah, I mean, it really depends on the budget of the family involved. They could rent out a large hall or it could be in the backyard of their own home or at a friend's house.
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Yeah, and I also read in that article on that really great photo spread the guy did, he interviewed the family members, and one of the families, he said, how long have you, you know, they didn't have much money, and he said, how long have you been saving for this? And they said, for 15 years. Oh, man. Like, they started socking away money every year because they knew this was coming.
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That is so great. And it was important. It was a very sweet story.
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Yeah, well, and it's a culture where family and community is such an important, revered thing. And it's something I'm envious of, you know?
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I don't know. That's what I'm saying. I'm not sure. I don't know the origins of that word.
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Well, we did the research, and I think it's good to cover stuff like this.
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Yeah, and again, it could be a DJ. It could be a mariachi band. It could be a rock band. It could be a DJ playing mariachi music. It could be. It could be like with my wedding, I had an iPod loaded up with my mix and just hit play.
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Yes, and I bet you anything this young lady has practiced walking in those before. Right. I don't think she would want her first experience in high heels to be in that dress on the big day. This is just logical Chuck talking. Although it would be fun to watch. Oh, no, come on. You don't think it would be? No one wants to see a, what do they, Kristen said they call her kinks girls sometimes.
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No one wants to see a kinks girl fall over. That's true. Except you. But you got laughed at while you did the backstroke, so I get it. Yeah, mocked. They may also get gifts, but not always. A lot of times they're symbolic gifts. A lot of times other people will bring gifts, but from the parents, the festival and ceremony itself is the gift.
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But sometimes if the parents have some dough and a big budget, they may get what's called regalo sorpresa, which is a surprise gift.
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On top of everything else, and this, of course, is including, like you mentioned, the prayer book and the rosary and the Bible and stuff like that.
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Yeah, but I think the gifts, too, also always represent that transition into adulthood. So she's not getting the dolls anymore. She gets maybe some jewelry or earrings and stuff like that. Right. Stuff to deliver her into womanhood.
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Yeah, well, I lived in Los Angeles, as you know, and they have obviously quite a Latin population. And I looked up Hispanic and Latino. I wanted to get it all right. Good, good. Let's hear what you got. Well, it says that they can generally be used interchangeably these days. But I think Latino can – like I think Hispanic refers to whether or not you actually have Spanish-speaking roots.
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That's kind of great, but I can definitely see on the day that the girl might have been overwhelmed. But I bet she also, in retrospect, is like, hey, I've got one cool story for my life now.
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Are you serious? Yeah. I literally couldn't tell if you were just being jokey Josh there.
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So Chevy got involved, of course. I think her parents gave her that.
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And so they try to have fun with it, I guess.
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Or you could, if you had a lot of dough, you could hire a choreographer like Paula Abdul or something.
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She's still choreographing, right? Yeah. Choreographing? Choreographing. Something's bad wrong with us today. I know, man. You got anything else? I do. This is a little sorpresa for you, my friend. There was a father in Texas a couple of years ago that spent $6 million on his 15-year-old daughter. Oh, my. What's his name here? He's an attorney named Thomas J. Henry of San Antonio.
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They're a very kind of well-known family. His daughter, Maya, is big on Instagram and social media, and she's big into activism. So she's like, you know, she's not just your ordinary teen.
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Although that is kind of ordinary these days, thankfully. To be a well-known teen activist? Well, to be active. Sure. But at her quinceanera, she had Nick Jonas perform, Pitbull perform. Sure. Let me see what else here. A 55,000 square foot space that they built. I don't think they built it from scratch, but it does say that it was built, purpose-built venue. How many guests? 600 guests. Man.
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Oh, is that right? But Latino can be like Brazil and places in South America as well, if I'm not mistaken.
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A 30-foot-tall cherry cheese in full blossom. Wow. Walls of roses, a garden room, the ballroom with butterflies suspended from the ceiling. She wore a Rolando Santana dress, which means nothing to me.
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But I assume that means it's something. She had her makeup done by Patrick Ta, who does the Kardashians. Her photographer was Michelle Obama's photographer. Sorry. And Thomas Henry and his wife, whose name is Azteca, beautiful name, they hired a New York social event planner named David Mon. He had a 150-person team to plan out this party.
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And finally, they arrived by police escort in nine Rolls Royces.
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And not to feel too bad for her little brother, or I guess maybe it was a big brother, he spent $4 million on that kid's 18th birthday, I believe. Que sorpresa. So they dropped $10 million on a couple of parties for their kids.
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And, of course, she had her pictures with both of them.
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Hey, guys, long-time listener, card-carrying member of the Stuff You Should Know Army. I've always wanted to write in, but just hadn't found the right topic until the It Stranger Things script retooling debate. That was during emojis. Stephen King is by far my favorite author, and It is my absolute favorite of his novels. Highly recommend. Also a huge Stranger Things fan.
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Though I have no media experience, I do have an MBA and know a thing or two about marketing. For what it's worth, I side with Josh, with the studio definitely retooling the script to create synergies between it and Stranger Things. Aside from casting the Stranger Things kid, which to me is a smoking gun, they changed the setting of the film to take place in the 80s, like Stranger Things.
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Well, it was that tattoo across his upper back. Yeah. Hispanic for life. For life, yep, with the number four. But at any rate, you know, lived in L.A., and there's a large Mexican population, so I would see quinceaneras going on all the time when you're just driving around on a weekend. That's awesome. I would see stuff, and I was like, wait a minute, it's not prom. It's summer.
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In the novel, the story follows the main characters in the 50s, and then again as adults in the 80s. There were elements of the story that didn't translate as well into the 80s, in my opinion, but it was a small price to pay in order to captivate that Stranger Things audience. Just one guy's opinion, but I'd like to say one guy's informed opinion.
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Sorry, Chuck, for what it's worth as a movie crush, or as a movie buff. I always catch movie crush. Keep it up. Mike Sanders. And Mike.
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I did a very simple Google search and found that Stranger Things was released in July 2016 and principal photography of it began about a week before that. Okay. So that's therefore rendering that impossible.
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So you think they shot a bunch of the movie in the 1950s and said, wait a minute, this TV show over here is doing great.
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And let's recast this kid that we've already cast.
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So as they're shooting the film It... They're doing rewrites. They're doing rewrites because they're like, man, we've got to lock into this TV show.
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I'm a particle physicist, and I think our universe is absolutely extraordinary.
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Like, what's going on? It's like prom times 10. And then somebody hit me in the head, and they're like, you dummy. You dumb white guy from the south. That's a quinceaneras. Right. And so I was like, well, you know what? One day I'm going to do a podcast about that. They said, what is a podcast?
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Learn all about our amazing and beautiful universe on Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe every Tuesday and Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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I have no idea. That's what I'm going with. Here we go. I didn't want to be too dumb-dumbs, and we're so far down dumb-dumb lane.
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Right, which is we've been dancing around this thing. This is the 15th birthday celebration for young ladies, young women in Mexico, Puerto Rico, in Cuba, in the United States, kind of all over the world. This can take place.
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Selects: What's a quinceañera anyway?
And also some great music, some delicious food. And family coming together for an important day. It's really great.
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Or did you want to go to the future? No, no. We'll go back in time. All right. So the origins of this, they date back all the way to the Aztec Indians. Obviously, in the 1400s and 1500s, they were performing these festivals because girls back then were marriage ready at the age of 15. That's kind of what it symbolized.
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That's right. And they had ceremonies. They had speeches talking about how important it is to become a wise, upstanding member of society as a young woman. Then the Spanish come along, of course. They invade what we now call Mexico over through the Aztecs. And that brought in a European influence to this whole experience. And this is where things got a little more – a little more like debutante.
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I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I think our universe is absolutely extraordinary.
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Yeah, and apparently until the 1960s, it was really kind of an upper class thing. But then in the 1960s, as Latinos immigrated to the United States and they became more part of American fabric, they really kind of spread throughout the U.S. and Latin America as becoming across all socioeconomic classes.
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And we'll get to this a little more later, but wonderfully, like you said, in poorer communities, you see entire communities chipping in some money many times, or the godmothers and godfathers, the padrinos and madrinas. You like that?
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To help pay for this stuff. I saw this photographer did a really great photo series of quinceañeras celebrations in poor neighborhoods in Mexico and photographed these really beautiful photographs of these young women in their dresses sort of in the middle of a very depressed neighborhood. Mm-hmm.
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And just showing how important it was that they still had this celebration, even though it was a burden financially on their families.
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Yeah, I also read a New York Times article where there's a lot of bias when it comes to things like this and bar and bat mitzvahs and debutante balls, where it's very easy for someone to say, like, you know, if you're poor living in Mexico City, why are you wasting, and that's in air quotes, your money on this celebration when your family doesn't have much money?
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And they say, you know, you never hear this kind of criticism often. for bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs or debutantes um regardless of socioeconomic status so this is just a very important important part of their culture that should be um shouldn't be looked down upon just because they may not have the kind of money to throw a big one uh you know what i'm saying
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Learn all about our amazing and beautiful universe on Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe every Tuesday and Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I think our universe is absolutely extraordinary.
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All right. Well, basically, we're both nerds. We love learning about this extraordinary universe, and we love sharing what we've learned. So that's what we're going to do.
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Hi, folks. Happy Saturday. I hope you're enjoying your weekend. I hope you're with your friends, your family, your loved one. If you don't like anybody at all, I hope you're by yourself and you're having a good time. I just hope you're well in general. This episode is for May 15th, 2018. And it's called What's a Quinceañera Anyway? I didn't know until we did this episode.
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From the tiniest particles to the biggest blue whales.
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Learn all about our amazing and beautiful universe on Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe every Tuesday and Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Selects: How Electricity Works
And they like to go off and do those things that teenage electrons do, and therefore it does conduct electricity.
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Yeah, like when you were a kid in elementary school, you probably did the little balloon trick where you make static electricity and make the balloon stick to your sweater. All you're doing, you're rubbing that balloon on your sweater and electrons are jumping from that balloon onto your sweater. And now there are two different charges going on.
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because you're overcharged, the balloon is now undercharged, and because opposite charges attract, it sticks to your sweater. Right. And that's static electricity.
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It sounds like you need to generate that electricity with a generator. Right.
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Yeah, it's funny just how basic some of these things are. Like you say a computer.
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Yeah, I think a lot of these words are like that. Like a generator or a... Corpuscle. Or a... What's it called when they stop down the electricity, which we'll get to? Transformer. Yeah, it transforms something. But you say them so much, you're like, what's a transformer do? Right. Anyway, I've been reading too much Science for Dummies, I think. All right, so generators.
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In the case of generators. And if you want to listen to two shows, Lightning and Magnetism, before this one, it might help you understand electricity a little bit more. All right. So just go listen to those. We'll wait. We'll do that right now. We'll wait two hours.
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Yeah, it's like what happens when you attract a paperclip to a magnet. It's just the transfer of electrons.
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Once, yeah. I think I vaguely remember that. Dude, I freaked. Yeah, you were crying. I was on the phone with Delta and everything. I was like, oh, here it is. It's on my head. In your back pocket.
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Yeah, it's the same concept as an old gristmill, except it's not creating energy. It's just moving energy. the stones that grind the wheat or corn.
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Yeah, and if you've ever been to the Hoover Dam or something, you don't have to have a waterfall or a river to make this thing work. That's why they build dams. You stop up the water, and then at the base of the dam, you have the means to release that water, and then it becomes that flowing water.
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And these are all just different methods, whether it's solar or steam or nuclear. I almost said it. Which is weird because I definitely don't say it that way. Well, you were very excited. I think I said it enough as a joke. Right. That it slips in. But anyway, all those are just means to turn that turbine. Right.
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Yeah, and this article, we used a few different articles for this one, like we said, including some Science for Kids websites, which, by the way, I highly recommend. If you don't get something... Yeah, it's a great place to go visit are these kids' websites because they break it down super simply.
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But in our article, it describes a generator as if it was water in a pump, which made a lot of sense to me. The generator... is the pump, but instead of pushing water through a pipe, it's pushing electrons down a line, a power line.
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Yeah, but you need something to push it. It's not a self-pusher. So you need that force, and that force is voltage. Right, yeah. Electromotive force.
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Oh really oh Yeah, it is. Okay. I wasn't even thinking of it as a math formula.
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Yeah, and I know it sounds a little confusing with volts, amps, and watts, but they are all different. Like, if you said... You know, that guy was shocked and he had 120 volts coursing through his body. That's not true at all because the volt is the force. Right. He's got amps coursing through his body. Yeah. But you'd be a huge geek to point that out to someone if someone said that.
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I thought you were going to say Once in a Lifetime. No, that's... What is that called? Once in a Lifetime? Yeah. Yeah, I've been singing the Schoolhouse Rock electricity song over and over in my head.
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In the United States, it's 120, but it's different in other countries.
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We acted like it was all either an insulator or a conductor, but you can be a resistor.
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Yeah, but if you're an official resistor, that means current moves. It just doesn't move as fast as it might in metal. Right. Or not at all, as in wood.
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Selects: How Electricity Works
I haven't been singing that. But do you remember it? Yeah, I was Electric Company over Sesame Street even.
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So all this is well and good. That's, you know, you can supply power, and we'll talk about this more in detail, too, to homes from a power plant. But you can also have a little battery... supplying that electrical energy to a iPhone, let's say.
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And in that case, you need something called a circuit, which is basically just a closed loop that allows the electrons to travel. And in most electronics, it's like you said, like copper wire maybe. And it travels from... There's a switch that turns it on and off, which is why a circuit is called a circuit breaker.
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If you break that circuit by turning the switch off, or if the wire snaps or something, no more electrons are going to be flowing.
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Yeah, it could be a light bulb or... whatever mechanical energy you're trying to create is your load.
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No, it's, in the correct answer there, it's the Who, by the way.
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that's great that you have electrons flowing, but it's not going to turn anything unless you have that motor. And, uh, electric motor is basically just a cylinder, uh, stuffed with magnets around the edge. And if you've ever used an electric drill and you fire it up, when you look and see in the vents, you can actually see sparks. It's pretty cool. It's very cool.
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No, I mean, yeah, I love the Who. Do you? But I'm with you. I don't see the need to rank things like that.
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It's like those little guns you used to get at the circus when you were a kid. Yeah. God, I love those. Um, so it's packed with those magnets around the edge and in the middle you've got your core, which is, you know, like an iron wire and, uh, It's wrapped around, you know, the copper is wrapped around the edges.
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So electricity flows to that core, creates magnetism, and then that pushes against the outer cylinder and makes that motor spin around, and then that's where you get your mechanical energy.
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Yeah, it skewed slightly older, I think. Sesame Street, to me, felt like, you know, six, seven, eight-year-olds. Electric companies were like eight, nine, ten, twelve.
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Selects: How Electricity Works
So like when you look at a power line and you see that bare wire coming down from the power line and driven into the ground by a stake, that is the ground and it goes down like six or ten feet. Or if you look at every house, you're going to see near the meter, the electrical meter, you're going to see a probably a copper rod driven into the ground, and that's your house's ground.
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Yeah, and Romper Room was kind of pre-Sesame Street even.
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Yeah, and we mentioned transformers earlier. Power plants create massive amounts of electricity, and you can't just shoot that down a power line and straight into a house because it will blow up everything in your home immediately. But they do need that kind of juice in order to transfer, like, hundreds of miles away from the power plant.
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You know, if you don't live close, it's still got to get to you.
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So the way they do that is through transformers. They transmit the power with a lot of voltage, so more force, less amperage. Less resistance. Less resistance.
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And then once they stop it down along the way, and by the time it gets to your home, it's transformed down to, here in the United States, 120 volts. Yeah.
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I don't remember. I just remember it was very immature.
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I think the Hot Pockets, too, they called it unsound meat, which is just a word that sounds weird in front of meat.
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All right, so now I think even though we've covered it in the Tesla podcast, we do need to go over ACDC a little bit.
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Great episode. Best Australian band of all time.
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Oh, okay. Tesla's all right. Sure. And they're not around.
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So there was a battle being waged between Tesla and Edison, and Tesla was all about the AC current, alternating current. Edison, as we know, said, no, no, no, that's far too dangerous, and I'll prove this to you by electrocuting animals. and dogs and cats, and even an elephant named Topsy. Yeah.
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Yeah. And I think I remember talking about there should be a movie, too, about that battle. Yeah, I can't believe there's not. It sounds super nerdy, but it would actually be interesting.
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So batteries these days use direct current power, DC power, and that means the positive and negative terminals are always positive and negative, and electricity always flows in the same direction.
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And then you have alternating current, or AC, which means the current reverses 60 times per second here in the U.S., 50 times per second in Europe. So it's just reversing back and forth, alternating that current. And I guess, so who won out in the end? Tesla? On a large scale.
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I mean, that's what power generation does. Yeah, but Edison has his batteries, I guess, that he could throw at Tesla.
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I guess we can finish with... If you get your power bill and you're amazed and you wonder how they calculate this stuff, it's pretty easy. Like we said, here in the U.S., we deliver electricity into your home at 120 volts. So you've got to remember that one, too. It's important. Our article uses a space heater as an example, which I think is pretty good. You plug in that space heater.
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Let's say it's the only thing going in your house, which is not realistic, but go with me. You plug in the space heater, and it comes out to 10 amps. So you multiply that 10 times 120, because that's your voltage, and you have got 1,200 watts of heat.
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Yes, because that's how the power company is going to measure it. Right. Because they deal in big chunks.
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And if they charge you a dime per kilowatt hour, it's going to cost you $0.12 an hour to run that space heater. Right. Pretty simple.
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And neat. And that's why when you go to buy an appliance, you should look at that little tag that says how many kilowatt hours you're going to be burning. That's right. The lower, the better. So electricity, huh?
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I'm going to call this Rare Birthday Shoutout. Hey guys, my name is Pearl, and I just wanted to tell you how much a fan I am of your show. I was introduced to the podcast by my best friend Molly. We've been best friends for 12 years, and many of our conversations begin by commenting on the podcast. For example, we could not stop laughing at your 1920s voice today.
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Toward the end of the Underground Tunnels episode, we laughed over and over. That is a good voice. I think she's talking about this one, see?
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Electricity, Tesla, Edison, killing animals. All right, that was for you, Molly and Pearl. Whenever we're in the car together, we find a podcast of yours to listen to so we can enjoy it together. I was wondering if you could help her out. Molly's 26th birthday is April 9th. I think it would be a totally awesome birthday gift if you would send her a shout-out.
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During listener mail, I would be forever in your debt. Thanks for doing the podcast. I'm a middle school teacher who always listens during my prep periods. And so happy birthday, Molly. Happy 26th. This should be close. Yeah, happy birthday. To April 9th.
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Yeah. And then conversely through us all together in their car. Nice. Yeah.
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That's my intro. Which is usually mechanical energy is what's produced. Right. By a machine.
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Yeah, it's pretty simple. Actually, it seems complicated, but it's not.
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Well, should we talk about the history of this stuff?
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Back in the olden days, in ancient times, there were dudes messing around with energy and static electricity without even knowing what they were doing. Right. They didn't understand it, but that doesn't mean that they weren't playing around with it.
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That's right, which we'll explain all that later, too. But there was one dude called Thallus of Miletus. He is a philosopher in Greece. And in 600 BC, he is thought to have been the first dude to mess around with electrostatics, static electricity, by rubbing amber. with fur, and he noticed that dust and feathers and things were attracted to it.
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He didn't know what the heck was going on, but he knew something was up.
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Yeah, and it was actually coined by a dude named William Gilbert. He was an Englishman, a physician. And he was studying sort of the same things with static electricity that Miletus was. And he was the first person to say it's electric when he saw these forces at work.
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Well, it was fluid. He was on the right track. Something is flowing, but they thought it was literally a fluid, which in those days was called a humor. And he said it leaves what he called then an effluvium, which is atmosphere around it. When you create this rubbing action, it removes that fluid. Right. But it wasn't fluid. They were...
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Not dummies back then, but they were just figuring it all out.
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Yeah, the old story of Ben Franklin flying his kite may or may not have happened. There are some people that think that didn't happen now.
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Yeah, that's sort of the story that he flew the kite with the key. And some people think it either didn't go down like that or didn't go down with him at all. But it's a great story either way.
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Well, yeah, and he was the first guy to say that electricity has a positive and negative charge and that it flows from positive to negative. So he's a smart guy.
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Then there was another smart dude named Coulomb, Charles Augustin de Coulomb, and he is the one that... wrote Coulomb's Law, and he said charges like charges repel, opposite charges attract, and that's kind of like the basis for it all.
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Yeah, he basically said you can now calculate this because of my handy-dandy little law.
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Okay. That came earlier. Later on, a guy named J.J. Thompson in 1897 said at a science conference, hey, I found something smaller than the atom. And everyone said, silly man, atoms are invisible. It even means invisible. You liar. And he said, no, I promise. There's something smaller. It's got a negative charge. And I'm going to call it a corpuscle. No, he didn't. Yeah.
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It's Latin for small bodies. And then I think, I don't know who later said, let's change it to electron.
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But the discovery of the electron was basically the birth of what we know as electricity today.
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The understanding of the electron is what it's all about.
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Can you even fathom how smart these people were to be that in the dark and figuring all this subatomic stuff out back then?
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We're not inventing this, figuring this stuff out for the first time.
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And it's a pretty dangerous field to try to figure out blind, too, you know? Yeah, I mean, more than one scientist got a shock from a Leyden jar. Oh, yeah. And you can make those. Do you make those in science class?
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Atoms are very tiny and they make up molecules and molecules make up everything you see.
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Yeah, there's no potential energy there. It's just in balance, and a lot of stuff is like that. A lot of stuff is in balance. Some stuff is not. Well, some stuff falls out of balance easier than other stuff. Well, yeah. The electrons, sometimes they're super tightly bound to the atom, and they don't want to leave the house. They want to stick around.
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Sometimes they're crazy teenagers, and the slightest energy and movement makes them... jump off from the atom and just say, I want to go attach myself to something else.
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Yeah, like if you pick up a stick off the ground... Its electrons like staying close to home, so it's not going to conduct electricity. If you pick up a metal rod, those electrons are crazy.
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Yeah, and we want to sell – we do want to sell these books out there. We want to sell these books all over the world.
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Oh, man. You ain't kidding. Ship these things to Cincinnati. Yeah. So where were we? So we were shipping things. Regional businesses were becoming national businesses. People were leaving the farms. They were leaving small towns. They were going to the big city. Immigrants were pouring in from Europe. African-Americans were going north because Reconstruction didn't work out so well.
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But the point is, there are a lot of people flocking to work this, what was called the second industrial revolution, where we saw over a period of about 40 years, factory output went from $1.9 billion to $13 billion. Wow. Right.
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And let's take a little break and we'll talk a little bit about Mark Twain and what these – a few economic stats of the day right after this.
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Well, I mentioned Mark Twain, and the only reason we're going to talk about Mark Twain for a moment is because in 1873, he co-wrote a novel, a satire called The Gilded Age, a tale of today where it followed a poor country farmer who is sort of, I mean, does he move to the city trying to get in on the second industrial revolution?
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Yeah, here's some stats for you. In 1890, the top one, and these should all sound very familiar if you're alive and breathing oxygen today. But in 1890, the top 1% of the U.S. owned 51% of all wealth. Yeah. Dude, more than half of all wealth.
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The top 12% owned 86% of all wealth. And the lower 44% of the U.S. population, which was about half the population, owned 1.2%. That's even more nuts. Well, I mean all of these just top one another, I think. Here's the last one. In 1897, the richest 4,000 families – that sounds like a lot of people, but that's less than 1 percent of the population.
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The richest 4,000 had as much wealth as the other 11.6 million families combined.
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Well, that's all I'm going to say about that. That's just not true. It's just not true. They're not anti-success. And I don't think that every conservative thinks – Like, yeah, man, like it's all fair and you should be able to do whatever you want to get ahead and stomp on anyone's head that you want to get there.
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I think these are just broad brush things that keep the country divided.
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Yeah, this is an interesting topic because depending on who you ask, the robber barons were either the greatest thing to ever happen to this country or one of the worst things to ever happen to this country.
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Agreed. So let's get off that and let's go back to the original, the OG robber barons who were not these guys. I'm talking about the term robber baron, which didn't happen in the 19th century U.S. for the first time. It happened thousands of years ago in Europe.
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Yeah, and you couldn't just portage your steamship up a mountain and over a mountain. You had to pay the piper.
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You have a much better just general world timeline that lives in your brain than I do.
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Wait, were you joking? Oh, no. Okay, good. I just always get the time periods confused, so I rely on books and research like a big dum-dum. So do I. Yeah, I know, but then you keep it in your brain. Mine just floats out like it. You ever see these cartoons with birds flying around people's head when they get knocked out?
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Those birds are always above my head. I don't have to get hit with an anvil or a piano. So the Rhine Gorge was one of those really narrow straits. And in 1250, Emperor Frederick III died. There was no successor, and basically that meant no regulation. And believe it or not, even way back then, a lack of regulation meant that people would take advantage of that. It's crazy. Same as it is today.
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It's almost like people are imperfect. Almost. And so these thieves would move into that gorge, jam up those tolls, maybe just steal stuff if they wanted to as well, and they were named the robber barons. That's where that term came from, those people.
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Yeah, it's so weird to look at this stuff. and just how apt it applies to what's going on today. And we think, I think some people think that these are all new problems and new issues, but it's as old as time, you know?
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Who can say? Should we talk about a few of these dudes?
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Yeah, and Commodore is a nickname that – and as you will see, he later – Vanderbilt University is named for him and their mascot is the Commodores because of him. And a Commodore is a naval officer sort of above – not quite an admiral but above a captain. I think they command like a fleet. Oh, yeah.
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Yeah, and it's worth pointing out, as we'll do with – I think we're going over four of these guys. But some had money born into it. Some started out very poor. And Cornelius Vanderbilt, even though that sounds like such a rich hoity-toity name now – He was born very poor. He was born in 1794 in a farming family on Staten Island and quit school when he was 11.
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And that's when he started working on the boat docks. And he was literally a self-made man, starting with that first little ferry boat that you mentioned at age 14. He was a big dude and he was very savvy, but also very ruthless. And this is something that you'll see Thank you. Thank you.
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Yeah, I mean it kind of – I think a lot of this has to – probably depends on what you feel about, you know, capitalism to this extent where it kind of doesn't matter how you make your money if it's sort of underhanded and – you sort of undercut competitors and monopolize things. That's all just free trade, man, free capitalism, and that's how it works out.
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And then those guys gave a ton of money to society before they died. And so that's all—it justifies the means.
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I didn't, but I mean, of course you can't make a perfect society.
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Yeah. He was modeled after old J.P. Morgan himself. And he was actually one of the first people to be targeted for antitrust. In 1904, Teddy Roosevelt came after him under the Sherman Antitrust Act and said, hey, this Northern Securities Corporation is really monopoly. And Supreme Court said, yeah, it is. Bust it up.
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We'll come back right after this and finish up with two more robber barons.
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Hello, everybody. We're back to talk about Andrew Carnegie. You've ever been to Carnegie Hall or Carnegie Mellon University? I've been to both.
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We did a little job there one time. That was fun. I've been to Carnegie Hall. I ushered a show there. No, I didn't usher. I passed out the playbills. which meant I got to see the show for free. What show? Oh, man, it was one of those special nights. I got to see Beethoven's Ninth with the full orchestra and German choir at Carnegie Hall. It was amazing.
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I got you. I went and saw Die Hard in concert. It was great. It was hilarious. So Carnegie, we're talking about Andrew Carnegie, who was born in Scotland, and they came to Pittsburgh. He was very poor. He's about 13 years old, and he worked in a cotton factory. And this will come into play later.
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He kind of self-taught himself from books that he borrowed from a wealthy benefactor from his private library, which will come into play later. Yeah.
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Wow. I would have thought great expectations, but that's okay.
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I think the word perfect is what's a stumbling block for me because, I don't know a single liberal thinks that they can make things perfect. I think the goal is to make things better.
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Yeah, I might want to eventually do an episode on this, but that's sort of the overview. You bring in the Pinkertons, and then they battle literally with guns. Pinkertons died, I think, like eight or nine of the 10 or 12 people that died were the Pinkertons.
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Oh, okay. Well, we should definitely do a full episode then because I want to get this right. For sure.
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Yeah, well, National Guard was called in not only to quell the violence, but also called in to act in the interest of Carnegie. So he kind of commandeered his own little personal army to help take care of things.
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Yeah, and I think Carnegie tried to distance himself from that strike by saying that he was sort of out of the loop. He was in Scotland the whole time. But they have since found correspondence that shows that he was very much involved in that. And, you know, there's some speculation that he may have had some genuine moments of regret and guilt over that.
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because he was a big-time philanthropist later in life. I think he said in his book, The Gospel of Wealth, the man who dies thus rich dies disgraced. And we mentioned the libraries coming back into play. He built more than 2,500 libraries.
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Bring it on, man. I'll punch that thing right in the face.
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And that's really one of his big legacies, along with the arts, the Carnegie Corporation and the Endowment for International Peace, Carnegie Mellon University, Carnegie Museum. But the libraries really have made a pretty big difference in this country.
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benefactor for sure he was also one of the most visionary philanthropists of all time too yeah and some people say that he was uh you know if you just account for money and inflation the richest man ever to live um i'm not sure how they calculate that because his 900 million dollar uh peak in 1912 is about 23 billion today so here i saw how you ready i'm sure it's yeah go ahead
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Yeah. And I think we didn't even mention, was it Carnegie that had at one point like $1 of every $20 in circulation was his?
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Yeah, I mean these numbers are staggering. For sure. For people like Rockefeller and Carnegie. It's just – it's unbelievable.
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Yeah, a lot of universities are named after robber barons.
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Yeah, and his whole, you know, of course, oil was his business, Standard Oil. It was just a Goliath. And there were a bunch of big like sort of like the railroads. It was oil and railroads were industries where you could have a bunch of people that had these huge, huge corporations. But Standard Oil was far and away bigger than any of them.
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By the early 1900s, they controlled more than 90 percent of the oil market.
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So we should get into the Gilded Age. We should hop in the old Wayback Machine because that's the age that we're talking about. And when you hear Gilded Age, it might sound really great because, I mean, what's better than a gilded, I don't know, toilet?
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That's amazing. It is. Let me see. He gave $75 million away to the University of Chicago. Well, it kind of founded the University of Chicago with that money.
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And in one of our best and most favorite episodes, you might remember, the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission helped eradicate hookworm in the South.
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So those are just four of the sort of most famous and some might say notorious robber barons. Big long list, you know, you could throw Henry Ford in there, John Jacob Astor, Charles Schwab, Andrew Mellon. Jay Gould. Yeah, I was thinking about J. Paul Getty, but he was later on. He wouldn't have qualified.
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That's a pretty good band name, though. Gilded lily? Yeah, like a 90s power pop.
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Yeah, I think I alluded to this in another one about the word marijuana. Yeah. Didn't I talk about that? Totally. But I didn't read the mail, right? Not that I remember, no. All right. This is from Jack Glick. Hey, guys. Love the show. Been listening for five years or so. Going to make sure not to miss any new episodes. I'm listening to the one on matcha.
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But the gilded age is, and Dave Roos helped us put this together, and he points out it's not a term of endearment. When something is gilded, that means it's got a thin coating of gold, but underneath it's, you know, it could be a gilded turd.
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When you started to talk about marijuana, I decided to get in touch. I am the lead analyst on cannabis taxation for the Canadian federal government, and we long ago made a decision to refer to the plant by its proper name, cannabis. Marijuana has a number of historically racist associations, and I know you guys are always wary of using appropriate terms for things.
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I had a good laugh at the question over whether womb was still okay to say in the ultrasound episode. I thought you might like to know how outdated and implicitly offensive marijuana is, and I'd like to encourage you to use the word cannabis when referring to it in the future. All the best. Keep it up. That is from Jack Glick.
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Yeah, and it was – because it happened so quickly and because it was such growth, I think the government was like, we're going to stay out of this and kind of just let you dudes do what you're going to do. No regulation. You can be as competitive as you want to be and you can satisfy – scratch every capitalist itch you want.
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And we're just going to let that happen because we're also kind of getting rich on the side.
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Yeah, and what we're talking about is stuff like snatching up resources where you could, hoarding them for yourself, like building such a massive business that you could drive out every other smaller business, drive them right out of business by undercutting their prices. Jobs were more scarce, so you could have people work harder for less and less wages, that kind of thing. Yeah.
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Yeah, I mean, let's talk about the Gilded Age and the, I guess, just... You owe it all to trains, really, and trains you owe to steel, so you got to go back a little bit. Right. Steel was a very big deal in that... When they found out, Mr. Henry Bessemer in the 1850s found out how to make steel like a lot cheaper.
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He got a new process going where it was just like making vast amounts of steel for a fraction of the cost and speed. And all of a sudden, you could open up those local rail lines to stretch across the country. And all these regional specialty businesses and industries, whether it was, you know, Cincinnati was known for furniture.
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And obviously in places like Wyoming, you had coal and you had copper in Montana and you had a lot of timber in Oregon. You could get that stuff anywhere you wanted to go. And that changed everything.
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Yeah, when I was reading this, and I tried to find out, but I couldn't really get a firm hold, I wondered if back then, when this started to happen, you know how people rail against... global trade and the globalization. I wonder if people railed against nationalization of commerce back then, or if they all just thought it was all great.
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I wonder though if it was like if there were business, like if there were furniture makers in Cincinnati going, I don't want to sell my chairs out there.
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No. Okay. I might be thinking of Maine. Right. But I wonder who is opposing it.
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I thought you were talking about the Rodney Dangerfield movie.
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Yeah, I agree. And you know what? Since we're on this tangent, we should tell everyone that we're writing a book and it's coming out this fall. Yeah. It's called Stuff You Should Know, an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. And you can preorder it now if you want a special custom poster. Dude.
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Right. So the pill managed to accept this, I guess, iconography, right? It became a symbol for this other thing. Yeah. But still managed to keep on keeping on. Right. I think 87% of women between 18 and 49 in the U.S. followed those hearings once Alice Wolfson and the D.C. women's lib movement made it a national thing. And I think 18% of them stopped taking the pill as a result.
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But the pill really didn't fall out of popularity. It stood in as the icon for informed consent and then just – After that was established, it just went back to being the pill. I think that's amazing. It is. Because it was this huge thing in 1960 for one thing, huge thing in 1970 for another thing. And now it's part of the cultural zeitgeist forever.
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All right. We're going to take a break. We're all excited about history. And now we're going to get into science. Science.
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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's the ghost of Jerry Rowland in the empty chair. Thanks again to Ramsey. Yeah, thanks Ramsey. How do I feel about this? I feel great. The pill is... It has everything. This might be... I just love this episode already.
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Hey, let's talk menstrual cycles. All right, let's, man. Because that's all that's going on here is... The pill manipulates the menstrual cycle by tricking the body with synthetic hormones.
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Yes. It tricks the body into thinking it's already released an egg.
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It is. It is. But it's also kind of lo-fi if you think about it. It is very lo-fi. It's neat. So we should kind of give you an idea of what the menstrual cycle is, right? It's 28 days. Generally.
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Yes, that's the rule of thumb. But yes, it's certainly different. It's different for every woman.
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And I think it's also down to like hours and stuff like that too. It's not just days. It's a human construct, you know. But have you stopped and ever thought about like how interesting it is that the cycle of the moon is like 28 days as well?
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I do too, but I... Kind of like when we did the female puberty episode, I just feel... Nervous.
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No. I think it's fascinating. Oh, no. I didn't say it wasn't fascinating. I never stopped it.
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Just in researching this, I was like, that's the cycle of the moon as well. That's interesting. So anyway, over the, say, roughly 28-day period, the whole thing starts with the pituitary gland getting a little froggy and saying, hey, I'm going to release some follicle-stimulating hormone. FSH.
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And that stuff floods the body and it makes its way down to the ovaries and it stimulates follicles, hence the name.
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That's right. It makes these follicles in the ovaries grow. And it just sets off a big series of events, basically. Estrogen triggers that pituitary gland again.
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Yeah, because the follicles then in turn release estrogen, right?
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Yeah. And so the pituitary gland is busy because then it secretes what's called a gonadotropin-releasing hormone, G, little n, big R, big H. One of the better abbreviations ever. Yeah, because it looks sort of like Guns N' Roses. A little bit, yeah.
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G-N-R-H. And that triggers a rise in luteinizing hormone, L-H.
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Dude's explaining female reproduction. I just, I don't know.
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Right. And so luteinizing hormone goes back down to the ovarian follicles. And it... It gets one of the follicles. So if you have a bunch of ovarian follicles growing, one of them is going to clearly – it's the lead horse, right? Yeah. It's going to develop into an egg. And as the luteinizing hormone stimulates it to develop into an egg, the egg – Pops off.
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The rest of the other follicles wither and die. And then the egg travels down the fallopian tube. Yeah. Where it may or may not be fertilized.
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Yeah, this is called ovulation. And while this is going on in the background, the uterine lining, the endometrium is thickening up. Right. It's getting ready for business.
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Hey, man, we're just explaining stuff. I know, I know. It's not like we're just explaining stuff. Just be cool.
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And the reason that is is because the estrogen and the luteinizing hormone are causing that to happen.
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So the mucus in the vagina... I'm saying, like, even more than usual right now. But the mucus in the vagina also... Does it thicken? Yeah. So it thickens. Is that after the egg has been fertilized? Because I think it would make it, it would become, okay, so it de-thickens. The uterine lining thickens. I think the vaginal mucus makes it easier for sperm to make its way through.
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So if all that goes according to the genetic plan, then those sperm are going to make their way to an egg. The egg is going to become fertilized. It's going to come down the fallopian tube, attach to the uterus, and it's going to start to grow into a child.
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It might also not happen. Either the woman involved might not have sex, so there might be no sperm. The sperm might not make it. There might be some sort of barrier method being made.
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Sure. Regardless of how this happens, if the egg is not fertilized, the egg eventually withers up itself and dissolves, and that thickened endometrium is shed, basically.
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Yes. In the form of? like kind of iron-rich blood tissue. Right. Okay. That is menstruation. That's menstruation. So when you think of, but that's your period. Yeah. The whole thing's menstruation.
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All right, so let's talk the pill. Yeah, the opposite of having kids. The pharmaceutical so famous that it's called the pill.
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Okay. It's like a 28-day cycle is menstruation. Because I always think of like, yeah, the period's menstruation. No, that's actually the end of menstruation. And then the whole cycle begins again. Right after that time, the pituitary gland's like, oh, all right, I'll release some follicle-stimulating hormone. The whole thing begins again.
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The pill interrupts this by making the body think it's already released an egg. Like when the egg comes off, of the follicle and makes its way down to the fallopian tube, the ovum makes its way down the fallopian tube, that's when the estrogen and the progesterone levels are high. Okay? So the pill introduces progesterone and estrogen levels and keeps them high at all times.
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And therefore, the body stops releasing eggs because it thinks it's already released an egg.
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Yeah, it just hijacks that whole process. Right. Synthetically.
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The woman's body is amazing. It is. When you think about all that's going on.
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Yeah. Our body's not doing anything even remotely like that. It's making like farts.
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That's what I thought. Yeah. When I was researching this, I was like, man, I've never felt less important.
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And like the insides of my body are just, I got some lungs doing some things. I got a heart. And then like, I guess I'm still making sperm. I don't even know.
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It is. I read this New Yorker article about a book on the birth of the pill. And now I'm talking about it. So everything comes full circle. Yeah. And they were saying like you don't call anything else the pill. Like Viagra is not the pill. It's the little blue pill. Antibiotics isn't the pill. You don't call it the vacuum or the meat grinder, right? Like there's really nothing like that.
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I've got like a wheezy old donkey running the show in there. Kind of dirty.
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Oh, goodness. So the endometrium still builds up in the uterus and is released, but it's known as a withdrawal period. So this is if you're on the pill. But that's why your period while on the pill is going to be generally lighter and shorter.
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Yeah. And so technically the pill mimics the structure called the corpus luteum.
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Which is the thing that releases progesterone and estrogen once an egg is released. So the body is like, oh, the corpus luteum has got it going on. I don't need to release another egg. I also am not going to have a period because during this time after the pill –
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those hormone levels start to become like a normal baseline in the woman's body, there's no endometrium that builds up and therefore there's no endometrium to shed.
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Right. And I don't think we mentioned this yet, progestin, which is the synthetic progesterone.
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It's going to make that vaginal mucus thicker. So you were right earlier. It is thinner to make the sperm thicker. make it excess the eggs easier, it will thicken up that mucus to make it harder for the sperm. So I think it's just sort of like a one-two punch to make it even harder to get pregnant.
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Although you can still get pregnant usually due to misuse of the pill because what you do is you take the pill at the same time every day. It's all very – synchronous and depends on that timing. And if you don't time it out right, your chances of getting pregnant are a little bit more. But apparently if you're taking it exactly right at the same time, then your failure rate is going to be 0.3%.
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So it's still technically possible. Yes, it is. 0.3% possible.
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Which offers up the question, like why, like when they were developing the pill... They had it completely in their control as to what they wanted to do with the menstrual cycle. And they decided – and I never knew this. It's very interesting. They decided to keep it on that 28-day cycle forever.
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Because for a lot of reasons, they thought – the Rock thought the Catholic Church, because he was a Catholic, they might be more willing to approve it if it seemed more natural, I guess. Right. He was way off there. They thought way off. He thought that women would be more apt to take it if it didn't seem like it was disrupting things too much. Yeah. Like I'm still in my regular cycle.
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Right. Because you do have that withdrawal period. It's not an actual real period, but it does come at the end of the pill cycle. Right.
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Yeah, but they could have gotten rid of the period altogether.
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Right, and a lot of people are like, well, go do that. And there are pills on the market that we'll talk about that do take away women's periods. There's others that put them at different spaces of the amount, like four times a year or something like that. And people started looking into this and they're like, well, wait a minute, shouldn't women be having periods?
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And the answer is not necessarily, right? Right.
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Yeah, I mean it's controversial for sure.
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Like if you're not ovulating, you technically don't have to have a period. And this Molly Edmonds wrote this really interesting pill. Good old Molly. Article. Yeah. Like is a period necessary I think is what it's called. Because women today have many more periods than our ancestors. Right. Something on the order of like 450 periods over the average woman's lifetime. Right.
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Yeah, about three times as many as our ancestors did.
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Yeah. So like back in like hunter-gatherer, pre-agricultural women had about 160 or something, right? And that was because they had more kids. They breastfed longer. They didn't live as long. They didn't live as long, yeah. And so some people make the point like, well, women are having more periods than ever before and – The body wasn't meant for this.
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It's actually kind of rough on the body to have a period. Like when the ovum pops off of the fallopian tube, it leaves a scar on the ovary. And that scar has to be repaired. And to repair, the cells in the ovary have to divide. And as long as they divide correctly, that damage will be repaired. If they divide incorrectly, that damage can turn into ovarian cancer. So that's a problem with it.
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There's also scarring with the shedding of the endometrium, like actually having your period itself can leave scarring. Same deal, right?
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Nothing compares to it. And it's for good reason. I mean the pill is monumentally huge as far as pharmaceuticals and medicine goes. I mean on the scale of antibiotics easily. Sure.
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Yeah, and I think, doesn't iron deficiency come into play?
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So that's actually a benefit of having a period. Oh, is it? You get rid of excess iron, which can lead to cardiovascular disease.
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Well, and there are a couple of weeks during the menstrual cycle where women have a significant reduction in blood pressure. So during the years, you know, their reproductive years at least, they are at, I guess, a slightly lower risk of stroke and heart attack.
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I think like 10% lower. Yeah, well, that's not bad. No, not at all. So there's pros and there's cons to having a period. The thing is, and this is what Molly ultimately points out, is we actually don't know if a period is necessary. Like the pill is still relatively new. And... I think she quoted a doctor in there, Dr. Susan Rothko, I think, or Rothko.
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And she called the pill that does away with periods entirely the greatest... unregulated medical experiment of all time.
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And she makes a chilling point. Like we don't really know what the side effects are yet because all of this is too new, especially the pill that does away with the period altogether.
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Well, yeah, and they haven't done – there are no long-term studies of menstrual suppression.
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From oral contraceptives at least. They don't know about – What that means for a woman, they don't know because most of this testing is done for women over 18, so they don't know what it means for women under 18 at all because they're just not involved in the research.
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Even though they do have research that shows about two-thirds of women would get rid of their period if they could do so safely because, I mean, we haven't even mentioned PMS or PPMD, which is just – isn't that like a really, really severe –
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Yeah. Whereas like PMS is not a picnic to begin with. Sure. This is like go to the hospital bad.
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Right. Yeah. Can be at least. Yeah. So, yeah, that's really interesting to think about.
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It also treats ovarian cysts. There's other uses for birth control pills too.
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You want to take another break and get back to it?
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Yeah, and it's the very first medication that was designed for a non-therapeutic purpose too.
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And so it's really difficult to overstate how much of an impact the pill had when they released it in the 1960s when it first came out. Are we going to do history first? Yeah, let's. All right, let's do that. So let me set the stage for you.
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Ooh, you're bringing a couch out. Back in the day, I'm going to do my Charles Nelson Reilly one-man show impression. Back in the day, if you were a woman and you didn't want to get pregnant, you had to coordinate with your husband that he wear a condom, okay?
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I'm over here hanging on this cliff by my fingernails.
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I think you're doing great. Isn't he doing great, everybody? Yes.
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So remember, so there are side effects both positive and negative to taking the pill. Right. There's some very common negative side effects like nausea is a big one. weight gain, spotting, which is called breakthrough menstruation, which is where you have bleeding during the actual pill cycle, not the prescribed period cycle of the pill.
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Yeah, and I don't think we mentioned yet either that in the pill prescription, in that monthly dose, there are seven, not always, but the way they designed it was there are seven placebo pills that are in there because you only take the pill for 21 days a month. But they put those extra seven pills in there to keep women on that.
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I guess the thinking was if they're used to taking this pill every day, they need to keep doing it.
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Yeah, if they don't for seven days, they might forget on the eighth day, and that's bad news.
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Yeah, so that's the most common way to do it and that's a very easy type of pill to take, right? Because all of them are the same level of hormone and the seven inert ones are usually a different color and they come at the end of the month. It's supposed to be easy. There's actually a recall right now of Tetula. Did you see that? No.
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Tetula is made by Allergan, I think, and they recalled a lot of their pills because they put the inert ones at the beginning of the cycle accidentally.
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And if you look, you can clearly see that the first like seven are different color. But where they're supposed to be at the end, they're at the beginning. And that is bad news if you're taking that pill. So if you have Taytula, go check it right now and go get some more.
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Yeah, but I think I interrupted you on the side effects. Nausea, headaches, breast soreness, acne, depression, moodiness, weight gain, decreased libido. And sometimes these can be, like if you start out on the pill, it can be worse. A few cycles in, it might get better. And if it doesn't, you can, there are different pills out there.
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There are. So when those pills originally came out, that first formula, I think it was called like Inovid, right?
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Searle. And they had 10 milligrams of progesterone or progestin. Yeah. And 0.15 milligrams of estrogen. And that is like a nuclear bomb pill. Women had the worst side effects from it. Like all these side effects, like each of them a Mack truck.
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And they were still willing to go through it to like have control of their body as far as pregnancy went. But they very quickly figured out through further research you can do the same. And the reason they selected that is like they knew that there was not going to be any ovulation with 10 milligrams of progesterone.
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And so they figured out that you could formulate with a much lower amount of both progestin and estrogen and still get the job done. And they still do that today. I think the estrogen gets down into the micrograms and you can get like 2.5 milligrams of progesterone in some forms of the pill.
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And then so if the pill is mistreating you, what you're saying is there are options, right? Yeah.
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Well, yeah, there are three main types of oral – did I say types?
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There are three main types of the oral contraceptive pills now, combination pills, progestin only, and extended release, which are the newest ones out there. The combination pill is the most common pill that you will get. The mini pill is the progestin only.
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Well, that's like a whole other kettle of fish at this time. Supposedly and socially, that went on all the time. There's plenty of premarital sex. But socially speaking, only single men were allowed to have premarital sex. Which is like who are they having premarital sex with then, right? If they're the only ones allowed to have premarital sex. Sometimes each other.
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And for some women, that's better. Like if you're breastfeeding and you can't have the estrogen because it's going to affect your milk, you'll probably be on the mini pill. And the mini pill peel, it works in a couple of different ways. It makes the endometrium too thin to accept that egg.
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And it won't allow it to attach. And again, with the vaginal mucus, it makes it too thick. to allow the sperm to reach the egg. But it is a little less effective, but still effective, but a little less than the combination pill.
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Because it's almost like a different, they're different mechanisms.
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Yeah, like it's 28 active pills for the mini pill.
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Right, but rather than tricking the body into thinking it's released an egg, this is just making it hard to get pregnant.
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It's almost like a different kind of pill. And then there's, what's the other kind?
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Well, the combination pill, the most common, there's a few subtypes of that pill as well.
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Right. So there's monophasic, which is what I was talking about, where you've got 21 pills and all of them are the same dose of progestin and estrogen. And then you've got the seven inert pills. And some women say, I'm not going to have a period this month. And then you just, rather than taking those seven inert pills, you just move on to the next month's 21 pills. Right.
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Yes, and I believe with the monophasic, if you miss a day, you can double up the next day.
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Because it's the same amount of pills or the same level of hormones, right? So, yeah, and that's far and away the most common. There's biphasic, which has two different levels of hormones, and then triphasic has three different levels. And the point of biphasic and triphasic is they're designed to give you the absolute minimum amount of synthetic hormones possible.
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that your body requires to keep from ovulating.
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Because the point is the lower the amount of hormones you have in there, probably the better off you are, whether it's cancer risk, moodiness, who knows. You're just better off with the least amount that does the trick.
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Yeah, and the kind of progestin in each of these is going to vary, but the type of synthetic estrogen is the same.
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Estradiol. That's it. Ethanol estradiol.
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Yeah, but the progestin is the thing that differs sometimes, right?
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And depending if like you're on a pill that uses one type of progestin, you can say, oh, I want to try a different type of progestin, and they'll say, here you go.
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And then the extended cycle, which we talked about, this is the newest one on the market. And I believe, isn't this the one that can reduce your period to like four times a year?
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Yeah. So there's a couple of different – there's seasonal and seasonique. And they're called that because that four-time-a-year period, you'll just be like, oh, it's fall. Oh, it's summer.
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Not in that order, but you know what I'm saying. Right. And then there's Librel, and I'm sure there's other ones on the market too. We don't mean to buzz market or anything like that. So there's one that's like 365 days, and then there's others that are 84 days so that you have either no periods at all or four periods a year. Right. So there you go.
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So there's a couple of other things I want to hit on. The pill is so much larger than just –
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birth control sure I mean just the fact that his birth control is an enormous thing like like you said John Rock thought he was going to be able to convince the Catholic Church that that this is a an okay thing yeah that was not the case now um in the late sixties the black power movement really zeroed in on the the pill especially the men of the black power movement and said like this is tantamount to black genocide
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Considering everyone refused to officially recognize homosexuality even existed. Yeah, I know where you're getting. Okay. So there are a lot of double standards, a lot of repression going on. But if you were a woman and you wanted to have sex, so whether it was with the guy you were having sex with or your husband. Mm-hmm. You basically had to say you got to wear a condom.
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And they definitely had like a case. Like there were plenty of cases of black women who went into hospitals and gave birth and then came out unknowingly sterilized. Like the doctor had just taken it upon himself to sterilize her after delivering her baby. So like they had this –
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evidence to back this up and it was never shown like yes there was a conspiracy to to wipe out black power in America through the pill but you like there were plenty of black women at the time who said like yeah I can get birth control pills easier than anything you know, down at like Corner Clinic or something like that.
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And even with the early trials from John Rock and Gregory Pincus, like one of the things that they zeroed in on Puerto Rico for was because they thought that if they could show that – backwards Puerto Ricans of color could learn how to take the pill regularly, it would demonstrate that women in the inner cities could or women in developing countries could.
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So there was definitely like a mentality toward the white establishment being on board with the idea of – at least providing the tools for minorities to control their rate of birth. Right. That was just pure and simple. That was a thought of it.
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It was. And it's had tremendous amount of benefits too, but there was some darkness in the place that it originally came from as well.
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Well, yeah, and of course anti-abortion groups think that the pill still to this day is an abortion-causing agent, what they call an—
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Do you know how to pronounce that? Abortifacient?
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Yeah, I think that's right. Which, you know, that's long been their argument.
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Well, their argument is that it makes the uterus hostile to a fertilized egg. Like prolonged use would prevent a fertilized egg that would otherwise attach from attaching. And so that's for all intents and purposes abortion in their position. Right, right. And yeah, I don't think that one's settled by any stretch of the imagination. So you got anything else?
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Yeah, because we're not like patronizing. We've never been patronizing. We might be like white dudes, but we're very much aware that we're white dudes. And let me leave you with this, white dudes. If you're a white dude, whether it's in America or the West or anywhere, your one job is to have some perspective. That's your first and foremost job. Take yourself out of your own shoes once in a while.
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Look around. Put yourself in other people's shoes. Your eyes will open widely and in a gog. Some say walk a mile. Sure. Why not? Get a little weight off, right? At least go check the mail. If you want to know more about the pill, just type in the pill. It'll bring up some cool stuff on HowStuffWorks.com.
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And if you said no, well, you were SOL one way or another. Either you weren't having sex or you're going to have sex without a condom. And if that happened, there is a really good chance that you are going to end up getting pregnant just from having sex.
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And there's also a really great American Experience site on PBS that had a bunch of cool stuff.
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Oh, man, that was good. Yeah. So good.
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And since I said American Experience and Chuck said so good, it's time for Listener Mail.
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Oh, no, it's not. No listener mail today because we've had some milestones here lately. And as we sit here today in real time, we as a company are celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Stuff You Should Know.
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Again. But we're actually having the party today. Right. And on the same day, Apple announced at their... WDCC. Yeah, their developers conference. Got up on stage, and this one kind of hit me. Like, we had the thousand episodes. That was good. The ten years kind of hit me in a big way. Right. But they got up on stage today, and they said that Stuff You Should Know is now the first podcast...
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in history first and only to reach 500 million downloads and streams on their uh platform yeah which is i i didn't know no it hit me too somehow adam carolla's in the guinness book of world's records right but uh here we are yeah as the only one and that's because of you all out there yes you said it a gazillion times but uh without you there is no us
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We would have been long gone if not for your support. So we continue to give thanks.
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Thank you again. Yeah. And we'll continue to give thanks.
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If you want to get in touch with us, you can send us all an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our extraordinarily grateful home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.
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Yeah, the ball was entirely in the man's court and women did not have much say in the matter.
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No, they didn't. There were a couple of things on the market. So before the industrial revolution, there were like folk remedies where you could use herbs and stuff like that. Basically, I think they're called herbal douches where you're just like squeezing stuff in there and like hoping – Hoping for the best, right?
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And then by the depression, there's something – there's a whole line of stuff called gynecological aids or feminine hygiene I think is what it's called. And some of them worked. Some of them kind of worked. Some of them didn't work. Some of them worked but would kill you or give you chemical burns. Right. There was a lot of problems. So you didn't have a lot of options, right?
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And then along with the fact that you actually didn't have that many options, socially – In 1950, 30 states and the federal government said you can't have anything that can be used as a contraceptive. And you can't even learn about it from your doctor or from school. 30 states and the federal government. This is 1950. Ten years later, the pill comes out.
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And a couple of years after that, 5 million American women are using it as a contraception. And now it was in their hands. They had the ability to decide for themselves whether sex led to pregnancy or not.
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Because not all states allowed it and not all doctors would give it out. Right. So it wasn't like, oh, the FDA said it's good to go so we can all get it. Right. It was still a fight. Yeah. For years and years and decades. It really was. So I guess we should start with a woman named Margaret Sanger. She is a very controversial figure, founder of Planned Parenthood. She's a nurse.
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And she wrote in 1912 about a magic pill that could prevent conception.
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Yeah, just a theoretical hypothetical pill.
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Right. And she's controversial for many reasons, not the least of which is her She was anti-abortion kind of when she was most famous. She was anti-abortion and kind of went all in on the pill and was like, this is the way to do it is to prevent the pregnancy. Once you're pregnant, sorry.
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And then, you know, there's the whole eugenics thing. We should do a podcast on her probably at some point.
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Because that's a rabbit hole right there.
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Yeah. But she was the early champion of it. She coined the term birth control in, I think, 1912 as well.
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Yeah, so in 1914, she started a newsletter called The Woman Rebel. That's where birth control was first typed out and distributed, the words, like you said. And then in the 1920s, some breakthroughs happened in science where they were able to identify progesterone and estrogen and realize kind of how it all worked.
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Yeah, so at first they were looking at this stuff as fertility drugs, and then they noticed that it actually could suppress fertility. And as they were, I think this was in the 40s when they were really starting in earnest, or is it the 20s?
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Well, I mean, they were synthesizing it from animals, and it was in early 1941.
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I don't think they were even synthesizing it. I think they were extracting it, and then that's what you got in your pill was animal hormones.
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Well, it says synthesized from animals, so maybe it was a process. Gotcha. But eventually in 1941, Dr. Marker, Dr. Russell Marker, I just said it like James Bond for some reason, he discovered how to synthesize hormones the synthetic form of progesterone, which is called progestin. And that really, this is from wild yams, believe it or not. That's how he did that. And that changed everything.
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It did. It made it cheaper. It made it easier to obtain.
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But you still couldn't really research, right? Because there were laws on even doing research on birth control. So the people who were doing this, it started out as Margaret Sanger. She hooked up with a doctor named Pincus and Gregory Pincus, who was a biologist, and he was interested in coming up with birth control as well. Um, Mary McCormick, was her first name Mary?
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Of the McCormick, I guess, the spices, right?
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Okay. So she lent a tremendous amount of her wealth to this research. And then a guy named John Rock, who was a doctor who was also working on a birth control pill, they all joined forces in the 1950s and started working on this really hard. But they had a lot of roadblocks up against them, and they cut a lot of corners together. and getting this thing out into market.
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Yeah, like going to Puerto Rico because they had to for trials.
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Right, and so this is not like Puerto Rico was like, we don't want this, but you're forcing it on us anyway. Puerto Rico had the exact opposite attitudes toward birth control that the United States did at the time. So it was a good place to do it. They just didn't inform anybody what was going on with this, that this was a clinical trial. They just gave them some pills and said, here, take these.
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Yeah, which they kind of came about by accident. Some of the pills were contaminated with estrogen, and they used that in scare quotes, I guess, just because what they really mean is mixed by accident. And that reduced a lot of the side effects because that was one of the big problems at first and continued to be for a while. And eventually they landed on a drug company called Cyril.
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There were two competing ones. The other one was Syntex and Cyril.
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Is that how you pronounce it? Searle? Searle? That's what I'm going with.
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Searle. They finally came up with what they thought was the right formulation. And in 1962, Syntex came out with their version. And then pretty soon it was being marketed and distributed after FDA approval in 1961.
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So, yeah. So, Cyril was the one who hooked up with Sanger in Rock.
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And they were the ones who provided the pills for the clinical trial in Puerto Rico. There was also a clinical trial at a women's mental asylum in Massachusetts.
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And the patients there didn't have any informed consent. And when they released this formula – First, it was for gynecological disorders, things like ovarian cysts. They knew it could be used to treat that. And Searle at the time was like, they had no expectations for this whatsoever.
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And then within a year, there were half a million women in America who were suddenly using this for gynecological problems. And Searle figured out, well, no, they're actually using it for contraception. Right. And so when they went and sought FDA approval and got it, that was when the floodgates opened.
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Like there was now a pill on the market that could prevent contraception that was the woman's to take. And all of a sudden there was the first year there was 1.2 million American women on the pill. And Searle at first thought they're not going to want this. Women aren't going to want to take a pill every day to keep from getting pregnant.
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And they couldn't even finish the name pregnant before like the pills were being grabbed from their hands.
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It was. And then these pills were not very safe. That's the upshot of this. The estrogen, there was way too much estrogen. It was dangerous. It was causing cancer. And in 1969, a very famous book came out called The Doctor's Case Against the Pill, written by a medical journalist named Barbara Seaman.
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And she got together with a bunch of doctors and researchers and women and made a case against the pill that it wasn't safe. It was a senator named Gaylord Nelson who read the book, took on birth control in Senate hearings. And in January 1970, in the Senate chamber, there was this testimony about the pill going on. Of course, run only by men. All the witnesses.
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With only men testifying, providing witness testimony. Yeah. But there was a woman there named Alice Wolfson and her group, the D.C. Women's Liberation Group. They were sitting there just getting more and more steamed.
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Yeah, in these hearings. At this time, these hearings were kind of under the radar. Right. Until Alice Wolfson, like, blew it up.
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The C-SPAN wasn't a thing yet. Right. So they were just getting more and more steamed watching all these men get up there and talking about women's reproductive health.
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But not only that, they were also – these people were talking about how dangerous the side effects were with the pill. Sure. Hypertension, blood clots, heart attacks, high blood pressure, stroke, all of these things. And the women in the D.C. women's lib movement – including Alice Wolfson, were like, we've never heard this before in our lives. How did our doctors not tell us this?
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Hey, everybody. Here's Chuck this week on a Saturday with a pretty relevant topic these days. Who knew that it would be relevant again? And this is from June 19th, 2018. How the pill changed the world. I think you know what, Bill, we're talking about.
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Well, that was the back story is that none of the doctors were sharing this information because they were getting, and it's, you know, I think there's always been a problem. Not across the board, but with doctors and pharmaceutical companies pushing certain drugs over others.
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But at the time, it was way worse than it is now. Like there was an actual... Yeah, there was a mentality among doctors, male doctors, who believed that if you... A woman was better off not knowing. You didn't want to get her all upset by giving her all the information.
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They didn't even have side effects listed.
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Right. And if you did tell her you ran the risk since women were so suggestible, she might develop a stroke just by thinking about it so much. So it was better off just not telling her about it. Yeah, exactly. That was the entire medical establishment at the time. Yeah. And so the pill went from this feminist icon in the 60s to by 1970 becoming an icon for white male sex. Medical patriarchy.
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And how patients' informed consent was a paramount issue now. And it just took on this other role.
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Well, and informed consent was literally born that day at that hearing. They finally heard an expert say – estrogen is to cancer, what fertilizer is to wheat. And Alice Wolfson stood up and started screaming. She was screaming, why are you using women as guinea pigs? Why are you letting drug companies murder us for profit and convenience? And it got a lot of media attention.
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And really, the aftermath of those hearings is when this consumer health movement started. And they started informed consent. They started having to list side effects on bottles. And, you know, it wasn't an overnight thing, but it really changed the pharmaceutical industry forever.
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That's good. But, see, the great thing about those books is that a 12-year-old doesn't really necessarily always pick up on those clues.
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I wasn't that great. I'd be curious to see if they would stump me now.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
But you cried a lot when you were a boy. Right, I knew. While staring in the mirror.
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And so then at the end, to wrap up the little genre sort of summary, you've got this great ending usually where everyone's gathered together and the detective kind of walks everyone through the big reveal of exactly how the killer did it. Right. And in her case, she did not – like when the killer is revealed, they didn't turn around and shoot them in the face. Like it's usually –
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Pretty nonviolent. They would be wrestled to the ground or arrested or maybe they might run away and you hear later that they had killed themselves or something like that.
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That's right, and she, Ed, takes great pains to point out that she did not invent this genre. There were people like Arthur Conan Doyle, obviously, and Poe before her that sort of established some of these rules, but she was very popular. She's very good at what she did. She wrote about what she knew, and we'll talk about her life coming up in a little bit, but...
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These manor houses and these estates and these English villages and even the exotic locales and these train trips and things were things that she actually experienced. And, you know, a lot of people are great at making stuff up and a lot of people are great about writing what they know. And it seems like she was really great at writing what she knew.
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Yeah, I don't have a super firm read on the history of literature, but I get the idea that this is sort of aligned with the beginnings of Pop Lit and like I call it the beach book. I don't know if there had been a ton of stuff like this that was just sort of pure comfort food and entertainment up to this point.
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But they were very entertaining books. They were humorous, a very dark sense of humor, great dialogue. All these verbal jousts between the detectives and the suspects is really key to that genre. Something Knives Out did really, really well. It was one of my favorite scripts of the year. Maybe my favorite script.
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But just really, really good, sharp writing. And it's no sort of no accident that she became so hugely popular.
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Yeah, and she... She was a business person, you know, like there's nothing wrong with saying, wow, people love this stuff and they sell a lot. And although it took a while for that to happen, as we'll see, but there's nothing wrong with any of that. I think people that call her a hack can go fly a kite.
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Well, and it's kind of like, what's the point of just sitting there? And I can't imagine any more boring than listening to us on headphones. Oh, wait a minute. That's our show.
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I think it is very much like Arizona.
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The legendary Devonshire cactus.
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Yeah, I mean, they had some dough. They were not wealthy, wealthy, but they were definitely upper middle class. They got an inheritance from her paternal grandfather such that her dad didn't need to work. Apparently, she is on record as saying that her dad wasn't around much, didn't really impact me much, so he can go fly a kite as well. There's a lot of kite flying.
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And she loved being out in the garden. She wasn't... I get the impression she wasn't like reclusive or anything, but she very much enjoyed time with herself alone, but also had friends and stuff when she eventually did go to school once her father passed and they couldn't afford that governess.
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How many novelists are the life of the party and super outgoing?
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I just I don't know. You kind of picture like the Stephen Kings just locked in an attic somewhere and not like, well, let me write a little bit. Then I'm going to go, you know, go to a party.
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I don't know. It's sort of a solitary pastime. So sure, there are examples of of extroverted authors. But I think she kind of fits the mold that you generally think of, especially for a lady mystery writer.
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Oh, I just meant for Jerry's sake, you know?
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Yeah, so she – like we said, she did some pretty – to us, dum-dums in America seem like exotic traveling trips. But if you lived in England at the time, it's no big deal to go to Egypt and check out the pyramids. That was – if you had a little dough, that was a pretty common vacation that you might take. So she did stuff like that, and she was exposed to exotic locales and used those in her work.
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In her very first novel even, Snow Upon the Desert – She wrote when she was like 22 or 23 years old, I think. And, you know, she had a hard time getting published at first because she was a young woman.
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Snow Upon the Desert. Yeah.
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Yeah, well, it makes sense.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
That's right. They were married in 1914. He was kind of promptly sent to fight in the Great War in France. And she worked at a pharmacist at a war hospital during that period. And this is where she learned a lot about potions and poisons and pharmaceuticals and things that she would – there's a lot of poisoning that goes on in her books.
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Um, and she later in her career, I think she actually would consult with doctors and stuff like that because she wanted everything to be really medically accurate. But early on, she learned a lot about this stuff from her work in the pharmacy.
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Yeah, and that's a good vehicle for a mystery novel because, you know, there's no murder weapon per se. I guess there's the poison bottle. But it can often be very vague, a poisoning death. Like could it have been a heart attack? Like you have to kind of suss out at first whether or not it was even a murder. It's not like an obvious thing where there's a –
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a bullet hole in their chest or something like that.
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Yeah, I met her when I was three.
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A little bit. She was nice enough. She signed my Murder on the Orient Express copy, first edition.
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Yeah, and this is the one that introduced the world to her chief detective for a lot of those novels, Mr. Poirot, like we mentioned. And later on they asked her why he was Belgian, and she said, why not, basically. Right. I don't think a whole lot of thought went into it.
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It turned out to be a really good choice because he had this kind of interesting accent, and everywhere he went, they were never set in Belgium. So everywhere he went, he was this sort of, a sort of strange foreigner that would come into town with this accent that no one quite understood. And he just had this sort of larger-than-life presence, I think, because of that.
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So it turned out to be a really smart choice.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Oh, man, I want to talk about Knives Out so much.
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So she had a daughter, we should mention, in 1919 named Rosalind, and that's the only child she ever had. And it was in 1920, a year later. that they finally did publish the mysterious affair at Stiles after she agreed to change the ending. They said, we don't like Poirot revealing all this evidence in court. So she changed the ending. They said, great.
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That's when she went on to publish that novel every year for about 10 years. Right. Very, very big books, but they weren't, they were popular, but she wasn't like a superstar internationally at this point yet.
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Nah. I did some spring cleaning here a couple weeks ago. I didn't even recycle or put it in a little free library. I just threw it in the trash.
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Yeah, it's... So here's the backstory. She and Archie... were not meant to be together, as it turns out. He revealed that he was having an affair with a lady named Nancy Neal, who was a friend of the family. And obviously that was the end of their marriage. So at the end of 1926, they decided they were gonna take a trip together a weekender.
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Archie went to be with his friends instead, and then she vanished into seemingly thin air. They found her car near a rock quarry with her fur coat and her driver's license there, and no Agatha Christie.
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And still spinning. Yeah.
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Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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No, we weren't big comic book people. We don't have anything valuable like that.
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We have this series of books, children's books, about awesome women in history from Frida to Coco Chanel to Amelia Earhart to Agatha Christie. And so I was reading this one the other night and thought, hey, Let's do one on Agatha Christie. I haven't read any of her work. Seen a couple of her movies. Love the genre, though. Yeah. As films.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
racially insensitive language, some would call anti-Semitic at times, anti-Catholic, through parts of her career such that the Anti-Defamation League complained to her agent at one point. And because of that, American publishers were given the ability to change that stuff out sort of at will.
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Yeah, and I read a lot about this, and there are different takes. One take is that the old, you know, she was a product of her time thing, which people – you know, rightfully point out. Another is that oftentimes she's doing this to show characters are sort of underdeveloped as humans and sort of backward. So there's that as well.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
But you also can't dance around the fact that she did use some pretty bad words. And, you know, we just got to point that stuff out.
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I've never read murder mysteries, although I'm going to now.
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I didn't until I read Ed Sayett.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Occasional racism. Yeah, and a lot of the racist stuff, just to put a final pin on that, was... A lot of it was character descriptions, which can be some of the ugliest kinds of stuff like that. Yeah. Because it wasn't just like talking about philosophies. It was just like literally physically describing a character. Sometimes she would use some pretty derogatory language.
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I'm glad we're doing our great work in the time of wokeness. Right, exactly. No one can ever go back. I mean, we've made missteps here and there, but they can't go back and talk about when Josh and Chuck were big racists at the beginning.
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Yeah, and also a very cool, good idea to write those books early on just in case because you never know.
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Besides the bombing thing. I mean, she could walk off a ledge or get hit by a bus or die of natural causes early. Like, you never know. And then you've got this legacy cemented.
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I have that DVD sitting on my desk.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
You're going to love it.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
So I guess we should say that she did die eventually five years or three years after I met her in 1976 at the age of 85 at her home in Oxfordshire. And it was natural causes, not poison.
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I do not have anything else.
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All right, I'm going to call this Letter from a Kid because we love reading these letters from kids. Hey, guys. I've been listening to your podcast for about eight months now, and I'd like to say I am a huge fan. This is Emmett. He's 10 years old.
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My dad is even more of a fan of you guys than me, and he told me about your podcast. I am a huge fan of the Atlanta Falcons and pretty much everything Atlanta related, including your podcast, which is weird because I live in Iowa.
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I think, you know, when you grow up in a place like Iowa with no professional sports, you know, you do that thing where you just pick out a team in a city.
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That's right. And now I'm really worried there's a professional team in Iowa, but there is not.
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I've been listening to your podcast a ton during this coronavirus outbreak to keep me from going crazy and it's worked. My birthday is actually coming up so I'll not be able to see my friends or even have a party. It would be totally awesome and make my year if you said happy birthday to me but I want to bet you won't read this on the air.
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Well played, Emmett. I love your grass podcast. And last year, me and my best friend Oliver started a lawn care business, and I made enough money to buy Beats headphones to listen to your podcast on.
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That's right. He says, I made sure to wrap this letter up and spank it on the bottom before I sent it. So happy, happy, big, I guess, 11th birthday, Emmett. Best to your dad. Hello, Oliver and everyone there in Atlanta, Iowa.
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I've never seen that show. What?
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We've had this conversation before.
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No, we have because you said that the first time. Okay. Yeah, I've never seen it, but I'm a huge fan of murder mystery movies, especially cozy mysteries like Clue is one of my favorite films. And this year's or last year's Knives Out was one of my top like three or four films of the year.
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All right, well, film professionals out there, please do not take offense to all your hard work.
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Well, yes. Do you actually do the math of how much you pay for Amazon Prime to see how much you're paying for that movie?
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All right. Well, that's an eight minute intro. So, so far, so good. Okay. She is perhaps, again, it's kind of hard to tell with book sales because they can be a little dodgy, but she is often quoted as the, or seen as the bestselling novelist of all time. And I did a little check to compare, like I thought, well, Stephen King sold a book or two. Sure.
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They tag his book sales at about $350 million. Her 66 novels and 14 collected works of short stories supposedly have sold to the tune of $2 billion.
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Yeah, that is a ton of books. I don't think our Stuff You Should Know book will approach those numbers.
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So let's talk about this cozy mystery or just mystery novels in general. They are very much formulaic, which Ed helped us put this together. Ed points out that's why people like them, because the familiarity and it's sort of a comfort food thing, like a good beach book. You know what you're going to get.
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Yeah, so you've got that murder. You usually don't see this murder occur. She doesn't usually, and in general in murder mysteries, you don't see the murder. That's kind of not the point of how grisly or gruesome the act is. It's sort of all about finding that body. And, uh, I won't, I had a bunch of knives out things to say, but I won't say any of them now.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
Uh, but then you've got your detective that arrives on the scene. And, uh, I will say this knives out very much follows this formula very smartly. So, okay. So you've got this master detective who usually arrives upon the scene, um, but they may already be there and they are generally very eccentric and sort of, um, They always have these quirky sort of characteristics.
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In Christie's case, we have the very formidable Hercule Poirot and then Miss Marple, Jane Marple. In Hercule's case, he's Belgian and has this big mustache and is just sort of eccentric and Belgian. He's not French. There's something about being Belgian that makes it slightly different. Sure.
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And Miss Marple apparently is just a very ordinary and people underestimate her and that's how she sort of wins of the day.
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Like Angela Lansbury. Yeah.
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Right. So you've got your setting in the cozy mystery setting. Like you said, it's usually like an estate or a home, maybe a hotel. Maybe it might be a small English village. Orient Express obviously is on a train, another sort of confined space. By the way, have you seen Train to Busan? No.
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They're kind of very similar, but Busan is Zombies on a Train, Korean film.
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You should check out Train to Busan. I will. If you think you've seen it all with the zombie genre, then think again.
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Yeah, I'm a couple of episodes into the latest season.
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Yeah, I love it. That's like Hartwell, you know.
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I've tried to get Bateman and Laura Linney on Movie Crush, and it's always, thank you, no.
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All right. So you've got your setting with Agatha Christie. She did include her travels in some of her later novels when they became like super popular, but it was still not like a globetrotting like James Bond kind of thing.
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Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery
That's right. You got your suspects. They are questioned by the detective. They usually all have a motive. They usually all... have the means because everyone, you know, in a great novel like this, everyone's got to be a suspect from the beginning. And then you can kind of quickly whittle or slowly whittle that list down.
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Yeah, I mean, that goes back to Encyclopedia Brown. The whole point is to try and figure that stuff out.
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That's right. I love my Bombas socks. They are super cozy and the secret is in their fabrics. We're talking about the really good stuff like Merino wool, which feels as cozy as a ski lodge. But if you want to brave the cold on the slopes or on a snowy run, Bombas has athletic socks built for that, too.
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That's right. And if you get cold feet, then you got to try those slippers that they have. They're warm because they have that fluffy, sharp aligning and the marshmallow-like cushioning. Really good stuff.
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That's right. Spoiler, or not spoiler, teaser. At the end of this episode, let's say between the end and before listener mail, if that's agreeable to you.
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It's easy. If you can cook rice, you can cook quinoa.
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Sure, depending on what kind of rice you're getting. Um, I eat quinoa at the house, I wouldn't say a lot, but enough, like every couple of weeks. Oh yeah, that's a lot. Is it? Yeah, it is to me. So what you do is you want to rinse it. Yeah. Like you will some kinds of rice.
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Yeah, they had this, it's actually really good for you, this coating called saponin. And despite its great health effects, when you add water to it, it lathers up like a soap.
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Yeah, and in fact, it means, it's from the Latin sapo, which is soap. So you don't want to eat it even though it's good for you.
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Yeah. So you rinse that stuff off. Quinoa, once you see it, it's really tiny. So you want to get a really fine strainer, not like a colander. Right. You get a colander, then all that quinoa is going to be.
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So get like a sifter, a really fine sifter. Rinse it real good until the water's running clear, and basically cook it like rice. It's one part quinoa to two parts water. Or broth. Well, that's what I do. I use chicken broth. Sure.
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I'm just kidding. Beef broth if you're gross. Okay. That doesn't pair well with quinoa. I could see it not. I'm just not a big beef broth guy.
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Beef broth. Beef broth. But I use chicken. I use like half chicken. So if I do the two cups of water, I'll do one cup water, one cup chicken broth.
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We are going to taste Soylent for the first time live on the air.
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Yeah, I just kind of do half and half. I got you. You stomp on it? Yeah. So then you cook it like rice. Like I said, you're going to boil it, and then once it gets to a boil, cover it up, turn it down low, and wait and let it simmer until it's all soaked up.
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the seed spirals to be prominent what's the deal with that you'll see when you look at it like before you cook it it looks different than afterward and that's the easiest way to say it like once you look it's almost like they pop open or something and um it's just quite obvious it's just big and light and fluffy you see the little seed spiral what's neat is and we kind of walked past it but you said it a couple of times that that saponin is um uh good for you
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I don't know. Or mix it into a salve? Maybe. Rub on your skin?
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I'm not sure. It's a good question. I bet people know. We'll hear about that.
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So you can eat it in a variety of ways. You can just eat it as a side dish like you would with rice or couscous or whatever, mashed potatoes. Yeah. Although I would eat the mashed potatoes.
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Well, I wouldn't, you know, I wasn't going to say anything. Then I was going to say something.
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I think you probably need binding agents. Or beef. Yeah, beef broths. Or I don't know. I've never made a quinoa burger. And I don't make any kind of veggie burger in my home. Oh, really? So I wouldn't really know.
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Yeah, I mean, I make them myself with my own little recipe.
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But that's just because Emily doesn't eat beef. So I've gotten so into the turkey burger that I don't even really. I mean, I'll have a beef burger out. Right. Never at home.
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So here's my favorite quinoa dish, and I got it from a restaurant in New York that I can't remember. But there are all kinds of variations. But I have it, I cook it and then put it in the fridge and chill it, like, overnight.
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So in the summer, I will get that cold quinoa and then dice up, like, some cucumber and some red onion. Okay. And, I mean, kind of anything you want, like, that fits a salad, summer salad.
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Like orange pepper, like crunchy green pepper or roasted red pepper. Oh, yeah, that's good. Garlic. Throw some pine nuts in there.
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Like you get some basil, some fresh herbs. That's the way to go, man. Yeah, like anything that strikes your fancy. Maybe a little lemon juice, a little apple cider vinegar.
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Yeah, and you just mix up anything that you kind of, you know, might add some texture like that crunch and serve it alongside like a burger instead of fries. Oh, yeah. And it's really, really good. And you know me, I'm not into healthy foods like that a lot. Right.
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Or maybe some dried cranberry or golden raisins.
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I don't love the golden raisins, but I do like the cranberry. Do you? Yeah, yeah. I think it's nice. All right, so that's Chuck's recipe of the week. That was pretty good. We'll do that every week, no matter what the topic is. What are you going to come up with for the tartar grade? Oh, just you wait. So here's the deal with quinoa. It's gotten really trendy.
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So in 2007, the United States was importing 7.3 million pounds of quinoa. Right. 2012, they imported 57 million pounds of quinoa. And God knows what it is this year.
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Yeah, he went from, in 2005, he sold $25,000 worth through his company. And these days, he's selling about $26 million worth annually from his own facility and about $40 million from other facilities. So he basically went around to them and said, hey, these weekend farmer's markets are cute, but how would you like to be a part of the industrial food supply?
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Okay. I don't know if I'm getting he and Yanni confused, though.
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They seem like they probably at least go bowling together.
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So the price has really gone up, too, as a result, and it was not small. For a lot of years, one metric ton was... About $500. And in 2010, that was $1,300. So that's almost threefold. And again, that was almost seven years ago.
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So you would think that's great. These farmers are making a ton of money now, right?
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Right, like the people of Fiji are exporting Fiji water, but they all don't have clean drinking water themselves. That kind of same thing, right?
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That's right. That's because Autotrader has the largest selection of new cars, used cars, electric cars, even flying cars. Well, actually not flying cars yet, but as soon as those get invented, they'll be on Autotrader.
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You know, we've all been there. You're sick, you're trying to schedule a doctor's appointment only to spend hours on hold, and then you find yourself crammed into a crowded waiting room with other sick people. And don't get me started about the prescriptions. That's a whole other story.
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That's right. And with Amazon Pharmacy, your prescriptions are delivered directly to you quickly and affordably. That means no more trips to the pharmacy and no more surprise costs at the cash register.
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All right, so if it's being produced in the Andes and prices are going up, you would think that at some point people in the United States might try and take a stab at it. And that's exactly what happened and is happening. And you sent this great article, Is Quinoa California Farmer's New Kale? Because kale had a similar explosion in popularity over the past few years. Kale's so hot right now.
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Those are just super delicious. And buttery. Yeah, with my crab dip especially.
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Or at least made fun of for being too hipstery and hot.
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I know. People just hate all that stuff. Yeah. You know, just like what's trending and what's not and what we think is cool.
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Yeah, or at least Don't get on your high horse about the other stuff being mass marketed stuff.
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What, you just want me to bring you crab dip? Yeah.
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Yeah, there was a story about it attached to it as well.
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Yeah, these dudes got together and they were trying to get to kind of the root of all this. And so they got a data source, ENAHO. It's the National Survey of Peru that they carry out every year about just Peruvian households and all kinds of stuff, data that they're collecting. But one of them is food. And there are 22,000 randomly selected households.
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Selects: The Quinoa Revolution!
So quinoa, there are at least 120 varieties. And it is nothing new. It's been around. In fact, we might as well delve into a little history here.
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So they got 10 years' worth of this data covering from before the quinoa boom, a few years before, through the quinoa boom. So they could kind of do a good comparison. Right. And they split the households into three groups, those who grow and eat quinoa, those who eat it but don't grow it, and those who neither grow it nor eat it. They say, bleh.
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Yeah, I guess the final household is people that pronounce it Quinoa. There's like one household in Peru. It's like, what is this stuff? And they all three showed a clear rise in their welfare, which they measured as the total value of goods consumed as that price of quinoa rose. And apparently that reflected in the increased living standards in Peru as a whole, too.
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So at the height of that boom, the welfare of the growers increased more rapidly than the other two groups, though.
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Yeah, at least that's what they're saying in this paper. I mean, we're not saying this is 100% evidence, but at least this is what they dug out after poring over these 10 years' worth of studies. Right. They said this guy, Andrew Stevens, a doctoral candidate, focused on specifically the Puno region in the Andes, which grows about 80% of all the quinoa in Peru.
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It's been cultivated for, geez, more than 5,000 years.
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And he said this is a cultural and nutritionally important food But it's not, I think the gist was people are trying to make it out to be like, this is what they subsist on every day and they can't afford to eat it. Right. And he said, this is actually a pretty small part of their diet overall. And they're actually eating more quinoa than ever before in that region that grows the most.
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That was pretty surprising. So it said they did not cut back their consumption between 2004 and 2012 despite a four-fold price increase. They see no signs of changing calories, proteins, or carbohydrates in the diet across Peru as a whole. Right. So they kind of debunked it.
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Yeah, like, hey, you're coming in here and you're basically taking this and now you're going to grow it all over the world.
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Well, I guess we could say more than five years.
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The other thing too, and I think you sent me this, was that –
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Because there's more basically there's sort of a land grab going on yeah, this is where I was going in Peru where All of a sudden they realized that you know before when it wasn't worth that much money They I mean sure they were producing it But it wasn't like it is now so all these people are saying wait this this land that was once unused like is anyone claiming it and There's sort of a rush to claim these lands well there was fighting going on
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Yeah, and it's an Andean plant and specifically originated... Around Lake Titicaca in Peru.
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Yeah. Man, what was that episode? I don't know. It's totally on the tip of my tongue.
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I can't remember. I want to say it had something to do with the Dust Bowl, but we didn't do one on the Dust Bowl yet.
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Maybe it was the Dust Bowl. Yeah, good one. Yeah, so the llamas... That's one of the big issues, right, is that they're not letting them poop everywhere.
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Yeah, it's wonderful. Wonderful area. Have you been? Oh, no. But just look at photos. Sure. Machu Picchu. Yeah. You're like, well, look at that place. Exactly. One day, maybe. I'd like to go for sure. But there is historical evidence of it being domesticated.
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In the long run, they're also worried that, I was talking about all those different varieties. I saw the 120, but it says here there could be up to thousands of different varieties.
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And farmers are abandoning most of these to concentrate on the ones that they can sell to, you know, ship out to export to American markets.
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Or I guess just, you know, not just America. I think Europe is eating this stuff like crazy too. Are they? Yeah. Yeah, but it says that those varieties are, this guy says that they're the future of quinoa because they can adapt to things like climate change, and if you narrow the varieties down to a certain few and they don't adapt, then you're kind of screwed.
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Yeah, well, they're trying to encourage it with these Andean farmers, at least. They are working with Bolivia and Peru to develop internal markets for these threatened varieties, like with school food programs and stuff.
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Like not necessarily to sell, but to use like within the country at hospitals and schools. They said they've been fairly successful with some of that stuff. So hopefully that continues.
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Yeah. And for the future. For all. Sure. They are growing in California, though. That article you sent, this dude is growing it in... In the Sonoran Desert. Crazy. In the Imperial Valley, below sea level. Mm-hmm. In like one of the hottest places in North America. Yeah. They're growing quinoa.
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like we said, maybe as long as 8,000 years ago, and they even saw in ancient tombs, they saw little, you know, archaeological drawings and things that what they think is quinoa.
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Yeah, maybe that'll be the title. Quinoa, colon, quinoa. Complex, more complex than you think.
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Or maybe it should say, well, never mind. I'll figure that out. Or should we just brainstorm some more on show titles? Let's do it. Are we going to try the Soylent? Yes, let's. And then do Listener Mail?
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I think you should probably shake well, right?
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People also thought that that was a sponsored episode by Soylent. And I was like, I think we said enough bad things about the taste that you should have figured out that it was not.
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So people were ingesting it and using it as a superfood way back when.
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Yeah, I mean, it's sort of bland. Oh, it's definitely bland. It's not nearly as sweet. It's not like a Honey Nut Cheerio milk.
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Or Cinnamon Toast Crunch milk. That's not bad. I was dreading this. I thought it was going to be awful from... all the comments, but that's not bad at all.
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Yeah, I mean, that's 20% of your daily nutrition.
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The aftertaste is a little bit like milk of magnesia.
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All right. I'm going to call. Yeah, I definitely don't like the aftertaste. It sounded sort of chalking up on my throat and tongue.
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All right. I'm going to call this just a nice email from this lovely Australian woman. Hey, guys. Been a long time listener. First time writer. Currently living in Sydney. Sydney.
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australia though i grew up in tennessee and uh now i'm a florida resident all over the place wow so maybe she's not australian i've been listening to y'all y'all since i was in college at uh utk go vols and i even brought you along with me while spending a year living in france if you do end up reading this on the air which i don't expect i would be so thrilled if you give a shout out to my little sister lb currently in portland
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What's up, LB? She just used a little reverse psychology on you there. Yeah, she did. Anytime we make a road trip, we put on Stuff You Should Know, which incites a groan from her every time. It's the chit-chat that bugs her.
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All right. To get to the point, I was listening to the Dictators episode and was so excited to hear you talking about Lucius Cornelius Sulla. In fact, that's my grandmother's maiden name. We pronounce it Suella, but whoever knows if that's the true pronunciation. Her family is from southern Italy and immigrated from Naples about 100 years ago.
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She recently went on a trip to Italy and studied up on her ancestor Suella and even visited a lot of the sites inscribed with his name.
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It's amazing to see a piece of your family history show up on your favorite podcast, even if it is about dictators. It gave me a chuckle. Thanks for keeping me entertained. Just recently caught up. to all the episodes on iTunes. I know, I know, there are much more. Yeah. Many more on your website.
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Yeah, I mean, the 21st century is when it really kind of became popular. Right. And even in the last, geez, mid-2000s, you can even talk about it being trendy?
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Well, in a lot of different ways. I assume you think it's one thing only.
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Oprah. Yeah, she had something to do with it for sure.
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Yeah, she definitely was a factor. Oprah, her reach is wide.
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But it doesn't reach me. Are you not an Oprah fan? No, I think she's fine, but I didn't learn about quinoa from her or anything else.
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I think the first time I had it was in a restaurant. To me, it spread because chefs started using it.
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Chefs don't serve anything unless Oprah eats it. She's patient zero. Here in the United States, I talked about at least 120 varieties. You're more than likely going to be eating the red. Red, white, and blue. No, red, white, or black varieties of quinoa. And do you eat it in your home? I guess we'll get to this stuff, but I'm curious if you've cooked with it a lot.
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So this stuff is known as an ancient grain, but it's not exactly a grain, and it's not exactly a cereal. It's classified technically as a pseudo cereal.
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Like Fruity Pebbles. That's 100% cereal, baby. They just came out with Cinnamon Pebbles.
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But quinoa technically is a pseudo cereal. It comes from the goosefoot plant.
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No, and it looks kind of weedy. And as we'll see later when you're cultivating it, it looks alarmingly like some other weeds. Weed weed. It can be tricky. With a capital W.
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I'm not sure you know what marijuana is. Huh. I'll show you a picture sometime. Okay. Okay. It is labeled a whole grain, though, because it's actually, it fits the whole grain definition because it is the whole grain seed which you're eating. Okay.
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Happy Saturday. Hi, everybody. Chuck here. We're going to go back in time today with this election to February 7th, 2017. The quinoa revolution. Mainly because I don't remember much about this one and I have to listen to these again. So I'm going to listen and I hope you do too. Learn everything you always wanted to know and more about quinoa right now.
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Actually, not easily digestible for many people.
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Yeah, and quinoa in particular is really weird. When you look at it, It's closer, you wouldn't think so, but it's closer to chard and beets and spinach.
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And it's super, super good for you. Like we're saying, it's a super food. And one of the reasons and another thing that makes it very strange is that it has a ton of protein, which is pretty unusual for a plant to have this much protein.
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Yeah. What it does have, unless you think this is not true as well.
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At least 10 amino acids. And that's good, right? Or is it bad, too? I guess it's okay. No, it's chock full of amino acids, which are great for your body because our body cannot make amino acids. So we have to get them from food sources.
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It's not very high in calorie. No sugar, no cholesterol, no sodium.
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I think just compared to grains, there are plenty of other fruits with potassium.
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No, bananas are really good for you. What else? Fiber, magnesium, folate?
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Well, I think one of the deals, though, is we're not seeing those in the marketplace, though. which is one of the – we'll get to it, but it's one of the potential problems is we're only eating like three or four of the 120 varieties. Yeah. And I think those are for sure gluten-free.
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Like if you go to your grocery store, you're not going to see 120 varieties of this stuff.
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All right. Well, let's take a break, and we're going to get back and talk a little bit about cooking this delicious stuff.
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That's right. Just go to squarespace.com slash stuff for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code stuff to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain.
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That's right. That's because Autotrader has the largest selection of new cars, used cars, electric cars, even flying cars. Well, actually not flying cars yet, but as soon as those get invented, they'll be on Autotrader.
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That's right. It's a tool that helps you know exactly how much you'll pay each month for your car so you never have to do car math again. You're welcome. So whether you're into timeless classics or the latest trends or whether you just want something practical with no surprise costs, if you see a car you like, it's probably on AutoTrader. See it. Find it. AutoTrader.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Instead, you can experience this episode, and I hope you enjoy it.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
So in the parlance of today, Chuck, George Square and his Muzak Corporation pivoted from home consumer markets to business markets. And that just knocked it out of the park because it turned out that there were a lot of companies, hotels, restaurants, clubs. I think the Stork Club was an early customer that said, you know what?
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It's really going to make our place seem fancy if we've got music piping in. all the time. So, yes, we would like to sign up for your service. And that's really where Muzak kind of started to take off.
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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there, and there's Dave C. Couston. I said it right this time.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
And very frequently, it's made into a much more mellow version of itself. Like any rough edges are taken off. Since they take the vocals out, it's not like that vocal melody is non-existent any longer. They just replace it with something else. So if they're trying to go for something like a little more upbeat or uptempo, they'll replace the vocals with, say, like a saxophone.
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If they're trying to do something a little more mellow, they'll replace the vocals with a string section. Yeah, or harp, perhaps. Yeah, that's one of the things that Muzak is very famous for is like what's called masses of strings, just strings upon strings. In fact, one of the early, I guess, big name groups that produced Muzak was called 101 Strings.
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They probably were absolutely accurate in that. Like, there's just tons of strings everywhere. Violins, cellos, violas, every string instrument you can throw at it, they just layer upon layer in these songs. It's one of the hallmarks of Muzak.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Do you ever listen to Joe Beam's stuff?
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Yeah, his record Stoneflower is just a masterpiece from beginning to end.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
If you're in France, that's how you would say it. But here in the United States, you say coussin.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Yeah, that's another thing, though, too, is, like, it's so mellow that to take that kind of music and then make it into Muzak is, like, it's almost like it takes a certain amount of audacity. Right. You know, like I was listening to, I found, so there's, I want to point people to two different Muzak records that are on YouTube. One is called More Than Music, Period and Environment.
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It's a 1981 Muzak record, and it has a version of Sailing. Christopher Cross's Sailing, one of the most mellow.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Exactly. They figured out how to basically make you lose control of your bladder. Right. Listening to this.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Yeah. That's a good one. And then the other one is called The Blue Album. And it is from 1974, I believe. And it's just both of them are really great. That's good introductions to Muzak if you're not into it already.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Oh, boy, I'm worried about what you're going to say, but okay.
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Yeah, because I keep seeing it just like dismissed as pseudoscience, but then there were plenty of early studies that were done by legitimate industrial psychologists and other like efficiency experts, that kind of thing, that showed that there really was a significant like improvement in productivity or less sick days, that kind of stuff in places that have Muzak compared to places that didn't have Muzak pumped into the office.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
I got you. But so one thing to say about this, we're going to talk about it in a second, stimulus progression, is that they did kind of plow money that they were making –
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
who were making a lot of money starting in the late 40s, early 50s, they plowed it back into research to basically come up with scientific evidence to back up their claims, which you can really kind of see the ghost of George Square still looming over the company, you know, this decade or so after he died. It's always been this kind of,
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science-interested, if not science-based company that's also been an early adopter of technology, as we'll see.
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Not in the least. But you can't say that kind of thing these days. People don't believe you. I know.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Yeah, I think World War II is basically cited as the moment when Muzak kind of proved itself enough at least to start being adopted by very large companies. And then within a few years after the war, by like the very early 50s, they started to spread more and more to even smaller and smaller companies.
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And it was this idea that if you played Muzak and Muzak's, you know, patented stimulus progression model, You know, you're going to avoid that mid-morning slump that like every worker goes through, you know, in productivity. And then the mid-afternoon slump, you could avoid that too.
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And think about how many more widgets you could make if your employees don't, you know, slack off productivity-wise from 10.30 to lunch every day. And then from like 2.30 until they go home. Like imagine if this very pleasant music is just kind of keeping them humming along. What people call a forward, just unconscious sense of forward momentum. The tempo is...
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in your environment is moving subtly faster and faster. And so to keep people from going insane, part of the stimulus progression was that the songs in a 15-minute increment would kind of go up in tempo, and then you'd have a 15-minute break of silence. And then the music would come back on again.
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But then this 15 minutes, their first song, the tempo of their first song, would probably start a little faster 15 minutes. Right. And so all of a sudden, next thing you know, you're making widgets like a maniac because you're being manipulated by the stimulus progression model, at least again, according to Muzak. I get what you're saying.
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Like, it's not like, you know, Harvard came along and said, yes, we've studied this thoroughly and this is exactly what happens. This is, you know, company claims, but it is intuitively sensible at least. Yeah.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Yeah, everybody's going to shake their groove thing.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
No, it's not. And since you brought him up for the second time, I say we discuss Brian Eno momentarily.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
You know what I found is a really good one for what you just described? You ever listen to Future Sound of London?
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
They have an album, like a double album called Life Forms, and it's about as amazing as Ambient gets, so you should check that one out.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Yeah, I think you'd like life forms then. Future Sound of London stuff is normally a little more, you know, super cerebral and intelligent, but it's also fairly dancey. Life forms is probably their most ambient stuff around.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Yes, if you like ambient music, you better thank your lucky stars for Muzak, because were it not for Muzak, you might not have ambient music, at least not now. Maybe it would be coming 50 years from now. Who knows?
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Kraut Rock is below rock and roll. I want to like Kraut Rock. It just doesn't quite jive with me. I like some, but not all of it.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
So he hits on something, though, that people would come to really resent about Muzak is not even just necessarily the syrupy-ness of the music itself, but the intent behind the music, that it was always intended to basically manipulate your mood into making you a better worker, a more docile consumer. It was... poking at your brain to get you to do things that you may or may not want to do.
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Maybe you will be less likely to punch some guy on the bus because there's music playing, which is a good thing. We should not be punching other people on the bus. But the point is, is you're being mind controlled in a certain way. And eventually people got kind of resentful of that.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
We're not there yet, though. We're not there yet, though. There was actually a point in time, though, Chuck, where Muzak and popular music were basically one and the same.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Right. And one of the reasons I saw that really explained it to me, because, you know, things change. Society just changed between the 1950s and the 1960s. It just abruptly changed. But that doesn't fully explain why music just was suddenly looked down upon. A good explanation I saw is that lyrics became really, really important in the late 60s. People had something to say.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
And Muzak does not include lyrics. It completely undermines the point of Muzak if you put lyrics in or don't, you know, don't rearrange the lyrics with strings. So Muzak kind of couldn't couldn't keep up with that. It's not like it went away. It doubled down. It kept doing what it was doing.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
And in fact, it would take some of those pop hits that had really monumentally important lyrics and just take the lyrics out and replace it with a saxophone or something like that.
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Right. But a lot of these songwriters in particular, like I think Joan Baez, Bruce Springsteen, Boz Skaggs, all of them refused to let their music be covered by Muzak or any of its competitors. But Paul Simon, I saw, said he always knew he had a hit when he heard a Muzak version of it, like at the mall or something like that. Which is kind of like Weird Al covering Nirvana.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Oh, I love Grace Jones for sure. What about Talking Heads? They go in there too, right?
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Like Kurt Cobain said that he knew that Nirvana had made it when Weird Al covered Smells Like Teen Spirit. I think it's basically the same thing.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Yeah, you'd have to. It's got to be cool, right? I just want to find out what somebody's going to do with it. Because like I was saying at the beginning, it really takes some creativity to come up with, okay, what can I replace this with that's not just completely predictable or boring, but also isn't going to grab everybody's attention. Because that's, again, not the point of Muzak.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
I mean, they literally went to art school together.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
It's one of the... I don't know if it was a slogan of the Muzak Corporation or not, but they basically said that they fill in the awkward pauses in life to where... That's good to say it. Yeah, you don't... It's like you were saying at the party. If you're at a party that doesn't have any music on, you just...
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Probably just get smashed out of your skull because you're just trying to lubricate the social situation so much. Whereas if you put on music, it's like it takes a lot of that edge off. That was one of the points, too, with Muzak. And then also to kind of get you to linger a little longer when you were shopping in a store. That was part of it as well.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Yeah, we have reached basically the early 70s, which is Muzak's first crisis point. And we'll come back to that after this.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Yeah, you also left out 90s techno. I've been listening to a lot of that lately too, like Alternate and The Prodigy and everything.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
That's right. Born with a jean jacket with the Van Halen logo on marker in the back.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
No, but there was a time where it was popular. Like JFK had it on Air Force One. Yeah. Eisenhower had it piped into the White House. It was playing on board Apollo 11. Yeah. Like it was everywhere. Like it's really hard to get across.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
how ubiquitous it was but I found a quote from a guy named Professor Gary Gumpert of Queens College in New York he said that at the time Muzak was just kind of amniotic fluid that surrounds us it never startles us it is never too loud it's never too silent it's always there and And that was what it was like.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
You were just kind of moving from one placid bucolic field to the next, going from mall to mall, store to store, elevator to elevator, bus ride to bus ride. It was just absolutely everywhere. So compared to that, the idea that it's absolutely everywhere, unquestioned, yeah, it really kind of started to take a bit of a downturn in the 70s, but it just didn't go anywhere yet.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
It took decades for it to really take a hit.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
They were on a lot of scotch at the time, man.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
I think I've heard of that, Things You Should Do or something like that.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Yeah, I kind of actually felt a deeper affinity for Muzak when I learned how many times they've been passed around corporation by corporation.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Yeah, but they were an early competitor. I guess a kind of a mid-90s. midlife competitor to um uh to music but by the 80s yesco had established a name for itself by doing basically the opposite of what music did rather than making you know uh covers of canned music without lyrics they would just go get the licenses of like the hot new song of the of the moment and And play those.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
And so rather than background music, which is what Muzak's whole jam was, these guys were pioneering foreground music. And they were just this small little outfit from Seattle that, you know, it was kind of like the little engine that could. And they changed the entire landscape, the audio landscape of the United States completely.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
just by being persistent, by getting that word out that, hey, now foreground's the way to go, not background. That's old stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Yeah, can't we just get both, though? Sure.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Oh, yeah? Well, he's sitting in the other room at my house right now. Well, I guess you're the bigger fan.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Well, I was going to say, he's not here on his will, under his own will. In fact, you could make a pretty strong case he's here against his will.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Not yet. They were teetering right there on the edge. And it was actually, they were bought by the Fields Company, the company that owns Marshall Fields. So Chicago makes another appearance. And the Fields Company said, we like where this Yesco group is going. We're going to merge with them. So Muzak actually merged with Yesco.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
the smaller company, but then ended up moving to Seattle right before the grunge movement hit. So Seattle's big musical contribution before grunge was Muzak, basically.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Yeah, and that was a big update. They apparently went with some design group, I can't remember the name of it, that just completely reinvented the brand because they went from being in the background to manipulating your mood using stimulus progression to this other thing, this new made-up sounding thing called, what's it called, Quantum...
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
One of the big reasons why, too, is because you can get stuff done with it. Like, lyrics can be so distracting. They just latch on to your brain and say, no, no, no, pay attention to me. I'm talking to you now. Muzak does the opposite of that. It says, go, be free, but also enjoy this. Like, there's like a whole part of your brain that Muzak can tap into that...
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
There's got to be another one, Chuck, because I'm still looking.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
We'll just call it quantum leap. Sure. So with this quantum leap thing that they had going on. The bacula effect. Quantum modulation. The bacula effect. Quantum modulation, okay? Oh, okay. I like bacula effect. That's a great one. Okay. With quantum modulation, it was we are evoking an emotion that is now tied forever to the brand that you're shopping, the store you're shopping in right now.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
So like this one – so they hire people who make playlists, who curate these playlists that are start to finish. They all share this one theme. They all kind of have this one like cool – not scary, super hip, beachy, you know, spring break 2008 kind of thing, whatever.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
So like a company will say this is what our brand is all about. Give us playlists that fit this. And so now you're kind of like you feel cool because of the music of where you're shopping and And so that makes you want to shop and associate yourself with that place even more. That's what Muzak, that's what's called Neo-Muzak is all about. That's the current state of affairs in the industry.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
2011. And then two years later, they retired the Muzak name forever. Just couldn't do anything with it. Ugh. So now it's Mood Music is the company that owns the well, but they're doing that whole foreground music quantum modulation type thing where, you know, you just associate a brand with a certain kind of music. Like you wouldn't walk into that Armani exchange and hear – You know, Paul Simon.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
You'd be like, something's off here. The mood, what is it, mood media? Their job is to make sure that there's nothing off while you're in that store, that it all just kind of fits together and you feel good about where you're shopping.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
doesn't require your conscious thought but it still produces like good feelings and you know like people people just smack music around like it's just it's so bland and it's so soulless and i totally disagree with that like if you actually stop and listen to music it's really really technically proficient it's frequently well done it's often very clever and creative and inventive um
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Man, those kids would freak out. Their frosted tips would stand up on end.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Yeah, so I don't know if they invented them, but they certainly were early adopters, if not pioneers, in vinyl records. People were not using vinyl at the time. Then they eventually ditched the vinyl records in favor of an electronic brain called Mater, M, the number 8, and the letter R.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
which basically was a big deck of reel-to-reel tapes that had a bunch of different songs on it, but they had different inaudible pulses that would trigger a different one to come on next, so you could curate lists on these huge reel-to-reels. It was just amazing. They were using this thing starting in the 50s. So the whole thing became kind of automated.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
They launched their own satellite in the 70s. They had a computer database in the 70s. Like they were very much pioneers and early adopters of a lot of different technology that we take for granted today.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Absolutely. Yeah. And I mean, the whole point of it, too, is virtually unchanged. I mean, it's not necessarily to make you a docile shopper anymore, but it's like they're trying to make you feel like that brand is part of your identity by evoking memories in you using songs to unlock them.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Okay, one is More Than Music, Period and Environment, 1981 Muzak record that has not just sailing on it, it has Olivia Newton-John's Magic, it has Take Your Time, Do It Right. which I don't care if the lyrics are there or not. If you're sitting next to your mom in a doctor's office and Baby, You Can Do It, Take Your Time, Do It Right comes on, you both know what that song's about.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
It may even be more uncomfortable in that situation. And then it ends with Funky Town. Nice. It's a good one. The other one is called The Blue Album. It's a complete stimulus progression album, and it has a bunch of good songs on it, including Orlean's Dance With Me. Which is, if you ask me, the Muzak cover is way better than the original.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
No, it's a little different. And then if you're like, oh, this music's floating my boat, go start looking up Ronnie Aldrich, Frank Chexfield, Montevani, and just start there.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
I like Yacht Rock a lot, too. I'm super right now into West Coast cool jazz. Stan Getz, Chet Baker. Oh, I can't remember. I can't remember his name, but I just got into him. He's a great jazz pianist from that era. Bill Evans, the Bill Evans trio. Oh, love Bill Evans. You're just getting into Bill Evans? Yeah, I just started getting into him.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
I started with Chet Baker and just started working my way out.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Yeah, he is. You can tell just by the Charlie Brown album that he's an amazing jazz guy. Yeah, good stuff. So, Chuck, I have one more thing. There is, you know, people hate Muzak a lot. So there's some artists who have, like, tried to – a lot of artists have tried to make hay out of the whole thing. But one guy, David Schaefer, had something from back in 2000 or 2002 something.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
He had X10R.1 and X10R.2, these two CDs that he released that were basically his – weird, unnerving remixes of Muzak that just turns the whole thing on its head so much so that you may laugh out loud when you first hear them. And I believe they're on his website. But it's like Muzak, but what you would hear in your nightmares.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Which is really saying something because you're doing this in the confines of covering an existing song in a way that makes it familiar and easy to recognize, but also takes away any intrusiveness that it might have. It's tough to do. And I really, I just, I love music. You're absolutely right. Like I listened to music this whole time. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
It's really good. And I believe he's got it on his website to go listen to. And I think you can buy the CDs too. So check that out. I'll check it out. Okay, well, if you want to know more about Muzak, just start listening and loving. Just don't prejudge. How about that? Great. And since I said don't prejudge, everybody, that means it's time for listener mail.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
I'll bet that's not how you say that. You put a little too much mustard on there.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
We'll probably just leave that in to prove a point. Just leave that in.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Yeah, I had to poke my head out of the studio and look at my record collection to come up with Bill Evans' name.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
We've taken it easy on her for years. Yeah. Yeah, that's about it, Chuck. I can't think of anything else we really edited out.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
No, we're like the Muzak of podcasts. There's other people who are all like the Ted Nugent of podcasts, and there's room for both. Yeah, like Roman Mars, the Ted Nugent of podcasting. That's right, man. That guy's always wearing like a studded leather wristband and stuff.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Not just when we were researching Muzak today, but also when I was researching the Havana syndrome. And I realized, like, this is my normal thing. This is the same stuff I listen to when I'm researching anyway.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
He doesn't listen and no one he knows listens. Oh, that's impossible. So who is that? Lila and Lauren.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Nice. Well, thank you very much for writing in. Hope we answered your question. And if you want to get in touch with us like Lila and Lauren did, you can send us an email. Send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Right, yeah. I mean, yeah, there wasn't music on elevators before, but for several decades in the 20th century, like, there weren't many elevators you could get on because people didn't have elevators in their house. So it was a public building you were in where they weren't playing music of some form, very frequently Muzak.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Hut, hut, hut, hut, hut. Yeah, because they're going up to the Cook County Assessor's office and like there's the entire Chicago Police Department is after them. But they're forced to get on this elevator and the girl from Ipanema is playing.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
There's another scene, too, from around that era, a few years later, from Airplane 2, where it's like Rip Torn – I believe it's Rip Torn, Artie from the Larry Sanders show. Yeah, yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
And I don't know the other guy he's talking to, but anyway, they're walking and talking, and they have to get on an elevator, and the elevator door opens, and it's just blaring like eardrum-shattering decibel MacArthur Park, and they have to get on. People are coming off the elevator with their hands to their ears with splitting headaches from this, but...
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
It's just completely the opposite of what elevator music is supposed to be like. But it's a good little scene, too, as far as elevator music goes.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
But that started, I guess it started with the Blues Brothers, which came out in 1980. But before that, that was like Muzak was not really lampoon. I mean, not everybody liked it. It really kind of started to get a little backlash in the late 60s, early 70s, as we'll see. But there was a very significant chunk of the 20th century, again, from maybe 1950 to 1980, we'll say.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
where everywhere you went in public, including if you took a Greyhound bus or if you were on a plane or you happened to be in Air Force One or you were at the mall, in an elevator, at your office, everywhere, Muzak was playing. There was Muzak playing everywhere. It was just a part of life that was inescapable, actually. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
I'm really impressed, man. I had not come up with that one.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
He was. He also was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, which connects this episode to the other one today. Yeah. That's right. Because he came up with something called a tree telephone. He figured out how to use any tree, but preferably one with fully leaved, I guess. I don't know what you'd call that. As a receiver and transmitter for radio signals.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Hey there, everybody. It's me, Josh. And for this week's SYSK Selects, I've chosen our 2021 episode on Muzak. And you might ask, who could possibly like the noisome, omnipresent annoyance that was Muzak? Well, me. I like Muzak. So there.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
He figured out how to use a tree, a living tree for that.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Right. I looked at the document for our Wright Brothers episode, and he did not appear. I don't think we mentioned him. But he might have been the first airline passenger from what I saw.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's like if you think of like a wave, if it's low frequency, there's big wide gaps in between. You can fit a higher frequency that's tighter and squished together in those gaps, but you're still using the same line. And, you know, this was the guy who came up with that.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
That's an enormous advancement in telecommunications that we're still putting use today in some applications, but definitely helped like the early Internet along, right? It was just a huge contribution to humanity. Like, forget even just Muzak. Like, just that alone would probably warrant, like, an episode for George Square.
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Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Right. He came up with it, but since he left it open, they decided to just take it from him and sue him for it.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
That's right. You're right. So – but he still was able to use this wire, wireless technology with multiplexing. And – At the time, people were starting to get into radio broadcasts, but radio, wireless radio that you would just have in your house that's picking up radio waves at a station, that was not widespread at the time. So George Squire said, you know what?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
But if you're not over 40, you might not even know that there was a time you couldn't step out in public from department stores, those are in something we call malls, to elevators without schmaltzy string arrangements of pop music pummeling you with their saccharine sound. And you know what? You're the worst off for not having experienced it.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
I understand people want music in their house. I'm going to give it to them. I'm going to use that multiplexing technology, and I'm going to run sound waves over the electrical wires that go into the house. Brilliant. It is brilliant. I'm going to sell this service to people's homes for $1.50 a month, about $20 today. Wow.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
And it's just part of your utility bill because it's coming in through your electrical company. And there's actually a section of Cleveland called the Lakewood, I believe Lakewood area, that was the pilot for this wired wireless radio that George Square invented. The problem was is by the time they deployed it, wireless radio was already a thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
And so he had this really great idea that just no longer had an application.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
Exactly. Yeah, and he had multiple channels too. Like when you subscribed, you got news, you got dance music. There was like I think three different channels you could choose from.
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Selects: The Strange Story of Sea Monkeys
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Yeah. For sure. But that also means you can unlearn it too. Well, if big cricket has anything to do with it. Why don't we take a quick break and we're going to come back and talk about a UN report that kind of changed a lot of things about four years ago.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Hey, everybody. Chuck and Josh here. And I was recently a guest once again on one of my favorite podcasts. It's called The Puzzler with old pal and friend of the show, AJ Jacobs. AJ gives really fun and funny word puzzles to guests like me, like Ken Jennings, like Dax Shepard, and hopefully like Josh because he would be so great on this show.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Oh, you got to be honest. A lot of fun. It's sort of like Wordle or Connections, but for your ears. And I think we should play everyone just a little clip. It's a puzzle that I have to convert movie titles from the metric system back to their actual title. Oh, wow. From my second appearance on The Puzzler right now. Nice.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
All right, this is going to be great.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
So subscribe to The Puzzler with A.J. Jacobs to tease your mind and tickle your funny bone.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
All right, so I promised you a UN report. 2013, there was a big kind of sea change. I don't know about sea change. It was the beginning. Beginning of a sea change. They issued a report called Edible Insects, colon, Future Prospects for Food and Feed Security.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
And it was basically just championing entomophagy and all the benefits that surround it, like how nutrient-dense crickets and other insects are, the fact that it's socially sustainable, economically viable and friendly, environmentally friendly. And it kind of...
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
you know, kind of paints it as like, hey, this is the future or it could be part of the future at least of getting protein into, you know, Americans.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Yeah, it's funny. They put in this article that it was the most popular document in the history of the UN.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Yeah, he spoke at a TEDx Youngstown, Ohio, because that's where he's based. That's where his company is.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
All right, so let's talk about crickets. Well, all insects in particular are very rich in protein, like we've talked about. They have a lot of healthy fats.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
A lot of zinc, a lot of iron, a lot of calcium. And there's something called, I guess... Well, yeah. I mean, this is when vegetarians and vegans are, like, these kind of terms make their skin crawl, I'm sure. But the kind of efficiency you get out of raising and killing and eating an animal is on a spectrum.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
That sounds like an Aaron Cooper poster gone bad. Yeah. Already.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
And, you know, from cows, like you talked about, it's probably the worst, I would guess, don't you think? Yeah.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Yeah. So like you said, not a lot of the cow is used to eat.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
And I think the chicken is about the most efficient animal protein right now.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
It's funny. We had an office visitor a couple weeks ago, and I don't think you were here. In fact, I know you weren't here because you would have been in here. That's right. But there's our great stepbrothers. You know, the movie Stepbrothers, for those of you out there, there's a promo for of John C. Reilly and Will Ferrell with an Olin Mills type posed photograph.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Yeah, a lot of that has to do with the fact that crickets are cold-blooded, so they're very much more efficient at converting that feed into protein. And crickets aren't even the most efficient insect. No, no. I'm not sure which one is, actually. I think mealworms are pretty efficient.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
You just said that because you're eating a mealworm. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Is that a mealworm farm in your pocket?
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
I pocket mulch. So, like we mentioned, Mr. Bach-Ruber is... If he's not German, he should be.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
It's spelled K-V-N, though, so we're just inserting vowels for him. Right, like D-N-C-E.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
No wonder I don't know. But he is one of, I think they're about, and this has probably changed even since this is written, about 25 or so cricket startup farms here in the United States.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Well, and their output right now is still really small in the early years here. But, you know, the dream for... For him and all these cricket farmers is that one day it will – I don't think they have designs that will ever be like in some parts of the world where it's on every menu in every restaurant.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
But they would certainly like to see cricket snacks in grocery stores and menu offerings in some of the more wacky hipster restaurants at least. Right.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
I'm not like... I'm not an adventurous eater, as you know, but I would totally try fried crickets and things. It doesn't gross me out for some reason.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
And Aaron Cooper, our buddy from Kansas who does our great Photoshop stuff, made us into, I was John C. Reilly and you were Will Ferrell. And the guy came in and was looking around and was like, oh man, these are great. And he went... look at that. And he went, that looks like, I don't know. It looks like it could be like something like the movie stepbrother or something.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Well, I think it's very funny that you, I remember your shrimp years in that you had an allergic reaction to shrimp. But you wanted to eat shrimp so bad, you started to eat shrimp a little bit just to see if you could eat shrimp.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
I just love that you were so dedicated to eating shrimp.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
This is a great time to bring up one of my big pet peeves.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
I know that cooking with shrimp heads and tails on increases the flavor quite a bit. Does it? Yeah.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Which is why they do it. Mm-hmm. It's one thing if you get an appetizer with like a prawn with the head left on or something. But if you, like I get pasta dishes sometimes.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
That have like heads and tails on them.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
No, like you literally have to dig them out of the pasta, take the head and tail off, and then put them back in your food. Right. Which is just, I don't get why restaurants do that. Like maybe cook it in there and then take it off for us.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
And I said, Oh, that's exactly what it is. Yeah. I tried to make him not feel bad.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Well, I mean, I'll eat a soft-shell crab until the cows come home. But I'm not eating a shrimp tail. Yeah, it sounds gross. Well, it's just not like they don't soften up enough, you know.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Well, yeah, but I throw that in the soft-shell crab zone. So you eat the shell of the soft-shell crab? Yeah, that's what you're supposed to do. That's what it is.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Oh, my friend. Is that like a blue crab? No, I think it's a special kind of crab. Oh, its parents must love it very much. I might be wrong. I think it's a special kind of crab. And then you prepare it with the shell. But I think the shell is soft to begin with, though. I don't think it's just from cooking. But like spider roll is one of my favorite sushi rolls. That's soft shell crab.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
No, no. Like, the little legs are coming out of the end and everything. What? That's why they call it a spider roll, because it looks like little spider legs.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
And then, like, a soft-shell crab sandwich is, I mean, you open the bun, and there's just, like, this crab staring at you.
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Selects: Are crickets the future of food?
Yeah. Like he didn't quite zone in on all of them were us. You should have like clapped loudly beside his ear. Uh, man, I had a little scary thing today.
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Uh... Well, quickly before, we just should mention that they did get a deal on Shark Tank.
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That's right. We get our kickback coming.
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Hey, everybody. Chuck and Josh here. And I was recently a guest once again on one of my favorite podcasts. It's called The Puzzler with old pal and friend of the show, AJ Jacobs. AJ gives really fun and funny word puzzles to guests like me, like Ken Jennings, like Dax Shepard, and hopefully like Josh because he would be so great on this show.
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Oh, you got to be honest. A lot of fun. It's sort of like Wordle or Connections, but for your ears. And I think we should play everyone just a little clip. It's a puzzle that I have to convert movie titles from the metric system back to their actual title. Oh, wow. From my second appearance on The Puzzler right now. Nice.
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All right, this is going to be great.
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So subscribe to The Puzzler with A.J. Jacobs to tease your mind and tickle your funny bone.
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If I may, this is kind of part PSA. This has nothing to do with cricket farming.
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But we're getting our basement waterproofed because for 13 years it's been leaking water like really bad. So much so that we have mold now.
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Yes. Oh, no. And we're also getting mold remediation done at the same time.
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So crickets live about seven weeks. I mean, that right there shows you a big difference between that and like the beef industry. Sure. So during that seven-week life cycle, they have three different environments that they reside in. And they basically live and hang out on what they call cricket high-rises, which are little egg cartons.
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So needless to say, that's a fun, fun way to spend a lot of money. But I come home today, and my carbon monoxide alarm is going off. Oh, man. Because these yahoos are using a gas-powered concrete saw in our basement.
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And what they eat is, because I was kind of wondering that, they eat grain-based feed, organic grain-based feed, fruits and vegetables. And they... Some of them will reach that breeding stage. Some won't. And if they do, they're going to lay a lot of eggs, like several thousand eggs a mommy cricket will lay in her lifetime.
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Drowning in cricket eggs. He probably wakes up every night sweating.
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Yeah, it can be. So they like hot, humid environments, or at least warm, depending on your definition of hot. It's hot to me, 85 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit with about a 40% humidity level. Yep. And the whole process from soup to nuts or from eggs to chirps is about 56 days.
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And it's like full on saying, you know, get out of the house. And my animals are in there.
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I bet Aristotle pillow talk was something else.
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So harvesting, I mean, there's no way around it. At some point, like any live thing that you're raising, you're going to have to kill it. And instead of like what we see on factory farms with cows and pigs, What you do on a cricket farm is you cool them down and then freeze them. And so what happens is they they get cold. They start to get a little chilly.
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Their temperature drops and they go into what's called a diapause, sort of a hibernation like state. And then pretty much after that, they go, it is sure as chilly in here. And then they're gone and frozen.
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And I just happened to go home after I went to a coffee shop to study because— I needed to grab something, but like I literally could have come home to dead animals.
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Yeah, I kind of wonder when I was reading this, I was like, how do vegans and vegetarians feel about eating insects?
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Well, it depends on who you ask. I didn't get any, like there is no official rule book. There's not? I don't think so. I'm surprised. But basically, I just went to a bunch of vegan, vegetarian websites and looked to see what people said. And it kind of ranged from, well, sure, I'll eat insects. And this is a much better way to get protein in your body than animals.
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to where other people said, no, it's a living thing. Not going to eat it. I get all the protein I need from plants. If you're eating something, a live animal, then you're not a vegan or a vegetarian.
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Well, they'd be a pescatarian, right?
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And that's when you go, technically, you're a pescatarian, and then you get punched in the face. Right. So eating crickets, some people say it's sort of nutty. Some people say it's a little sweet, like sweet corn. I would like to know for myself. I wish we could have gotten our hand on some chirps beforehand.
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But maybe we can follow up in the future.
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Yeah, like we did with— Soylent? Yeah, with a soylent. Soylent. We'll do a follow-up. Soylent. So there's this lady, Daniela Martin, and she has a travel show. Well, it's an insect cooking and travel show called Girl Meets Bug. Very cute. And we should say the chirps ladies called crickets the gateway bug. I also thought that was kind of funny.
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in punny and daniela says that she started eating crickets and kind of became fascinated with insects in general when she was in mexico and yucatan and kind of became i don't think obsessed but just super interested in this as a as her protein of choice and said you know i started cooking them up with a little little butter little onion little salt and
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And like with anything, if you put it in a pan with some butter and onion and salt, maybe a little garlic, it's probably going to taste pretty darn good.
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It was weird, man. And they were down there. I mean, not only did they not have on so much as a dust mask for the gas, but like concrete dust is really dangerous too. They're like, I don't care. I've got Obamacare. It was so weird, man. And just it freaked me out to the point where Emily, she wanted to like fire the guy.
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Yeah, even when you hear stories of these creepy cannibal people. They usually cook it in butter with a little salt and onion and garlic.
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He ate penis like that. He did. Man, that was a very disturbing case. Sure. So she says crisping them in the oven is another, besides grinding them into powder, cooking them up like broiling them in the oven. Don't overcook it. A little olive oil, a little garlic salt. Throw them in about 250 for about 15 minutes. And a little sea salt on top maybe.
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And you're going to have a crunchy, delicious, nutrient-rich snack.
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What do you do? Just, like, wash them in a colander?
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Yeah, I remember being alarmed when I briefly worked in the chicken industry when I found out that a lot of chicken feed is made from chickens.
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Uh, he wasn't even there like the, you know, the foreman or owner of the company.
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I'm going to call this Kevin Spacey's Accent Explained. Oh, and before I read this, there is a House of Cards spoiler. Spoiler. So alert to that. Hey, guys, just listened to the episode on accents. I'm happy you brought up Kevin Spacey's accent from House of Cards. Because I have a theory. Spacey plays the character Frank Underwood.
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Yeah. And she wanted to be like, man, if he doesn't understand that this is dangerous. Uh, and he said, you know, open up your windows. It'll be clear in 15 minutes. And it took two hours for that alarm to stop going off. Oh my gosh. Wow. That is really scary. It was really bad, man. I was out on my deck basically for the rest of the morning until I came in with my dogs and my cat in a crate.
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grew up poor in Gaffney, South Carolina, but then went on to the Citadel in Charleston and created a persona that eventually lands him president. His accent does not sound like a bad attempt at the R-less, old-money Charleston accent, but I think it fits the character.
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Instead of a twangy R-full accent that he'd have from Gaffney, Spacey's playing Frank Underwood, who was playing someone with noble Southern roots, and that's why it sounds fake. Am I giving Kevin Spacey too much credit? Possibly. But being from Greenville, South Carolina, I enjoy dissecting his Carolina accent.
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Actually, I don't have much of an accent myself, except with words like lawyer and oil. Jerry just laughed. Because my brother, who's 10 years older, trained it out of me when I was very young. He said he didn't want people to underestimate my intelligence because of our accent. He would correct me every time I would say things like, turn the lights on.
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instead of turn the lights on, or naked instead of naked. Yeah. If you're saying naked.
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I sort of wish I sounded more like the rest of my family, but what a considerate thing for my big brother to have done when he was a teenager. Seriously. And that is from Mary Jean Murphy.
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Yeah, it was weird. Yeah, anyway, so I'm slightly shaken.
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I just got to calm down here. The sound of the crickets on our miniature cricket farm here are soothing me at least.
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Yeah, we covered entomophagy. I meant to look up when, but it was... it seems like a long time ago. Right. And that's eating bugs and insects. Uh, but this is focusing specifically on crickets because by all accounts, they seem like sort of the, uh, our best bet at trying to get something like this going in America for real.
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Yeah, I'm kind of not surprised, but it goes to show you the population boom. If meat consumption has increased that much in the face of probably more vegetarianism and veganism than ever before, too, you know.
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I'd like, we should, I mean, we've been dancing around doing episodes on vegetarianism and veganism for a while, so we should probably tackle that at some point. All right. I'm kind of curious about the history. Cause it seems like in the, like probably since the onset of America until the
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And then I'm talking off the top of my head here, but until probably the 90s, it seemed like everybody was just like meat, meat, meat, meat, meat.
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Well, like the 50s, it seems like they would eat steak for lunch.
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And I can't imagine like a steak for lunch that seems so indulgent. Yeah, I think it is. You know?
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Like, yeah, just give me the 20-ounce ribeye for lunch. Right. It's just, I don't know. I can't imagine that. And three martinis.
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Oh, man. I know we talked about the ending of that show. Crazy.
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Yeah. I think you still owe it to yourself just to watch the finale. Okay. So this dude, Kevin, how would you pronounce that? Bachuber. B-A-C-H, which is fine, that's clearly Bach, and H-U-B-R, you just don't often see two H's side by side.
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So anyway, Kevin Bakuba is a dude that is kind of championing, well, not kind of, very much championing this movement. In 2007, he went to Thailand and tasted crickets, deep fried crickets. And he's from California. And he was like, hey, this is really good. He's so far out. They've been doing this in Thailand since the late 90s.
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The king established a big growing program for crickets and cricket farms, education and schools. Like, you know, this is a good way to get protein in your diet. And he said, I think this is the direction America should go. And I'm going to get in on the money side of it.
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Yeah, he's woven throughout this thing, though. Yeah. And, you know, if you listen to the entomophagy episode, episode? No, it's episode. We pointed out then, and it bears repeating, that America is new to this, but I think it was Canada and the United States and Western Europe are literally the only places on Earth that don't consume insects as a regular part of their diet these days. Yeah.
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Hi, everyone. I hope you're having a great weekend so far. Do you want to know about crickets and how you can sustain yourself on them? Well, then listen to this episode, Are Crickets the Future of Food? And this is from September 7th, 2017. I hope you enjoy it all over again.
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In a droid rage? I think I was probably not the best husband, though. I see. Over that time period. Yeah. Judging from Emily saying... hey, you're a real a-hole. Get off the steroids. Get off the juice.
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So long story short, I experienced this recently, and it was awful, and I can't imagine like shooting a TV show or something or like doing anything or performing live.
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Like I would have to address it because I would scratch and smack it was what I usually do.
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Yeah, I didn't do – you know what really did it was the – We have a handheld implement in the shower along with a regular shower head.
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And put that sucker on the tightest, hardest, most penetrating flow. Right. And just put that hot water on it, man. And that was like... I think I spent half my days in the shower over that week and a half.
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No, it felt so good, man. I was just like I couldn't get enough of it. And then the cortisone and all that junk too.
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Yeah, well, we ran across that in Poison Ivy and Scabies for sure.
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And talked about some of this stuff, but I think itch. We had an itch we needed to scratch with this particular topic.
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I thought it was poison ivy because that area has some poison ivy. But each of us, Scotty and I, had it just on the arm that we sunk in cement. And then we researched and found out that could happen.
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Yeah, which C-fibers aren't just limited to itching. I think only about 5% handle that, and most of the rest are for pain.
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Yeah, you did a video about this, right? Yes. A short video.
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Okay. If I remember correctly. Does that mean we have to do this? Do I have to be here for the next four hours?
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Yeah, it was pretty interesting, too. There's a signature pattern in the brain when you get an itch, and a few specific areas light up. One is a cortex, and it all makes sense when you put it together. The cortex, in this case, just sort of geolocates where on your body you're getting that sensation.
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Yeah, or in my case, from right elbow to wrist. Right. And then a little bit in other places, but not too bad. That was the main area.
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Yeah. Very complex conversation going on. And then the region, I thought this was interesting, the region that governs emotional response. So basically this is your brain saying, I don't like this. This makes me feel bad. Yeah.
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And then finally, the limbic and motor areas, and I thought this was the most interesting. Those areas process irresistible urges. The same ones that say, I want to smoke crack or I want to eat too much cake, says... you have an itch that is unbearable and you need to scratch it.
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So I just, I don't know, I thought that was all very super interesting when you combine that pattern.
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Well, it is. You know, they kind of found that out. And Gawande, Dr. Gawande, pointed out something interesting, too, that I never thought about is that you can have like that short collar rubs against your neck all day and you might never notice it. But if there's like one little string that's just poking one little area, that might trigger an itch.
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Down to like millimeters. Yeah. And the other thing they found out too is that Not only can they sense it from a few inches away, but it's a very slow acting thing, which as opposed to like heat on the hand, like a candle on your hand. I almost said candle in the wind. That's super fast, but that explains why an itch is kind of slow to come and then slow to resolve by scratching.
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It's not like you scratch it and you're like, oh, it's all better now. It helps a little bit.
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Yeah, so I got that, but what does that do to sort of like... say, hey, body, don't worry about that for a minute. I think so. A pain receptor is now active.
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Folk prog? Well, they'd have to be German, probably.
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Another interesting thing they learned, too, was that – I guess we're kind of jumping around, but who cares, right? If you scratch, you don't have to scratch the point of the itch to relieve it, apparently. Right.
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Like, if you have, I had that itch on my right forearm, and I could scratch maybe, it doesn't even have to be the left forearm, so it's not like you have to mirror it, but I could scratch, like, my neck, and apparently that might help relieve it.
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Well, and I think they did find that, like, your back and your ankles, supposedly, are some of the most rewarding places to scratch. Exactly. And I don't know. I've never really thought about the ankles, but... My mom would give me back scratches when I was a kid. That's nice. And it was always like one of my favorite things ever. Sure.
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And so I don't get those anymore now that I'm a grown up because it's gross. Mom, scratch my back. I'm 46 years old. Lay down. But yeah, it was like I think I prefer to back scratch to a back rub even. when I was younger, but now a massage is probably way better. But if a masseuse could include a little back scratch in there, Get ready for a huge tip from me.
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Yeah, I get that. Once skin cells are involved under the nails, then you're a murder suspect.
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All right, well, should we take another break and talk a little bit about one of the most distressing articles I've ever read?
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All right, so we've referenced this article from The New Yorker from Dr. Atul Gawande. And he talked a lot about itching and just had good information on the science of it all.
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But most of the article was focused on a patient, a woman in Massachusetts that they named M for the article. Just M. The letter M. Right. In other words, you know, she's anonymous. And I think she was anonymous because she kind of had a rough go after her divorce. She ended up getting HIV from getting on heroin. Kind of spun out, it seems like. But then got her life back by all accounts.
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But ended up getting shingles as a result of HIV complications. Right. And... The shingles went away, but the itching did not, to say the least.
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Yeah, it was on her head, and she kind of managed to control it during the day, but like you said, at night she couldn't control it to the point where I think she was restrained in her sleep.
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Oh, okay. After they realized it's a problem because your brain is oozing out of your head.
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I don't even think that would excite mirror neurons like a leg break would. No.
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The doctor's like, very interesting. Just give me a second here. Oh, my God. Well, they gathered up all the other doctors and nurses. Sure. Yeah, you got to come see this.
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You sourced a couple of, well, we had our own article on HowStuffWorks.com, but you also sent this great New Yorker article written by Dr. Atul Gawande.
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I didn't see much follow-up on this. I did read one article that... a follow-up with Dr. Gawande because there were a lot of skeptics after that article came out that said it's impossible with your fingernail because she said she didn't use an implement. It's not like she got out a metal file to scratch through your skull.
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And he said that his theory was that bacteria that became infected had eaten it away such that the skull became soft.
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And then people also said, you know, you don't have men and women in the same room in hospitals or asylums. That's false. And he said that it was like the room next door and quit being pedantic. Yeah, really? Man. I think people just didn't believe it. So all these folks wrote into The New Yorker. All these coastal elites said, no way.
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Well, and they also then said at some point she had a psychogenic itch.
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So they basically covered three out of the four kinds of itches The last one being, man, I have such a hard time. Pre-receptive. And that's what you get from like a mosquito bite or if you have a skin disorder like eczema or something. Sure. So they basically ruled out the most common one and at various stages said, no, you've got this other one for the other three.
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yeah you can reduce that response and then your itch will go away well i took a benadryl at night and they also make this benadryl spray uh a topical spray that just it really helps right so between that and cortisone and then the benadryl at night i did okay right and those awesome showers so the like the pro-receptive itch we've got treatment for basically yeah
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Yeah, that one, what is it, can help regulate your blood pressure as well? Yeah, right. You can't just switch that off. Right. Just turn off the gene that produces that. You won't itch, but you might die early. Right. Not worth it. Right. The one that really, I mean, they're all sad, but the psychogenic, when you have a mental illness where you feel like you have parasites and bugs on your skin.
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I can't remember. I know that I said it the way everyone else says it, though. That's all I remember.
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Man, but all this stuff, it just had so much empathy for Em.
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Actually, I've never used an alias at a hotel. That's dumb. And I don't even know if you can, can you? I guess if you're a big shot, you can.
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And wanted to follow up so bad to see how she was doing. You know?
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Did you ever see the Todd Haynes movie, Safe, with Julianne Moore? No. It was one of his first movies after the Karen Carpenter thing he did. I mean, it was a real movie, but it wasn't released. But Safe was very disturbing. It was about a woman who kind of slowly drifted into madness from believing that the world was poisoning her. Wow.
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And household chemicals and everything, and it kind of started slow, and eventually she ended up at this kind of safe camp for people like her. Right. Very distressing movie. And one of her first movies, too.
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Yeah, it's really good. Oh, it's old? Yeah, it was... It was early 90s, I think.
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But we'll get to some of the more interesting aspects of that article later, specifically a very specific patient that's quite distressing.
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And that wasn't necessarily itching, but it was just like that psychogenic thing of like, I think everything in my house is killing me.
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No, I don't really get like that. Oh, no? No, I'm very easily kind of led on to the next shiny thing. I got you. I'm like a bird. Yeah, basically. That's probably for the best. It is. It has its drawbacks, though. What else you got? Well, one thing it says in here is that having someone else scratch your itch apparently does not do the trick. So you have to scratch your own itch.
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Oh, man. Not you, them saying. Oh, right. Like, I think it definitely helps.
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Oh, yeah. And if you could reach that area of your back, it would be better than that.
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No, it's metal, but it's telescoping, so it's not two feet long.
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Yeah, it looks like a bear claw. Not the pastry, but a real bear claw, which actually looks like the pastry.
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Why did you think it was called that? I'm just kidding. They actually should call it a bear paw. It looks more like a bear paw than a bear claw. I'm going to try and bring that around.
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Yes. And not just haphazardly scattered about the bear paw. Exactly. Yeah.
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He did include a couple of neat historical tidbits. Like in 1660, and Germans are all over this thing for some reason. Yeah. Researchers, they're all German.
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Well... Maybe the Germans will get active on this again.
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Nice work. Thanks, man. Same to you. Thank you. And you haven't scratched in a while, so.
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Man, there's nothing worse than a movie. I feel like I've seen this a few times in movies where someone is compulsively scratching until it becomes a sore, and then they're scratching it. It's just like, ugh, I can't watch that.
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I'm going to call this one of the many emails we got on the swearing episode. Did you notice that? People really seemed to like that one. Yeah, they did. Got a lot of response. Yeah. Mostly from fellow potty mouths, which were very filthy emails too, which were great.
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And I responded in turn by cursing at them in my replies. Sure. Which I hope they enjoyed. In all caps? No. I didn't want to be too aggressive. So this is from Emily Allen. Hey guys, long time listener. First time writing in. Um, writing about swearing, I should start by saying that it's funny I'm writing about this episode because I almost never curse.
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And when I do, it's normally not a very offensive swear. However, your intro made me think of something interesting I wanted to share. You talked about how you really censor yourself during recording in order to keep your show family friendly. It got me thinking about how our jobs really shape our vocabulary, how we express ourselves.
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I noticed a major change in the way I speak since becoming a teacher. I primarily teach kindergarten to second grade students, and I found this really changed the way I express myself. For example, I try to avoid even saying things are dumb or stupid around kids. I'll often say, well, isn't that silly instead?
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This works in the classroom, but I often get laughs from friends and family when I refer to a situation as silly, like a disagreement with a colleague or something a politician does. There are other expressions I use with the kids that often slip into regular conversation as well. The most embarrassing, when I'm out and excuse myself to go potty. That always gets a laugh.
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Selects: How Itching Works
The itch. Right. But there was a physician in 1660 named Samuel Hoffenreffer. Actually, that's my new hotel name. Yeah, it is. That's a good one. He kind of, well, he defined it by saying an itch is an unpleasant sensation that provokes the desire to scratch. Pretty simple.
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Selects: How Itching Works
Anyway, I just wanted to share and thank you for all the great work you do. I learn so much from listening each week, and I'm always excited to see the new episode offerings every Tuesday and Thursday. That is from Emily. Alan. Thank you, Ms.
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Selects: How Itching Works
I think Haffenreffer, he felt that was implied. Right. He's like, it goes without saying.
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I don't know if I just noticed more because as I was doing it, I was thinking, well, now I'm scratching. Then I thought, do I always scratch this much or itch this much?
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Maybe we can get an intern to follow us around and just record our scratching.
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I don't notice it. All right, moving on to Dante's Inferno. It was in Dante's Inferno, the burning rage of fierce itching that nothing could relieve is how falsifiers were punished.
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Oh, I thought you were going to tell me. You were just wondering.
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All right. Well, I don't know what Dante meant, but they're bad people.
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Oh, very nice. So itching scientifically is known as pruritus. P-R-U-R-I-T-I-S. Yeah. It's one of those tough to pronounce things, for me at least. And for well actually they still believe that the evolution of the itch was to help humans survive basically because so many things that can kill you and nature
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or things like mosquitoes or flies or spiders or fleas that can have malaria or the plague or any number of diseases attached to their tiny little insect bodies. So, hey, human, you've got a mosquito on your neck that could kill you. You might want to slap it or scratch.
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who was the bear in jungle book was that baloo yes he would do the baloo where he would get up against a tree or a wall yeah and then i did it probably because of that i'm sure that's where i got it and realized that it works and i still do it every now and then oh yeah yeah i look kind of silly but do you sing while you do it yeah bear necessities right that's still my favorite what else are you gonna sing
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I'm going to start doing that, actually. You'd be like, I think something's wrong with Chuck. Yeah. So like you said, though, it was up until almost, what was it, 1987? The mid to late 80s.
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That another German, H.O. Handwerker. and his gang of toughs, they started to do actual research about it. They were puzzled and wanted to solve it.
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Hi, everybody. Chuck here. It's May 9th, 2017 and podcast time. I know it's really 2025, but we're going all the way back. to May of 2017 to talk about itching. Oh boy, just seeing that title probably makes you itch. And that's one of the deals with itching, if I remember correctly. So I hope you dig it and I hope you're not too itchy right now.
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Yeah, like even though they ramped it up to 11, no one ever said like, holy crap, that hurts.
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Yeah, they said this is not worth the five Deutschmarks that I'm getting for this lousy study.
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I traveled to Europe in 1997, and I was still on all that weird money. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah, so it was a while after that. So now scientists... I think this sort of introduced an itch to the scientific community because after... hundreds and hundreds of years, Handvoca sort of disrupted the thought process of the itch and the scratch.
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And all of a sudden, scientists were like, oh, well, maybe we should start looking into this. Maybe we can actually isolate the nerve and figure this thing out.
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I wonder if all of this was under the notion that they were trying to cure itching.
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I wonder – I never really thought about it until just now, but I wonder what happens when a performer – or somebody that is in the public eye or on TV or on stage or the president giving an address, what do they do if they have poison ivy or some other kind of contact dermatitis? Have you ever thought about that? What if Lin-Manuel Miranda has a really bad case of poison ivy?
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I guess they can get an understudy in that case. But you can't have an understudy as president.
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Or like a news anchor when they're just like, oh my God, I'm dying. I don't know. I guess a news anchor can tape things. But I'm talking about live. What does Tom Petty do, for God's sakes?
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We're meeting for coffee. He's not performing. Anyway, I was just curious about that.
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No one can look at you anymore. People are writing in. You're disgusting them. It was gross. One thing that made me think of that is I had recently – you can still kind of see it on my forearm, the scars – But I did a cement job. I was building this fence, putting in a gate at my house. And Scotty, you know Scotty. Sure. Pippin. Huh?
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Not Scotty Pippin. He and I built this thing together. And we sank these huge posts for this gate. And I didn't know that cement could cause contact dermatitis or even burns. Never knew this. And we were... it was kind of a tight spot and we couldn't get shovels in there in the hole. So we were literally mixing this stuff like up to our elbows with our arms.
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And I was like, this kind of feels good. I even said like, you know, like oatmeal or something. And then two days later, my right arm was just covered in, The nastiest dermatitis I've ever seen.
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And then he got it. Yeah, it's still kind of hanging around. So I went and got a prescription for steroids, which made me a little crazy for a week and a half. Okay.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
That's right. And the second thing I wanted to say, since you said gallons of this drink, as I was drinking it, I think this would be really good as a punch. Like throw it in the punch bowl with some like cinnamon sticks and sliced oranges and some other. Like a bunch of ice? Bunch of ice and stuff like that. And I think it would make like a pretty, pretty decent party punch, actually.
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I don't know. How does that hold up in a punch bowl?
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
All right. Then I say pour four liters of Topo Chico in there.
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Yeah, and what's like a red tinting? High C. Oh, I guess so. But what's something that's not super sweet, like Campari? Would that change the taste a lot?
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It would be a little more festive as a punch, I think, if it was red or green.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
All right. I'd say we move on to let's go ahead and knock out our two or two confections.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Yeah, so what's happening is we usually try and source some sort of a holiday cocktail and tell you how to make it. Sometimes we make it and have it on our own. And this year, we had someone send in a holiday cocktail. A few months ago, we got an email from somebody named Holly Eitenmiller.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
You know what? Let's start with Italy because this is also another thing that a listener sent in, which is really great. People are starting to help program the show because it gets really, really hard to find new short Christmas stuff after all these years. But Carl with a K, Hardin, sent in a suggestion to do a short stuff on pizzelles. Pizzelle or pizzelle?
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Yeah. It's an Italian cookie that is enjoyed, you know, at different times of the year, weddings and things, but really known as a Christmas or Easter cookie.
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I know, but it was still great. Great delivery. Nothing wrong with writing a joke, my friend.
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I just feel like such a fraud. No, not at all. Traditionally, black licorice or anise is the traditional flavor, but that's sort of the old world stuff these days. You can flavor it with whatever you want. A lot of chocolate ones, vanilla, lemon's a very popular flavor. I saw gingerbread. Yeah. Oh, sure. I could dip it in this punch.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Yeah. I saw an elk one, but that feels a little gamey.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Yeah, like the old world way, and I imagine a lot of just sort of traditional Italian families still do it this way. I mean, they make machines like a waffle iron that you could do this in. But it's the old school two cast iron plates, like you said, that have those decorative designs. And a lot of times it's a snowflake for Christmas.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Back in the old days, you could get like a family plate made with your – Whatever, like your family crest maybe or a special date in your family or anything that's meaningful to your family.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Yeah, sure. And then you can eat that drunk face. And then you cook those over an open flame, you know, like turning it over, you know, each side, each side. Let that thing cool off. And then you can do a lot of things with it. You can roll it up like a cone and put stuff in it. You can just sprinkle it with a little powdered sugar. I saw one where you can use it as an ice cream sandwich layer.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
And this is a drink that Holly invented called, hang on to your hats here, Grandma's Christmas Breath.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Yeah, I'm going to see if there's a good Italian bakery in Atlanta. I'm sure there is.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
All right, so that's the pizzelle. Should we move on to your le bouche de Noël?
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
How would you say it? What's the correct way, in other words?
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Yeah, it is, and it was not something you would eat in the old-school tradition in France. What happened, it dates back to medieval times, and you would get a real log of wood, usually a fruit tree or many times a fruit tree, and you would do that to, let's say you wanted a good apple harvest for the year to come, so you would use an apple branch or log.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
You bring it home, you put that thing in the hearth, And the hearth is sort of where the family hung out. So it's just sort of the centerpiece there.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Yeah. And I'm not sure if we mentioned you lighted on Christmas Eve. If you've really done your job well and you picked out the perfect log, maybe soaked it a little bit and game the system, like you said, that thing might burn to the new year. And I would guess the whole family just celebrates if that happens.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Oh, I didn't really, I wasn't sure what the breath would be, but I guess boozy breath. That makes sense.
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That's right. That happened sometime in the late 1800s. Apparently, a gentleman named Pierre Lacamme published the first recipe for that in 1890. And it started spreading around to other cultures, other cultures that either spoke French or just dug what the French were into. And, you know, you make it. It's like a it's like a jelly roll cake.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
But you've got buttercream instead of the jelly and you roll it up and you frost it with a ganache of some kind. And then you try to make it look like bark, like use a fork and kind of scrape along the outside to make it look a little more like a log.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Well, our dear departed Grandma Mary, Emily's grandmother, who was the senior general in the stuff you shoot in Army, who passed away at the ripe old age of 101. That's awesome. When she was in her 90s, like around Christmas, she would have a little Bailey's in her coffee.
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Yeah, boy, I'm looking at some of these online. These are really lovely.
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I see the toadstools. I see the little forked bark. Those look nice. But I see someone who somehow managed to make it look like real pine bark. That looks really great.
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All right. So those, yeah, those are the two confections. And so we're going to hop in our sleigh. We're going to ride around up in the stratosphere, atmosphere. Where are we up there?
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
That's right. And generally the president's family lives there, depending on how old the kids are and stuff like that.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
But there are a lot of traditions over the years. You can go to whitehouse.gov under the Christmas stuff if you want to look at all these. But I feel like we should maybe concentrate on a few of the more fun ones. Okay.
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The first Christmas tree in the White House that anyone knows about was in the second floor oval room, which was a family parlor and library in 1889, which was the Benjamin Harrison administration. And they used real candles to delight the grandchildren. Okay.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Yeah, despite the danger. I think, like you said, 1891 was electricity. And three years later, Grover Cleveland had the first electrically lit tree. But, you know, Teddy Roosevelt, that guy was old school if he was nothing else.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Oh, Franklin, of course. He's in older school. Yeah. Yeah. Teddy supposedly banned Christmas trees. That is a bit of a I think it's just been twisted a bit over the years. I don't think he banned them. He just it was not a part of their family tradition to have a tree. So he did not.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Yeah. So I guess Christmas time, I don't know, equals drunk grandparents. Yeah.
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Yeah, so it wasn't like everybody was doing it. Although in 1902, Archie Roosevelt did sneak a little small tree, hid it in the closet upstairs even, decorated it and showed his family. And Teddy Roosevelt did not say, get that infernal thing out of here. Apparently he liked it and said, all right, well, the tree can stay.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Yeah. He was like, I'm going to take down that record.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
He brought in 47, just blew Eisenhower out of the water. The Clintons had 32, also beating Eisenhower in 95. And the younger Bush said, I'm going to beat daddy. He did. He brought in two more trees than dad.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Yeah, so I asked Holly if there was a story behind it, but I did not hear back by recording time. She doesn't want to talk about it? Yeah. You know what I'll do? Through the magic of editing, I'll pause and go get some ice.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Yeah, that's fine. But it was the first one. So technically, I guess she started the Nutcracker theme. Sure. As all themes. But that wasn't the first tree in the Blue Room. That is traditionally where the official tree is now in the Blue Room. That started in 1912 when Robert, Helen and Charlie Taft, the children of William Howard, put that very first tree in the Blue Room.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
And they have a competition now internationally. You have to win the state competition first. to qualify to see if your tree can be the tree in the blue room. And we're just going to go over a few of these leading states now because far and away, well, not that far and away, but North Carolina has had the most trees since 1961 in the blue room with 13.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
That's right, and surely not a sympathy pick because, like I said, North Carolina pumps out some great trees as they are in the lead. Pennsylvania is in second with 11. Then you have Wisconsin with eight, Washington State with seven, West Virginia with four, and then basically other states with two or one.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
And if you're wondering what kinds of trees, far and away, fir trees lead with 52. There have been seven spruces and one pine.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
And then I'll be right back. But to your ears, I'll be back in like one second. Okay. Hold on. OK, I'm back, everybody. I have my shaker with ice. Josh, why don't you read out the ingredients and I'll pour them up.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Oh, a fir. So it'll be, I guess that'll be the 53rd?
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Yeah, are we going to hit these Christmas movies?
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
All right, everyone, we're back and we're going to finish up with a couple of Christmas movies. Well, one, a TV special and one, not just a Christmas movie, but the Christmas movie.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Yeah, we're talking about the first Christmas movies. Shocking stat here. Over 150 new holiday movies are produced annually. Yep, 98% of them from Hallmark. Probably so. That may be a real stat, actually. Who knows?
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
They should just redress people and recast them and just be like, all right, you're Bill, the local sheriff in this one, and you're Johnny, the local diner owner in this one.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
But if you're thinking like, oh, it's a wonderful life. No, no, no. That's the 40s. If you're thinking, all right, March of the Wooden Soldiers. No, no, that's 1934. Sure. You have to go all the way back to the very earliest days of putting anything on film to find the inspiration that would lead to the first Christmas movie.
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No, wait. All right, I just watched the horse thing again. No, I'd like to see Nope again. I saw that in the theater, but I haven't seen it since, and I quite enjoyed it.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
All right, so that 2.1-second horse running, first thing, a lot of films that followed didn't have a narrative yet. They were just literally people were amazed that they could just see something moving on film. The Lumiere brothers very famously in 1896 had a 50-second clip of a train coming right toward the screen.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Probably the first and last time a train didn't go through a tunnel to indicate intercourse.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
That's right. But then that first Christmas movie came just a few years later, right?
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OK, so the story here is this stuff is really hard to find. And I had to get like a delivery service because I literally couldn't find it anywhere.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
That's right. It's called Santa Claus. It was a pretty groundbreaking film at the time. I guess almost anything you did would be groundbreaking at the time.
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No, I agree. It had some pretty decent special effects. It's a story of Santa, a very simple story, obviously, 76 seconds. But it's Santa visiting the home of two kids on Christmas Eve. You can watch it on YouTube. It only takes 76 seconds, plus some dumb ad. But you see two kids checking the chimney for Santa before either mom or the nanny or somebody puts them to bed.
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They turn off the lights and then the room is dark and then all of a sudden pops up. The first little special effect is on the right side of the screen, a little circular image of the rooftop, like an insert almost within the film frame itself. We see Santa climbing down a chimney, but really just walking down some stairs disguised as a chimney.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Movie I still haven't seen. I haven't either. Oh, let's let's keep it that way. Let's promise. Let's do a blood oath.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Oh, sure. We had to have. I will say this about Santa Claus, the 76 second film. Given that most movies from this era look pretty creepy and given that every Santa from this era looks really creepy. Yeah. This Santa creeping through the room over these children. I was ready for this thing to just make my hair stand on end. And it wasn't that bad.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
A little bit of creep, but it was actually had a little sweetness to it.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
But we don't know who this guy is, right?
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
All right. How are we going to wrap it up? Oh, wait. We need to get in our sleigh first.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
But yeah, you know, I gave up. That's the thought that counts.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Did it work? Josh has been giving me the earworm for 16 years on the reg.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
All right, so now I'm annoyed, so let's talk about the sweetest Christmas special of all time.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
That's right. Ziggy is the comic strip character, Ziggy, the little, short, bald. How old is Ziggy? That was one of my questions.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Oh, no. Yeah. All right, so the gingerbread rum just went in. I took a little sniff, and it smells cloyingly sweet.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
I mean, is it supposed to be a grown-up, though?
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
I couldn't tell because I wasn't into Ziggy, but did some Ziggy research and looked back at some of the comics. And Ziggy was beloved because Ziggy was great, and Ziggy was sweet, and Ziggy was joyful, and Ziggy was not cynical. Ziggy lived with a dog and a parrot, and you might find a Ziggy comic strip that was...
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Just a little wry joke, or you might find a Ziggy comic that is literally just Ziggy smiling and looking at you and saying hello.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Yeah, for sure, and he really pulled out all the stops because not only is it a Christmas special, an animated Christmas special, but it was one that really took the time with the artistry to just knock it out of the park. A typical half-hour animated special at the time had about 35,000 drawings. Ziggy's Gift had close to 140,000 drawings.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
They usually have about 50 rough sketches to sort of map out the story. There were 1,200 for Ziggy's gift. And for all of this effort, A, you got an animated special that, for the time, again, when you look back now, really good, smooth, outstanding animation. And it won the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program that year.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Yeah, absolutely. When it came time to make the special, they were like, what do we do with Ziggy's voice? Like, how do we cast this iconic silent character? Because you can really ruin like a comic strip character come to life if you don't get the voice right.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
And so they decided not to use a voice at all, which was brilliant. And apparently that came from Wilson's daughter, who a few years before said that the reason it's hard to find a voice for Ziggy is because when you read Ziggy, you hear your own voice.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Yeah, and get your What Would Ziggy Do? T-shirt printed up.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Yeah, I mean, I just use a standard bar jigger, so whatever the big side is.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Yeah, and you could, you know, get Ziggy with it.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
All right. Well, that is it for the Christmas special this year. We want to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas or Merry and Happy Holiday of your choice, however you choose to celebrate. Yeah. We're Christmas guys, so that's what we do around here. And I'm wishing you and Yumi and Momo a very Merry Christmas and Jerry and Dave and Livia and Dave and Kyle and who else? Ben? Ben?
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Yeah, thanks, man. And, of course, with Jerry, her lovely wife and daughter as well.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Yeah, I think you just heard the cork pop, the infamous cork pop.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
I'm not saying I'm going to drink all of this. All right, what's next?
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
That's right. The holiday spectacular, and a couple of traditions here, is that this episode is brought to you ad-free, and also... Exactly. By us. And then also we have managed to work it out. I don't know about every year, but it seems like every year where this is the last episode that we record of our recording year. And it's so great and so fun to wind it down this way.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
All right, well, can we pause so I can go to the grocery store? Yes. No, I'm going to open up the old Tropicana that I just bought.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
And I bought it at a convenience store, or I would have gotten an orange. I'm just going to do one shot of that. Okay. Just go one, one, one.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Yeah. I mean, the only reason I'm doing this is because I just felt like somebody should try this out on the air. And so here we go, everybody. Post-production drumroll.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
No, it's not bad. I mean, it's orangey because the Grand Marnier and the orange juice, obviously.
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The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
And it's not bad. I mean, it's definitely like a festive holiday drink. I would not recommend more than one of them. Oh, is it pretty boozy? I mean, it's pretty just sort of sweet. Thanks on your tolerance for sweet drinks.
Stuff You Should Know
The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
It could probably come through a little bit more. So I could probably add a little less orange juice if there were to be a next time.
Stuff You Should Know
The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
All right, Chuck. How are you feeling? Good. And big thanks to Holly again for this drink.
Stuff You Should Know
The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
I've only heard White Elephant. Interesting.
Stuff You Should Know
The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
No, never heard that one. I've only heard White Elephant when it comes to this kind of game.
Stuff You Should Know
The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
That's right, because it involves the trading of gifts, which we'll get to the rules in a second. It can, well, I'll mention that when we get to the trading part. Okay. Yeah, the origins is interesting because I never knew this as far as the white elephant name. Supposedly, it came from what is now Thailand, what was Siam back in the day.
Stuff You Should Know
The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
And the king of Siam was, if he was annoyed, he might give someone an albino elephant if he didn't like them very much, right?
Stuff You Should Know
The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Yeah. And the whole idea here is to have fun. So, yeah, 20 bucks, I feel like is I mean, you can set it according to whatever, you know, financial pool you're swimming in. But I feel like 20 dollars is a pretty good round number.
Stuff You Should Know
The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
They give some tips here in this article, which is kind of fun, which is to try and fool the unwrapper by wrapping it, wrapping perhaps a small thing in some big elaborate package, or by, if you get really creative, if you can even reshape something as far as the wrapping goes to where it looks like something else, like maybe a bottle of wine, when it in fact is just like a folded up whoopee cushion.
Stuff You Should Know
The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Yeah. And I also realized when you sent your stuff over, I was like, hey, we kind of have a theme for one of yours and one of mine. Yeah. Which is, you know, like sugary confections from different parts of the world. Right. So those are kind of fun. Maybe we should do those back to back.
Stuff You Should Know
The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
That's right. So once you've drawn your number and are thus ordered an opening order, person number one is going to grab a gift. They're going to open it. They're going to show everybody what it is. Oh, my God, it's for whoopee cushions because they're probably three these days to hit that $20 mark. Right. And that's it. They got their gift. Everyone gets a good laugh.
Stuff You Should Know
The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Next up is person number two. And this is when it gets interesting because person number two has a choice. They can pick a new gift from the pile or they can go ahead and just steal that first gift if that is something that they actually want.
Stuff You Should Know
The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Yeah, I mean, you can do house rules, of course, or regional rules. But generally, a gift can be stolen no more than three times. If a gift is pronounced dead, that means you can't steal it anymore. And that's after it's been stolen, right?
Stuff You Should Know
The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Oh, right. Duh. After the three times, it can no longer be stolen.
Stuff You Should Know
The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Yeah, if your gift is stolen, you can't steal it right back. You have to steal another gift or choose from the pile. And are there any other variations?
Stuff You Should Know
The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
I don't know. You've got those whoopee cushions. I say the party is just getting started.
Stuff You Should Know
The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
Yeah. Well, two quick things. One thing I wanted to mention earlier on is I have seen this game go badly. Like if somebody really wants to keep something and it gets stolen, they get their feelings hurt. Boy, try and park that attitude at the door. This is supposed to be fun.
Stuff You Should Know
The 2024 SYSK Christmas Extravaganza!
And if all of a sudden you're really getting mad because you didn't get that whoopee cushion, then, you know, do some self-reflection on what you're bringing to the table.
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WWDTM: Governor Whitmer
I think I'm going to have to go with Roxanne and Messi on the flag.