Josh Clark

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I never subscribed. I was way too paranoid to do something like that. But yes, I read it. I looked at the pictures.

Later on, he followed the Sex Pistols around and co-produced a documentary on them called DOA.

Right. Exactly. Michael Kennedy, who was for Saad's personal attorney and then came on as High Times legal counsel from like the beginning until I think 2016 when he died. He explained it that High Times was meant to be a way to use free speech to teach people how to grow pot.

And that like they basically had found a loophole, thanks to the First Amendment, that they could disseminate all of this information as far and as wide as they possibly could. And in teaching people to grow their own pot, That would eventually change attitudes about pot and potentially lead to legalization. And as we'll see that they were successful in that quest that they started back in 1974.

Yeah, that's right.

Right. Or illicit drug versus illicit drug. Like at the time. Well, the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 had just been passed thanks to Richard Nixon and marijuana. which, by the way, I read is not at all racist. There was a Latino, I think, historian who researched it. And he's like, that's actually myth.

So good for him that it was a schedule one, which I think it still was until like this year, which means that it has, according to the government, No medicinal value whatsoever and the high potential for abuse. And both of those are just absolute lies. They're just not correct. They're not true.

They knew this back in 1970 and that this Controlled Substances Act kicked off the war on drugs, which in retrospect, most people now agree was misguided and a huge waste of money and killed a lot of people. Right. And this was the era that – And incarcerated. Yes, incarcerated. It's a big one too.

But it was in this era, the beginning of this era, that high times started to kind of become not just an idea but an actuality. So they wanted to fight that, which was part of the reason they were willing to like – use mockery or just all of their articles had a slant to it because they felt like they were taking on liars.

And that's a legitimate way to respond to liars is through mockery or really kind of pushing your agenda against them. But that was a huge, I think, impetus for creating High Times for sure.

Well, yeah, they threw a launch party at the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York and invited like a bunch of media and just got them messed up. Like straight button down media types, journalists, some like TV news people showed up and were like giving brownies and like, here, try nitrous oxide. And have you ever had cocaine? Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it was legitimately cool during a certain period of life. Yeah. Like if you were 50 doing that, it's kind of sad. But if you're like 20 or 19 or 21 or 20 and a half, let's say, then, yeah, I get it.

And I read a quote from Michael Kennedy, the legal counsel for High Times. He said that he remembers three or four lawsuits being brought against High Times from people who got so wasted for the first time in their lives that they decided to sue the magazine for it.

The first one, I would take issue with the idea that it was beautiful. It was a 20-pound brick of schwag, just brown and compressed and ugly. But at the time, it was like their premier weed, Colombian. And just another aside, I'm sorry about this, but... I wonder.

So I've always wondered in Hey 19, the Steely Dan song, when he says the Cuervo gold and the fine Colombian, is he talking about cocaine or is he talking about pot? And I went and researched this and I stumbled into like a longstanding argument.

Yeah, I read an explanation from one person, and it sounded pretty legit. They said it's 100% pot that they were talking about. That's what you called really good pot. Back in the 70s, it was Colombian. And it wouldn't have referred to cocaine in the first place because at that time, most of the cocaine came from Peru. Colombian farmers hadn't really taken up coca production.

And so most people, if you were aware of cocaine, you were like, this is some fine Peruvian. You wouldn't say this is some fine Colombian. So it seems like that guy settled it, at least in my mind.

I guess it does. Sure.

No. It's pretty good. Like about the people who came up with Yacht Rock?

Oh, okay. So, like, it goes back to the 70s and 80s?

Well, there's a band called Yacht Rock that kicked it all off, and I don't know.

Could have been going on tour with them. Yeah.

Have you seen the limited series Black Doves?

It's a British spy thriller, like eight or ten episode show.

It's really good.

No, I'm with you. No, just go watch it. I recommend it.

Yeah, it's true. But, I mean, do they have it on their coffee table?

Just text me and be like, what was the thing with the thing? I don't know what you're talking about.

I don't have my phone on me. It's on the charger.

Well, but also rightfully so. The FBI and possibly even the CIA was infiltrating the counterculture and planting informants. And there was a time where he was like, there's an informant here, the high time staff, and I don't know which one of you it is. There may have been. Yeah, it's possible.

Like he had reason to be paranoid at the very least, but it was definitely fueled to extremes through his drug use for sure.

I think that's the thing that's getting me.

Yeah. I mean, that's like some heavyweight underground stuff right there that they got into their pages for sure. And yeah, I think the latest thing you mentioned was 1978 with Truman Capote and Andy Warhol. So this is all in like the first four years that they're cramming all this stuff in there.

So, yeah, right out of the gate, it was it was very successful in part, Chuck, because there was nothing like this in existence before. I mean, aside from some underground zines that 50 people read before High Times, it became a national magazine. A national magazine about pot and people who love pot and love drugs and want to see them legalized.

And here's how you do it and here's how you grow this stuff. And today it seems like it's not a really big thing to talk about pot or to find an article about people smoking pot in Newsweek or whatever.

And that is because High Times existed and laid the groundwork for it.

Yeah, that's crazy.

Yeah. And also one of the other things, too, I was going to say you could sense it, but no, it was just really overt, was they had an agenda in every single one of their articles. There was a way they wanted you to think, which is their position on it. And they would like mock the other position on it, typically the government's position on like legalization or something like that.

That always reminds me of that episode from Six Feet Under where the daughter finds some actors who are snorting their co-star's ashes. I don't remember that one. She OD'd on cocaine or something like that and died. I can't remember the daughter's name from Six Feet Under, but she finds them doing this. Claire. Claire. She just goes bonkers on them. Like, what is wrong with you? It's really good.

It's very satisfying. Yeah.

She was so morally offended by what she was seeing that she just unleashed on them. It was weird for her, but it fit the moment.

I don't think she was there yet. I think she was younger.

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Right. And so, I mean, the DEA had tried to take down High Times many times. This is the one they almost got them with because it took out their advertisers. Their advertisers went to jail or were run out of business. And all of a sudden, a huge amount of High Times regular advertising dollars just vanished, like overnight, because of Operation Green Merchant. Something smoked?

It went up in smoke. That's right. Sorry. No, it was worth it for sure. And I read a quote there. They were saying, like, at this point, High Times was on the verge of bankruptcy. The DA almost got them, but they managed to kind of slowly climb their way back and get back into it. In the 90s, this is when I started reading High Times, it was saved by hip-hop.

Because before Dr. Dre's The Chronic album came out, Pot was just viewed as like, you know, people who listen to like hippies or burnouts like Judas Priest fans, stuff like that. That's who smoked pot. And they were just as likely to sniff glue at the same time. Right.

Then the chronic came along and it was it just exploded like overnight. Pot was totally in fashion again. And a whole new generation just got into it like really quickly.

Over time, though, I mean, it became it's an iconic magazine.

Right. For sure. And the one other impact that it had, too, is they helped instruct people how to set up your home grow system. So it's like hydroponic systems started kind of going from a thing you had to put together by going to 50 different stores. Like you can buy this entire hydroponic system through the pages of High Times. They help people learn how to do that along the way.

Pretty much everybody's heard of High Times. If you've never even picked one up, there's a good chance you've heard of High Times or somebody referencing High Times. It's like it insinuated itself into American pop culture. And the reason why it became iconic is it survived all sorts of.

And as a result, pot just started at the same time when it became fashionable again in the early 90s. It got exponentially better than it had been leading up to that. It was like somebody threw a switch and all of a sudden pot was what you see or think of it now. Like just sticky buds and gorgeous, like beautiful flowers and all that stuff. Like that really was much more potent.

Like that happened at about the exact same time as like the Chronic and Snoop Dogg coming out and all that. Like 92, 93 is when it really changed.

It wasn't the 64, was it? Super Nintendo? Yeah, the 64. Was it 64? Okay.

I know the mascot of USA Olympics.

Oh, that was a good documentary, too, by the way.

I didn't know that. Did I?

That's crazy. I believe it, though. There's probably, like, felt scraps everywhere and half-de-boned chicken and things like that just sitting around.

Yeah, like they moved that Overton window and made just the concept of legal weed something. They took it from something like a dorm room conversation to this is how you would do it. Here's a path to legalization in the States, you know? Yeah, yeah. And they just made it like a potential— thing, like a real concept. They brought it into existence and helped push it along.

Drug culture transitions like like throughout all these different like ways of thinking and looking at drugs and different drugs people were doing high times managed to just keep plodding along and stay relevant, I guess, is the best way to put it. I didn't think I was going to say that out loud, but here we are.

I should say they covered the people who were out there like coming into or bringing it into existence or really thinking about it. But through covering them and exposing them to millions of people every month, that kind of got the whole idea out there.

Yeah, Thomas Forsyth helped bankroll them in their early days. The National Organization for the Rethinking of Marijuana Legislation? Reform of marijuana legislation.

Yeah, reform.

You were sitting amid a sea of brass bowls with, like, the tie-dye little plastic middles that you would hold on to?

That's a little weird. That's so Atlanta.

Yes. And yet at the same time, especially in like the magazine industry, they're just dismissed as, you know, they're just stoners. They're potheads. Right. And they don't care. They don't seem to to they don't go after awards. They don't like submit their their their writers work for awards and stuff like that. They genuinely don't seem to care about that kind of stuff.

Because they're off doing like their own thing and they're actually doing it. But I saw a citation of how popular culture thinks of High Times. They cited a Saturday Night Live skit featuring Jack Black. And he played High Times top reporter. And he was like, I think at a press conference or whatever.

And he would stand up to ask a question and then he would forget what he was going to say every time.

Oh, I thought it was hilarious. I didn't even.

Right. But I could not find it anywhere. And it's I just read about it like all the other stuff I'm talking about. I didn't experience it firsthand. I've just read about it.

Yeah. And I think Jack Black himself was as well.

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I agree. I agree. So High Times was founded by a guy named Thomas King Forsad. And I just realized I didn't look up any videos of people pronouncing his name, but I'm pretty sure that's how it's spelled.

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Thanks to the ease and convenience of Amazon One Medical and Amazon Pharmacy, healthcare just got less painful. OK, Chuck, so we were talking about how Stephen Hager guided high times through like a really prolific era. This is like in the 90s, I feel like. And I don't maybe I'm just talking because that was the time I came in contact with it.

Well, I've seen the little French version of the umlaut, the little devil's tail coming off of the bottom of the sea.

It feels like that's when it really transitioned into like an iconic thing that was never really going to go away, even if it went away. You know what I'm saying?

So in 2004, as I understand it, I believe Hager retired in 2003. And so the replacement they brought in for editor in chief, as far as I know, I think we've both seen conflicting stuff, right?

Oh, gotcha. OK, so Richard Stratton came in as the editor in chief and he had bona fides. He served eight years in federal prison for dealing pot.

No, he didn't have those. That was the other thing. He was a journalist. He'd reinvented himself as a journalist. I think he had some books under his belt. He wasn't like a bad pick. He made a bad pick. He was very good friends with Norman Mailer. And in fact, one of the reasons he went to prison is he refused to implicate Norman Mailer in his pot dealing activities.

And when he became editor in chief of High Times, he hired Norman Mailer's son, John Buffalo Mailer, who was 25 at the time.

Hired him as executive editor. And yeah, I like his name. John Buffalo Mailer had zero publishing experience whatsoever. And the whole thing, it was just this is a bad time for High Times.

And that indicates a sound, if my high school French doesn't fail me. So I think his name was Thomas King Fursaad.

Yeah, and they brought Steve Hager back in to kind of right the ship again.

And he did. Like this, High Times started the idea that we should legalize marijuana, worked at it ceaselessly for decades. And finally was still around when that change started happening. And states started talking about actually legalizing pot. Not decriminalizing, but legalizing pot.

Like you said, not just for medicinal purposes, but hey, if you're an adult and you want to smoke pot, go ahead and smoke pot. You're not going to get in trouble because we don't have any laws against it anymore. Like this was starting to happen. And High Times was right there, totally poised to just...

just step up and accept its kudos and its huge rise to prominence as this new changed culture around pot was about to just explode. And around this time, private equity got involved and everything went down the toilet.

I was going to say, it looks like the Allman Brothers satanic advisor.

Yeah.

Again, because private equity got involved. That's right. There's a really good Politico article called The Long Fall of High Times by Ben Schreckinger.

And it's really worth the read. It's very long, but it's good. And that article puts the blame on Adam Levin, who ran Oreva Capital. He's the one who came in as the private equity guy and made all of these terrible decisions, did shady stuff like the announcements for, you know, some of these business ventures like they would announce them publicly.

And then the other company involved would have to come out publicly and be like, they haven't even approached us about this. What they just said is not true. So that's not a good thing to do. That IPO was a big deal too, because if you have investors, they want you to go public and then they can really start making money off the company.

He just couldn't get it together to get the IPO out the door. Yet, that didn't keep them from selling pre-sale shares at $11 a piece to High Times readers, promising them they were getting in on the bottom floor before the IPO even happened. Just shady stuff.

And so this lasted for just a couple of years before the magazine, the whole brand, went into receivership, meaning that there was a corner-pointed person who was in charge of their assets who would try to figure out how to help them get out of bankruptcy or how to help them get out of a hole without going into bankruptcy while at the same time paying off their creditors.

And I guess it didn't really work because in, I guess, May of last year, the receiver said, hey, we're going to have a fire sale. Everybody step up, get out your checkbooks. Let's do this thing.

I hope that that ends up being like your Sharknado thing or like the Jared from Subway thing or like your Hugh Jackman Greatest Showman thing. I hope that comes true thanks to you.

It's possible. He's been on the cover a bunch, but he might not be paying attention, you know?

So I read a great quote from Pot Culture magazine. So High Times has just stopped. They put out their last published issue in 2024. And the fact that they were still putting out a print magazine actually says how strong the brand was at one point.

Because they went right through that time where magazines were just folding. Print anything was just folding left and right. And yet they still had the print magazine. And they had a pretty heavyweight website too, hightimes.com. It had their whole archive, all the magazines on it. And yet the website hasn't been updated since June 2024. The last issue was September 2024. Yeah.

If you go onto the site, none of the images work. They're all grayed out, rectangles.

It's very disappointing. And Pot Culture Magazine put it that the once mighty Hightimes.com is gone, reduced to an error message that is reminiscent of finding your favorite uncle dead on the floor. I saw that quote. I don't think anybody could have put it better than that.

Yeah, and you know that same 50-year-old who's upset because I said something about high times on his coffee table? He's pretty much a wavy gravy lookalike, too.

Sure. It would be for sure. But I think that the things have evolved so much that you're fine. Okay. Okay. Good. So yeah, Snoop, Martha, please do buy High Times because it's such an ignominious and is that the right word? Or was I just deleterious to my own vocabulary?

No. Such an unclassy end.

It's just like that magazine deserves better than that.

No, I'm with you. I think Martha Stewart has that much laying under in piles under her hodgepodge bottles that we were talking about, you know?

Okay. Well, that's it about High Times. If you want to know more about it, there's tons of tribute articles all over the web to read that are kind of fun. And while you're doing that, it's time for Listener Mail.

But why do you suck so much?

Right. So this guy, Thomas King Farsad, it's a pretty cool name. And if it sounds made up, it is made up. His real name was Gary Goodson. And it's not because his name was Gary Goodson that he ditched that name in favor of Thomas King for sod. He was actually a big, big time pot dealer.

That was a great reminder. We love, love, love being reminded when it's pointed out to us that we fed into something that we were just totally unaware of, especially if it's unjust, you know?

Of course they are. That's right. That should be a t-shirt.

Well, thanks a lot, Rosalie. We appreciate that big time. And if you want to be like Rosalie and send us an email like that, you can send it off to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com.

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Like not only did he sell literal tons of pot in like the I think starting in the late 60s and going well into past the time he was had started publishing High Times. He smuggled it himself. He flew planes and he went to Mexico, he went to Jamaica, and he smuggled pot, tons of pot at a time, into the United States.

Tell them about the issue with the peace sign in the bullet hole.

Yeah, he shot bundles of stacks wrapped together with a Colt .45 handgun to really kind of drive the point home.

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That is an underground zine right there. If it has a bullet hole in it that the publisher put there, that's really something. Yeah, it's like with real blood. Right.

You said something that I think is really worth pointing out, because there's a whole camp of people who tell this origin story of high times and Thomas King facade that is like just some money making scheme or just a lark or something like that. This guy in actuality was a dedicated First Amendment warrior, like dedicated.

And also he was very committed to the counterculture, not just because he sold tons of weed, but he genuinely believed in legalizing marijuana, that that was a crucial thing to do in the United States. And he put his money where his mouth is. And like you said, he started with underground zines. And then he took up – I saw that he joined or he founded. I couldn't tell which one was correct.

Well, it's basically like an associated press for underground magazines. It was called the Underground Press Syndicate. And I think it changed its name to something else, right?

But we'll just call it that. But it was, like I said, the AP where you could you could like get all sorts of news about drug busts or about, you know, some spectacular pot harvest or something to do with underground culture. And you could just print it in your your local mag. And the people in Phoenix are reading the same thing as the people in Denver. But they don't know that.

They just think it's like part of your magazine.

No, it's not that. I just think that guy's gotten more than enough of his spotlight. But, yes.

You know what, then? Forget it. Okay. Wow. I didn't think I was going to talk you out of that one.

Yeah, because if you take out the O. And no, if you change the O to an A and take out the R, you've got facade, like the front of a building. So I'm making an educated guess here.

That's OK. I was reading the High Times archives and I guess they had some like sixth grade trained AI scan and alter or turn all of their magazine photos into text. And boy, they came up with some creative ways of spelling that guy's name.

There's few things that are funner, but also more shocking than looking at vintage cocaine paraphernalia ads that appeared in the likes of High Times and other magazines. Yeah. And there was one that I pointed out to you that was just... Like this thing should be in the Smithsonian. It was a metal, probably like a gold plated Coke tube.

So you put one end in the Coke and you put the other end up your nose and you sniff. Right. Just in case you didn't know how to ingest cocaine.

It's shaped like an old school vacuum cleaner. And so the Coke goes into the bottom of the vacuum cleaner and comes out the handle, which is up in your nose. They call it the Hoover instead of the Hoover. Like whoever came up with this is just, that's dedication right there. Because that's the kind of idea you'd just be like, man, we should totally make this.

But then the person actually went and made it and sold it.

That's right.

Exactly. And if you knew what you were doing, you could clip the ends off of all those prizes and use them as Coke straws.

Yeah. Who was the chairman of that committee on obscenity and pornography? Right.

Yeah, it was a form of protest that picked up really quick. I mean, there's few things you can do to somebody publicly that is more disrespectful and humiliating, but also non injurious. Then pie him in the face. But he did that.

He was called to testify. And not only did he say that censorship is the true obscenity, he said F censorship and F you. And then he pied the guy in the face in a congressional hearing. This is what he did. This is just the kind of person he was. Like he wasn't somebody who just talked a big game. Like this guy followed through on the stuff that he really believed in.

Oh, God. Yuck.

Sure.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and we're just hanging out feeling irie here on Stuff You Should Know.

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.

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?

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So Haney and Abbott, they were like, we're going to do this. And they came upon a great idea that they would visit a toy industry convention, like the big one in Canada. I think it was the Canadian Toy Manufacturers Trade Show. I can't remember what it was called. I looked it up. I couldn't find anything on it. But they went, remember, they were journalists.

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So they went as reporters as if they were on an assignment to do a story on the toy industry, specifically the board game industry. So they used that cover to pick the brains of a bunch of people who were in the board game industry. And one of the, well, they found out a couple of things very quickly. They found out that the board game industry was in a slump.

They also found out that is a very, very closed industry. Where if you're a newcomer with an idea, just hit the bricks. They're not going to listen to you. That's not how the board game industry works. And they figured this out. So they decided that from going to this conference, they were going to have to do this themselves.

If they wanted to get this game out there, they couldn't just sell the idea. They had to make the game first. And that's what they set about doing.

For sure.

Right. You know, very similar to that. Not quite as lucrative, but still pretty, pretty well. The people who bought several shares each were set for life basically after the game hit. Oh, yeah. But at the time, Chris Haney told his mom she shouldn't invest.

And this is his idea, his business venture. That's how much he believed in it, I guess. But there's a guy named Michael Wurstlin. And so this iconic, really elegant design for the package, the board itself, cards, all that stuff. It was Michael Wurstlin's work. He was 18 at the time.

And he didn't get a dime up front for it. He did this work for five shares of stock in the company of equity. And, yeah, it was very smart, as we'll see.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry's here, too. We're just rolling the dice and moving the pies. I call them pies, too. Yeah, because, I mean, it was like a pie piece. Yeah, I can't think of anything else you would call them. I think some people call them wedges, but they're clearly sickos.

Yeah, we should explain because I've never understood it until I started researching this. It's called genus because genus, you know, like in taxonomy, genus is above species. So there's a bunch of different variations of this thing. Another way to interpret or another definition of it, it's general. It's not specific. And so the questions in here were not, they were very general.

You didn't have to be like a specialist in anything. To play Trivial Pursuit. And if you were, you're kind of handicapped because there was a bunch of other questions that had nothing to do with your specialist or special. Yes. Specialist. Specialism. What is the word I'm looking for? Specialty. There you go.

I think there's somebody behind me with a hammer.

Yeah. We were like, well, what about plastic? They're like, keep guessing.

That's brain damage if you play too much.

Yeah, we've said it before and we'll say it again. Like they were the greatest bunch of people that I've ever worked with as a group. Like as a group, they were as good as it comes. It was amazing.

Yeah, hugely consequential. And this was Christmas 1981. So this is the first Christmas that Trivial Pursuit comes out and makes a big splash because they sold out of those 1,100 games so quickly that by the time the next Christmas rolled around, they'd already sold 100,000 copies in Canada. And that's a lot.

Well, I've seen the guys who invented the game, so.

And it turns out it's even more than you think it is, because at the time, a board game to be a bestseller sold about 10,000 copies. So this little this little independent. Yeah. A very independent game created by a couple of outsiders sold 10 times more than you would expect it to sell as a bestseller in this first year.

Reiter, yeah.

Yeah. Oh, boy. We should probably tell everybody what we're talking about. First, this is stuff you should know. Second, we're talking about Trivial Pursuit, arguably one of the greatest board games ever created. And we're not just saying that because stuff you should know has its own Trivial Pursuit edition. It's because it legitimately is such a great game.

And I saw one hundred and twenty five today. Oh, really? Yeah, I put $40 in for 1983 in West Egg, and it said $125. It told me $90. Oh, God. Oh, no. All of our inflation calculations are now in question.

It must be having a bad day. This is the worst thing that's ever happened to us, our beloved West Egg.

Voluptuous, too. So you said heavy. Each game package weighed six pounds because they really pulled out the stops and the materials. And like, yeah, it was cardboard and yeah, it was plastic, but it was really, really well-made, well-manufactured, well-designed cardboard and plastic put together. And again, just the look of it had such an elegant look. It just didn't.

It did not look like other board games at the time. It was like Sorry or Trouble or something like that, you know, where it's like wacky and there's like a cartoon explosion or something like that. A bunch of kids rolling dice on there. And that was a big deal, too. There was no kid, no person anywhere on the box. The only person who showed up was the poet, the English poet Alexander Pope.

whose quote, what mighty contests arrive from trivial things, was on the box. So this whole thing is so highbrow that it just doesn't even make sense. And yet that made people want it all the more. It was a brand new thing. It was a revival of board games is what Trivial Pursuit was when it came out.

Yeah.

Yeah. And maybe make some extra allowance in the bargain.

So this was Christmas 1983 that it blew up in the United States. And when it blew up in the U.S., it really just changed everything. Like you said, that first year, they sold 1.3 million games. They sold 20 million the next year in 1984. Wow.

And by January of 1984, right after it started to come out in the United States, the New York Times reported that people in New York were trading cocktail parties for trivial pursuit parties. And I was thinking about it. Yeah, right. Yeah. I don't think there's anything more insufferable than the New York Times reporting on what cool New Yorkers are doing right now.

This was a great example of that, the 80s version, too.

Yeah, I've never seen that movie, but I do know that one of the characters lets her husband, I guess, impregnate, serve as like a surrogate sperm donor to her friend. Yeah. And the only reason I know that is because there is a great Saturday Night Live skit about it. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah.

And I guess did they show the the the wife who is like hanging out downstairs in the movie while they went upstairs or something like that?

So in the Saturday Night Live one, like she's just sitting there like reflecting, like drinking tea and like thinking about how great and just beautiful this is. The sound coming from upstairs, they're like really getting into it. And she's getting like more and more concerned and worried. I think I remember that. Yeah, I think it was Jan Hooks who was like the woman downstairs.

It was a great sketch.

I'll bet. Yeah, looking at the board and pictures of the board and some of the question cards and all that. Like I was just overwhelmed with nostalgia because it was a huge thing in my family to playing Trivial Pursuit.

Oh, nice. That was her pick, huh?

OK, so I should wait 10 years to see it.

I'll wait 10 years.

That became kind of an urban legend. Like your cousin's friend memorized all 6,000 questions. Yeah, that's funny. Yeah. And there were some other cute or interesting anecdotes, I guess, that kind of came out around the time. One was Ronald Reagan was reported on having played the game while he was waiting for the election results in 1984. And during the game, he got two questions about himself.

And you can relax, he got them correct, both of them.

One of the facts I saw bandied about in some of the reporting, that was a great Reagan, by the way, was that either Ronald Reagan signed Clark Gable's discharge papers from the Army or Clark Gable signed Ronald Reagan's. Oh, really? It depends on who you ask, yes.

No, no. Like they just happened to be like, that was just happened to be the luck of the draw as far as the arrangement went.

No, I think like let's say it was Clark Gable who signed them. He would have maybe been like a higher up to Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan was getting out. It happened to be Clark Gable rather than Colonel Joe Schmo. Yeah.

I love that game. Yeah, for sure. As it turns out. For sure. And what's funny is it indoctrinated us into everything that boomers like. Like it was a really like huge cultural transfer from one generation to the other in that way.

And so at each Christmas 1983, it was like you could not find that thing. Yeah. And 1984, same same deal. Like it was really hard to find. But this time, Selchow and Ryder had like learned their lesson and were like keeping up with supply a lot better than they were at the very beginning of this whole thing.

And so at the peak of this, I think it really peaked in 84, but that certainly continued on into 1985. Oh, yeah. In the spring of 1985, 15% of households in America had a Trivial Pursuit game in their house. I saw at some point it was 20%, one in five.

Oh, I believe that. Totally.

Yeah, I'm sure it's just a little bit frayed and the parts where it folded and the rest of it's just fine.

Nice. There's a little cocaine in the little folds and tequila stains on some of the spots. Yeah.

Yeah, and Worsland, the guy, the 18-year-old who did all the art, he founded a company called Worsland Group, all one word, that became pretty successful marketers in Toronto. And he used his money from his shares to start that. So it definitely paid off. And then, yeah, like you said, the Haney's and Chris Abbott or Scott Abbott were just mega rich from this.

I mean, this game made hundreds of millions of dollars in the 80s, like 80s money. God knows what West Egg would convert that to. Yeah. But it was there was a lot of money made off this. And you got to think back like these were just a couple of dudes who had an idea and went with it.

Although there were people who were like, yeah, that's questionable whether you had that idea like you kind of referred to earlier. Right.

Yeah, and Spiro Agnew from Mad Magazine. Oh, yeah. So we should probably start at the start, and that actually goes long before Trivial Pursuit was created, but not as far back as you would think. Like, in the United States, we did a live episode on game shows. That was really cool, and we talked about this some.

Yeah. I mean, imagine being that guy. You're like, you owe me tens of millions of dollars. And then 10 years later, you owe them a million dollars. Like, yeah, this is just some guy. He wasn't some like high flying jet setter who had a bunch of money. I don't know what happened to him.

Yeah. But I mean, this is the one guy who said that. And like you said, he didn't come up with witnesses or any kind of supporting evidence. And yeah, it's just not clear what the deal was, whether he was just looking for a payday or if he did get ripped off. But as far as the court's concerned, he definitely did not get ripped off.

Sure.

Well, if it was like a David and Goliath thing where Goliath won, that would be very sad indeed. Yeah, what about the other one? I can't imagine that. Yeah, we'll move on because this one's getting really sad. The other one is the story of a guy named Fred L. Wirth. And if you are into trivia, Fred Wirth is essentially your messiah.

He is the original trivia dude who's been writing books on trivia, books containing trivia for decades and decades now. I don't know if he's still alive, but if he is, he's probably still going strong. And he apparently had published a three-volume encyclopedia of trivia at some point. This was before Trivia Pursuit was launched. And he did something.

You know how we've talked about mapmakers, like, including, like, a fake town to basically protect their property, see if somebody ripped them off? Yeah. He did something with trivia question. He included a trick question in his stuff.

No, that was Beretta.

But back as far back to the 30s on the radio and then later on TV, quiz shows were like all the rage. And America's had like fascinations with trivia and then got bored with it and then came and found it again and then got bored with it. And back in the 30s, that was one of the peaks where everybody was super into it.

Yeah. I mean, they said that they used his book for creating these things. They didn't deny that at all. But yeah, I guess it was just their case was based on the idea that a fact's a fact. This guy, it's not a creation of his own.

He found it. Right. No, I get it. And I imagine Fred Worth probably thought that was like an iron proof defense. Like, yeah, I got these people into putting this question in there and it didn't work out. I'm sure he was astonished when that came along, that ruling.

But also just before we move on, Chuck, I just want to tell all of our hardcore Colombo fan listeners to just stop your emails right now. We know for a fact that Frank is not, as far as canon goes, Columbo's first name. Canonically, Columbo doesn't have a first name or else his first name is Lieutenant.

So Frank Columbo just happened to show up in a couple of screenshots that the producers of the show originally never intended anybody to be able to zoom in on. Right.

Oh, yeah, definitely.

Sure. Yeah, we got all kinds. Takes all kinds, Chuck.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

So, yeah, probably.

Oh, so they're they're now the Brampton Battalion, but they were the North Bay Battalion, right? No, no, no.

Okay. I always get North Bay and Brampton confused. I do too. So Olivia dug up a pretty interesting article written by who, Chuck? A guy named Ron Rodriguez. No, it's Juan Rodriguez.

Yeah.

So, Mr. Rodriguez is what we're going to call him for now, because his name is really hard to say, it turns out. He wrote, I think, a daily quota of 40 trivial pursuit questions a day, obviously, and only about half would get picked. And we kind of went through that, too, because we helped out putting questions together for our version. And they asked for hundreds and hundreds of them.

And you're like, OK, well, we're done. They're like, OK, well, we're going to use about a third of those. So we're going to have to do this again a couple more times. And it was like, there weren't that many facts in all of the episodes of Stuff You Should Know, you guys. But we pulled it out. But I can feel Mr. Rodriguez's pain.

Yeah, I should say we weren't actually writing the questions. We were coming up with the source material for the questions from the podcast.

Yeah. There's some writer at Hasbro who's like, uh.

And then I think now, over the years, there's been about 300 editions published. Wow. And very early on, they stayed fairly generalist. Although, I mean, let me take that back. They went from genus to silver screen edition, baby boomers edition, and I think a sports edition. But compared to some of the editions that they've come out with now, those are still pretty generalist. Yeah.

So another one was Disney. Disney was the first tie in that they had in 1985. And that was still pretty general. It wasn't like Donald Duck facts specifically. Right. Weirdly, here's a piece of trivia for you. The second brand tie in that Trivial Pursuit released a game around was Fame, the TV show and movie. Oh, wow. Like I'm Going to Live Forever had its own Trivial Pursuit edition back in 1993.

That's a great question.

No, in that Slate article that you referred to, the author makes a case. They were basically saying, I think the whole premise was Trivial Pursuit lost its way. And this was written about 10 years ago or something.

And the premise or the thesis this author had was that it went from being general, where basically anybody could come along and try their hand at it, to increasingly more specific, to where now you had to know everything there is to know about Harry Potter. or everything there is to know about the Lord of the Rings, or Friends, or The Nightmare Before Christmas, or that kind of thing.

And that it just made it more and more narrow. It narrowed the pool, so you have to have more and more additions to appeal to as many people as possible. Whereas if you just made more generalist versions of the game, then you were always going to appeal to the most people possible.

Maybe. Yeah. Because you're not just talking about trivia. You're also poking fun at your own game. Like like you're putting all this effort into something that doesn't really matter in the end.

That's awesome. I will be very disappointed if the Seinfeld edition doesn't have a question about who invaded Spain in the 900s and the answer is the moops. Right. It's got to. It has to.

Probably. They've come up with some other pretty cool ones, too. One's called X. It's much more adult, edgy questions. I think it's for 18 and up. And it's a stamp game where if you get it wrong, they stamp an X onto your forehead in ink. And once you get five stamps on your forehead, you're out. Interesting. It is interesting. And then the weirdest edition I found, Chuck, was the EMS edition.

Emergency Medical Services came out in 2012. Wow. And it had categories like trauma, illness, anatomy.

Yeah. I'd like to see some of those questions. I couldn't find them. And you can also play free online. There's a new version that came out this year called Trivial Pursuit Infinite. It uses generative AI to come up with questions. And if you are a TV watcher, you can watch the new Trivial Pursuit game on the CW that's hosted by the lovable LeVar Burton. Oh, we love LeVar. Everyone loves LeVar.

Who doesn't? No one.

Gotcha.

Can you give an example of how it didn't hold up or a general example?

I thought you were going to say it was like deeply sexist or something like that.

Yeah. Pretty impressive stuff.

I love these Christmas episodes, the pre-Christmas special, usually Christmas toy episode.

So happy holidays to all of you out there. And the next time you see us, we're going to be on that ad-free holiday special. It's coming soon. Do you have a listener mail today?

I took it seriously, too, for sure. I love Trivial Pursuit, too, but it was definitely in the vein of the people who invented this thing that kind of poke fun at themselves and even at you, the player, for playing it.

Oh, great. Well, since Chuck answered in the affirmative when I asked him if he had a listener mail, it's time for listener mail.

Oh, they're not friends anymore?

Wowee. Yeah, so good to be back in touch with Chris. Yeah, thanks a lot, Chris. Thanks for getting back in touch. I think that that's no longer parasocial. That's just social.

Well, if you want to be like Chris and remind us that we've hung out with you before and also share some pretty great information and correct us for not shouting out an independent version of something we talked about, we love that kind of stuff. You can send us an email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.

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He and another guy named Dan Karlinsky wrote a book simply called Trivia. But he's credited as one of like the early people to spread the whole concept of being quizzed about inconsequential, usually pop culture questions to just show like how much you knew about your childhood. And that Edwin Goodgold thing, two things about him. He went on to become the manager of Sha Na Na.

Yeah. Oh, wow. And he wrote in Columbia University's, I guess, their newspaper. He was one of their writers. He wrote that this is that these trivia games that are like the hot new thing on campus are played by young adults who, on the one hand, realize they have misspent their youth. Yet, on the other hand, do not want to let go of it. And that was the whole idea.

It was about all the stuff that you learned in your childhood from reading Superman comic books and listening to like gangster or seeing like gangster TV shows just from being a kid. That's what the whole thing was based on. And that kind of became a tradition, too, that it was largely stuff in the past. A lot of it was pop culture.

Yeah, and I didn't see it anywhere, but I would put some serious money on the idea that Trivial Pursuit's success revived Jeopardy. Yeah, I bet it did. Because it was a huge, huge deal, as we'll see. Yeah, for sure.

But the whole thing starts all the way back in 1979, in December of 1979, appropriately, because Trivial Pursuit and Christmas, for its first few years of being out, were synonymous with one another, essentially. Yeah. Maybe synonymous isn't the right word, but they were. It was a big deal around Christmas time when it first came out about that.

For sure. And these two guys, they're two Canadians. I read an article about them that was contemporary to them in the Toronto Star. It said that they come off like the two original hosers. Like even bigger hosers than Bob and Doug McKenzie is what they were saying.

Yeah, I think they definitely did. They certainly covered it. One of them, Scott Abbott, was a sports reporter for the Canadian press who I think his focus was on hockey. The other guy was Chris Haney. He was a photo editor at the Montreal Gazette. So these are a couple of late 70s, early 80s journalist dudes who wear mustaches and drink beer during their interviews on the news. And smoke. Yeah.

Yeah, and smoke during them, too. Like, these were the guys who invented Trivial Pursuit.

Yeah, that's how I was born. They just realized how many times he bought a Scrabble game and they were like, we could do that. What a story. Yeah, these guys, that was the kind of thing that they would talk about doing is making a game because they realized that other people have made money off of it. Up to this point, their big claim to fame in their circle was having

carried out a pyramid scheme with a chain letter that was actually successful in that they made money off of it, and they never got caught for it either. So up to this point, so these were, that was these kind of guys, right? And this particular idea, though, kind of started to take shape really, really quickly. I think it was Chris Abbott or Scott Abbott,

Who was like, well, how about something with trivia? And remember at the time, like trivia was not a hot item. And also, as we'll see, board games were not a hot item. So these were like two bad ideas that these guys decided to put together and accidentally became a success or not accidentally. It ended up becoming a success. But it was like they figured it out really quickly, didn't they?

Right, not wedges.

Yes. Well put. I am not one for boasting typically, but I will say that I once confirmed won a game doing all the things you just said in 20 minutes. Wow. By yourself? Yeah. No, no, no, not by myself. I was playing a dude at work at the liquor store. No, no, no.

I mean, I guess if you were really honest, you could play by yourself, you know? You could sit around and read cards.

That's not honest. I'm saying you could roll, you could move, you could ask yourself questions, answer them, and if you got it wrong. Yeah, yeah.

No, good try, Chuck. Right. Great guess. You kind of ruined my 20-minute anecdote, frankly.

Yeah, yeah. It could take a while, especially if you just had a lot of people who, yeah, didn't know trivia. But yeah, it would usually take, yeah, 45 minutes, an hour, depending on how fast everybody was moving. Usually it took longer because the whole point was almost every question and answer would like generate a quick conversation or usually short conversation, sometimes longer.

Right. Exactly to that, too. But that was the point. And that's one of the reasons it became so popular is like it was really easy to have a party centered on trivial pursuits.

Yeah, that was typically how it was done. So you could argue and be mad at one another when the other one insisted on the wrong answer.

Yeah, that was always my weak one, too. And that was always the one that would get picked for me if I ever made it to the middle.

It was usually history or entertainment.

Yeah.

Yeah. My worst was definitely sports and leisure. And I would, yeah, geography was probably second.

Right. Only in the British version.

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Oh, OK. Well, if that's the end of the intro, then, Chuck, I think we have to put an ad break in here.

That was the state of the art at the time.

Yeah. Toledo has something called the Canal Experience or Historic Canal Experience. There's some canals running through part of the town from the early 19th century that you can walk along and you're like, wow, this is an old donkey path, huh?

Yeah, I remember when he was at the mic asking the question or making the suggestion, he kept moving around because he still had his sea legs.

Yeah. Oh, it's a donkey. Yeah.

Yeah, but still, like, it was working. That was the key.

Right. And you can bet that every donkey in Scotland was like, whew, thank God they invented these things, right? Yeah, probably. So there was also, as we talked about, one of the big problems with sailboats as shipping vessels was that they had trouble getting in and out of harbors. They had trouble navigating. They had to wait for the wind.

So very quickly, it seemed kind of obvious that you could, if you could get one of these boats into port, into harbor, which you could use a tugboat for, you could also pull it up river. It wouldn't have to navigate any longer because you could just pull it by a helper vessel into some of the cities that were not located on the coast, but they were located on a river.

One example I can think of is London and the Thames.

So, yeah, hopefully we'll do Thomas proud because we know a little bit about tugboats now after researching them for a little while. Big shout out to our friend Dave Ruse for helping us with this. You could do worse than going to check out Ruse's podcast, Bible Time Machine. And that has nothing to do with tugboats. But let's talk about that.

So, like I said, it was in Scotland that tugboats got their name back in 1817 in Dumberton. I think I'm saying that right.

Oh, well, how would you say it?

No, it's got to be Dumberton.

Okay. Well, we'll go with one of those two. How about that? Sure. Somebody built a steamship, a tugboat. They named tug. They weren't called tugboats until this time. And I guess that name stuck because it also makes sense practically. You're tugging a boat behind you. So that from henceforth on, they were known as tugboats.

It's a little anachronistic.

Yeah. Remember that Simpsons where Lenny goes little kid Lenny's like, oh, I just logged on to my Internet because he pooped his pants out of he pooped his bathing suit with the little Internet. So he said he logged on to his Internet. Oh, that's so good.

Right. And then the owners were like, well, we don't go on these boats. We just own them. So sure. I mean, that's fine. They can blow up. But yes, they were viewed skeptically, I think. Right. Like it was it was not just a done deal that these things were like going to save the industry or shipping.

But there was a proving ground. What ended up being a proving ground on the Tyne River that connected Newcastle to the North Sea. They were facing a problem, right? They had these barges that were called colliers, and they were sailboats, but they were coal movers because Newcastle was a huge coal producer. And these colliers could do a lot of damage because they were hard to navigate.

They had all the same problems that any sailing vessel had. So there was a guy named Joseph Price who in 1818 was like, I think I've got a solution to this. I'm going to buy some of these steamships that they're now being called tugboats. And I'm going to have them pull these colliers, these coal ships up and down the Tyne. And I think it's going to revolutionize shipping.

And Joseph Price was right on the money. The price was right.

Right. And these new towns that were getting coal for the first time were able to give up having to burn dried donkey poop that they scraped up off the donkey trails along the canals. It was huge for them.

So, yeah, Joseph Price proved to the world, like, no, these things are extraordinarily valuable, so much so that they're going to completely change shipping from this point on. And they definitely have. And they're still just as useful as ever. And they made a name for themselves so much that when the Royal Navy purchased their first steamships of any kind, they were tugboats.

The Comet and the Monkey. Comet and Monkey. And I can't decide whether it's a band name or a cartoon name.

Comet and Monkey.

So, yeah, they definitely proved their worth pretty early on. I mean, this is 1818, and the first ones were used shortly before that, right?

Sure. That's where they're most famous.

It's the exact same thing because those two paddle wheels were able to be moved independent of one another. And once you can do that, yes, you just start doing donuts to show off in the harbor, you know? Yeah. So the 19th century came and went and those paddle wheel tugs were replaced with screw propellers, which is another term for a propeller like you see on a ship.

Like that's just called a screw propeller. So like any ship, they were propelled by propellers. And then diesel engines came along, and that's when everything really kind of changed. Because when you have a diesel engine, you can get some amazing horsepower out of it, way more than steam. It's also less dangerous. I think we talked about all this in our Rudolph diesel episode.

And that's when the tugboats became, started to become the tugboats that we think of today. Okay.

You bet.

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So you mentioned tugboat strike, right?

Oh, well, there's a tugboat strike we have to talk about that really kind of demonstrates how important tugboats made themselves over the years. In New York Harbor in 1946, every single tugboat operator, there were 300 of them in the harbor at the time. They all went on strike.

1320?

Nope, not that far. Oh, 2020. But one of the things that tugboats are that makes them like the workhorses of the sea, as you could put it, is that they have really impressive power to tonnage ratios. Yeah. So the size of the tugboat, the actual weight the tugboat weighs, compared to the amount of power output its engines can create, usually in horsepower, is really lopsided. Yeah.

And this was very quickly, it became evident how essential tugboats were for everything in New York, because there was coal coming from Lake Erie through the Erie Canal to the Hudson down to the harbor. And it would be spread all throughout Manhattan and all throughout New York. Food shipments came in by barge. Garbage went out by barge. New York operated on barges.

And if you're using barges, you need a tugboat to tow or push those barges. So when the tugboat stopped working, New York stopped working. And within 12 days, the tugboat operators got their demands fulfilled. Wow. Which turns out to have just been nicer hats from what I read.

Right. I said float, by the way, but gloat works even better.

Yeah. They were gloating while they were floating. Oh, okay. So there were some things that changed. Stuff you would not at all connect to why tugboats became less vital over the years. Still incredibly important. And you can make a case that world shipping would essentially just stop if tugboats stopped.

So they're really important, but just not in exactly the same ways as they were before, because we started getting our energy over things like pipelines. We started using things that weren't coal. Trucking and shipping containers became a much bigger thing than, say, barges over the years. So with each of those things, the tugboat became... Less and less able to do what it did in 1946.

And yet it's still so vital that you just can't do anything without them.

I saw that there's one called the E-Wolf, right?

It is awesome, and let's talk about why. Here's why, Chuck. Remember we said that these things generate crazy amounts of horsepower? Yes. Some harbor tugs are ocean-going tugs. generate 27,000 plus horsepower. Yeah. It's like having 27,000 horses just running at the back of this thing, like kicking their legs all at once. Right. Yeah.

And to do that, you, um, use a lot of fuel, a ton of diesel fuel. Um, Some of these boats can carry way more than they need in a day, like 30,000 gallons of diesel. But I saw that the average harbor tug, which is working almost constantly, will use about 3,000 gallons of diesel fuel a day. And that is a lot of fuel to use, right? So it's using this non-renewable resource.

It's also putting out crazy amounts of diesel emissions.

And that's just one tugboat using 3000 gallons of diesel a day.

The reason also I was like, why do they carry so much more than they need? Because doesn't that make the tugboat heavier and therefore you have to use more fuel to get more horsepower out of it?

And the reason that I came up with that I found was that time is of such value in a harbor at a port that it's more costly to stop what you're doing and go refuel than it is to carry around all that extra fuel. They have those capacities so that they take way longer in between refuelings. That's the point. That's how crazy important time is in ports. Yeah.

That's the motto.

so that these fairly comparatively light boats, compared to the horsepower they create, can pull, pull, pull. And they can push, push, push, and they can do all sorts of amazing stuff, which is why they can move these enormous, huge oil tankers and shipping container ships with just the mighty might of their little hearts. You'd think I would have practiced something like that.

I never thought that.

Yeah, isn't that amazing?

I also read about something called a tractor tug, which has basically two outboard motors, like those two side paddle wheels. And so you can move them independently. And they have a lot of power, too, just not as much as the azimuth, I think. But they're controlled by two joysticks. So it's hard enough. Just think about using one. Imagine using two to move a tugboat around like a huge ship.

that you're trying not to knock into other ships. It's just, I can't, it's got to be one of the more stressful jobs around piling a tugboat, right?

We'll have to ask Thomas.

uh that is gumming up the works um you're gonna send a tugboat in there to get those things out of there so we yeah we talked about that um the ship the ever given which uh blocked the suez canal for i think weeks which is a huge dent in global shipping right we talked about that in detail and i could not for the life of me remember what episode that was in do you

If we did, we didn't name it that.

I don't remember doing any canal episode.

I don't think so.

I think we just earlier talking about donkey paths and stuff did our canal episode. Hmm. Wait, wait, wait. I guess that's possible. We might have done one that included like the Panama Canal. Yes, I'll bet it was in the Panama Canal episode. I think we did that one.

Okay, there you go.

We did. A little different, but yeah. Also, by the way, the Navy just unveiled a whole new group of search and rescue ships. They're called Navajo-class tugboats, and they're pretty cool looking.

Yeah, they're called FIFIs. Cute. Either FIFI or FIFI. I've only seen it spelled out.

FIFI would be weird. Yeah, FIFI is not weird in the sea. Well, it's...

Let's try this out. Arrgh, look at that Fifi. Arrgh, look at that Fifi. I think Fifi wins the day. OK. Yeah. So what else?

Right. A tugboat just goes in between two people struggling to find something to talk about. And now all of a sudden they can talk about the tugboat that just went in between.

I hate this question so much.

There's also anchor handling. There's actually special tugboats called anchor handling tugs, appropriately enough. And the anchors they're talking about are oil platform tankers. And these are ocean-going tugs, the ones that carry 100,000 gallons of diesel fuel because they're out to sea for indefinite periods of time. And the anchors that they're pulling around are massive.

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They're like keeping oil rigs out in the open ocean from floating away. So obviously they're really big anchors. But it's hard to get across how big they are unless you go look up photos of them. Try to find a photo of a human being standing or working near an oil rig anchor. And it'll really kind of drive home what these tugboats are pulling around. Makes it even more impressive. Yeah.

Yeah, I was reading an LA Times article about, remember the shipping shutdown, the cargo container backup in LA and Long Beach at the pandemic that just killed everything. The writer went out on a tugboat and he was just kind of chronicling like a morning in the life of this tugboat.

It would have been way better.

And they were talking about how recently two deckhands, one had been injured and one had been killed by a line tightening and pressing them up against the side of the tugboat. So- Oh, like Jaws. Yeah, exactly. But killed them. Yeah. Yeah.

So it was a I mean, you can just imagine like this is a three inch thick rope that just suddenly is, you know, thousands of kilonewtons pressing you against a metal, a big piece of metal, which is the inside of the ship. That's not it. It's not the place that you want to be. So it is being a deckhand, which is one of the jobs on the tugboat, is very dangerous. And as we'll see later.

Kind of the job you want to work your way up out of, I think.

That is too short. I mean, you're like, oh, six hour shift. That's not bad. But then you have to eat and sleep in the next six hours. That's yeah. I don't know why they do it like that. It seems like you would wear your crew out really fast with that schedule.

No, I think even eight hours, that extra two hours to unwind and eat and then get six hours sleep is adequate. Because, I mean, seriously, you think about it, you're like you're not doing six hours off and then you just fall over and sleep where you were just standing while you were working.

Now that you're off the clock, you're going to like unwind, you got to eat, you're going to just do whatever, shave, shower. And then you're going to get what, three and a half, four hours sleep if you're lucky, maybe five. I think that's a little whack, as they say.

Yeah, and I'm sure they're significant others like, oh, you're awake again, huh?

That's what I mean.

I don't know, man. It's a hard life. I'm sure Thomas can tell us.

Yeah, that one's fine. But I like the articulated tug barge or ATB. The sexiest link. It's an improved version of this, right? So the barge and the tugboat have like a notch and a corresponding like pointy part.

You put them together and put a pin through the two, and now you've got like one single machine, but the tugboat can still maneuver like fishtail and move that barge in all sorts of crazy hard angles, right? And I was like, why don't you just mechanize or motorize the barge And apparently, they use this mostly for oil tank, oil shipping. And you just get more oil out of it.

And the barges are cheaper because they don't have any self-propulsion. So it's kind of like a shipping container in a truck. Like the tractor is different than the trailer. And so you can hook all sorts of different trailers up to the same tractor time and time again, rather than just having to pilot that trailer all the time.

It made more sense to me when I was researching it than it is now that I'm explaining it.

Yeah, I think the expense, the added expense, I think they're cheaper because it's just a barge that is just basically a floating container that a tug can hook onto. Yeah.

Yes.

So I think it kind of, from what I understand, it bears a bit of a resemblance to like the shipping, like trucking industry, where somebody needs a tow or an escort or something like that in or out of the harbor. And you just contract with somebody then. I don't know if like you contract with one specific shipping company or you just kind of go back and forth depending on who needs what when.

Or it's a mixture of both. I'm not sure. But I know that back in the day, it used to be whoever got there first. So as a ship was coming in, tugboats would race out to meet them. And whoever got there first had that contract right there because they were the first ones on the scene. And they were the ones who were going to pull the ship into its berth.

Yeah. No, I don't think it's like that for sure. But I read another article. The AP did an article on the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore last year, earlier this year. You remember when that ship ran into the bridge and the bridge collapsed in Baltimore?

So there was like heavy criticism because that ship wasn't being escorted by a tugboat. And everybody's like, where was the tugboat? Why was this allowed to happen? And the AP was explaining, that's just not how it works. Like the tugboat pulls the ship out of its berth and kind of gets it on its way. And then it goes back and attaches to another ship.

It's making too much sense. I've never considered myself the tugboat of the lake. Can I be doing this with my teeth? Can I be holding the rope with my teeth? Because that'd be much cooler.

And then that ship has to find its way out of harbor, including navigating under and next to bridges and other stuff, right? And the reason why is money. It costs an extra 10 grand to pay a tugboat to pull you safely out into a harbor so you can make way. And the shipping industry holds the cards now.

Because if you start charging more at a port or you start, say, requiring ships to have a tugboat all the way out into the harbor, It's going to cost more money. And if another port nearby doesn't force you to do that, it's going to be less.

And so everybody's going to go to that port and all of your dock workers are going to lose their jobs and you're not going to get reelected as mayor of Baltimore. You see what I'm saying? Wow. Yeah. It's crazy how weirdly entrenched it is. And again, it's just so discouraging.

It seems like every episode we talk about, you can trace it back to some group of people who are cutting corners because of money. And then something bad happens and nobody does anything about it. I'm so sick of it.

It does. Okay.

Yeah, I'm all right now. Let me just apologize to Thomas. Sorry, Thomas.

Yep. Pretty neat.

There's some other stuff you can do too, but that's probably the best. Okay. Good. I'd like to do the best thing. Good. You got anything more on tugboats, Charles?

Okay.

I was reading like a kid's maritime museum website about tugboats and they were trying to explain why everyone loves tugboats because it's true. Like there's nobody who doesn't like tugboats, especially if you have nothing to do with the industry, right? You're just watching them from afar. And they explained that they're very powerful and they're small, but they're also very helpful.

We'll go do some third-league trials for it and figure out the one right way to pull a pontoon in a lake.

And I think they kind of nailed it on the head.

Okay. So Chuck gets it, and he mentioned beards twice in quick succession, which of course unlocks listener mail.

What? Sorry.

Oh, gotcha. I gotcha. Yeah. I got it now.

What did you think?

What?

Edward Scissorhands? Sleepy Hollow?

He's got a whole. I disagree. Sleepy Hall is one of my all time favorite movies. That's one of those ones I can watch like any time.

I understand what you're saying. I mean, the 1990 Batman, not the best. I would say that that's not a great movie, too, for sure.

I understand what you're saying. Fair enough.

Yeah.

Yes, I think Catherine O'Hara did great.

I keep forgetting to recommend a movie to you that I'll see it and remember how great it was. And then I forget to tell you about it again. It's called A Dark Song. Okay. It's about a woman who seeks revenge. So she finds an occultist to help her conjure demons to enact revenge.

I don't know how I found that one. I really don't remember. But it's on Amazon Prime, if I'm not mistaken. And it sounds like a hokey premise, but the research that the writers did is so dead on that it's entirely possible there's people out there who believe that you can do this exact thing that they're doing and conjure this exact demon. It's nuts. It's really a good movie. It's pretty rough.

I would not watch it with the kids. Um, but it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a very good art house horror film.

It's a little, there's a part in there that she should not see.

It is very convincing.

Yep. Uh, did you ever read the, um, listener mail?

I said that. You said something in quick succession, and you unlocked listener mail. Jerry already ran the chime.

I did tell you, and you didn't jump. And everything broke down as if the tugboat stopped tugging.

No. I'm going to lash you to the tugboats.

Okay.

Oh, I know where this one's going.

They do. And I've seen that often converted to tons. And it's the same thing. The more kilonewtons you have or the more tons you have, the more pulling power, towing power, pushing power that tugboat has. So there's this one boat that Dave found called the Island Victory. At least one article called it the most powerful boat in the world.

That poor kid. I don't remember what island he was on.

Yeah, that was a sad story.

Great. And it was Fex, Subways of Your Mind. And who wrote in? Because, I mean, a million people wrote in. I don't think we've ever got more email about the same thing in less time than on this one. It was astounding. It was like when those post office workers come in at the end of Miracle on 34th Street and start dumping Santa letters onto the judge's bench. Right.

It was like that, but with emails about the most mysterious song on the internet.

Oh, dude, we'll be getting them for years, Chuck. We got an email from somebody this week, and the subject line was, Chuck predicted Sharknado. That is an old, old classic.

The greatest showman, yeah.

Thanks a lot, Michael. Very much appreciated. Thanks to everybody who wrote in. We don't mean to sound ungrateful. We're just joshing around.

Yep, thank you. Yeah, keep us informed as best you can all the time. And since I said that, and you want to be like Michael, I should tell you that you can send us an email. Send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.

I saw other articles that named some other shipping container vessel. But this tugboat, say it's probably the most powerful tugboat around. The Island Victory has a bollard pull of 4,680 kilonewtons, which converts to 477 tons. A typical harbor tug, which is nothing to sneeze at, has a bollard pull between 500 and 600 kilonewtons. 600 kilonewtons converts to 61 tons.

So this is an enormously powerful boat. And that's the whole point. They're not fast. They aren't pretty. They're cute in a really weird way. But they can generate so much power that they can push a shipping container vessel around. More importantly, if you have a really high bollard pull, the reason that this rating is even there is to find out which tug you can connect to which vessel.

Because if a vessel is starting to go in the wrong direction and it's about to crash into, say, a bridge… Um, the tugboat has to be able to go from zero, not moving at all in the water to pulling that boat in the opposite direction away from that bridge in a moment's notice. And it has to have that much power. And they do, they do.

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Yeah, it's just what they use, like you said, when they purposely or accidentally bump up against a larger ship. You can't just have the tugboat, like, crack up. So you have a fender. They're built to bump. They are built to bump. And some tugboats aren't necessarily built with a beard. They'll have tires strung along the side to use as a bumper as well.

Okay, fine. So one other thing that you're going to find about tugboats that we'll talk about more in depth later is that they're extremely nimble. They're agile. They can move in a different direction very quickly.

And that is a really important thing, too, because one of the big jobs that the tugboat plays in, say, like a shipping lane, like a port, is to help ships avoid other ships coming in or out. So they have to be able to move, not just pull a ship very easily, but they have to be able to move quickly and move that ship out of the way of, say, like another ship.

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Welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too for the present moment. And this is Stuff You Should Know.

Every holiday season starts with the best of intentions. Bake that homemade pie. Get all your holiday shopping done early. But then, life gets in the way. But don't feel bad. It happens to everyone. And luckily, you've got DoorDash.

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That's right. There was another problem, too, even for a ship that was nimble enough to kind of navigate its way into port, say like the mouth of a river in a harbor or something, right? Once it got in there, it had to wait for the wind to whip up again to set sail once more. And this was not something that happened every hour on the hour, even twice a day like the tide.

Sometimes you would have to wait for days or weeks for the right wind to come up that you could catch and ship back out to sea again. Also not at all efficient. So there was like a real need for tugboats to be invented. But what's nuts is tugboats were invented and then ignored for decades.

And then finally, the guy who invented them, who was just totally made fun of, as we'll see, for inventing tugboats, was vindicated. But I think he was dead already.

Yes, I do. It was Thomas because this episode is tugboats for Thomas.

Yeah. Not only that, the people in his hometown of Gloucester, they wrote a song about him. They wrote a song. They wrote like they thought this guy was so terrible and just such a lousy inventor that there was a song. I'm guessing people would sing in pubs.

About him specifically, his name's in the song. Imagine sitting there nursing like you're mead while everybody around you is singing that song about you. You're not going to try? Whip up a melody. Oh, oh. Jonathan Holes with his patent skulls invented a machine to go against the wind and stream. You should finish.

You went with the Gilbert and Sullivan version.

They're like, get out of Gloucester.

So, yeah, Hulls was definitely ahead of his time, but it would be 60 years before the first steam powered tugboats. His invention were actually put into good use and they were deployed in Scotland and Yeah. And as we'll see, actually, Scotland was where the tugboat got its name. At the time, I'm not sure what they called them. Maybe still helper vessels. I don't know.

But one of the first things they did was to start pulling cargo along canals. Because at the time, if you wanted to move cargo easily over land, you did it over water that was cut into land. And you would do it with a donkey pulling your cargo along the shore. The donkey was walking on the shore with the line going from the donkey. to a little barge that was being pulled down a water-filled canal.

Right, in front of Frances Perkins. She didn't jump to her death. No, no, no. So she's literally witnessing one of the turning points in history. As it happens, seeing women, teenage girls jump out of the ninth floor of this building because it's on fire. And not only is she witnessing a fire that will change history, she is one of the people that will force history to change because of this fire.

The... the fate or the destiny that put her a block away from this fire when it happened is... It's just astounding to me that she was there because she went on to be one of the people who said, this is never going to happen again. And under her watch... It basically didn't. It was the worst that it ever got.

And it never got that bad again because of the safeguards she forced the state and then later on other states and the federal government to adopt.

Yeah, we need to do an entire episode on that. At the very least, just to shame the two owners who were just totally responsible for all those deaths.

Yeah, it was. But at the same time, those guys were particularly nasty examples of the system. They weren't average by any means from what I understand. Yeah.

I know. I'm not a big fan anyway.

She did. She was appointed to the New York Committee on Safety under the recommendation of Teddy Roosevelt, which says a lot because that means she'd already made a name for herself in her 20s in New York City politics to the point where Teddy Roosevelt would say, like, you really kind of need this woman on there.

And then let's not forget the fact that the operative word here was woman as far as society was concerned at the time. And this legislation that she got passed through in New York or that she helped get passed through in New York, like I was saying, it became a model for other states and then eventually the federal fire codes. Right. because of this, largely because of her efforts.

And she made a name for herself. She'd already made a name for herself, but this really kind of helped cement her name. And she started working closely with a guy named Alfred E. Smith, who was an assemblyman from New York. But she won his respect pretty easily. I think they worked on this New York Committee on Safety together. And so when he became governor, she kind of rose along with him.

She was appointed by him to New York State's Industrial Commission, which made her the first woman to be appointed to a state government position in the country. And with her $8,000 salary, she was the highest paid woman to hold any office in the United States at the time. So she became important pretty quick. But she became important, everybody. This is really important to remember.

Yeah.

By hard work and heart, which is just a wonderful combination. Like amazing things happen from people who have that combination.

Totally agree. Had never heard her name before. Had never even known she existed. But, yeah, the more you dig into her, the more you're just like, it was almost a crime that this woman was virtually written out of the history books.

And not just works harder. She was known as a policy expert about worker safety and wage justice by this time, too.

No, we're not kidding at all, Chuck.

So like you were saying, she first kind of rose to prominence with Alfred E. Smith, who, from what I could tell, I didn't get to research him very much. But the stuff that I ran across the references to him, he seemed like a genuine, like, true believer, crusader in justice, social justice as well. So they were like a good pair. And he made it as far as New York governor.

He ran for president and didn't win. And when he didn't win, he, I guess, lost the governorship and was succeeded by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And so Roosevelt came into power in New York as the governor of New York. And Francis Perkins was already there and had already built up a reputation. And Roosevelt recognized... the kind of person she was pretty quickly.

Because a lot of people are, you know, you can give a lot of credit or a lot of vilification to Roosevelt for his New Deal policies, depending on your political stripes. But if you, you know, if you admire him for it, as I think most people should, he... It wasn't just him.

One of his great talents was to recognize talent in others and to bring those people together and then enact policies based on their expertise and their recommendations. And one of those people was Francis Perkins, starting when he was governor of New York and then also when he became president, too.

They really did. I mean, like she was the first cabinet, first woman to serve as a cabinet member. I mean, women had just gotten the right to vote about 13, 12 or 13 years before.

I know. Isn't that crazy? And yet she held public appointed offices and still couldn't vote.

Right, exactly, yeah. So it was a really big deal that FDR appointed a woman to a cabinet position, and an important cabinet position, too. I mean, like, it's not like there's any necessarily unimportant cabinet positions, but Secretary of Labor is pretty big. Yeah, especially then. Yeah, especially then, right?

And especially, you know, at a time when this emerging superpower took a huge punch in the face and got knocked on its butt like the rest of the world by the Great Depression. This was important stuff that they were trying to figure out on the fly. But he chose a really great person who wasn't really accepted at first, not just by the public, but by virtually anybody.

The labor unions weren't happy she was there because she had a background in social work and policy, not labor.

Yes, but she eventually won them over just by virtue of what she did. Like the labor movement was on the ropes at the time. The progressive era ran from... I think 1890 to about 1920. So by the time 1929, 1930 comes around, it's dying off the labor movement. But under her leadership as the Department of Labor secretary, she revived it.

And by the time she either died or left office, I can't remember, I think a third of all Americans were members of unions, right?

That's right. And every single person who's getting a check as measly as they've gotten lately is getting one because of this system that Frances Perkins set up. And what's really, I think, worth noting, too, is this is exactly the kind of situation that she got this passed for, that she helped design this for. Totally. Totally.

It did, and it also helped reinforce and build out America's infrastructure too because they had all this labor that the government was putting to work doing it, right?

So she was in charge of overseeing that. And one of the other, I guess the next big thing, I think it was before Social Security, was something called the Wagner Act.

The Wagner-Wagner Act, depending on your persuasion. It gave workers the right to unionize and the right to collectively bargain. And one of her roles was to go out and promote this stuff, not just to, you know, other members of the government or members of industry, but to individual Americans, too.

So in 1933 alone, she gave 100 different policy speeches in just that one year on New Deal projects, promoting them. And one of the speeches she gave, I don't know if it was in that year or not, but she went to Homestead, Pennsylvania, right across the river from Pittsburgh, where Carnegie Steel was headquartered.

And she was going to inform these workers about their newly won rights through the Wagner Act. And Carnegie Steel and the local government would not give her any place to hold this meeting. They wouldn't give the secretary of labor a place to talk to voters. So she, and there's apparently a famous picture of her leading all of these steel workers on foot to a post office.

She's like, oh, I can think of a place where I can assemble legally, and that is the post office. So she gave her speech on the grounds of the Homestead Post Office to thousands of steel workers, informing them that they could legally unionize and bargain collectively for workers' rights.

Yeah, mostly the second one.

Right.

Okay, Chuck, so we were saying at the outset that if you got an unemployment check, thank Frances Perkins. Or if you ever get an unemployment check, if you even like the idea of the fact that an unemployment insurance policy is out there for you in case you ever need it, thank Frances Perkins.

And the reason you thank Frances Perkins is because she basically oversaw the creation of the legislation that became the Social Security Act of 1935. And when I say oversaw the creation of that legislation, like she, that was it. She was the head of this cabinet level committee that was assigned the task of coming up with a social insurance policy, a social safety net for the country.

And they came up with this within six months successfully. this full policy report. And within two days of delivering the report, FDR turned around and unveiled the Social Security program idea to Congress. And another six months or so later, maybe eight, it passed into law.

I agree. I think we have, man. I'm almost positive. Yeah, it really rings a bell.

Who is it? Tommy Chong?

Because there's a quote, I can't remember exactly what a quote was, but to paraphrase it, it's basically like we need to always keep our eye on the long term and plan for the worst case scenario. While, yes, there's a lot of immediate needs that we need, but there's always going to be something that comes down the road. And if we have planned for it, we're way better off.

Yeah. While we're reading these emails, while we're having to sweep up the studio. Yeah.

And I feel like it really shows in the podcast.

Self-deprecation, Chuck. That's our specialty. That's right. That's right.

Right. That's the brilliance of the whole thing is it's a transfer payment system to where you are directly funding the people who have retired now. But it's on the premise that people behind you are going to fund into this to support you later on. Right. It's beautiful. It's a genius idea.

And apparently FDR sent her, Frances Perkins, to study the British system of unemployment insurance even before he was president, back when he was governor of New York. And he became the first public official to commit to developing an unemployment insurance plan. And it was at the persistent behest of Frances Perkins that he did that.

Well, yeah, that's the thing. A lot of people say, like, if it weren't for her, no joke, this stuff probably wouldn't exist. Certainly not in the form that it does now. And that's not necessarily fair. There are, like, there were programs that had, like, Social Security-type programs among the states, including unemployment programs, but they were ad hoc. They were patchwork.

Just imagine how disastrous it would be on top of the current disaster if there wasn't such a thing as unemployment insurance. And this is how we found out that we really kind of need it.

Most states didn't have them. And it's kind of the... the beauty of the federal program is they're basically like, okay, states do this, but we're going to oversee it and organize it and help fund it.

Yes, and that was like her whole thing. Like we do need to make sure that people get peanut butter sandwiches because their families are going to starve. Like, yes, these immediate needs have to be met, but we also simultaneously have to plan for the future too. It was just this persistent drum that she beat. Like we're going to continue to have problems. Let's plan for them now.

Like the level of visionariness – In this person was, you just don't see that. I can't think of too many other people who've come and gone in the federal government, in the United States at least, that had that level of, I guess, awareness of looking down the line that far rather than just, you know, four years out or to the next election. Yeah.

And you can make the case, Chuck, that she is the woman who gave America's kids the concept of a childhood.

Yeah. So if you have gotten your unemployment insurance check and it has helped you, thank Francis Perkins somehow.

At the very least, she extended it by many, many years.

I've got another amazing fact about her. She, I believe, is the first cabinet member who Congress ever sought to impeach. Oh, really? Yes. I'm almost positive that's correct. I know that they did try to impeach her and they failed in the impeachment, not just the conviction. They couldn't get enough support for articles of impeachment.

But it was because she refused to deport an Australian longshoreman who'd successfully organized a general strike in San Francisco. And the anti-communist elements in Congress suspected that this guy was a communist and wanted him out. And she said, you know, I don't think very highly of this guy. I don't really agree with a lot of what he stands for.

But I don't think that you have really good evidence. And I think this is all retaliation for the strike you organized. So I'm not going to deport him. And you might say, well, what did this lady have to do with deporting? Apparently, back in the day, the immigration system the power of immigration or control of immigration was up to the Department of Labor.

So the Secretary of Labor was also in charge of immigration, which really kind of gives you an idea of where America's immigration policies, you know, where their mind was at.

That it was about importing, you know, good workers or also controlling who came in to keep competition for jobs down.

So she was in charge of immigration, which, as we'll see later on, she used to great effect.

Yeah, I think so. Okay. That's a good idea. It's the kid with the last question in Q&A.

Yeah, which is kind of a bummer. Some people might say it's a bummer. Some people might say good. Sure. She also played drums for Dokken for a brief time. For a little bit. She did it all. And all while wearing a frumpy tricornered hat. Yeah.

Yes, there are a couple of other things to throw in too. Both her husband and her daughter suffered from what we today call bipolar disorder. She cared for them their entire lives. That little thing. Yeah, right.

No, while she's doing all this other stuff, she made sure that they were cared for, took care of them directly herself. And one of the other things I think is worth mentioning, too, that before FDR became president, while she was working in New York, she was already known publicly as,

before she became secretary of labor, because she was the first, uh, public official to call Hoover out on his BS when he was downplaying, uh, joblessness numbers and unemployment figures. Um, and just general terrible economic news and pretending things were way better than they were, she was the first person to step up and publicly contradict him and made national news for that. Wow.

And, you know, again, this is a woman doing this in, like, 1930, so just that alone makes national news, but she was also calling him out on his BS. And one thing that we have to say before you finish with the cherry on top, Chuck, is she had guys figure it out. She had a folder called, called Notes on the Male Mind.

And she would just take notes on guys and men that she worked with and just kind of try to get an understanding of them. And she realized that the way to get male colleagues to treat you normally or maybe even respect you is to remind them of their mother. Wow. That's what it takes apparently to get a guy to treat a woman with respect at work.

It almost seems malicious in a weird way. Like, I like to think that that's not the case, but what other explanation is there?

It's weird.

After she turned that essay in, you bet your bippy she did.

Yes, she made sure that about at least 55,000 Jewish German immigrants made their way into the United States through these Department of Labor immigration quotas. And another, I think, 200,000 people in general were rescued from Europe as World War II was starting to develop over there because of her.

Just on top of everything else, she also saved a bunch of tens of thousands of Jewish people from Hitler in World War II. Amazing. Amazing Chuck. I guess that's it for Frances Perkins, huh? That's it. Well, if you want to know more about Frances Perkins, go start reading about her because there's even more detail to her life than we captured here. And she's worth reading about.

Very admirable person. And since I said admirable, it's time for Listener Mail.

Nice.

Well, yeah. Okay. If she wasn't talking about Tommy Chong, I'll tell you that.

Oh, that's cool.

Go to them, and they will help you.

It's kind of like if you're afraid of flying, watch the flight attendants, and as long as they're not freaking out, you're fine. It's the exact same thing. He's saying when the S goes down, there's people helping, so that's always good. God bless Mr. Rogers and you, Tony. Oh, man, man. Yep, thanks a lot.

I couldn't tell if you were just putting a little mustard on the Tony. No, like Tawny Katane. Sure, yeah, from the Whitesnake videos. That cultural icon. Well, thanks a lot, Tawny. I apologize for Chuck calling you Tawny Katane. Okay. Can I apologize for you, Charles? Sure. Okay. Well, I'm going to do that. If you want to get me to apologize for Charles, let's see if you can do it.

You can send us an email. Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.

Right. They're like, oh, we don't need to help her put on airs. Well, then just like, you know, I don't ask, I don't tell, I just don't, whatever.

I want to say also before the residents of Newcastle bust a vein in their forehead, she's also cited as a native of Newcastle, Maine. Oh, okay. And they're right across the Damariscotta River from one another. I think she's from Newcastle.

Maybe. Maybe, except imagine if neither town knew what shoes were. I think that would be a pretty accurate analogy. Oh, boy. I love the Mainers. So she came from really dyed-in-the-wool Yankee stock. Her family came over, I think, in the 1680s. Her family had built an outpost during the French-Indian War.

Her grandmother, who had more of an influence on her, she said, than anybody, had a cousin who she was close to who founded Howard University and fought for the rights of newly freed African-Americans. She came from like a long line of people who like cared about other people. Yeah. And yet, surprisingly, her parents were very conservative.

They were in favor of, you know, helping the poor, but not mingling with them helping them. Like, helping them by, like, you know, sending some money or something like that. Okay. And they produced a child, Fanny Francis. She changed her name, I think, in, I don't know, her 20s or 30s. She was the opposite way. She was like, no, like...

People are people, and they all deserve help, and there's a lot of injustice in this world, and I want to change it myself. And she's one of those people who actually did enact tremendous change for all the right reasons.

She said people are people, so why should it be? You and I should get along so awfully.

I gotcha.

Depeche Mode was before New Order, huh? Yes. I mean, technically, if you count New Order as an outcropping of Joy Division, then they were first. Oh, so, well, Joy Division was different, though. It was pretty different. Different enough that they might as well be two different bands.

You know who we need to give us the judgment call? Who? Is Frances Perkins, who apparently would not have enjoyed our banter. She was very much known as like a dour, serious woman. But from what I can tell, that's actually a public persona that she wore to get men to take her seriously. Yeah.

And apparently she had made it all the way through college. And in her senior year, I think she attended an economics lecture by Florence Kelly, who was a huge wage justice crusader. And that just changed her life.

Hello, friends. It's Josh. And for this week's Select, I've chosen our September 2020 episode on Frances Perkins. If you haven't heard of her, that's okay. She's one of the most unsung Americans ever and was even left out of the history books for a while, all because she was a woman. Check out this episode where Frances Perkins gets her due.

What did she do there?

And we should say like she's getting all of this schooling, but at the same time, she's also set herself off on a what's that like learn while you work program called? Internship. Internship. I guess so. That's not exactly what I'm looking for. But yeah, I mean, it makes sense. So she set herself up on a real world internship program.

So while she was in Philly working for that bureau, she was investigating those fake employment rackets. Like she was on the ground doing this stuff, like carrying out these inspections, investigating factories, like taking notes. In her early 20s. Yeah, basically, yeah.

While she's studying this stuff, she's also out doing and seeing the stuff firsthand that she's learning about, which, from what I can tell, she really kind of digested and held on to, and it just kept driving her for the rest of her life what she saw. I think that's called the School of Hard Knocks.

It is, but she enrolled in the Wharton School and the School of Hard Knocks at the same time, which is pretty impressive.

But there's—she did—this is one of the things she did. There's very few more depressing words than these strung together. She improved working conditions for children.

That was one of the things she did. I know. And that was at the Consumers League of New York. And she got there and was like, yes, I've achieved one of my first goals, which is working directly with the same Florence Kelly who gave the economics lecture that changed her life years before Mount Holyoke. That's right. Yeah.

So she was one of those ones who said, I want to do this and then would do it and then would move on to the next thing.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And this is Stuff You Should Know, the amazing unsung woman edition, volume two at least. No, more than two. What number would you say then?

I think it's an NYU building now.

Let's see. 727. Wait, I can't do math out loud.

No, no. It was way more than that. 12 times 7 equals 84. Yeah, that's what I said. 84 hours a week. But like even that doesn't sound that big. 12-hour days, seven days a week just to keep your job.

Which was not good even back then.

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Capital One N.A. Member FDIC. 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.

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It's stuff you should know, eh?

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That's right, Chuck. Andrew Moyes, VP of Fan Expo HQ, had this to say about Orlando. Often, we will bring our entire team to Orlando for the event, and that includes our executive-level team members as well, and we're able to give them a great experience with luxury hotels, special restaurants, all those key things to feed into the proper executive experience.

He also said that Orlando's easy airport access and close proximity to hotels and transportation make it a top choice for hosting major events.

Remember the Arrested Development little subplot where Charlize Theron was thought to be a British spy? Oh, yeah. What was... For British eyes only.

So, Chuck, foreign accent syndrome, it's kind of all over the place right now, right? Yes. You've got Lisa Alamia who woke up from jaw surgery with it. Apparently, people who have strokes can suffer from foreign accent syndrome. And I actually saw one case where your foreign accent syndrome in one patient who suffered a stroke was cured by a second stroke elsewhere in the brain.

So we have, like, it's very tough to predict what's going to happen when foreign accent syndrome does come about. And, you know, there's been people from Japan who've developed Korean accents, or there have been people from Scotland who developed South African accents. It's kind of everywhere and all over.

Right. Because remember that Harry Whitaker 1982 criteria specifically says it has to be related to central nervous system damage.

Right.

Mr. F. Mr. F. That's right. That's right.

Yeah, so they developed, first it was neurogenic, then they developed psychogenic, and then there's actually a third one now. It's mixed. So apparently it can actually be from a psychological issue that possibly could arise from, say, a brain lesion. So it's both of them together working to create this foreign accent syndrome.

And definitely the psychogenic version of foreign accent syndrome differs tremendously from the neurogenic version. in a lot of ways, and number one is the psychogenic tends to clear up. It accompanies, say, like a psychotic break or a manic episode or something like that, and as the episode wanes or goes away or clears up, so too does the foreign accent syndrome.

That is not the case with neurogenic. With neurogenic, they have no cure whatsoever, and basically the only treatment that they can come up with is through speech therapy, where a speech-language pathologist basically retrains you to talk the way you did before.

Right.

One of the more famous cases that kind of demonstrated that psychogenic FAS was an actual thing happened here in America. There's a woman in her mid-30s who had a history of schizophrenia in her family, and she was brought to the ER after attacking her mom's landlady.

And she believed the landlady was practicing voodoo on her against her. And she attacked the woman. And throughout all this, during this episode, she had taken on a British accent. And taking a family history, they found that, number one, she had schizophrenia in her family. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a result of this incident. But that she had had similar instances before.

And during these, she had spoken with a British accent. Yeah.

I don't believe so. That's not what I took from it.

Yeah. Well, I mean, remember, I think we've done one on schizophrenia before, haven't we? I don't know. Have we? We definitely did one on dissociative personality disorder. Yeah. Which is just absolutely fascinating. But I was like you. I kind of noticed like, hey, what about multiple personalities? It doesn't it seems like something that would be right up that alley.

I'm sure they've looked into that. But apparently that's not part of it.

I don't know. I just assume. Oh, okay. Oh. This is off to a great start. It's unusual, odd even, you could say that you suggested I say the intro in a British accent because we're talking about foreign accents today, Chuck. That's right. It was coy. I see. Now it makes sense.

Right, right. So she sounds like a native, I think Mandarin speaker is probably what we're thinking of, who is speaking English. And if you weren't looking, like you would expect to see, say, maybe like a middle-aged Chinese woman when you looked at the video. Yeah. And no, it's like, I don't know, late to mid-30s Caucasian woman. Yeah.

Native-born English speaker, and she's who I was thinking of when I was saying for some people it's a really big problem because it's presented a big crisis for her identity. She said that she can't look in the mirror while she's speaking any longer. She just doesn't feel like herself anymore, and it's really hit her hard.

Good Lord. From migraines.

It is. And from what I gather, she'd be like, yeah, well, imagine how strange it feels coming out of you.

Yeah, it is. I mean like it's bad enough You've got migraines and then to have a crisis of identity. Yeah, it's yeah, not fair. I

Right, because it can't do a lot for you. We don't know how to treat strokes very well. And once damage has occurred in the brain, it can be pretty tough, if not impossible, to reverse that damage, right, if it's permanently damaged. So, yeah, the idea that you've now gotten a foreign accent, they're probably like, that's kind of the least of your worries.

You just had a massive stroke or a huge head injury or something like that. But what it's revealed to them is not that there's this huge mystery. And we have kind of played into it a little bit by not revealing this from the outset. But you as a patient with foreign accent syndrome, you didn't hit your head and wake up with the foreign accent. It's all in the ear of the beholder.

The whole idea that there is a foreign accent syndrome as the way that it's stated is false, right? And we'll talk about that after this break. 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. Capital One N.A. Member FDIC.

Yes. Well, Amazon understands, which is why they created Amazon One Medical and Amazon Pharmacy. They're designed to remove these pain points from health care. With Amazon One Medical, you get 24-7 virtual care so you can see a provider within minutes and avoid those long, annoying waits.

Thanks to the ease and convenience of Amazon One Medical and Amazon Pharmacy, healthcare just got less painful.

Andrew Moyes, VP of Fan Expo HQ, had this to say about Orlando. Often, we will bring our entire team to Orlando for the event, and that includes our executive-level team members as well, and we're able to give them a great experience with luxury hotels, special restaurants, all those key things to feed into the proper executive experience.

He also said that Orlando's easy airport access and close proximity to hotels and transportation make it a top choice for hosting major events.

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.

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.

So try Bombas now. Head over to bombas.com slash S-Y-S-K and use code S-Y-S-K for 20% off your first purchase. That's B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash S-Y-S-K. Code S-Y-S-K at checkout. Okay, Chuck, we're back.

So I thought I heard you drawing a breath right before we broke.

Did you have something to say?

So there have actually been studies where they've played a video clip of, or an audio clip of a person with foreign accent syndrome to different people. Yeah. And said, you know, where do you think this person's from? And the same person will get tens of different answers out of tens of different people.

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Right. Well, no, no, no. She definitely doesn't sound British, but that's the point. She sounds Chinese, but she's not actually speaking in a Chinese accent. She didn't hit her head and wake up with a Chinese accent. What happened was she got these series of migraines, probably had some sort of stroke.

And a region of her brain that controls the really intricate process of prosody, of making your tongue do certain things to intonate and accent certain words in certain ways that make up your accent and your dialect overall, that got damaged. And so now she can't control it in the way she used to before. It comes out sounding differently.

And to you, somebody who has heard people speak in a Chinese accent before, it sounds like a Chinese accent.

Agreed.

Right.

Yeah. Yeah. So... So this is from what I understand, this is the point, right? So our accents are extremely personal. They're part of like us individually, but they also signal our membership in different groups, right? So like a farmer is going to talk differently from a stockbroker and a farmer from Georgia is going to talk a lot differently than a stockbroker from Portland, Oregon, right? Okay.

Yeah, if you say ah instead of a, or you substitute consonants like R for L, right? So you're, you know, what's that? What were they singing? Jingle bells on... Oh, no, Deck the Halls on A Christmas Story. A Christmas Story. Fa-ra-ra-ra-ra, right? Yeah.

So if you were a Caucasian English speaker and you damaged your brain in a way that the part of your brain responsible for forming L's now formed R's instead. Right. To other English speakers who'd heard...

native Chinese speakers you would sound like you had a Chinese accent because that's what people who speak Chinese do when they're speaking English right so you didn't actually adopt a Chinese accent you just creating sounds in the same way that somebody who was a native Chinese speaker would yeah I mean I see what they're getting at with all this to me it's a little bit splitting hairs

think that's what i'm trying to say i think the difference is this chuck with your at your accent your native accent your native dialect is the result of your exposure to your environment right lifelong all the people around you all the stuff you've learned all the things you've heard it creates your dialect right when you suffer foreign accent syndrome

Your dialect your brain is damaged so that you can't produce that anymore, and you just kind of haphazardly producing something else Yeah, you don't actually follow so like if you took Sarah Cal call wills language and and had her read a passage from a book. And then you had a native Chinese speaker, typical accented Mandarin speaker, read that same passage. It would not be the exact same thing.

There'd be all sorts of derivations and deviations from that normal Mandarin accent because Sarah Caldwell's brain was damaged in a certain way that makes it a totally unique accent.

You're not letting this one go, are you?

Right.

I don't think so, no. I think it sounds off to them, and I think it's probably distressing because they're like, wait, let me say that again, and they still say it what they perceive as the wrong way. Because apparently one of the hallmarks of foreign accent syndrome is the errors or the differences that they make in their porosity is predictable.

Which makes it like an accent. I mean, that's what an accent is, is you're going to drop your T's or replace the T with the, T-H with a D. Right. Just about every time or add the R when you say wash. Wash? Yeah, exactly. Like that's, it's a predictable thing. And that's part of foreign accent syndrome. It starts to happen in predictable ways too. Yeah.

So I would guess, yeah, it sounds off to them as well.

Because that's the other stock market seat. You thought I was going to say New York? I did. So when we code switch, when we meet other people and take on their way of talking...

Right. That's like the psychogenic version. I know. It's just so confusing. Well, it almost makes me think like, so before there was nothing but neurogenic foreign accent syndrome, right? Everything else was, you're just crazy. Now they recognize that there's psychogenic FAS as well.

I think what's going to happen with more and more study, they're going to just diverge into two totally different syndromes now.

You know, I think they're going to be like, that's actually not the same thing. That's something totally different. Neurogenic foreign accent syndrome is its own thing, and psychogenic is something else entirely as well.

Which one?

It would have to be psychogenic because neurogenic has basically that original Harry Whitaker criteria in 1982.

Well, it has to not be related to the patient's ability to speak a foreign language.

So, like, she would be technically canceled out from neurogenic for that one. And it would also, it didn't have anything to do with central nervous system damage.

Which is, again, that's why I think it's going to end up being its own thing.

It is.

That's all I've got, man. Isn't that enough? I think so. Man, any language stuff, anytime we talk about language in the brain, I guess neurolinguistics, I turn to goo. It's so interesting to me.

That's what happens when something interests me. I turn to goo. If you want to turn to goo and learn more about foreign accent syndrome, you can type those words in the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com. And since I said that, it's time for Chuck.

it's called code switching and i think it's a way of signaling hey i we have something in common i don't want you to be distracted yeah it's a welcoming thing yeah my my overalls with no shirt on are distracting enough i don't want you to be distracted by my accent too so i think it is a way of saying like hey i'm i'm i'm we have something in common the thing is is

How was that? That was great, man. So, Chuck.

We've got some more people to thank for sending us some nice stuff.

Oh, that's good.

Very nice. I think you handled that foreign accent very well. Thank you. I want to say thanks big time to Robert Combs from Whitetail Coffee for the amazing coffees. Especially, like seriously, this is a really good coffee. Especially the Ladaris and La Morella. And that's Whitetail, T-A-L-E, coffee. It's just an amazing coffee subscription service that you should check out.

Can't wait to go grab them.

Nice.

Nice. Thanks a lot, guys.

That's a good place to be. But we're not going to have diabetes, my friend. No. Doug Fuchs sent us a beautiful illustrated card. Thanks for that, Doug. Thanks for saying hi.

Yeah, from everybody listening to you, Chuck, we send our condolences to you.

Yeah. Let's see. Preston Pope, he sent us some amazing chocolates, Chuck, from V Chocolates. V, just the letter V, chocolates.com. Seriously, it's good stuff. I feel bad. I feel like I'm running around on Little Bit Sweets. Oh.

Oh, it's so good.

Chuck, you may never go back to American Mayo again.

This afternoon?

It's subtle, but you'll notice. You'll say, wow, this is actually really, really good mayonnaise.

Thanks a lot to Tim and Joe from Primer Stories. I don't know if you remember, but our animal rights double parter tied into an essay I wrote on PrimerStories.com. And they sent T-shirts to say thanks for that. So thanks back for you guys' support.

Accents are such a part of group identity that if you do that in front of some other members of your group, whether it's your family or your friends or whatever. They're going to tease you. They are going to tease you, guaranteed. And one of the reasons why is because what they're doing consciously or otherwise is maintaining the borders of their own group's identity.

Yes. Thanks a lot. Don Kent, who last gave us some Pliny the Elder before, which was nice, also sent us a bunch of Soylent. And thank you also to Soylent itself, the company, who heard our Soylent episode and said, you guys haven't tried Soylent? Here, here's some Soylent. And thank you for that, Soylent. That was very nice.

So is he like a trained optometrist who can like?

So he just gave you a piece of glass that's going to ruin your eye over time?

Yeah, for sure.

I'm going to use it. Your new nickname is Pringles Guy. Okay. I've got someone else, Pringles Guy. Janelle Samara sent us a copy of her book, Our Only Hope. Thank you and congratulations on writing a book.

Francis de la Paz. So, you know, there's like a whole group of people out there who believe in writing letters, beautiful letters with fountain pens and all that. Yeah. And Francis de la Paz is one of them, sent us a beautiful handwritten letter. And you also apparently customarily send what's called a flat gift. And they sent a postcard, the sad life of sad clown, which is great.

I think sad clowns are great.

Oh, okay.

Right. We got some other ones, too, Chuck. We got a Lighthouse postcard from Big Sable Point from Teresa. We got a couple of Christmas cards from the Johnson-Alleman family and Tess Sullivan and her family. And I guess in part because of National, what is it, National Writing Month or Letter Writing Month? International Correspondence Writing Month. Exactly. Noel Verosa. No, sorry. Noel Versoza.

They're saying, don't put on airs. Don't think you're fancy. Don't think you're just like that guy. You're one of us. And making fun of somebody who adopts someone else's accent is a way of doing that. It's a way of maintaining group divisions and borders.

Right. Noel Verizosa.

I got it that last time. Noel Verizosa wrote us a nice handwritten letter in fountain pens.

banjo one for cello and it's got these cool pictures and then you can download these songs and kind of figure it's I mean it says for all ages but it seems like it'd be great to give a kid right so check that out it's very worthwhile I've got two more to finish them to one Austin Doyle sent me an amazing oil crayon painting which I assume will inflate in value very rapidly once Austin dies

Yeah, he's a great guy. I mean like when he dies of old age. I just plan to outlive him. Oh, okay. So I can cash in on the painting he made me. And then Ben and Aaron Gibson sent us the Japanese car magnets that signify an elderly driver or a teen driver, which we've talked about before. Oh, yeah, yeah. I remember those. Thanks, dudes.

Nice.

I got a lot of stuff to carry out of here.

Or a radio flyer. Ooh, I got one of those for my kid.

Oh, yeah? Yeah, the old red wagon. Like the real one? The radio flyer? Yeah, they still make them. Nice. Well, thank you again to everybody who sent us so much great stuff. We appreciate it big time. And if you want to get in touch with us, you can send us both an email to stuffpodcasts at howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.

Where really, when you do kind of adopt someone else's accent, I think one of the things that you are doing is trying to make the foreigner, the stranger, feel more comfortable. And having met your mom, I guarantee that's what she was doing.

Sometimes getting better is harder than getting sick. Waiting on hold for an appointment, standing in line at the pharmacy, the whole healthcare system can feel like a headache. Well, Amazon One Medical and Amazon Pharmacy are changing that. Get convenient virtual care. 24-7 with Amazon One Medical and have your prescriptions delivered right to your door with Amazon Pharmacy.

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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.

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.

So try Bombas now. Head over to bombas.com slash S-Y-S-K and use code S-Y-S-K for 20% off your first purchase. That's B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash S-Y-S-K. Code S-Y-S-K at checkout.

Did you guys make fun of her in front of the woman?

Sure.

Right, and then talk to each other like the kids in Escape from Witch Mountain.